How to optimize your Google My Business listing better than your competitors and derive real benefits from it?

Companies that have 100% completed their Google My Business listing register 4 times more clicks to their website than others (source). This is indicative of the potential of this tool. However, a study by Places Scout revealed that the My Business files reach on average a level of completeness of only 72%.

Suffice to say that a large number of companies miss out on the essential and resource-saving opportunities offered by Google My Business:

• An important source of traffic via local SEO
• A display in “0 click” searches, which today would represent half of searches
• A powerful “drive to store” lever via Search and Google Maps
• A much more qualitative presence in the SERP
• Access to successful ad extensions on Google Ads
• Increasingly essential bridges with Google Shopping
• Access to very extensive statistics on the behavior of your prospects towards you

Today, the interest of this marketing tool is far from limited to local organic traffic. Claiming your business there and filling in the information on your file as well as possible only takes a few minutes and can be very profitable, especially if you then devote a minimum of time to updating it regularly.

Besides, would you know how to situate the level of optimization of your own Google My Business listing compared to the average?

It’s a good way to know if you’re on the right track and to increase the returns you get through it. To help you in this process, here are our recommendations on the main levers for optimizing your My Business profile in connection with the study by Places Scout mentioned above.

Summary

• Information listing: achieve 100% completeness
• Reviews: motivate your customers and respond to them
• Notes: play the transparency card with your customers
• Photos: don’t wait 100 days to update
• Posts: stand out from the crowd by taking advantage of this little-used communication channel
• And after?
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • How do I create a Google My Business listing?
  • What are the benefits of optimizing your Google My Business listing?
  • How to optimize your Google My Business listing for local SEO?

Information listing: achieve 100% completeness

Have you created or claimed your profile on the interface provided for this purpose by Google My Business? Perfect, but before going into the details of optimizing your profile, the first thing to do is to make sure you have filled in all the practical information about your company. It may seem trivial to you, but a large part of the GMB files do not validate this first step.

So don’t jump on the most attractive features and take a few minutes to fill in your file 100% with:

• The name of your establishment (tip: you can add keywords to it, provided that they are perfectly representative of your activity, because Google sanctions attempts to over-optimize on this point)
• The logo and the cover photo
• Contact information (telephone, address, hours)
• The main category and the secondary categories of your activity (here you can also target important keywords and/or take inspiration from the categories used by your competitors)
• The list of your services and possibly the strategic products
• The description of your activity
• The associated website (which must contain the same information as your GMB listing)
• Some recent photos

If you have all of that, great to start with. You can move on!

Reviews: motivate your customers and respond to them

Sharing customer opinions on companies referenced by Google is the primary purpose of the My Business platform. It is also one of the essential factors of the algorithm which is entrusted with the task of determining the profiles to be displayed according to user searches. You would therefore be wrong to neglect them, considering that they are secondary to your traffic acquisition objectives. Quite the opposite: they are essential to your Local SEO Services.

Google My Business also offers a feature allowing you to send your customers a link allowing them to directly access the section allowing them to submit their opinion.

In this case, your competitors who have been on Google My Business for longer than you are surely ahead of you in this area. Inevitably, time has done its job… In order not to be left behind, we advise you to strongly mobilize your client portfolio in order to make your file take off more quickly.

But, believe us, getting your customers to save their reviews is often harder than it looks. A very small minority will do it quickly, while you will have to reroll most of them, sometimes without ever reaching your goal.

So, it might be a good idea to find a way to encourage your customers to leave you a review. Be creative: you are bound to find a small counterpart likely to motivate them to accomplish this small gesture.

Notes: play the transparency card with your customers

Playing the transparency card is often the best way to get feedback from your customers. You need this opinion to improve your SEO, so don’t hesitate to tell them clearly.

But some customers are sometimes harsh when giving a rating… Even if they have nothing in particular to reproach you with, they may be reluctant to give you the maximum rating of 5/5 stars. However, to stay above the average mark measured by Places Scout, you will have to obtain as many maximum marks as possible.

The best way to achieve this is therefore, again, to play the card of transparency. By not hesitating to ask your customers to give you 5 stars on Google if they are satisfied with your work with them, you will reduce the risk that these satisfied customers will settle for a rating of 4 stars. As for partially satisfied customers, they will see this as an opportunity to let you know and will probably wait until you have corrected the situation before going to your Google My Business listing.

Remember that you normally have a mutually beneficial relationship with them. Being kind to you allows them to legitimately hope that you will do the same to them when the opportunity arises.

Photos: don’t wait 100 days to update

They say a picture is worth 1000 words. Legend or not, what is certain is that a GMB profile containing photos will in any case see its click rate skyrocket. Not to mention that the photos have a reassuring side for a prospect in search of information.

So be generous with photos on Google My Business and try to keep adding more as regularly as possible. A profile whose most recent photos are months or even years old may appear suspicious in certain areas.

If your business lends itself to it, you can even engage your customers, again by finding a way to encourage them to add their own photos. The quality and authenticity of your listing will improve.

Posts: stand out from the crowd by taking advantage of this little-used communication channel

Kind of mini-articles intended to develop important aspects of your business; Google My Business posts are a great way to answer questions that your prospects may have about you. However, barely more than one in ten profiles use this native content on the platform.

They therefore constitute an interesting lever of demarcation. Given the traffic that a well-referenced GMB listing can attract, it is both an important channel of visibility for your business and a real tool for personalizing your communication in a relatively impersonal environment.

Little house tip: you can recycle, in these posts, the publications that have obtained the most engagement on your PPC for Medical Spas.

For what? Because:

• These Social Media publications benefit from almost zero organic rankings on Google.
• Thanks to them, you will save precious time in writing your posts.
• You won’t have to worry about their ability to grab your target’s attention.

And after?

Once you’ve turned your Google My Business listing into a machine for attracting qualified traffic, come see our Google Ads experts. As you were told in the introduction, this sheet is increasingly useful in the context of Google Ads campaigns, because it gives access to certain features likely to increase your ROAS. We told you about it in our article on the challenges of Drive-to-Store in the era of the “online to offline” economy.