Google My Business — Complete Listing Guide
What is Google My Business Listing?
Google My Business or GMB is a business listing on Google.
Google My Business is a free service that helps local businesses to list their business. GMB helps local customers to find information about them that includes business name, hours, location, reviews, photos, etc.
Whenever people look for some product/service in their neighborhood, they perform local searches like “Restaurants near me”.
Google My Business is the best place to boost your Local SEO and start with Hyper-Local Marketing.
How & where do they appear?
GMB listing appears whenever you carry out a search for a local keyword.
The information that you can see for a particular GMB Listing -
- Business name
- Customer Reviews
- Address
- Operational hours
- Phone number
- Button that says “Website” (Which once clicked, would redirect the user to the business’s website).
- Directions (Once clicked will open the physical location of the store on Google Maps).
Setting up a GMB listing from scratch
The first step starts with logging into the Google account of your business, or you have to create an account if you don’t have one.
After this go to, https://www.google.com/intl/en_in/business/ and click on manage now.
Step 1: Enter your business name.
Step 2: Choose your business category, which will help Google to understand which type of customer should benefit from your listing.
Step 3: Add your address (that will appear on Google Maps).
Step 4: Specify if you visit or deliver to your customers, you can let them know where you are willing to go.
Step 5: Add your Business contact number or website or both.
Click Finish and your listing is ready!
Optimising your Google My Business Listing
After finishing the above 6 steps, you will navigate your way to your GMB listing dashboard.
After working your way to this, you have to complete your listing by adding service hours, logo, description of your business(max. 250 words).
According to Google, businesses with photos see 35% more clicks to their website and 42% higher requests for driving directions in Google Maps. Photos should be at least 720 pixels wide by 720 pixels high and JPG or PNG files. The cover photo is the most important one as it shows on the front of your listing.
According to my personal experiences, I can say adding more than 6 photos can boost your listing’s performance.
The most important thing to increase your listing ranking is Labels and Reviews.
“Labels” you can simply understand them as the keywords in Local SEO. You have to research on the google search console and look for local keywords that are having a large search volume for similar businesses.
You can add a maximum of 10 labels to your listing.
“Reviews” help Google to understand the user's analysis towards a particular listing. So try to get a 5-star rating with positive reviews on your listing from your customers.
You should always actively check your reviews. You must reply to customers who are satisfied with your service and ask unhappy customers in a professional manner. Reply to negative feedback in a polite way that “we will look into this and we hope to serve you better next time. “
You can add posts to your listing. You can add posts about your offerings, or greeting customers on festivals, your new product announcements, etc. The posts help you to show your activity while a user searches for a similar kind of business.
Try to add all the information accurately on your listing and complete your listing 100%. Thus, a good GMB listing can help you rank better in local SEO and boosts your credibility.
Thanks for reading this article. I hope that you found this article useful.
