Lesson #3: Maintaining Your Google Business Profile Listing
Now that you have added your Google Business Profile, it’s imperative that you maintain the listing. As your competitors learn about local search and add their own sites, you will likely see your listing rank lower. The way to prevent that is to keep the listing updated.
There are several things you can do to dominate the listing and get the bulk of the internet traffic being received.
One thing you can do is continue to update and add posts to your Google Places listing. The information you post can be anything related to your business that would be good for anyone who visits your page to see. This will add more relevance to your listing helping its positioning over time.
Also, make sure your website is fully optimized. Having an optimized website is important when it comes to how high your Google Places listing will rank for your chosen keywords. The two work together and help each other gain rankings in the Google search engine.
Make sure your site contains the proper keywords, title tags, description tags, and all other pertinent on-site optimization components. However, you should not keyword stuff your listings as Google does not like this. They have to be worked in naturally in order to get ranked properly.
You should also use a variety of off-site SEO strategies in order to totally maximize exposure. This includes things such as article marketing, press releases, social media networking, and video marketing.
It is also important that your business name, address, and phone number are an exact match to the information on your Google Places listing. Make sure you have a “Contact Us” page on your website with a map as well.
Google scrapes business information from other business directories to verify your business name, phone number, address, etc. So you should add your listing to other business directories such as Yahoo and Bing.
You don’t have to stop there. There are plenty of other sites where you should list your business as well. These listings are called “citations.”
Some of the other online business directories you can use are Yellowpages.com, Citysearch.com, Yelp.com, and Superpages.com.
Listing your business on multiple citation sites will also help Google verify the accuracy of your listing and to help improve the strength of your listing.
Customer reviews are also very powerful when it comes to maintaining your Google Places listing. Google loves reviews so those listings that have reviews perform better than those that don’t. To get reviews from your customers, just ask them to go to your Google Places page to give their review.
You can also offer an incentive for them to give you a review. There are a lot of creative things you can do to get reviews depending on the nature of your business.
In addition to your Google Places page, get your customers to provide reviews for you on all of your business listings. This will increase the power of those listings, which will in turn increase the power of your Google Places listing. Whatever you do, don’t do fake reviews for various reasons that we won’t get into here; just take our word for it.
Reviews are also good for converting visitors to into buyers. When looking for a product or service to purchase, people place a lot of value on what other people think. So if you have a lot of happy customers, this could definitely work to your advantage.
If you would like professional help verifying your business listing or optimizing a business listing that you have already claimed and verified, check out our Local Search Optimization/Submission package.
For your convenience, here’s a list of all the blog posts in this series:
• Lesson 1 – What is Google Business Profile and Why Use it?
• Lesson 2 – Setting Up Your Google Business Profile Listing
• Lesson 3 – Maintaining Your Google Business Profile Listing
• Lesson 4 – Getting to the Top of Google Business Profile and Staying There
• Lesson 5 – FAQ’s About Google Business Profile
Glennette Goodbread, Certified Search Marketing Specialist
Premium Web Design
