Does Google My Business help with SEO?
Google My Business is essentially a free listing and in our experience it does increase your local visibility and have a positive effect on your Google ranking. A Google My Business listing includes: business name, telephone number, email, address, website, business hours, * links to your social media. There is also an area where you can get customers to add reviews and where you can add your own posts. The posts can promote new products, offers or encourage people to visit your site.
About your business name, address and telephone number
SEO people will talk to you about the importance of a consistent NAP. NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone Number and having these consistently displayed everywhere on the internet really helps Google to connect each of your mentions and can help you establish creditability and trustworthiness. We would extend the NAP to include consistent descriptions about your organisation across all listings including Google My Business. We recommend creating at least two descriptions about your business, one short (about 30 words) and a longer one (about 60 words) and use a variant of this across all of your listings.
About Google Reviews
We recommend encouraging customers to add a Google Review. Good reviews do 2 things. 1) they confirm to Google that you are a trustworthy organisation which makes them happier to recommend you and 2) the reviews are visible when your Google My Business listing is visible and so send a strong signal to potential customers that other people are happy to recommend you.
There is evidence that if the reviews include searched for keywords this can really help how your listing performs in the local pack. Which segways us rather neatly into..
About Google Posts
Google Posts help generate organic clicks to your website. Posts include a ‘call to action’ that encourage users to take a specific action. Action Buttons include; Book, Order Online, Buy, Learn More, Sign Up or Call Now. Posts comprise text, an image and a call to action.
We also know that Google rewards fresh and updated posts as it shows that the business is active and cares about its users/customers. Each post remains visible for up to 7 days so we do recommend adding a new post every week. At this time you are not able to schedule posts unless you use a social media management tool such as Sendible.
We recommend that you use a trackable link in your posts so you can see how effective each post is. You can read about trackable links here from Google.
The most important way that Google My Business helps with Local SEO
Let’s start with the basics; No Google My Business listing, no visibility in the local pack. The Local pack appears at the top of Google searches, immediately below any paid for advertisements.
The local pack listing shows your name, address, opening hours, telephone number and links to your website and a summary of the reviews you have received. It makes sense that a user, who can see the reviews at a glance, will be influenced by the amount and star rating of reviews.
If you’d like to talk to us about any of your SEO or social media requirements contact us today.
info@build14me.com or call 07903 019596
Worried that your SEO isn’t working? See our recent blog giving you some hints and tips about monitoring your own SEO:
Is your SEO Working?
