Google My Business is an important part of your Internet Marketing Strategy. This blog will teach you the steps to optimize your GMB profile so that it can work for your business!
Optimizing Your Google My Business
Let’s talk about how to optimize your Google My Business profile.
- First and first, you need a login and when you’re adding your company name or updating your company name, do not add any keyword there, it is not going to work. Sometimes people are creating their Google My Business Page but there is no website button activated. Make sure that you have your website there. Also an important tip; Do not use ‘’800’’ numbers! Because you’re local, you have to be in that area and if you use it may create some sort of an idea that you are running nationwide, and your leads are looking for a local solution, it might be risky.
- No peel boxes or UPS stores! Only use your own local address, do not duplicate or do not create any other listings in another city with a different key.
- Photos are important as well, as many as possible. If you’re a kitchen remodel you can add kitchen photos, you can add your own photos to create some sort of authenticity. As an owner, you can put your own photo, when people see your face, it’s going to be that’s the first step to create that conversation to create that connection with the future customer. You can add pictures of your office, your gstaff.
In short, you can add anything connected with your business, it’s all going to help you when you are optimizing your Google My Business Page. Of course, list your hours of operations and your services that you offer. Most of the time, some of the businesses show themselves as 24 hours open. But you cannot design anything at 10 pm, right? But if you believe that you can answer the phone, you can expand your available hours, that may help you. One of the most important steps for optimization is categories. Google My Business is going to ask you for categories depending on your business model. If you’re a cabinet store you have two options; a kitchen remodel and a cabinet store. If you’re a countertop store, you have countertop contractor and countertop store options. You may think cabinets sound like a cabinet that you walk in there and you will see some furniture, No! This is how your future customers make searches and it’s all about the users, it’s not you. If someone wants to come to your store they may use kitchen cabinets showrooms, we have a really wide showroom category. That’s not really helping at all but cabinets stone and kitchen remodeler is one of the options that you can go with. If you have a home improvement store as a primary, this is not the correct thing for you to go there and check, or if your primary job is selling kitchen cabinets but you are listed at a countertop store, it’s not the correct way that you’re listing your company. That’s why we believe that keyword research is really important. You will understand your ideal customers in the area whether you’re using it because it depends on the area changes from state to state.
How to Build Citations
Building citations is not about your Google My Business. This is about your off-page. You need lots of citations across the web and consistency. You need your name, address, and phone number, even without LLC and kind of things. Because if you add LLC, you need to add LLC everywhere. If you are just giving your name, let’s say ABC Kitchen and Bath, do not use percent sign or end in different pages. Sometimes crawlers get it and try to populate that name in different pages and that’s going to create some sort of increasing mess all across the web, trying to be as consistent as possible. If you have duplicate content it is not helping you. Sometimes you have duplicates in third-party websites like Yellow Pages, or Yahoo, you may have duplicates, this is not good. If your name is even different, that’s going to create more mess. Try to avoid that duplication. Data aggregators take your information and sell it to marketing companies. That sounds like they are notorious because they’re selling your information right here, Factual, Axiocam Infogroup New Star, but their citation generators are going to help you when you just put them on the screen. So it’s a good way to create an auto, you’re kind of not putting your citations on autopilot. But do not kind of get overwhelmed with the thing that if you are saying they’re selling your information, that’s okay. They’re doing their job, and they’re creating your citations. In exchange, you look at over 300 plus online search sites they have worked with and they will create your citations for that website on autopilot.
Best Practices Examples
Let’s talk about the best practices, you need to upload your photos and you need to add them consistently, at least once every 30 days you need to post something from your Google My Business Page. There are different options there, you can create a deal, you can create an update, you can add a photo there or write there in 30 days. Just like you’re doing from your Facebook and Instagram pages. You need to add your Google My Business Page to your task list. Responding to reviews is another thing, when the homeowners are looking at your bad reviews if you’re responding to these bad reviews with the responsibility if you do not create some sort of discussion there this is going to help you to create a more professional looking website. Bad things can happen but that experience is going to be forgotten the next day, but the professionalism that you put in place when you’re responding to a negative review is going to stay there forever. Also when they ask you some questions, you need to make sure that you answer all these questions, because that shows some sort of responsibility and when you show that responsibility, then you will see that Google also compliments you along the way.
What Are the Best Tools You Can Use
- There are different tools that you can use such as;
- Bright Local
- White Spark
- Advanced Local
- Moz Local
These tools will give you the most important 20% to create the 80% of the momentum. Because the most important listings that Yext has and Yext can list you up there, you just optimize one Yext profile page, and your name and address, and phone number will be distributed to all these hundreds. If you’re changing your hours, let’s say you’re just limiting your hours, and you just change your Yext profile and all these web pages are going to be changed as well. You don’t need to go there and change one by one, Yext is going to give you the most important ones like Google Yelp, and that kind of thing that you’re going to get, you will get the Bright local. We are using it to create niche-specific citations, some of the citations that Yext cannot work with, we need to customize that citation campaign then we use Brightlocal. It’s like rock, pebbles, and cents. We can think the Yext is going to create rocks and Bright Local us for the pebbles. Because data aggregators and that kind of thing are going to be the sand. You can also try different tools. But we see that our fellow marketers are using some of the tools and for different niche markets. But Bright Local & Yext is going to help you to generate the most important citations. Yext is going to give you the big ones but all these services are available for you, also there are different pricing that they offer. We are partners with Yext and we automatically sign up with all our client’s when you start working together.
Let’s talk about the best practice for the citations. You need to manually claim to optimize your Google My Business Page. For the direct API, let’s not talk technical. But the Yext is going to give you the most important 50 citations and some of them are like premium citations. You cannot even try to hire someone to create pseudo citations. But yes, it is not going to let you go into some premium citations, or this premium citation page is not going to get into their system without Yext.
What Google Is Testing
Google is making some tests, what is testing right now is like those Google guaranteed badges for $50, this is not in our niche but we can go on with different examples. For example, we can talk about cleaning companies. Google guaranteed badge works with that system; you pay $50 to Google, and they give you that badge. Google doesn’t ‘’kind of pay and gets it’’ type of services, because it’s not connected to the user experience. In order to get that $50 badge, you need to go through a specific type of questionnaire because this is Google, they cannot create something like ‘’pay it and get a type’’ of things because that it’s going to hurt the user experience. But this is just a test, they’re testing it right now and we will see more information in the future. Another thing that they are testing is, when you go to Google and search for roofing contracting websites you will see that they are ranked according to rates, this is a test. We saw that a couple of months ago, they appeared in the search results. Our fellow digital marketers posted a lot of things such as; Hey, what’s going on? Google is changing so let’s position for that. But then they unreleased that they were testing and we will see a little more things about that. It’s obvious that Google is going to increase the importance of reviews and then they will give you Google’s comment about that company’s top rating.
Review Automation
We mentioned the importance of the reviews and there are different review services that we are using. We are using Nearby, Review Buzz, Birdeye, Customer Lobby, there is only one thing here, if you do not ask your customers to get a review, none of these tools is going to help you. The question here is how to get that review, that’s the most important thing. You need to put those people on an email campaign, you need to send at least one email every week and your campaign needs to continue indefinitely until the time that they click on the link in the email and they give you a review. That is important because when they click you shouldn’t really need to send another email in the reminder since you get older, the review system needs to stop there when you just get removed from that person. If you check you can find different review automation types of software but we created our own software. It’s not only for the review, Super Susan which is our automation system, is not only for the review it’s also a marketing automation system that we mentioned at the beginning of the blog. We used functionality from other tools and we implemented it in Super Susan. If you need some sort of a demo, if you’re having a hard time getting new reviews, or if you have really low ratings on your Google My Business Page or different directories, get that to us, we can offer you a solution for that.
About On-page and Off-page SEO
On-page SEO includes the things that you do inside of your website. A strong website with good content creates the user experience and if you have a multimedia type of things like a video or type of things that you can offer to your website visitors, there’s going to increase the page on time metric. That’s going to send good signals to the Google Analytics server so you can improve your page on-page time, that’s the way to improve that. Also, another way is the pages for each of your services and products. You need to create subpages for your services.
We mentioned three things: relevancy, proximity, and authority. Proximity, you cannot change your destination, your distance from the searcher because this is something that is going to be calculated by Google. But how about your authority? You can play with that authority, you can increase that authority by Google making that decision. Also, keywords in the title and H1 tags, are the things that we always mentioned, it’s like walking into a bookstore, you need to navigate yourself in a bookstore with the labels so same thing for the Google crawlers and the same thing for your website users in your sitemap and take H1 tags and titles and in a standard. Those are important facts you need to care about. You cannot just put some things on your homepage randomly, you need to differentiate a little bit in order to give Google, because this is the only way to tell Google crawlers about what your page includes. You need to put your name, address, and phone number in the footer because when the Google crawlers come to your website and scan the website to the bottom of the page and when they see you put your name, address, and phone number in the footer it will going to help you and if you have different locations, two different addresses don’t help you this moment. Because you may have two different locations and you want to show that address to the people, you can put that address on the footer. But make sure that name, address, and phone number is going to be the same as your Google My Business Page, name, address, and phone number. Even do not if you’re using brackets for the phone number. You need to be really careful when you’re creating your consistency to return emails and phone numbers. Updates are important, what we do is a general practice, we post a city page at the beginning of the month, we post a blog post in the middle of the month, that is giving us enough content and enough authority to get ranked in different cities and to gain authority from Google.
Off-page SEO means the things that you need outside of your website, claiming, optimizing Google My Business listings, your first step. Off-page SEO is also another factor when you’re looking at your optimization, your reviews, and your on-page SEO, and also your off-page SEO helps you a lot when you are optimizing your Google My Business Page.