If you’re not familiar with Google Business Profile it’s time to look into it. Recently rebranded from Google My Business to Google Business Profile (read our blog about it here), it’s a great tool that helps you manage your business and get found by local customers.
What Are The Benefits Of A Google Business Profile?
Google Business Profiles allows businesses to engage with their customers on Google. Not only will this improve your local search visibility and ranking in Google’s search engine algorithm, but it will also help drive more traffic and sales to your business.
We’ve put together a list of Google Business Profile best practices to help optimise your profile and connect with your customers.
Content Is King
Great content adds value to a traditionally transactional relationship. Like all digital marketing channels, content is king, and creating engaging post content helps you gain visibility. It’s no surprise that Google ranks content based on engagement, so the more you engage with your audience, the higher your Google rankings will be.
Make sure you also use relevant business and industry keywords in your content to boost your credibility, and get found for those terms people are looking for.
Understand Your Customer
Successful content strategies stem from a deeper understanding of who your customer is. Demographics are a great place to start, from there start thinking outside the box. Ask yourself, what do your customers value, and what are their pain points as well as other relevant questions to your industry and business.
Test Your Content
Google My Business has a dashboard that tracks your posts. Here you can view which posts perform best and get the most interactions. If you find that one type of content isn’t performing as well as you expected, test out another to see if it changes the results. We recommend variety, after all it is the spice of life, and this approach allows you to share different aspects of your business. Some content ideas include:
- promotions
- behind the scenes
- new products
- business news and updates
Call To Action (CTA)
Every piece of content should have a CTA that tells your customer to do something which gently pushes them to engage with your content. It doesn’t need to be a sales pitch, but the best CTA’s are clear, specific and create urgency that drives your customer to take action.
Make sure when you link to your website in your CTA, you link to the specific page that relates to what your post was talking about, so that customers aren’t confused when moving from one platform to the other.
Images And Video
To show your brand’s personality, make sure to add images and videos to your Google Business Profile. Your logo is obviously important, but choose a cover photo and additional photos that spotlight important features of your business.
Original photography will always work better than stock photography but make sure you upload the correct file size otherwise they won’t display properly. Many free online tools, like Canva, can help you size and design images.
Post Consistently
Treat your Google Business Profile as you would your other social platforms, which means post regularly. Google Business Profile posts have a shelf life of one week, so you don’t want your profile to fall by the wayside. We recommend at least one post a week to maintain a presence.
Connect With Your Customers
If you’re asking your customers to interact with your profile, it’s important to interact back. Answer questions or respond to reviews, you can even enable direct messaging to help maintain a healthy level of conversation.
Need More Tips For Your Google Business Profile?
When developing a Google Business Profile strategy, engagement should underpin everything that you do. If you’re unsure where to start with your local SEO, give us a call and our team can help identify a great strategy to increase your Google Business Profile visibility.
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