Google is the king of search engines, commanding 86.86% of the market share according to July 2021 findings. There is no better place for any business to gain more visibility and web audience than on Google through Google My Business.

Google My Business optimization service is a free online directory that allows business owners to create a profile from which they can manage and control how information about their business is presented on Google Search, search engine result pages (SERPs), and Google Maps.

Google My Business allows entrepreneurs to create their business listing (profile) by adding valuable information to Google and local customers for rich and compelling local search listings. The information includes but not limited to:

• The name of the business
• The type of business
• The physical address of the business
• The business hours of operation
• Phone contact with the business
• The website link of the business
• Reviews about the business
• The overall star ratings
• Images of the business
• The social media accounts
• A link to Google Maps
• Posts about your business
• Related search

Surprisingly, most Google Search users have local intentions to find places to shop, eat, or entertain themselves. Google My Business optimization service helps businesses rank high in the local pack increasing their visibility to those users. The local pack comprises search results displaying the business information, mainly the business name, physical address, and website on Google Search and Google Maps.

Since the local pack is displayed below the paid adverts and just above the organic search results, businesses using Google My Business listing can gain greater traffic than those not using this business listing platform.

Let’s dive into some of the reasons why Google My Business is instrumental to any business or organization.

Importance of Google My Business

It has No Cost implications

All that is required is a Google account, popularly called a Gmail account although Gmail is just one among many other features such as Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Ads, and much more. The signup is easy, fast without having to have to pay a dime.

Easy Management

The business owner easily controls the information in a single dashboard. The business owner can post information about his business, respond to queries, check reviews, post videos and photos, and much more through the dashboard.

Consistency of information

The information provided is spot-on accurate regardless of the geographical locations of your customers. If the business owner changes the location, customers are able to find the business with ease since any updates on the business listing information occurs in real-time.

Helps to interact with Customers

Google My Business helps the entrepreneur to engage more and better with customers or prospective customers. This occurs by responding to questions on direct messaging and responding to reviews.

Provides Insights About the Business

A business owner gains insights about the customers’ behaviors as to which action is taken when they discover your business and recommendations on improvement areas. Through the heat maps, business owners see where clients are originating and can inform their decision on expanding operations in certain areas. For example:

(Image Credit: Search Engine Land)

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What Influences Google My Business Rank

Ranking on Google My Business shows a business position in the search engine results on the local pack. The local search results are based on three primary Google My Business ranking factors: relevance, distance, and prominence.

A mix of these Google My Business ranking factors helps determine the best match for users’ search. This explains why Google’s algorithms may rank a business high, yet it is farther away from the user’s location than those close by due to their prominence and relevance to your search query.

1. Relevance

It can be defined as how best a business listing matches the user’s search question. This narrows down the results to display only fine detailed answers to the search query, not just hundreds of millions of webpage results.

1. Proximity

From this perspective, distance refers to how close or far away, the potential search results are from the search location. Google algorithms are smart enough to work out the distance if a user does not spell out a search location depending on what they already know about their location.

iii. Prominence

This factor is used in reference to popularity of the business. Google my business shows the businesses and places that are most prominent offline and online. This helps to know the effectiveness of Google my business ranking on websites and away from the sites. For example, all of the business in this image are very close in distance so the more popular one will go on the top of the list:

How to Optimize your Google My Business

Most business owners ponder on how to make my business show up on Google search owing to the fact that a small fraction of most Google users never land to the second page on the SERPs. That said, let’s engage in how to get your business to show up on Google first.

Adding Relevant Information

Putting updated information on your Business Profile consistent with information provided across other channels such as a website or social media networks. Ensuring that the business name, address, and phone number (NAP) is correct, updated, and consistent with local citations can be a good step in optimizing your listing. Local citations such as online directories and social bookmarking sites help verify that humans own the business.

Google My Business will cross-check to find whether the information is given tallies from other channels to avoid inconveniences caused by missing or wrong information. For instance, if the website shows that you are open during certain days and hours of operation, customers drive there to find that you are indeed closed; you are likely to lose business as they will turn to competitors.

Completing every section of your business profile helps in providing more information about your business. The completeness of information about a business increases consumers’ calls since more information builds customer confidence and trustworthiness.

Appropriate business description and the right category and subcategory connect the business with users looking for specific services or products. For instance, a general medical practitioner treats various health problems. Still, if they are more comfortable treating ailments of a specific age bracket, the primary category can be pinned to the desired age group, say pediatric services. Notice how this dental office put each category they comfortable with, this way their business will show up on multiple search queries:

(Image Credit: dbaPlatform)

Claiming your Business

Creating a Google My Business account helps you to gain access and optimize your Business Profile. Claiming your business’s short name makes it easier for consumers to find your business. A short name is a name that consumers commonly use to cite your business. Short names contain characters between 5 to 32 and may contain business name, location, or anything really as long as it is within the confined terms and conditions. Short names help entrepreneurs share links easily without using URLs with a long string of letters and numbers.

Posts

Adding a regular post with a link and photo to your Business Profile from the post section on Google My Business website or app. This can go a long way in increasing business visibility. Regular posts about announcements, upcoming events, product reviews, eBook downloads and special offers and discounts will help optimize your business. Post increases the amount of action of customers who land on your profile and can follow the business profile for new updates and posts. The image below shows where you need to go to add a post:

(Image Credit: Moz)

Use Images

Attributed to Google efforts to enhance and expand image search potentiality, including images, help optimize your business ranking. Artificial Intelligence technologies such as Google Lens help return visual SERPs that enable consumers to find the exact product they are looking for.

High quality, unique, and relevant images help organizations to maintain high visibility on Google. Images should be tailored to capture the exterior of the business premise, interior of the building, products on sale, team members, and the team offering service to consumers.

Images are helpful to people experiencing challenges with processing text and text reading difficulties. Business concepts and values can be and clearly illustrated using images, graphs, and other graphics. Creative images linked in posts and pages make the content more interesting and amplify the search visibility and ranking.

However, it is wise to note that you add at least one photo for great success in image optimization every week. The logo should be your thumbnail photo, and the cover photo should best represent your brand as differing feature photos will be displayed depending on the search question.

Prominence

Google search results reflect prominent landmark buildings, museums, or famous brand stores in the local search results. Information contained on Google about articles, links, and directories of a business is used to measure the business’s prominence. Numerous positive reviews and website search result positions also inform Google on the prominence of a business.

To improve on the ranking, it is important to employ a Google My Business ranking checker. A Google, My Business ranking checker offers details about how your Business Profile rank based on several criteria. For instance, a Google My Business ranking checker will look into your website’s speed, image loading time, incoming and outgoing links, links between site pages, website performance on mobile devices, site structure, and keywords on the website. The Google My Business ranking checker scrutinizes the Business Profile to check where the listing performs well, information gaps, and piecemeal guidance on improving the Business Profile and local presence.

Include Social Media Handles

While there is no straightforward setting in the dashboard to automatically add social media URLs to accounts to the Google My Business knowledge panel, how do people do it? This happens through the use of structured data to associate social media profiles from the website.

The website profiles help Google algorithm to understand who owns what profile and will link them. Since this does not happen automatically, you add a little bit of extra code to your schema code on your site to link the social media accounts into the Google My Business knowledge panel. Adding social media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Linkedin and others to the knowledge panel allows clients to connect and engage more on your social platforms and give them more visibility. For example:

(Image Credit: Infineca)

Backlinks

Backlinks are crucial in the Search Engine Optimization sphere as they are the core components for good SEO. Backlinks refer to links that associate one website resource to another. It may be a different page of the same website or different webpages. Quality backlinks improve website relevance by having location anchor text and keywords. Quality backlinks improve the website indexing and overall rank

in the SEO.

Asking and Answering Questions

The question and answers allow anyone to ask or answer questions about your Google my Business listing from the knowledge panel. However, it can have either a positive or negative impact on the business depending on the responses that you receive in those answers.

While it is not possible to turn off the Q&A feature of your Business Profile, there are several ways in which you can optimize it. Choosing the frequently asked questions FAQs then providing answers which you upvote, helps new users to gain more confidence and about your opinion on the questions.

When formulating questions, it is crucial to keep in mind that keywords help in ranking, so organically targeting keywords is a great keyword strategy for higher ranking. Monitoring the answers provided can help you ensure that your business’s accurate information is highlighted to avoid misleading existing and prospective consumers.

We hope that you found this article useful.

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Responding to Reviews

Reviews add credibility and reliability of a business to perform a service or produce products that they purport to offer and how they say they do that. Business owners need to respond to all reviews and time since a huge percentage of consumers trust online reviews as they would in personal recommendations. More positive reviews, especially by locals, build and enhance customer trust in the business entity.

By answering even the negative reviews, the business reputation is upheld and differentiated from a scam and a shambolic company that only cares about profits. At whatever cost, try as much as possible to answer all reviews, especially negative ones, as it avoids public outcry and unwarranted keyboard fights. The tone of response should always be friendly, professional, and helpful to regain their trust. For instance:

(Image Credit: LocaliQ)

Responding to positive reviews allows you to understand your key selling points and positions better to maintain and improve your products and services. The reviews are indicated using the yellow stars. Google algorithm considers the business reviews to rank businesses on the web pages results. Businesses with highest positive reviews take the top positions in rank and cascades downwards till those with less reviews then finally to those without any review.

Embedding your Map

The Google My Business optimization service answers how to rank higher on Google Maps by allowing business owners to embed a Google Map on their website. This is ordinarily done at the “contact us” page. The website’s embedded map further proves that the business is located at the same address as indicated in the business listing.

How to rank higher on Google Maps through embedding the map is easy. The business owner searches for his business name on Google Maps. Once the results have been displayed, you click on the “share” icon then select the “embed a map” tab. A map showing your business’s geographical location pops up with an HTML code that you can copy and paste into your website’s business contact page.

Ensuring that Your Website is Responsive

A good website needs to look not only stylish but also automatically adjust to accommodate different viewports and screens. The responsiveness of a website refers to the ability of the website to function consistently regardless of the screen size nor hardware device, whether mobile, tablet, or computer. Due to the prevalent use of mobile devices with almost a ratio of 1:4 in comparison to desktop, websites need to consider all gadgets. Websites with broken links that require zooming and pinching are generally slow, thereby ranking lower on Google Maps.

Aim for the Knowledge Graph

The knowledge graph is the featured snippet on Google search results. The featured snippet or the “position zero” always appear at the top of the webpage result. If you are wondering how to get your business to show up on Google first, then here are tips that you should follow.

• Answer the question completely.
• Give your answer in the simplest way possible.
• Give accurate information
• Use structured data or schema markup.
• Use professional videos

Use of the above will help optimize my business rank on Google My Business and how to make my business show up on Google search.

Continuous regular Audits

To stay ahead in Google My Business ranking, it is important to perform regular audits. You can monitor the performance of your Business Profile in the insight section of your dashboard. The data provides you how customers can find your business. Identifying the business’s discoverability helps business owners understand the keywords and areas from which they are coming originating. For example:

(Image Credit: Bizebo)

Phone call analysis informs the business owner of the business’s peak hours and thus can be able to adjust the time frames appropriately. Through the customer action section, the business owner can determine customer behaviors and know what to improve based on content featured on Google My Business profile.

Diib®: Improve Your Google My Business Ranking Today!

Google My Business is a great, free resource for any business owner. Diib Digital offers comprehensive analytics designed to optimize your listing, improving traffic and overall ranking. Here are some of the features of our User Dashboard we’re sure you’ll love:

• Bounce rate monitoring and repair
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