Google My Business (GMB) service offers varieties of features to be visible on the Google SERP for your business. Now, all owners of a Google My Business page can access the statistics of the page over the last 18 months that includes the type of search to find a listing, actions on the page, phone calls, photos, etc. Find out everything you need to know about Google My Business and Local SEO!
What is Google My Business
Google My Business is a very comprehensive directory service developed by Google. The advantage of this online directory is that it takes place on Google SERP on a substantial number of requests. So it’s a great way to gain visibility without spending much money. Its listings are found on Google SERPs, Maps and Google’s navigation service.
Google My Business is a beautiful business card to show your business and other essential information about your business, your restaurant, your coffee, your store or your shop. So you can display the location of your business, opening hours, photos and customer reviews as well.
Tips for using Google My Business
Your Google My Business listing should appear as a real extension of your website or pages on social networks like; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+. This is often the first contact for your potential customers. We only have one chance to make first impression a good one, right? Working on your Google My Business page is a great way to reassure and help the customer in their process of buying or walking through your business.
Here’s a list of easy but important small tasks to do on your Google My Business page:
→ Link your website with your Google my Business page with a link to gain organic traffic
→ Add opening hours and update them (holidays, exceptional closures) to facilitate access to your business and avoid losing customers who are facing a closed door
→ Add a phone number: Incoming calls can boost sales by providing additional information
→ Add an address for easy access to your store with Google’s “Directions” feature
→ Ask your customers to give their opinion about your business. Good review always help to bring new customers.
Why is Google My Business important for local SEO?
Google is the search engine that dominates the search engine market far ahead of other competitors (about 94% of requests in the UK). Being visible on the SERP of this particular search engine ensures unique visibility of your business. It is an essential factor to increase sales, reservations or visit your shop.
Google My Business is a service which is optimized accurately for mobile searches in smartphones or tablets. An essential asset when you know that more than half of searches on Google are searches via mobile. In addition, 97% of Internet users seek local businesses, and 40% of mobile searches are localized. Finally, a Google My Business form takes a prominent place on the results pages of Google on computer or mobile, in so-called local requests.
Definition of local SEO
The local SEO refers to optimizing a website or other digital communication medium such as a social network page to be positioned optimally on local search queries with references to the geographic location like a city, region, etc.
What is the purpose of local SEO?
Local SEO allows you to focus your attention and those of users on more specific queries. These more specific queries are less numerous but are much more qualified, and it is easier to position oneself on them. Indeed, an independent electrician in Hersham of Surrey district can more easily position itself on the request “Electrician Hersham Surrey” than on a request “Electrician” which makes compete with all garages in the United Kingdom and especially electrician networks. Localization is very important for this type of service; users often include a localization element in this request.
An example of local search result in Google search engine: