In our third part of the small business SEO series, we’re going to be focusing on your Google business profile. For a local business, getting ranked in the Google Maps section of the search results pages is one of the most impactful things in terms of lead opportunities.
You’ll find a lot of blog posts, case studies, and best practices around Google business profile creation and optimization, but we’re going to focus on a couple of high-level tips that are aimed to be more impactful in their ability to help you rank. We’re going to search for some quick wins and give you an ongoing strategy to help you maintain your position.
If you don’t yet have a Google business profile, we will start at the beginning. The first thing you are going to need is a Google account. If you don’t have this yet, head over to Google and create a new account (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/56256?hl=en). This account is going to be how we will access and create our Google business profile.
While logged into your new account, head over to Google to create your new business profile here: https://business.google.com/create
You’ll see this:
It’s always a best practice to search for your business before creating a new one. Sometimes Google can pick up information about businesses from other websites or data aggregators. Just be sure you are not creating a duplicate listing. If you find your business, select it and you can start editing from there. If you do not find your business, you will click the link to “add your business to Google“. Then you’ll see this prompt.
The two most important fields are going to be your business name and your primary business category. You can change these later, but we will give you some best practices to get these right.
The business name should be the official name of your business. However, it is widely known that keywords in the business title/name field do affect its ability to rank. But it’s also important to not stuff keywords or overdo it here. It’s become quite common for businesses to include their primary service or category in the title.
Even with our business listing, our official name is “SEOteric”, but we’ve added “SEOteric Digital Marketing” as our business name, and we often use that in other areas as well to add clarity.
The next important field is going to be your primary category. You can search the categories available by starting to type in the category field. If you need a place to start, you can review close to 4000 categories on our list of Google Business Profile categories page.
Choose the most appropriate category for your main business category and then you can proceed to building out your profile. The profile editing has been moved to the SERPS, and you’ll get a pop-up that looks like this when you click on the “Edit Profile” link.
Here, we can now build out our profile with as much information as we can. The best practice here is to be comprehensive and fill in everything as completely as possible. You will notice that there are several business categories with one selected as primary. Go through the list and search for available categories that fit your business. Take your time here because getting all the appropriate categories can have a big impact on whether you rank for categorical Search terms or not. Find all of the available categories and add them here.
Next, we’re going to create a compelling and keyword-rich description. Try to sell your service and include the services here to give your listing more relevance for those terms. You can add an opening date if you have it, and then put in your contact phone numbers. You’ll notice we have two numbers listed, one is a local number, and the other is our toll-free 800 number. The local number is primary.
As you, you will fill in your website address, social profiles, and location and areas. The location and areas are also a critically important part of your business profile. If you have a physical location, you will enter your business location along with a suite number if it’s applicable. Make sure your PIN marker is in the right place. If you were pin is not in the right place, you can click on it and you will get a button with a link to “adjust” it. For businesses with a physical location, you want to make sure that the checkbox for “show business address to customers” is selected. If you do not want to show your address because you serve clients at their locations, you can toggle that off.
Next, you can select your service areas either by ZIP code, City, or state. This is another area where you want to be comprehensive and include the areas you serve.
As you, you’ll also enter your business hours and other attributes. Some of these might be somewhat confusing, but you’ll click through each attribute and see if anything applies to your business like accessibility, amenities, crowd, parking, planning, and service options.
Once you save your profile information, you should see a profile interface that allows you to add a few more important things to your listing.
The focus here is to be comprehensive, so we’ll want to go through each of these and fill out as much information about our business, our products and services, Q&A questions, etc. as we can. By adding a few photos including your logo and some nice images that can be used as your banner image. Include some photos about services and products to give more relevance here also.
If you allow clients to book appointments with you, you can provide links to your appointment page on your website.
Once you have filled out all of the information that you can, Google Now gives you an easy way to acquire reviews. There’s a link called “Ask for Reviews” that will give you a specific review link that you can share with friends, family, and customers who have interacted with your business. Getting a baseline of reviews is also a really important optimization tactic. Data suggest that visibility for Google Business profiles is limited for profiles with less than 10 or so reviews. Will want to get in the habit of asking satisfied customers to leave a review, and sending this direct link will make that easier.
Now that we have a profile that’s created and comprehensively filled in with all available information, we’re going to focus next on building prominence and increasing ranking potential. Next up in our small business SEO series, we will cover how to increase local rankings in Google Maps.
Categories: SEO, Technical, Technical SEO, Websites
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