Google My Business: It’s more important than you think

Google My Business It’s more important than you think

As Google is by far the most popular search engine, maximising your presence on there is vital to any business. How you set-up & use your Google My Business profile is more important than most people realise.

Google My Business – Who uses that?

Launched with a heap of buzz back in 2011 Google My Business was supposed to be the next BIG thing when it comes to social media platforms, but the platform never really seemed to take off.

However, for business owners, the fact that Google My Business for personal users is somewhat of a ghost town is irrelevant, it’s still really important to set up your local business listing; here are the main reasons why:

1. Google Places – When people are searching for local businesses, the google places results will always show up first before the organic ones, so you want to be included in that list! To be in the list you first need to make sure your location and business categories are set up correctly so particular searches will show your page. Where you rank in the results depends on a few factors such as the information you provide, reviews, and so on.
2. User Experience – When someone searches for your business specifically, they get to see your Google My Business profile result giving them quick and easy access to your basic contact details, opening hours, link to your website, and online reviews which is really handy.
3. Ranking – If you want to succeed online, everyone knows that a good google ranking is very important, and listing your business with google can help contribute towards a higher ranking.

Setting up a Google My Business page is pretty quick and easy to do, simply Click here to Claim Your Google My Business Business Page and follow the instructions from there, and remember as discussed in a previous article, if you work from home you can hide your residential address from public view and just display your suburb – see the info for that here: New Website – Now What?

Once that’s done you can just leave it at that if you wish, or you could go one step further and share a few things on there as well. Google My Business was built for SEO (i.e. showing up in search engine results) so anything that you share there has a good chance of showing up which is just another helpful way to drive traffic to your site… and it’s free, so why not?!

But wait, there’s more – Google Reviews!

We all know that reviews play a huge role in online marketing and influencing a customer’s buying choices. Recent figures show that around 90% of customers will research products or businesses online and often will trust online reviews more than personal recommendations from friends or family. As google is by far the most popular search engine, having reviews on there is super important!

When potential customers see you in local google places search results, as mentioned they are always displayed first and will show how many reviews you have and your average star rating (if you have 5 or more).

Even if you have tonnes of reviews elsewhere (such as Facebook or Yelp) if you don’t have any on google, in these local results it looks like you have none, and if your competitors do, users might be more inclined to check them out instead.

So how do you get Google Reviews?

To leave a review, customers must have some sort of account with google, such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, etc. If they don’t have one of these, they will need to create one before proceeding; it’s quick and easy so hopefully, this won’t turn them off continuing.

How to make getting Google reviews a little easier…

The easier you can make it for your customers, the better chance you have of getting them to leave you a review.

So rather than have them search for your business first an even better way is to simply provide your clients with a direct link to your review form; then all they have to do is click on it!

Google doesn’t make this easy though (annoying right!?). There are a few steps you have to take in order to get this direct link and to make sure it works both on desktop and mobile, but as this method is by far the quickest and easiest, it’s definitely worth doing.

So how do you get this direct link? Well here’s where I bribe you:

If you’re already a customer of ours, hopefully, you are thrilled with what we have done for you, or perhaps you discovered us through this article section of our website and have found it useful?

If so, one of the kindest compliments we can receive from you is… yep you guessed it – a review!

And as a thank you for leaving us one, I would be happy to provide you with the direct link to your own review page (like mine below) so you too can quickly and easily ask your own customers for reviews. Just shoot me an email and I’ll hook you up!

>> Click here to leave Rivmedia Web Design a review on Google! <<<

Thanks in advance, we really appreciate you taking the time to help us grow our online reputation and I hope this article helps you do the same!

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