Local SEO success relies heavily on optimizing your Google My Business presence. Here are four essential items to think about if you want to improve your GMB presence.
Are you taking advantage of your Google review answers and the new Google My Business (GMB) capabilities to gain an edge over your local search competitors?
If not, here are some key factors to consider as you work to improve your GMB presence.
· Encourage feedback
One of the most effective strategies to boost your GMB profile is through reviews. They are free yet do a lot to improve your company’s visibility among organic searchers.
Consider how you’d go about sorting through a comprehensive list of area general contractors if you’ve never worked with one before. Because you don’t have a third-party validation of areas like pricing and quality of labour, you have no clue if the claims made on a contractor’s website are accurate. In this situation, Google reviews will assist you rank higher in local area searches. People looking for digital marketing agency in Delhi/NCR will be more likely to trust your company if you have 10 or 15 four- or five-star reviews.
Those reviews, however, will not appear overnight. To persuade pleased consumers to submit reviews at all, you may need to perform some2e outreach. You can do this by sending them an email, a postcard, or just asking them to give you a review of their experience with you. Another alternative is to use review management softwares and you can do the following using these softwares:
o Keep track of your consumer feedback.
o Requests for text message reviews should be sent via text message.
o Directly respond to new Google reviews via email alerts.
Irrespective of how you do it, your request for review should motivate customers to be fair and comprehensive in their assessment. Ask for actual photos of the job you completed or a goods they purchased from you. Photos are excellent for enhancing the visibility of your GMB profile even further.
· Don’t Use Spammy Techniques
Google is undoubtedly clever enough today to detect attempts to abuse the system by automating content, establishing doorway pages, and keyword stuffing. GMB follows the same logic.
Why would Google, the world’s largest and most powerful search engine, let you get away with spamming practices like bribing individuals to create favourable reviews? Potential customers will trust genuine, honest reviews. Google can tell if you bought a shady website to write a false five-star review for your company.
In reality, review websites may catch fake ratings and reviews and mark your website as dubious. When visitors visit on any of your webpages, the flag will appear alerting them to not entrust the website. Offering incentives, such as future discounts, for consumers who submit favorable GMB reviews, follow the same logic. However, in this scenario, doing so may hurt your online reputation.
Potential buyers may believe that persons who mention the inducement in their reviews are lying. Attempting to bribe people for positive assessments, on the other hand, obscures the situation’s potential reality.
Even if customers had a bad experience with your company, they would not mention it in their reviews. This increases the likelihood of future customers being “duped” and having a terrible experience when they expected something better.
· React to Negative Feedback
Instead of working more than you need to by employing these strategies, I recommend just preventing negative GMB reviews from occurring in the first place or promptly responding to any poor reviews that do occur. The former would undoubtedly necessitate you getting your hands dirty and ensuring that every area of your business is working well.
At all times, cater to your consumers, and if something goes wrong, be understanding, handle it right away, and make sure everyone leaves happy. Reach out to customers who have left poor reviews online to apologize and empathize. This demonstrates to the general public that you care about your customers even after they go your business.
- Make Use of New GMB Tools
My final piece of advice for improving your GMB profile is to take advantage of Google’s most recent updates to its online business tool. The Google Marketing Kit, for example, allows you to make free stickers, posters, and social media postings to promote your company’s promotions and events.
The social posts, in particular, should be a massive help to your internet profile. You may make unique posters out of your favourable evaluations, complete with written blurbs, and then share them on social media.
Visitors may now follow your company’s local profile on Google My Business in the same way they would on Twitter, FB or Insta. Your followers would then have access to your company’s:
o New social media updates from GMB.
o Offers.
o Blog articles.
o Events.
o New product releases.
All of these things will help your followers become more aware of your brand.
Finally, Google Posts allows you to creatively promote events, coupons and deals. You may also increase user engagement by using photos, infographics, call-to-action buttons & videos. Because its analytics function allows you to observe how users responded to whatever you wrote, Google Posts is an excellent GMB advertising approach. In addition, you can use the info you gather to create even better posts in the future.
Keep a check for Google My Business’s “local favorites” attribute, which will give online and tangible badges to the best 5% of businesses in each group in the not-too-distant future. There aren’t many details yet, such as if company categories would be divided by locations and, if so, how those locations will be bifurcated.
Conclusion
The leader of search engines wants you to grow your business’s local presence, and as evidenced by the effort, Google is putting into its new GMB features.
Having a strong GMB presence will make it easier for local customers to locate you, and encouraging those customers to submit favourable reviews will bring in even more customers.
