In our experience as a digital marketing company, Google Business Profile (aka Google MyBusiness) has been an incredible tool to help our clients reach their local target audience. It doesn’t matter if you’re a non-profit organization or a large corporation – everybody should be taking advantage of this free service from Google. In this post, we’ll explore some of the must-know secrets of Google Business Profile.
What is Google MyBusiness? (Google Business Profile, Google Business Listing)
Think of Google MyBusiness as an online “Yellow Pages”. It’s a free tool that Google offers to businesses that have a physical location or provide a physical service.
Your Google Business Profile gives viewers a quick overview of your company, including hours of operation, location, phone number, website, and reviews, along with other basic information.
Read more about Google’s free tools.
Secrets of Google Business Profile
In an era where you can easily start websites, businesses, and more at your fingertips, Google Business Profile (GMB) becomes a vital step to connect directly to Google. In my personal opinion, I believe that Google will examine your GMB profile before even looking at your website. This means that if you haven’t claimed your profile, optimized your profile, and shown Google that you’re active on your profile, you could be missing out on many customers.
Claiming and Verifying Your Profile
The first thing you will need to do is to make sure you own and claim your profile. Chances are that Google has already created a profile for you, unless you’re a startup, so you will need to Google your business name and then you will be able to claim and verify your listing.
The verification process can take a couple of days, but as soon as you have it done, you have the first nice green check from Google.
For more information: add or claim your Google Business Profile
Optimizing Your Profile
Google gives you all the tools you need (including a Profile Strength Score), but you must complete them. So, to have a fully optimized profile, you need to follow their instructions. Here are the most important of them:
A – Complete your profile:
- Match your name with the correct name under your website.
- Fill out every field with your correct information – emphasize having the right phone number, website, social media profiles, and address.
- Choose your correct business category
- Add a description that is more than 300 words.
- Add an opening date
- Add your service areas
- Add your business hours
- Add other information: accessibility, amenities, crowd, parking, planning, etc.
B – Add pictures:
Add at least 10-20 pictures of your business, highlighting your team, interior, and exterior shots. Try not to use stock photography.
C – Add products and/or services
Add at least the three main products or services you offer so they will display in your profile.
D – Add 3-5 questions and answers
Yes, you can go ahead and take the FAQ from your website and add them here, one by one. I recommend doing this every month. More on the activity below.
E – Add 2-3 business posts
You can go ahead and be creative when posting business posts. This could be events, discounts, promotions, announcements, etc. You can set a date to stop showing them, but by default, they stay under your profile for 6 months.
F – Reviews
One of the most important things is to ask your past customers and current customers for reviews, by sending them your dedicated link to them. Click here to get the review link for your business.
After they submit reviews, please make sure to respond to every single one of them. Even if it is a negative review. (If you would like to know how to answer to a negative review here is a blog post about that. )
The reviews and the business posts are a perfect segue to move to the last point, Activity, on your profile.
Show Google You Are Active with Your Profile
Now that you have claimed and optimized your profile, you would need to add this channel to your marketing plan and to give it some love on a weekly and monthly basis. How?
- Add more pictures monthly (if possible)
- Add more questions and answers monthly.
- Ask for more reviews from your customers and answer each one of them
- Add more posts (we suggest at least once per week, but 2-3 are best practice)
What you’re doing with the above is connecting your profile directly to Google, and telling them, “Hey Google, we are active! We want to be highlighted, we want to be shown, we are open for business.”
Extra Tips and Secrets:
- Add directions to your website – help your customers plan their visit to your location
- Add an amenity map to your website – show nearby amenities to help customers explore your area
- Confirm your holiday hours – there’s nothing more frustrating to see that a location is open on a holiday to get there and it is actually closed. So update your hours for the upcoming holiday.
- Add a map to your website – help customers find your location
- Add a booking form link for your customers to directly book an appointment
Need Help With Your Google Business Profile?
You may have read this and felt overwhelmed. The reality is that creating and optimizing the profile is a monthly task, but it pay dividends every month, too.
We just finished a meeting with one of our clients that had 250 calls last month from their Business Profile. We also have another client that has more than 1000K users to their website from their Business Profile. We also have seen increasing engagement and ROI after our clients have posted offers and products under their listing. It’s up to you. The results are clear.
If you would like to take advantage of this Google free tool, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us for help with the creation, optimization, and the monthly maintenance of your profile.
Contact us today and book a meeting to talk about how Lifedge can improve your organic search and can bring more leads to your doors by using Google Business Profile.
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