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Google Business Profile: Optimize your company listing and improve your local SEO
Google Business Profile has become one of the most powerful tools when working with local SEO. This network allows you to easily improve the positioning of your business within your city. How can you optimize your Google Business Profile?
By creating an account in Google Business Profile what you are doing is becoming part of the Google business directory, which will benefit you in that it improves the visibility of your organization in the area where you are located.
And why is improving local SEO useful?
It is simple, the process of buying and consuming has changed.
The new consumer has modified their relationship to the products they want to buy and their way of discovering new businesses, whether they be shops or professionals.
The first phase of the purchase process involves undertaking an internet search in order to locate what we are looking for, researching all the options that the search engine shows us and opting for the one that is most attractive to us.
Why have a listing optimized in Google Business Profile?
Let’s say we want to find a speech therapist in Philadelphia, PA.
We must emphasize that Google results will vary depending on previous search history and IP address.
Google will show us the results closest to the area where we are.
Therefore, if I search for “speech therapists” Google will show me the results that are closest to where I am. As I’m in Philadelphia, the results will be related to speech therapists who are in this municipal area.
These are the first therefore, they are all Google Business Profile files.
Note that all of them have their own website but if the didn’t, you can use Google Business Profile to help improve local SEO and appear in the top results, without needing a website.
It’s witchcraft!
What happens if we get more specific with the keywords?
If we search for “speech therapist in Philadelphia” the results differ, hence the importance of optimizing the Google Business Profile.
By working on our company profile inside Google Business Profile, we can tackle a greater number of keywords that trigger the appearance of our profile in search results.
Learn how to optimize a Google Business Profile
Let’s not forget that this is a Google tool, so we know in order to be competitive, you need to focus on strategies such as SEO. In order to get big results, you still need to focus on the small details.
Therefore, the first thing I do is a keyword study that helps me choose the terms that interest me.
To optimize a Google Business Profile listing we have to know which parts we are most interested in improving.
- Name: Here we will add the name of the company. We should add a tag that is clear and specifies our services.
- Category: in this section we will put the one that is closest to our activity. We can include several
- Hour: in this section we introduce our hours of operation
- URL: if we have a website, we can include it here.
- Contact telephone number
- The physical address of our company. This information should coincide with that on our website.
- The Description: this, together with the name and the services section, are the most important part of the file. In this part we have to include 750 characters that get the most out of SEO, so it is important to define in advance the words that will give us the most success.
- Services: in this part we have to define our services always keeping SEO in mind to improve our local positioning.
- Photos: of our team or of work performed for example, and always geolocated and tagged in order to optimize our positioning within Google My Business
Optimize your company description in Google Business Profile
The first thing we have to do to facilitate the positioning of our Google my business listing is to choose the keywords.
Let’s see how to do it in a simple way.
Tips to select keywords on Google Business Profile
- Define your products and services
- Choose a tool with which to perform the analysis. I recommend:
- Add your location for your products and services and carry out a search. We are going to select keywords that attract a wide range of web users without forgetting about those that may search with more limited keywords but who may be more transactional.
Returning to the speech therapist example “Speech therapist in Philadelphia”
Remember that we are working on local SEO, it’s specific to an area, so don’t expect to find a great many searches for those keywords.
Now what we have to do is check the list one by one and choose those that result in the most searches.
Imagine if Philadelphia does not have search results but a nearby town or city does.
I normally don’t like to focus on a single keyword.
Do you remember when you were little and at school they used to provide you with a few words, and from those you had to write an essay? Well, that’s more or less what you should do with the selected keywords when writing the description of your file in Google Business Profile. Write your description using these selected keywords.
Once this is complete we have optimized the description segment of our file. To complete and optimize the services part (here we can also take advantage of SEO), we will select keywords in a similar way to those we have chosen for the description part.
Optimizing the service section on Google Business Profile
To complete and optimize the services part (here we can also take advantage of SEO), we will select keywords in a similar way to those we have chosen for the description part.
In this section we can include various services and each of them can be completed with up to 1,000 characters. Take advantage of the length, otherwise you could miss some opportunities.
Let’s give SEO some flare to optimize Business Profile Services:
To work local SEO in Business Profile we are going to carry out another small study of keywords.
- Define our services
- Select the core or root service
- Introduce this service in the keyword analysis tool (Semrush, Ahrefs, keyword planner…) and choose from our portfolio of services, those that are most useful to us
- We select some keywords that are formulated as a question through ‘Answer the public’
- We give you an answer in the description of our services not forgetting that we are working on local web positioning
Update your Google Business Profile listings
The company listing of Google Business Profile is a living document. On the Internet everything changes from day to day and the search trends and the evolution of the services offered by a company are increasingly attempting to adapt more to this dizzying pace.
That being said, It is important to keep in mind that everything changes so don’t forget to modify your file from time to time.
Schedule an appointment every quarter with your local Google Business Profile listing and play with the keywords and above all, measure the impact by connecting your Google Business Profile with Metricool.
Remember that other important aspects in the listing are:
- Reviews: or the stars that give us reliability and define whether our establishment is reliable or not. We should encourage clients to leave us reviews as it is very important feedback.
- Attributes: These are characteristics of our establishment that are created by the users themselves as they visit and comment about their experience. We cannot generate them ourselves.
- Questions: these are questions that users leave us in our listing regarding doubts that arise before visiting our company. Don’t lose track of them because those who leave questions expect an answer.
- Special hours: Any modification to the normal working hours. For example, if you are going to have a reduced schedule on New Year’s Eve.
- Publications: updates of our business, promotions, news…anything that will help us gain more visibility.
Photos in the listing
In general, one of the parts that I like the most is the world of statistics. It is interesting to spend a few minutes on this section because we can draw important conclusions that will help improve the visibility of your listing.
If we go to the statistics section on the left and go to the end, the graph is telling us that we have the same number of photographs as our competition but in this example our competitors outdo us with client photographs
Knowing this, we’ll need to upload more photos (or videos) of our business and that we must encourage our clients to upload photos of our establishment.
Check the complete guide to Google Business Profile
➡️ Google Business Profile ⬅️
Conclusions on Google Business Profile
If you have a physical business location, you should be on Google Business Profile. It is an easy network to maintain compared to the rest of the social networks we work with.
Not only that, in addition to its ease of management, its return is more effective locally compared to the management of other social networks.
As we have seen, it is not even necessary to have a web page to be visible in your local area. Although having a website and using it effectively in terms of SEO can grow your business and open new markets.
How do you use Google Business Profile?