If you have a business in a physical location, it is crucial for people in your locality to find you. It’s not about offline SEO anymore; you must have a properly listed business in Google My Business (GMB), Yelp, and other directories to be visible online. Considering over a billion people now use Google Maps, it is imperative to focus your listing more on GMB. But first, what exactly is Google My Business? To place big businesses in a fair position to compete with smaller businesses, Google introduced Google Places. A company could create a free listing adding details like address, name, and telephone number. Later on, Google renamed this service “Google My Business.” While algorithms have been updated, the concept is still the same.
Step 1: Auditing your GMB profile
The initial step of Google Maps Optimization is to understand the current position of your platform and identify areas that need improvement. If you don’t have a GMB profile, we create it immediately before moving on with our audit. We’ll then add your profile to listings and use specific tools to check your presence on other directories. After the audit, we create a list of to-dos to tackle and arrange in terms of priority.
Step 2: Competitor and keyword research
You cannot compete against yourself, which is why you need to keep an eye on your competitors. We do competitor research to see how their businesses are listed, how many listings, and how they perform on local keywords. Then, we analyze top-performing keywords and use them as target points where we will integrate with your GMB profile.
Step 3: Optimising GMB Profile
We then optimize your GMB profile to ensure each piece of information is accurate and has been correctly updated. We also ensure we answer all positive and negative customer reviews. Our marketing team goes as far as taking a 360-degree view of your physical location to update it on Google Maps.
Step 4: Weekly review management
Every week, we will review all your listings and check both customer reviews. We collect and manage customer reviews, give optimized responses, and teach you to respond to negative feedback. Our review process is delicate, and we’ll work closely to handle all customers. We’ve formulated a couple of tactics to help boost reviews, and we’ll use them.
Step 5: GMB Optimization
A Google my business post will make your business be seen on local profiles as it also includes other information such as featured products, promotional sales, events, news, and more. Our GMB services ensure you have the right information at the right time for your target audience. We will optimize your business profile and give customers every bit of information about your business even before they come to your doorstep.
Step 6: Optimising image uploads
There are a few tricks we use to optimize images uploaded to Google Maps. Apart from using high-quality images, we ensure it is geotagged and has your business’s geolocation. We also embed keywords in the image alt text and metadata.