5 Easy Steps to Improve your Google My Business rankings
- Mar 17, 2020
- By Rajeev Nar
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 48 seconds
Whether you are a small local business or a Multi-National Company with multiple offices at different locations, you would always want to top the search engine results. It is about achieving good visibility and competing with the big-ticket rivals.
Missing it out will make you lose on the huge stream of Organic traffic. No matter what you sell, as soon as you have a storefront or an office, GMB will work for you.
In this blog, we will learn what Google My Business is and how it can push your listings to the top of the local rankings.
GMB reflects your Google Place Rankings
Google My Business listing is the most important local SEO strategy to claim and verify your business. It simply increases your chances of showing up in local searches.
Improving GMB has a few implications as well. This umbrella listing covers various Google products including:
- Google Maps
- Google Local Pack
- Google Places
You need to show up on these to increase your organic traffic.
What is Google My Business?
This is a simple, free tool that helps you in managing your business online. Millions of users have an implicit trust in Google and its ability to furnish information. Improving your GMB rankings will help your business stand out among competitors and manage your online presence in different ways. Verifying and editing your business details can make your business easily approachable.
You will need to hire the best SEO agency in London for accurate results.
Benefits of improving Google My Business rankings
The advantages of using Google My Business include:
- Manage all your information with clarity and accuracy.
- Reading and responding to reviews will ease customer interaction and
- Get access to insights on how your customers reach your business. It will help you enhance your current online presence as well.
- Improving GMB for your business automatically improves the organic traffic of your website.
If you optimise your GMB properly, there are several other features you can take benefit of.
How to improve Google My Business rankings?
Allow Google to verify your business so that you can rank higher in local searches.
1. Business Listings
Google My Business rankings come down to Google verifying that your business is real. Basically, it is about determining how often the name, address and phone number of your business are cited or listed on the internet.
It acts the same way as backlinks work for SEO. Your ranking depends upon the number of times your business is listed.
Submit your business to local or national business directories to get cited or listed.
2. Consistent NAP
There must be consistency between the NAP (Name, Address and Phone number) of your business listed in these directories, on the contact page of your website and Google My Business listings. Different and outdated NAPs will only confuse the Google crawlers.
If you want to check the consistency if your NAP, conduct a search for your business. Click to check what every listing looks like. If you find incorrect information on any website, contact them and get it changed. Hire the best SEO agency in London to track your business listings.
3. NAP on website
Ofcourse, it is essential to list your business name, address and phone number on your website. It is good to have your details on the header or footer section of your website. Use it with the Schema markup to earn brownie points.
4. Embedded Google Maps
You must have seen embedded Google Maps on the Contact Us page of many websites. Embedding Google My Business listing on the contact page is a good practice. List yourself after confirming with Places listing on Google.
It is easy to embed your business. Search for your business’s in Google Maps. When you find it, click on the three lines beside your business’s name. Later, click on ‘Share or Embed Map’.
5. Reviews
Reviews are the last and most important factors to improve your rankings. Get everyone review your page. Obviously, crawlers will prefer your pages with more reviews over pages with no reviews at all.
Providing searchers with the most relevant search results falls in Google’s line of approach.
Evaluate Rankings
If the ranking of your website does not improve even after making all the above changes, you need to increase the citing of your business. Look for the sites where your competitors are listing themselves. Check if your business is already listed there or not. If not, list it right away.
As a matter of fact, Google uses business citations to list the most relevant businesses with search engine rankings.