Best Ways To Optimize A Google My Business Listing

Google is the dominant search engine for local searches. As the virtual inventor and catalyst for the widespread adoption of the Search Engine, Google is now controlling and shifting the towards more precise results and actions.

As a result of their unparalleled service, whenever someone is looking to make a purchase in their local market, they revert to Google.

It’s a question that all business owners ask at one point or another: How do I optimize my business listing on Google?

What Happens Without Proper Business Listing Optimization

These days, not being found on Google means you’re dead in the water. Are you in Google’s good graces?

This blog post will give you a quick glance at the things you need to do in order to leverage Google and get found when your local audience is looking for products and services that you offer.

Here are some stats that show why optimizing your profile is mandatory in the current state of affairs.

• 3.5 billion Google searches are made every day. (Internet Live Stats)
• The volume of Google searches grows by roughly 10% every year. (Internet Live Stats)
• 90% of searches made on desktops are done via Google. (Statista)
• Half of all users who performed a local search on their mobile device visited that store same day. (jotform)
• In fact, research shows that 63.6 percent of people are likely to check up on a business’ Google reviews before they visit. (reviewtrackers)

Some more statistics on the growth of Google.

The Benefits of Profile Optimization

Google My Business is the most powerful free tool at your disposal. Herein lies the opportunity for anyone wise enough to jump onboard.

Develop and utilize the platform to its maximum potential and get a prime placement on Google Maps.

• Only 61% of local businesses have even claimed their GMB profiles;
• Only a fraction of those actually optimize properly;
• And even fewer keep this information updated;

When done correctly, you’re essentially rendering your competition a non-threat.

How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

Claim and Verify Your Listing

Register with Google and get it set up. Many of your competitors may not have verified their listings and as a result, are getting penalized. It’s easy to sign up and claim your listing, the process takes some time to send a postcard to your location. Once you get your listing confirmed, ensure all data is 100% accurate. Google is helpful in this regard with claiming steps.

Choose All The Best Categories

There are likely several possible categories your business can be associated with. Get creative to find all the industries, professions, and categories you may relate to your products and services. Find all that applies to you and select what works.

Develop Your Business Description

Write engaging content that will persuade prospects to engage with you. Create a powerful copy that will be displayed on your GMB profile.

Develop Your Business Information

Fill everything out so that Google feels secure in suggesting you to their search audience. Keep this information up to date, and be as descriptive and complete as possible.

Develop Reviews

Ask for, respond to and engage your reviews on Google. Your happy clients make the best crowd to ask for reviews. Once you have reviews, thank those who left good reviews, and also thank those who left bad reviews. A bad review can dissuade a prospect, but if you respond saying that you’re improving your service to account for the shortcoming, you might bring them back in.

How To Know If Optimizing Is Working For You

Upon implementing all these things, you will start to see impressive results. Below, we have two images of separate business dashboards inside of Google My Business. They show the number of times that their brand was found on the search engine. Keep in mind it all depends on your ability to show up first.

Insights

Google ultimately wants to sell you ads, and their infrastructure allows you to monitor all types of clicks, impressions, calls, conversions, and a myriad of tools to show their paid campaigns are performing.

Lucky for the average GMB profile, they also have a suite of free monitoring tools. These are inside the dashboard, known as Google Insights. The case studies above are derived from that dashboard.

You will definitely want to track and monitor your results. At first, upon claiming your business, you might not have anything shown, results will be dismal.

As you optimize and improve your profile, get more reviews, you will start to see improvements.

Google Maps delivers powerful leads into your world via click to call features, directions, and website linking.

Google Maps is the #1 free source of high quality leads.

We have two examples that display what is possible with a high performing Google My Business profile. One of the best features of GMB is that it allows you to track the results it is having on your lead generation.

This is the Google Insights feature, and here are those case studies.

Insight Dashboards

Home Service Business:

Retail:

Get the Checklist and Get On The Maps

A definitive guide for local professional service businesses who need more highly-qualified prospects… right now.

1. Implement the sequential steps to optimize your GMB profile effectively.
2. Learn a strategic approach to rank for dozens of keywords in Google Maps.
3. Follow a proven framework to maintain and improve your Maps rankings long-term.

Get the checklist now!

The Step by Step Course For Optimizing your Maps

Maybe you’re more hands on and want to get this done instantly with the exact steps.

Learn about our optimization course for step by step instructions on placing yourself on the maps listing. We walk through the exact things you (or your team) need to do in order to get on the maps. Not one step is overlooked!

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