In today’s time, it’s difficult for any business to thrive without having an impeccable online presence. The reason is a large number of customers have turned their heads towards Google and other search engines to find the products or services they are looking for. This makes it mandatory for businesses to increase their Google business profile (GBP) ranking.
As per stats, local searches cause almost 18% of overall mobile visitors who visit stores even within the same day. It’s an eye-opening stat for the majority of businesses looking to improve their presence in local search results.
So, if you are yet to optimize your GBP, it’s the right time to do so. Otherwise, there’s a higher possibility that you could miss the growth opportunities. To optimise your Google business profile, you need to take into account lots of things. We discuss every point in-depth to help you understand everything better.
What is Google Business Profile (GBP)?
Google Business Profile is basically a tool from Google. It’s available free of cost for businesses from multiple industries. The tool lets businesses manage their overall appearance in Google Maps and Searches.
Businesses leverage GBP to display their details online, including contact info, hours, location, customer reviews, etc. A well-optimised GBP is necessary for local SEO. It tantalizes customers from nearby locations by maximizing online visibility of your business. Local businesses need to build trust and thus improve their digital presence.
A GBP account lets businesses chalk out their local search strategies, apart from displaying their exact location on Google Maps and accessing Google reviews.
Let’s see the best example of Google Business Profile;
Why GBP is Crucial for Local SEO?
A GBP helps businesses attract more eyeballs and thus get a plethora of opportunities to grow. Let’s take a look at many other benefits;
- Get more Local Eyes
One of the major benefits of GBP for local SEO is it works effectively when it comes to attracting local eyeballs. You need to know that Google always emphasizes local results through its Local Pack when users search for services by including terms like ‘near me’.
Local Pack is basically an important section of search engine results pages (SERPs) that reflects nearby businesses along with various details like ratings, map locations, contact details, and more.
The most important thing you need to do is to optimize your GBP properly, which is essential for your business to appear in the higher-visibility section. It increases your chance of being noticed by local customers and also organic traffic to your storefront or website.
- Build Trust and Credibility
You need to keep in mind that any incomplete or inaccurate information impacts adversely on the trust and credibility of your Google Business Profile. So, make sure you provide every piece of information with accuracy. In today’s time, customers always check reviews before they take a final action to purchase any products or services.
A positive review indeed helps you gain more customers for your products and services and thus increase sales. Apart from this, trust and credibility are also an important factor for Google, which considers GBP to be one of the important local search ranking factors.
- Get More Customer Reviews
As we already discussed, reviews are one of the encouraging factors that prompt customers to buy products or services. This is something that you can gain from your customers through your GBP. Positive reviews help customers take decisive steps and thus make an important purchasing decision.
Apart from this, customer reviews are also essential for reputation marketing, which involves using customer reviews as social proof for marketing campaigns. Apart from this, reviews are also useful when it comes to lead generation.
For instance, if any business has at least 10 reviews, they are likely to get 10 to 15% more website visits compared to their competitors that have not even a single review. Without a Google Business Profile, it’s not possible to respond to or manage customer reviews.
- Generate More Leads
Google holds the majority of online traffic for search engines. So, if a large share of such potential customers are not capable of discovering your business on Google, your business will struggle to discover more potential customers to sell and thrive.
It’s important to ensure that you have a lead-generation website. This is necessary to be visible in ‘traditional’ Google Search results. Apart from this, it also works great for your GBP.
- Control your Business Details Online
When it comes to controlling and managing business information online, it’s something that is the biggest deal. Your GBP includes accurate business information, including company images, business names, product/service descriptions, etc. These are essential, especially when your potential customers search online for your offerings.
Meanwhile, there are indeed many technical benefits when you control your business information on Google. You need to check the accuracy of NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) and ensure its higher accuracy, which indeed determines the online presence of your organization.
You need to always consider NAP as the “Yellow Pages of the Internet.” It’s important to take into account that Google always considers and stores these business info with the use of accuracy and relevance of NAP, which influences extensively listing rankings of your business.
Apart from this, Google also indexes your GMB details across searches and Google Maps. Any inaccuracy with your GMB or NAP can impact negatively your search rankings.
GBP acts as a central platform where you can easily control your organization’s details across Google. Therefore, it’s crucial to stay on top of it to generate more sales and leads.
- Interact with Potential Customers
GBP acts as a dynamic platform for higher customer engagement. It facilitates you to answer questions with the use of its Q&A feature, post updates, respond to reviews, and offers, and also add photos of your products or services. This kind of interaction ensures two-way communication channels between your audience and business.
This engagement not only boosts customer experience but also indicates to Google that your business is relevant and active. These are two important factors that enhance your local SEO performance.
Tips to Improve Google Business Profile Ranking for Local SEO Success
You need to adopt a holistic approach and proven strategy when it comes to improving Google Business Profile ranking for local SEO success. We will discuss the way to do it effectively by describing multiple steps;
- Claim and Verify Your Google Business Profile
It’s one of the most important steps to boost GBP ranking for local SEO success. Verification of the business listing is indeed quite essential. It lets you optimize your search rankings for your GBP listing – without verification, it’s not possible.
While verifying your business, you need to start gathering customer reviews and ensure your listing appears on Google Maps and Google Search.
How to Verify Organizations on Google My Business?
The entire process of verification is performed in multiple steps. Let’s discuss various important steps in depth;
- You need to first request Google to send a postcard to your business address
- You will get a postcard with a code
- You will also get instructions to submit the code online to complete the entire process of verification.
- Choose the Right Business Categories
You need to take into account that Google has more than thousands of business categories. So, it’s pivotal to select your business category wisely based on the type of your products and services.
Keep in mind, you get a chance to select up to 10 categories. So, you need to perform the selection of the business category accordingly. Meanwhile, the most important thing you need to take into account is that your primary category is specific and accurate. It ensures how perfectly and also for the things your business ranks for.
Once you select the right category for your business, Google uses this information to display your business in relevant search results. For instance, if you provide any spa services, your business will appear in search results for ‘masseuse’.
The best strategy for category selection can be choosing 1 primary category and the remaining 9 as a secondary category. Make sure all selected categories are relevant to your offerings.
- Optimize Business Name, Address & Phone Number (NAP)
As already discussed above, NAP accuracy is essential to boost Google’s Business Profile ranking. It allows search engines to understand the type of your business and thus also create a trust factor. It leads to a higher ranking in search results as well.
How to Ensure NAP Consistency
Let’s understand several ways of ensuring NAP consistency;
- You need to always create a standard NAP format. It’s crucial to decide on a complete standard format for your NAP details. It includes the way you format your business address, name, and contact details. After getting a complete decision, you need to always use this standardized format across multiple Google Map listings.
- You should always optimize your website. Make sure your website displays your NAP information. It should be most preferably in the header or footer where it’s easily visible on every page. It’s advisable to add schema markup to the code of your website that helps search engines fully understand and thus exhibit your business details in search results.
- Never forget to check your listings. You need to create a schedule to check your listings on a regular basis. Businesses always change with time, they may change your contact details, and locations, or update any business name. You can check regularly any changes displayed across a range of platforms.
- Write a Compelling Business Description
To complete the process, you need to write an eye-catching description of your business and also add several images. Make sure your business description is useful, enticing, informative, and succinct. You need to avoid doing keyword stuff. Instead, you need to emphasize making your business stand apart from competitors.
- Add High-Quality Photos and Videos
Images are necessary to make your profile complete. They help you fill out your profile listings and add characters. Images are necessary to tell the entire story of your organization. It gives you an opportunity to offer visual branding. Apart from this, images and videos are useful for GMB search engine optimization.
Many studies already revealed the impact of images on GMB and witnessed that listings with images are much more reputable and can drive more clicks. Google allows you to label images as your organization’s logo and also as a cover photo for a proper place for several branded images.
- Set Accurate Business Hours (and Holiday Hours)
Once you complete the verification request, you need to now set your business services and also its operation timings. Business services are highly descriptive and also specialize in your business.
While setting your business operation hours, you need to understand that Google only displays your listings less often outside of hours. They will label your Google listing as ‘Closed’.
- Manage and Respond to Reviews
As we already discussed the importance of reviews on purchasing decisions. The majority of customers go through with reviews to make their final decision. Google is also familiar with this.
Apart from this, positive reviews also play a vital role as positive word-of-mouth and thus contribute a lot to publicizing your business. Your business listing displays both positive and negative reviews. It depends on your business to gain as many 5-star ratings as possible.
- Use Google Business Posts Regularly
With the use of social media, you can post regularly and thus provide the necessary updates to your customers through your Google My Business profile. The updates tend to vary anything, from seasonal deals and general announcements to blog posts.
To get most of your posts, you need to do the following things;
- Post with consistency. You need to understand that several post types expire every week. Therefore, regular engagement is something that is quite necessary.
- You need to align your posts with your marketing campaigns for perfect traction.
- You can include calls to action (CTAs) and links to boost more customers to your business.
- Add Products and Services
Now, the next step is to add products and services your business offers to your GBP profile. It helps you add more depth to your profile and thus enhances keyword relevance as well. It also helps Google to understand in terms of complete offerings of your business, which allows your profile to be more visible in relevant searches.
While adding products and services to your Google Business Profile, you need to consider the following crucial factors;
- Mention every product or service concisely and clearly.
- Use appropriate location-based keywords that your potential customer may always search for.
- Make sure you include pricing details wherever it’s necessary.
Keeping in mind the above important things allows your business to be more informative and also to become discoverable in searches related to your products and services.
- Monitor Insights and Performance Metrics
Keeping an eye on Key Performance Indicators is necessary to determine the overall success of your local SEO efforts. You need to analyze different metrics and thus determine how perfectly your strategy works and identify the areas for improvement.
What are Important Metrics you need to Measure
You need to measure the following important performance metrics to gather crucial insight;
- Website Traffic
- Search Ranking
- Click-Through Rates
- Customer Reviews
Use Analytics Tools
Using analytics tools helps you track and measure KPIs effortlessly. You can consider any of the following tools to leverage;
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Local SEO Tools
By leveraging any of the above tools, you will get a complete understanding in terms of how perfectly your local SEO strategy performs and also where necessary adjustments may be required.
- Build Local Citations and Backlinks
You may be desiring to know about local citations, right? Well, it includes various details related to your business, including contact details, address, name, etc., on other websites. Local citations are essential to boost local SEO. To get better results, you need to have a consistent citation.
Ways to Develop a Strong Citation and Backlink
You can create impeccable and powerful citations and backlinks in the following ways;
- Do business submissions to many reputed directories including Bing Places, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and more.
- Get easily featured on news websites, local blogs, community boards, and more.
- Stay in touch with local businesses or influencers to earn backlinks
- Encourage customers to write and leave reviews on many third-party platforms.
Whether it’s backlinks or citations, it contributes equally to building credibility and reliability in Google’s eyes and thus works outstandingly to boost the visibility of your GBP.
- Mobile Optimization and Click-to-Call Functionality
Since the majority of users use their smartphones to perform local searches, it necessitates mobile optimization. You need to ensure mobile-friendliness of your GBP and every feature should be easily accessible through mobile devices.
The most important feature you need to activate is none other than Click-to-Call. To do it better, you need to consider the following important factors;
- Make sure your contact details are easily clickable and correct
- You need to test the functionality of multiple devices
It minimizes the friction for users and thus boosts conversion as well. The reason is customers are most likely to consult businesses directly by using their cell phone when the option is not easily available.
Advanced Tips & Local SEO Tools
We will discuss here some other advanced and most effective tips to enhance your Google Business Profile Ranking for local SEO success along with many SEO tools;
- Geo-tagging, UTM parameters in links
Geo-tagging is a process that includes embedding geographic coordinates into a variety of media files like videos or images. When you do geo-tagging of images of your GBP or websites, it makes convenient for search engines to associate properly with your image-based search results. You can leverage tools such as ExifTool or Geolmgr for geo-tagging of your images before you update them to your business blogs, profiles, local landing pages, etc.
Besides, you can add various UTM parameters to the link as well. It lets your business understand in terms of how varieties of sources or campaigns boost traffic to certain specific local pages. For instance, you can add UTM tags to your social media posts, GBP links, or even ads.
It helps you find the right platforms that are highly effective when it comes to generating local visits and also conversions. Tools such as Google’s Campaign URL Builder or GA4’s built-in features can simplify UTM tracking, which makes it convenient to determine ROI for local efforts.
- Tools like BrightLocal, Whitespark, and GMB Everywhere
While searching, you will come across a range of specialized tools that can boost your local SEO management. The major advantages of using them are they minimize manual effort and thus provide a fully actionable insight. Some of them are as follows;
- BrightLocal
It’s one of the appropriate tools to manage local SEO. The tool is useful for various purposes, be it for local rank tracking, citation building, review monitoring, or GBP audits. It’s a perfect option for multi-location businesses seeking to centralize strategy and reporting.
- Whitespark
You can use Whitespark for local citation services. The tool is a perfect choice for discovering and creating authoritative local citations. It also offers necessary tools for local track ranking and reputation management.
- GMB Everywhere
It comes as a Chrome extension that provides you with complete information regarding Business Profile data since you browse search results. It’s the right option for competitive analysis that displays a variety of details such as keyword presence, post frequency, review trends, and more.
- Tracking Rank Improvements and Keyword Presence
You can determine your SEO performance only by analyzing your local search rankings and also keyword presence. You can use many robust tools such as SEMrush and BrightLocal, which are available with features like local rank tracking.
It shows how perfectly your business ranks for targeted keywords in specific ZIP codes or cities. It’s a good idea to create a weekly report to track your movements in rankings and also identify various opportunities to boost underperforming pages.
Apart from this, you can also analyze keyword presence in various sections of your GBP, be it the Q&A section, description, posts, reviews, etc. You can incorporate various local-based keywords naturally. These indeed help you boost your local discoverability.
Conclusion
A fully optimized and properly maintained Google My Business profile is necessary for improving your local search ranking and thus also luring potential customers. Always remember a powerful online presence tends to make a great difference in today’s digital age. Therefore, you should never ignore the relevance of your GBP.
If managing it feels overwhelming, consider hiring a local SEO agency to handle your Google Business Profile professionally. Their expertise can help you rank higher, attract more customers, and stay ahead of your competition.
Additional Resources:
- How to do SEO For ‘Near Me’ Searches (SEO Tips That Really Work)
- What Are Google Local Service Ads and How Can They Boost Your Business?
- Top 20 Local SEO Tips to Boost Your Local Search Rankings
