A Google My Business profile is extremely essential for local SEO as it enables you to appear in local search results for queries related to your services or products based on your location. Once listed, the information from your Google My Business account will appear on

• Google Plus
• Google Maps
• Google Search

Benefits of having a listing:

• When a user searches for your business’s name, it appears above the fold on mobile devices and on the top right-hand side of the desktop search results.
• The users can get all your important business information such as phone number, address and opening hours.
• The users can easily find you on Google Maps and track the routes to your physical location.
• You can get automatically connected to your G+ (Note: Google Plus will be no longer available after 2nd April 2019) in which you can build a profile, post updates and share the latest news regarding your business.
• You can build a reputation by making customers review and leave feedback about your business.

If you want to reap all these benefits, you must improve the prominence of your business in Google My Business listing. Here are five tactics that let you optimise your Google My Business account efficiently and quickly.

1. Fill out the necessary information:

Before implementing any advanced strategies, you need to ensure that your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) are consistent and up-to-date across the web. This gives the most potential for your Google My Business listings to represent your business.

You must also focus on the following factors…

• Put a high-quality logo
• Update opening hours
• Choose the right category
• Upload quality photos
• Update your website’s URL

2. Build Local Citations:

For any business, having a consistent NAP is extremely crucial to rank well in local search results. Google considers third-party data account to determine which business to show up for geo-type searches. If the information about your business is not the same across the web, it will have an impact on your local search ranking. So, you should regularly check, clean up and build local citations on quality business directories.

3. Go on the Google’s 360 Tour:

Why not give your potential customers an inside look at your business with Google 360 Virtual tour? With Google Maps ‘street view’ option, you can let the users see your business location through 360-degree photographs. You can also add a ‘business view’ simply by letting a Google-approved photographer to take some photos.  All these aspects increase your brand’s online presence and familiarity.

4. Try to get positive reviews:

You can ask customers for reviews and feedbacks, which help search engines to authenticate the users’ experience with your business. If you have more positive reviews, it creates an impression that more people are feeling comfortable to do business with you. Besides, building positive reviews, you should also focus on mitigating negative feedbacks. You should never ignore negative reviews and should respond quickly and appropriately. While positive reviews give your local business a competitive edge, the negative reviews destroy your credentials.

          Effective ways to get more reviews:

• Ask your customers for more reviews
• Encourage customers to rate your business
• Use email marketing list
• Offer incentives to every review
• Share reviews on social networking sites
• Give incentives to employees who gather reviews

5. Strengthen the connection between your website and GMB:

There are several strategies that you can implement in your website to boost the local connection signals between your website and Google My Business profile.

• Display your business name, address and phone number on the website.
• Incorporate organisational schema Mark-up onto your homepage so that you can showcase additional details such as social profiles, logo and much more.
• Try to get more links from high-authority websites
• Try to create different landing pages, especially if you are operating your business in different places.
• Focus on general SEO as well. If you drive a lot of organic traffic and rank well on search results, it will aid you in local searches.

If you implement these five tactics, you can definitely make your Google My Business Page stand out and attract potential customers. It’s also worth adding a few videos and checking GMB insights very often.

Don’t have time to work on these strategies? Don’t worry, give us a call today! Let the experts at Verve Innovation will do it for you!