How to Optimize Your Google My Business Profile for Local SEO

If you are a business that mainly focuses on targeting local customers, then optimizing your Google My Business profile for local SEO will prove really beneficial for you. By optimizing business information and engaging with customers, brands can effectively enhance their digital presence and improve their overall local search performance.

However, it is important to note that, just like any other online thing like a website, profile, etc. the optimization process of Google’s business profile also requires following the right approach to experience good results.

In today’s blog post, we are going to discuss a step-by-step procedure for efficiently optimizing the GMB profile for local SEO. So, without discussing any additional information, let’s fire away.

Steps for Optimizing Google My Business Profile for Local SEO

If you follow the approach described below, it will be a lot easier to optimize your Google My Business profile to boost local SEO.

1. Claim & Verify Your GMB Listing

   First of all, you have to both claim and verify Google business profile listings. This is an essential yet useful process, it will help establish your brand’s legitimacy by ensuring that it has complete control over the services, products, and information being displayed to the targeted audience.

   The claiming and verification is quite straightforward, all you need to do is:

   • Go to GMB’s official website and click on the “Manage Now” button.
   • Now, it is time to search for your “Business Name.” If the results appear, then you can proceed towards the claiming process. However, in case there are no results, this means you have to create a totally new listing.
   • In the claiming process, you have to enter all the required information such as business details, name, phone number, category, and many more. Make sure the information you are providing is 100% accurate, this is because it will be later verified by Google.

   Once you have completed the verification as well, you can then easily manage the brand’s important information, services/products, reviews, and many more.

   Since search engines like Google strive to provide legitimate results to people, so due to your GMB verification, your business will get a boost in rankings, a clear indication of a boost in local SEO.

2. Optimize Business Description

   The heading is already telling everything – the GMB profile description is a concise overview that tells both Google and potential audiences what a business is about or what sort of products or services you are offering. In simple words, the business description plays a key role in convincing the potential customers that you are the brand they are looking for.

   Apart from this, the description also helps with local SEO. Google uses the information provided in the description to match the relevancy of your business to user’s search queries.

   When it comes to the optimization process, there are numerous approaches that you can follow:

   • For instance, your description should clearly state what exactly your business does. Mention the products or services you specialize in.
   • You should also focus on highlighting unique selling points. Like what features or other things make your business different from its competitors.
   • While writing, do not forget to use relevant keywords, as these will a vital role in ranking your GMB description.

   Wait…we are not done yet! There are multiple other things that you need to take care of:

   • Keep it concise: Potential customers usually don’t have enough time, that’s why it is recommended to create a sweet and concise business description.
   • Use powerful wording: To grab the audience’s attention and keep them engaged, you should make use of compelling wording and a clear sentence structure.
   • Add CTA: A description is incomplete without a call-to-action. The CTA will help potential customers to take required action such as visiting your official website, etc.

3. Add High-Quality Photos

   Since you are marketing through the internet, then the only way customers will have to evaluate the overall quality of your sold products and services. The more quality images your GMB listing will have, the more the chances that it will be able to convince the potential customer to make a purchase.

   There are numerous types of photos that you can include in Google My Business profile, some of them are:

   • Product photos: This is obvious, if you sell specific products, then it is essential to add high-resolution pictures. Make sure the pictures are taken from different product angles so that customers can evaluate the overall quality easily.
   • Exterior photos: You can add pictures that showcase the outside building of your brand or organization. Doing so will help customers efficiently understand the exact locations.
   • Interior pictures: The inside photos will provide the targeted audience with a glimpse of the business, which will ultimately help in winning their trust and loyalty.
   • Team: Finally, adding team photos is also recommended, as it helps showcase your business’s working culture and positive environment.

   Finally, it will be if you hire a specialized photographer and a graphic designer who will help your brand in designing and publishing compelling visual content on Google My Business profile.

4. Encourage Customer Reviews

   When optimizing GMB profiles, businesses often ignore the importance of customer reviews. But you should not let us explain why. Customer reviews help in convincing new customers to make purchases.

   So, when people leave positive reviews on the GMB profile, it will significantly impact local SEO and boost the overall credibility in the eyes of both the audience and search engines. That’s why, you should enable the option to leave reviews.

   Apart from this, there are several other strategies that you can try.

   For instance, when a customer makes a purchase, you can approach and request them to leave a review on Google’s business profile. It is also recommended to respond to each review whether it is negative or positive. Doing so will show that, the business is quite about what their customers think.

5. Utilize Posts & Updates

   The most excellent feature that Google My Business Profile offers is that it allows brands to create posts and updates to keep the audience engaged and informed. This can greatly enhance visibility in SERP.

   The types of posts you can create are:

   • Promotional posts
   • Event announcements
   • Product updates
   • Information posts

   It is recommended that posts and updates are consistently published to stay active for search engine crawlers.

6. Automate Post Scheduling with Simplified

   We know that businesses often have busy routines, so they may not be able to regularly publish posts and updates may not be possible. This is where Simplified – an automated GMB management software will act as a lifesaver for them. It allows them to schedule posts and updates, saving time and effort.

   The process is simple, just sign up or sign in to the Simplified account, and go to Content Calendar. Here, you have to link the Google My Business profile. Now, start scheduling posts.

7. Continuously Monitor & Analytics

   This step will indirectly help you optimize your Google My Business profile, let us explain. The GMB profile provides a dedicated portion only for analytics. This portion will give useful insights about how your profile is performing across the web, and how potential customers are interacting with it.

   This sort of data will help you determine where your GMB profile is doing and where improvement is needed.

Wrapping Up

Just creating a Google My Business profile is not enough; instead, brands also need to optimize it for SEO, so that it can experience high visibility in search engine results. In this detailed guide, we have discussed the steps that need to be followed for GMB profile optimization, hope you will find this blog valuable.