Google My Business is one the most effective forms of local SEO you can do for several reasons:
Your Google My Business listing is a free-to-use tool that doesn’t require complicated investments. Google My Business posts can effectively engage customers and promote responses. These social signals are powerful SEO factors. GMB also posts direct customers’ clicks to various elements of your website or GMB page. This way, it boosts your SEO scores.
Great SEO usually works by cooperating with Google. Google ideally wants its search users to find the most helpful answers or responses to their searches. Your site can be one of the most helpful answers to the queries made by a google user.
Connect your Google My Business profile to Everything Else
Many people don’t account for how connected data on the internet is. Your GMB listing can match your site to your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, Instagram feed, and answers to Reddit threads. Improving your Google My Business profile and connecting all your social profiles will increase your authority level in your niche.
Consider the following example – Let’s say you’re a real estate agent and you create a GMB profile. You then link your Google My Business page to your website. On your website’s about page, you share a link to your LinkedIn profile. As part of your digital marketing efforts, you check Reddit once a week and respond to real estate questions and share a link to your LinkedIn profile and website.
Google will bring all this together when accounting for SEO:
• Your expertise as a real estate agent will be established by the credentials you shared on LinkedIn
• The authority of your website will improve every time a link appears on Reddit
• The trustworthiness of your site will improve due to the links to your physical address in the GMB listing
• Connecting your GMB listing to all these different outlets will be in line with Google’s E-A-T criteria
How Can I Use GMB to Boost My Content and SEO?
You can use your GMB posts to strategically Direct traffic and engage with your customers. Your Google business profile can be an integral part of your content publishing strategy. let’s see a couple of reasons why this works:
According to several case studies by Moz, only 17.5% of businesses publish GMB posts every week. 40% of businesses don’t use GMB posts at all. This means that you have a tremendous opportunity to move up in the local SEO pack by just posting stuff.
The same case studies show that people tend to click on GMB posts almost 100% of the time. For this reason, taking time to create a relevant and engaging post is going to boost the traffic to your website. This traffic will help search engine rankings according to case studies by SEMrush.
To recap, posting on GMB will help you get ahead of your competition, especially the local 3 pack. Since less than 20% of businesses make GMB posts every week, the posts you publish will help move you up the local pack in the search engine results pages.
Keep in mind that people engage with GMB posts at an impressive rate. Taking your time to reach out to your customers, answering their questions, and responding to reviews will generate all kinds of great signals to the search engines. Ensure that you’re checking in with your Google My Business every week to boost your local SEO and reach out to more prospects.
How do Google my business posts work?
A GMB post is an opportunity for you to reach out to more prospects via your profile and listing. you can add any updates, special offers, new events, or products through your Google my business profile. The posts will appear on your page when people perform a local search. They are usually at the bottom of the business listing and users can scroll through the available posts.
The following are some of the ways you can use post types to boost your SEO and generate more leads from search results:
Using GMB Update Posts
Every business can use the update post feature to boost their search results rankings and local SEO. the following are some of the things you can do:
Inform customers and prospects you’re still open for business. There’s often a little confusion over the business opening and closing houses, especially in this era of lockdowns.
Inform people where you are open. The local search results will use location proximity as one of the highest-ranking factors. Be sure to use prepositions like around, near, and in along with place names to help establish your business name in a given location.
Develop a landing page that highlights safety, such as in the case of Covid-19. Don’t try to sell anything on the page – just try to reassure them that you’re open and they will be safe.
These tips are quite simple to follow, but they will help your GMB page stay relevant during a difficult time. You can also apply the same tips to any other special event, for instance, a conference, a sporting event, or a festival.
Showcase Offers and Generate Leads
The special offer post is one of the common GMB posts meant to generate more revenue. Let people know about what’s on sale and they will most likely buy it. There are a few other things you could do with this kind of post to even generate better results for your business. Below are some strategies to consider:
Write up an offer post and link a form that captures user data. For instance, imagine you have an outdoor gear store. You could run an offer that gives users a 10% discount in exchange for an email address. This should result in more leads, and also expand the email list for your future marketing efforts. Keep in mind that direct links from emails to your website are a major SEO ranking factor.
Creating regular GMB posts will also boost your business ranking in the local pack. You may not want to offer discounts to your customers all the time. Consider discounting your upsell products instead. Offer something like 50% off the extra add-on rather than the primary product. This way, you may get the local SEO boost without affecting your profit margins.
You can save some time in the process by creating some Google My Business post templates for your recurring offers. For example, if you’re running a Mexican restaurant, you can create a Taco Tuesday Template that you will be rolling out on a weekly or monthly basis. Ensure that you keep updating the details of each post but run the posts regularly to help you dominate the local pack.
One online marketing secret is to advertise your benefits, not necessarily your price. This will help protect your profit margins. Try coming up with ideas for your Google My Business posts showcasing your products and services without giving them away.
Update your Prospects
Updates don’t have to be huge. Hired a new staff member? Make an update. Purchased new equipment? Make an update. Launching a new line of products? Update your audience. Changed your business number or operating hours? Make an update.
The thing about updates is that you can include other details within them. For instance, adding your location and using prepositions like in, around, and near will get your business onto the Google Maps pages. Since many people are using Google Maps these days, you can be sure that this will boost your local traffic.
A great way to form a small update is by publishing a case study. For instance, you could create an extended review of one of your most successful services and publish it. Offer your prospects a case study as a free resource or download. As long as it’s a good fit for your business, this kind of content can be helpful to your marketing as well because people will naturally share their contact information on your website.
Create Event Posts
Any event should qualify for this kind of post. To create events that work for your business, the things already mentioned above will apply when it comes to boosting your SEO results. You can aim for getting contact information from the users who you can then integrate into your email marketing.
One way to do this is to add a call-to-action and create a landing page for your even posts. For ticketed events, this is a great way to capture contact information, even if the price is free. For instance, consider a special sale. If it’s for a furniture shop, you could run a special event aimed at offering a 10% discount to everyone who has a ticket during the event hours.
Moreover, event posts will stay up during the event, which makes them a potentially long-term form of marketing. And with the latest Google Update, other posts will stay in your profile for many years, unlike the 7 days allowed before the update.
Add Product Posts to your Google My Business Profile
This will mainly help you highlight your competitive advantage and increase your traffic. Most businesses will include a few products in their Google My Business profile at some point. But you can be a bit more strategic than them. Focus on highlighting timely, interesting, or unique products. These are some of the tips to consider:
- Highlight some of your most interesting products for a quick traffic boost to these pages
- Focus on the benefits of your interesting products for your prospects
- Choose the kind of products that will make your business look unique and highlight them often
As we pointed out before, traffic will naturally boost SEO rankings. Each visitor that comes to your website from a Google My Business post will add a little SEO juice to your site. With this in mind, use product posts to generate traffic to the pages you want to rank higher.
How Often Should I Publish Posts on Google My Business?
Ideally, it should be more often than your competition, but not so regularly that it appears as if you’re spamming your Google My Business listing with not-so-helpful content. Aim to post at least once every 7 days. Without posting fresh content, your Google My Business information will go stale. potential prospects might feel like they have walked into your shop, rang a bell for attention, and no one was there to answer.
Google My Business crush can help you discover how often your competition is posting on their profiles and track your local ranking in Google Search.
Our tool can help you analyze the Google My Business profile of your competitors. It shows you exactly how many posts are live, how many posts they have published in the last 90 days, and similar insights. You can use this data to crush your competition by posting more often.
How You Can Optimize GMB Posts for SEO
the following are your three main priorities when optimizing Google My Business for SEO:
Location signals and information: Your GMB post should ideally contain the correct service radius and location for your business. be sure to include location signals like “around the center of + your target location” to give your customers a stronger location matching. To increase the engagement of your posts, be sure to check where most of your driving direction records come from and integrate post locations in your post content.
Choose the right categories: Each business has its unique primary category, with many other secondary categories. Check with your competition and ensure that your primary and secondary categories are aligned with the top three spots provided by Google.
You should mention your primary and secondary categories when creating content for Google My Business. Ensure that all geo-targeted mentions have the name of a location and other relevant information such as addresses or neighborhoods, to maximize your engagement level with customers who might be living nearby.
Use keywords connected to your business: stay on top of your game by taking your Google search console data and pulling out the full list of keywords that are most relevant to the location where people will potentially find what they’re looking for. use these findings to improve your copywriting effort and produce higher-quality Google My Business post content.
GMB UTM link + GSC for higher rankings: It’s important to use your UTM links when using your GB search engine results pages as you can filter by UTM without needing to include the brand name in Google Search Console.
A local searcher with a strong purchase intent wants to buy a specific product or service. The correlation between search results and queries can be pulled from a blog article, old GMB posts, and deeper landing pages.
For some inspiration, connect your Google search console to a Google spreadsheet. This way, you will be able to filter out extra queries and get deeper insights into the upcoming GMB post in addition to more content ideas.
To improve your chances of ranking higher, don’t ever repeat the same GMB post. Instead, always publish unique content as you would when creating a blog article structure: headline, introduction, body, conclusion.
For a more effective strategy, choose one of your most successful Google My Business posts as the “anchor” or “lead” And link it to six other related posts on your GMB profile. We’ve seen great results when we link these together, as both can positively influence your search ranking.
Leverage Aged GMB Posts: Aged Google My Business posts are easily picked up by the search algorithms as local justification.
The GMB post algorithm can be hit-or-miss. it will often pick up all posts that are 2 to 3 months old and use this as local matches on the 3 pack. you need to know a few things before you decide on your strategy:
Keep an eye out for the type of Google My Business posts that are triggering your ranking results, and then organize them into a spreadsheet
If you find that your Google My Business posts are getting too old, stay on track with your publishing frequency. Note the length and type of content and uploads for each post along with how often they were originally published. This should help to keep everything on track.
Don’t repost the same content. From experience, all Google My Business posts using similar or duplicate information underperform and are sometimes not indexed by Google.
You can reverse engineer your competition’s ranking by finding out how they rank on that 3 pack. Once you notice that one of them has a local justification for their listing, chances are that this will work for yours too.
Optimize your Google My Business posts for voice searches
Nowadays, more people are using voice search to perform online searches, which entails asking whole questions instead of little search queries. This is especially true for mobile devices, as the Google search bar field now features a little microphone icon. Most users, or about 60% of the total search volume, are using the microphone icon to speak their question directly into Google search.
If you have questions and answers as your Google My Business posts, you can serve this to prospects, especially when they are close to your business when they search.
GMB posts can also be optimized for voice searches by publishing a post with an H1 that predominantly features one of the nearby words along with other relevant location mentions ensuring you are targeting people who will be interested in what’s going on around them. You can also audit your keyword insight lists with keyword research, and check if there are any “near me” keywords that are triggering your listings.
Additionally:
Use a call-to-action in each of your posts to drive Direct conversion. Google typically sees clicks and behavioral signals as a positive thing. as more people visit your site from a post, you will be winning directly through the possibility of a sale and indirectly through boosting your SEO.
Add your own Q&A section on the knowledge panel. This should help your prospects and customers with authoritative information directly from the business owner. it’s a perfect way to feed super relevant information into your business account for the search engines to see.
Use photos and videos to liven up your knowledge panel. multimedia content is a lot more memorable than plain text. For instance, a short 30-second intro video for a new employee will have a much better impact than a blurb with their name, background, etc.
Your Google My Business listings should ideally not have any empty spaces. Just login into your Google business accounts and fill out the data points with the correct information about your business. ensure that you go through your old information and update your customers about any business changes.
How To The SEO Performance of My Google Business?
There is another aspect of Google My Business that will have a huge impact on your Google SEO: customer reviews.
Reviews are generally a great form of content marketing. you don’t need to approach them passively, as you can exert some influence over how many customers post a review as well as the quality of the reviews.
The following are a few useful tips to help you make the most out of your review marketing:
Each customer is a potential source of a review post. while avoiding being pushy, simply ask them to add a review to your GMB profile. reviews will essentially serve as posts that don’t expire, under their form of social media.
When you get used to asking for reviews, try helping your customers use specific keywords in their reviews. For instance, you can ask the happy customers to mention specific services or products they purchased. This way, you can improve the relevance of your reviews.
Strangely enough, many businesses do not write back to their customers’ reviews. How rude! Google will notify the user every time someone responds to their review. so be sure to write back to your customers. thank be happy ones and try to address the issues the unhappy ones experienced.
While reviews will make great posts on your Google account, you can do more. Try getting Direct feedback from your customers so that you can use it on your site, a blog post, or a small case study. when you get it, mark it up in JSON/Schema and get stars in the search results.
Keep in mind that your reviews don’t have to appear on your Google My Business listing to be effective. you can reach out to other sites, especially industry websites, to try and have your business reviewed on their platform. the backlink will effectively boost your SEO and add credibility to your business
As a local business, you can go beyond GMB posts to use review marketing in your GMB profile. There are many positive effects but include better placement on your Google Map results, increased credibility in the eyes of Google and your customers, as well as a higher ranking in the local search results.
Will Google My Business Posts Ever Expire?
Google my business posts no longer expire after 7 days. In other words, your published posts will stay in your profile by default. Reviews too will not disappear after some time unless a customer decides to take theirs down.
Where Will Google my business posts appear?
They will appear in a carousel located at the bottom of the knowledge panel for local businesses. The posts are arranged from newest to oldest, and the visitors can click through the different posts and engage with them.
Key Takeaways
Google posts are not only useful for communicating to your prospects and customers but are also effective tools for updating them on what’s new while improving your local SEO in Dublin.
With many business owners already harnessing the benefits of Google my business posts, the effectiveness of your strategy will now mainly depend on whether you are trying better than your competition or not.
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