With a plethora of marketing technologies cropping up year-by-year, maintaining a well-distinguished and thriving business can be very challenging. One effective way to keep your business afloat and to stand out as a local business is to track your local SEO. Thankfully, Google My Business helps us with that.
How?
Google My Business is an essential tool that lets you manage your brand’s visibility and overall performance in the search engines. It is free, incredibly user-friendly, lead-generating and best of all, it gets you to Google Maps, Google+ and even pushes you higher in the organic Search results! According to a 2017 report, Google My Business remains to be the most substantial driver of local SEO success.
Top 5 Benefits of Google My Business
1. Customers will find you easily
I’ll just go ahead and say it: People today are becoming very techie. The moment we think of a question or we decide on even the most mundane of things like where to eat, the internet has a huge influence on us.
With a Google My Business listing, you get to be on the Maps and you get to be even more searchable on Google. With a consistent online presence, more and more customers will be led to you.
2. You can connect with your customers directly
Customer engagement is a crucial technique in boosting your local SEO. Google My Business allows you to connect with your customers in multiple ways including customer ratings and reviews and responding to them.
Just recently, Google also launched a messaging feature where customers can directly chat with business owners and business owners can easily answer their queries. One-click reservation paths, options to sign up for a newsletter and even a display of your latest offers are also now available.
I personally find these features very helpful. Aside from being eminently easy to reach, it would be easier to gain loyal customers as well as increase word-of-mouth referrals. Plus, you get to share relevant photos with them – another technique to entice customers!
3. Showcasing events, promotions, specials, and new arrivals are hassle-free
This feature is a newly released one from Google. You will be able to share our current promotions, advertise upcoming events and showcase your top products and new services. By doing these, you will be able to encourage existing customers to enjoy your new offers as well as invite potential customers to your business.
4. You get to track your progress and site activity
It’s always a good thing to be able to track your site’s progress and overall activity. With Google My Business, you can easily view Insights and have an inside look on how people find your listing, what they do when they find it, where these customers or visitors are from and if they pressed the “Call” button.
To get a better understanding of your Insights, updated charts, graphs and detailed information can be found. Photo views, as well as direct requests, can also be accessed. I find this information is very useful in tracking my SEO-optimized site’s expanse and efficacy.
5. You can manage everything even on your phone
As an on-the-go type of person, I enjoy Google My Business on my phone. I get to manage my account anytime, anywhere and at no cost. The good news is, Google My Business is available for Apple and Android phones.
Expert tips on how to improve your local SEO with Google My Business
Now that we have established how Google My Business can help, it’s time you learn the tricks to optimizing it to boost your local SEO.
- Complete your information as much as possible: Compose a solid description, add appropriate categories, enter important information such as business hours, days of operation and available payment methods.
- Upload your company logo and add relevant photos: I highly recommend putting at least 3 good photos. As visual creatures, photos help people get a glimpse of your services or products. This is a good way to stand out and captivate users’ interests.
- Keep everything up-to-date: An updated information gets you to places. One important data I deem high-priority is the phone number. Always make sure your phone number is up-to-date.
- Interact with your customers: Make use of Google+, ratings, and reviews as well as the new messaging feature to constantly connect with your audience. Answer their queries, respond to their comments, offer good customer service and just constantly make them feel you are “present”. This greatly helps in improving customer trust and reliability.
- Study Insights: The data from Insights are very helpful for your SEO strategy. Take advantage of the information so that you can deliver exactly what the customers need and want.
- Encourage local reviews and social check-ins: These are first-hand experiences from customers. By encouraging them to leave reviews, check-in to your business and give star ratings, you are amplifying customer trust, building exposure and at the same time giving prospective customers the kind of confidence they need in a business.
Outshine your competitors in 3 letters: SEO
Surely, there are a million other businesses in your niche that signs up with Google My Business. To fully surpass their rankings, you need exemplary SEO strategies. Thankfully, the techniques in SEO have today is manifold. From keyword optimizing to impressive content creation to backlinks to meta tags – we are nailing it!
