Tips to improve your Google listings local ranking.
As the world turns more digital it becomes more essential for businesses to improve their visibility online, especially through sites such as Google. Most businesses understand this requires optimizing their website and creating online ads, but what most don’t know is that it is also just as essential to optimize their Google listing. Also known as your Google Business Profile, this tool summarizes the most important parts of your business to make it easy for potential customers to find and learn more about you. Items such as your reviews, services, hours, and contact information, enable potential customers who never knew you existed to quickly find you, learn about your business and engage with you without ever leaving Google. This makes Google business an essential sales funnel for every business.
Each month 167 billion searches are made through Google. Meanwhile, the typical business listing only gets 1,260 views during that same period (statistics from Bright Local). That is a minuscule 0.00000075% visibility. Of that only 59 actions are taken from those 1,260 views. Less than 5% of viewers.
These statistics show that most businesses just aren’t taking full advantage of their Google Business Listing. On the plus side, this also shows that completing this list of optimization tips will greatly improve your ranking against your competitors. These are the 10 things you can do to improve your Google listing rank easily.
Claim your listing
Add about, contact, and attributes information
Add primary and secondary categories
Add services/products
Add website, menu, and appointment links
Upload photos
Publish posts
Answer questions
Get more and respond to reviews
Set up messaging and automated responses
Applying these improvements will turn your listing into an automated client acquisition tool, bringing you in new clients without you having to do any work to find them.
Benefits to optimizing your listing
Boost your local ranking
Optimizing your Google listing will improve your local ranking for keywords you want to be found for. Google's algorithm looks for 4 things when deciding who ranks first on its SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages); relevancy, authority, recency, and proximity. Whatever result provides Google with the best results for these 4 factors will consistently show up first and outcompete their competitors.
Are you missing opportunities to rank? Set up a free SEO checkup call today.
Improves Engagement
As the world continues to become more convenient people want to spend less time loading web pages and searching for answers. Google has come up with a couple of creative solutions to this problem in the form of SERPs. SERPs are the many different ways we receive content when searching on Google. Your Google Business Listing is one of these SERPs. By providing a business's most important information on the right side of a search page, Google is able to provide a user with all the information they need to make a decision about a business in a small snippet that requires no further action from the user. This convenience has led to what is known as “zero-click searches”, the action of a user looking up a question or business, finding their answer on the Google SERP, and exiting without clicking on any links. A business without a Google Listing showing up is at a huge risk of just getting ignored, even if they are in the first place on Google, as their competitor who does have a listing is showing up right next to them, but with all the information a user needs to make the decision to use them instead of the competitor without a listing.
Convert More Customers
A regular Google listing will very rarely convert potential customers into paying ones if it just shows a couple of reviews, some photos, and where to find you. A handful of reviews and photos will not convince a searcher you are the top dog in town. Having a website link, a phone number, multiple photos, reviews, FAQs, and a unique call to action such as, “request a quote” or “make a reservation” gives searchers more than enough information to convince them you are the right choice as well as a fast way to get in contact and convert into a paying customer.
Just like any SEO strategy your Google Business strategy should center around providing as much quality information as possible. As we all know Google’s mission is to provide users with the most accurate and authentic information possible. So if you are unsure if what you are doing is right, ask yourself whether you are providing quality information for your customers. If you are, Google will typically notice and rank you higher for it.
If you would like to know where you can improve your ranking beyond these 10 steps we offer a free, no-commitment SEO checkup for your business and show you the more in-depth edits you can make on your listing and website to improve your ranking further.
