3 simple steps to rank higher with your Google Business Profile (formally Google My Business)
#seo #tips #GBP
Introduction to Google Business Profile
Queries including ‘Near me’ and ‘In my area’ have surged by more than 200% in the last few years, with these users letting it guide where they eat, what they do and how they shop.
It also provides an astonishing click-through rate, with 50% of users clicking through to a website (if available) once they opened a business profile.
Google uses factors to decide who to show for a particular search, and they’re divided into two categories:
- Basic factors: This covers the name of your business, the categories you’ve selected, reviews, associated social media platforms and how relevant and accessible your website is
- Advanced factors: This covers more advanced SEO markups like schema, keywords, links and domain authority
A much more detailed list of signals can be found at the Whitespark search ranking factor report
With 132 potential factors, it can seem like a daunting task to optimise all of them, so we’re going to focus on 3 things you can do today to increase your ranking.
1: Target your primary business category
This is the biggest influential factor google will take into account when ranking your listing on google maps. Choosing this category is not as straightforward as you may think, as your business may straddle multiple business categories. A beautician, for example, may have to choose between beauty salon or nail salon.
Beauty salon may seem like the obvious choice, but nail salon searches receive triple the volume as beauty salons, so may be the better choice for bringing in more customers.
We used the SEMrush keyword analysis tool to compare these results
The easiest way to identify what categories are working is to have a look at what categories businesses around you are using, GMB Everywhere is a free Chrome extension that lets you spy on what categories other businesses are using. Try using different search terms on the map and see which businesses show up first, and what category they’re using. If the majority are using a different term to yours, consider changing it to match.
Once installed your Google map search results will show details about the businesses, including their primary and secondary categories.
Not sure how to change your Google Business Profile category? Check out this guide
2: Business name
Keywords in the business name is the second most influential factor on the report. You can use this to your advantage as long as you can legitimately add those keywords to your business name.
Google’s guidelines make it clear that adding unnecessary information to your business name is not permitted, but if done carefully it can safely give you a big boost to your business ranking.
The businesses pictured below have used regional or service-relevant keywords to rank on the first page of London based businesses on Maps, despite other businesses having higher reviews or more comprehensive websites.
As long as you can justify why the keywords should appear in your Business profile title, you will be able to reap the benefits of the 2nd most important factor.
Not sure how to change your Google Business Profile business name? Check out this guide
3: Reviews
Reputation is everything, and with the ability to filter businesses by ranking, having an average rating of 4.5 stars and above will mean you will always appear if customers rank by the highest rating only.
As a factor, reviews appear as 3 separate metrics in the top 15 rankings, so their influence on your business is not to be ignored!
Put simply, these 3 factors are:
- The average rating your business has
- How many relevant keywords are mentioned in your reviews
- The total number of reviews you have
While gathering reviews can take time, the simplest way to boost your rating is to ask customers for reviews. Make it part of your sales process to send customers a request to review your business, not everyone will take the time to do it but you can make it as easy as possible by generating a review link via your Google Business Profile.
Encourage your customers to use specific keywords in their reviews, it may seem odd but an honest, open approach usually works, explain to the customer that relevant reviews really help out your business.
Not sure how to generate a Google Business Profile review link? Check out this guide
We hope these tips have helped, there are of course many more factors that decide on your maps ranking, so check out the full Whitespark report for other areas that you may be able to implement and get your business ranking higher today!