Google My Business Optimization
Optimizing your listing helps increase your ranking. Obviously, the higher your listing ranks the more customers will find you. The good thing is if you do it yourself it is totally free to perfect your GMB listing. We of course help many businesses with this for many reasons, they simply would rather have an experienced company that can constantly monitor their listing so they can focus on other aspects of their business. Many small business owners wear many hats and marketing is simply one they don’t have time for so they hire us.
We charge $300 to fully optimize a GMB listing and $40 per month to monitor and update but we understand that some businesses just starting out do not have the budget for that so they choose to go at it on their own. This guide is to help those.
In this section, our Google My Business company shares some tips on how you can make full use of your GMB profile for maximum visibility.
1. Keep your business information up to date.
Consumers rely on the information they find on your GMB profile. As such, it is important to provide accurate information consistently. For example, suppose you recently made changes to your operating schedule, phone number, or even address. In that case, you should update your profile immediately to keep your account verified and visible online.
2. Upload plenty of photos and videos of your business.
The human brain is hardwired to process visual information. Your GMB listing can be instantly improved by adding photos (which also helps with GMB SEO). Google My Business statistics 2021 from Google show that businesses with pictures in their listing receive 42 percent more requests for driving directions and 35 percent more click-throughs than those that don’t. You should also make sure that the photos you use were taken locally to your business, there is metadata embedded into every image and the location in which it was taken is looked at by Google so you want to make sure your photos are taken locally or you modify the location data on the image.
You would be very surprised at how many people look at photos on a business so this is something you do not want to overlook. We try to add 4-8 new images per month.
3. Write Posts.
Establishing yourself as an expert in your field usually helps grow a business as well so writing informative posts that users can read and learn from improves your Google My Business listing position as well as helps potential customers connect with you and establish trust.
Note that Google Posts only stays on your profile for seven days, so you will have to continuously share content updates, preferably once a day. You also want to make sure that all your posts are also added to the blog section of your website so you are fully utilizing that content.
4. Ask your customers for Google My Business reviews.
84 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from a friend. Google My Business reviews are vital because they can influence your customers’ buying decisions. Additionally, they also help to improve your online visibility and reputation through SEO.
Politely ask your satisfied customers for a review. A good strategy for this is to simply send out a text message to them with a direct review link. We handle this for many clients and when we send out SMS messages to their customers with a direct review link we see a 70-80% success rate. One client just a few weeks back went from 32 reviews to 110 in 3 days and all we did was send an SMS to each of their previous customers asking for a review.
If You Need Help
If you need help applying what you learned in this short guide then give us a call and let us help you. Z3D Creative is a full-service agency that helps businesses like yours improve local visibility by optimizing your GMB profile. We offer Google My Business services that drive more business to your location. Or if you simply want us to take a look at your listing and run a report for you so you can see how you are doing we can do that for free, just give us a call or email we’re happy to help.