Guide to Boost Your Google My Business Profile

Posted on 2021-03-18 13:26:50, by Seawind

Optimizing Google My Business profile is a big part of local SEO success. 

Major points to consider in order to boost Google My Business presence.

1. Encourage Reviews

Reviews are one of the best ways to grow your Google My Business profile. They cost nothing but do much to raise your business’s profile to organic searchers.

Think about how you might go about weeding through a large selection of local general contractors if you have never employed one before.

You have no idea if the claims made on a contractor’s website are accurate since you don’t have third-party confirmation of areas such as costs and quality of workmanship.

In this case, what you need are Google My Business reviews to raise you up in local searches.

People who look up any “search result” in their area will be more likely to trust your business if they see you have 10 or 15 reviews in the four-to-five-star area.

But those reviews won’t show up overnight.

You often have to do a little outreach to happy customers to get them to leave reviews at all.

You can do this by email, postcard, or simply by asking them verbally to review their experience with you.

Another option is to take advantage of review-management platforms such as BirdEye, ReviewPush, and Positive. These programs allow you to:

• Organize your customer reviews.
• Send text message review requests.
• Respond to new Google reviews directly from email alerts.

No matter how you do it, your review requests should encourage customers to be honest and detailed in their analyses.

2. Avoid Spammy Tactics

Google is definitely smart enough today to know when someone is trying to cheat the system by, for instance, automating content, creating doorway pages, and keyword stuffing.

The same idea applies to Google My Business.

This is Google’s own tool, so why would the largest, most robust search engine in existence let you get away with spammy tactics such as paying people to leave positive reviews?

Potential customers are going to trust real, honest reviews.

Google and those review sites I mentioned do, too. They know when you’ve paid some dubious website to provide a fake five-star review for your business.

In fact, review sites are able to detect spammy reviews and will flag your site as being dishonest.

The flag will result in a popup that users will see when they arrive on one of your pages, warning them not to trust your site.

The same concept applies to offering incentives, such as future discounts, for people to leave positive Google My B.usiness reviews. In this case, doing this could simply backfire on your online reputation.

If people mention the incentive in their reviews, potential customers might think their praise is false.

Even if people had negative experiences with your business, they won’t say so in their reviews. This makes it more likely that future customers will be “fooled” and end up having a bad time when they expected something better.

3. Respond to Negative Reviews

Instead of working harder than you need to by engaging in these kinds of tactics, we advise you simply to preempt negative Google My Business reviews before they happen or to respond diligently to bad reviews that do come through.

The former would obviously require you to dig in and make sure that every aspect of your enterprise is running smoothly.

4. Leverage New Google My Business Tools

The recommendation for boosting your Google My Business profile is to take advantage of the relatively recent additions Google has rolled out for its online business tool.

One such feature is the Google Marketing Kit, which allows you to create free stickers, posters, and social media posts for advertising your business’s promotions and events.

In particular, social posts should be an enormous boon to your online presence. You can create cool posters of your positive reviews, featuring blurbs from the text, and then share them on your social media platforms.

GMB also now lets users follow your business’s local profile just as they would on a social network such as Facebook or Instagram.

• New GMB social posts.
• Offers.
• Blog posts.
• Events.
• Product updates