The Google Business Profile (previously known as Google My Business) is a free service that enables businesses to manage and update a profile with their location, contact information, services, customer reviews, and more. A complete and accurate Google Business Profile (GBP) will help potential customers find your business and verifies your brand. At the same time, an enhanced GBP can drive a great deal of business even though you may have less reviews and history compared with other listings.
Maria White for Search Engine Land:
1. Info section: Categories
The category chosen considerably impacts the rankings at the local level. Your company’s primary categorization explains what it performs (i.e., law firm, dentist, plumber, hair salon, etc). Furthermore, this will be the sole category accessible to the entire public.
2. Reviews
About 77% of consumers “always” or “regularly” read online reviews when browsing for local businesses, according to BrightLocal’s recent survey.
Reviews are an increasingly important ranking component and a conversion factor. They are crucial to local businesses, not only to stand out but to build credibility.
Google will emphasize reviews for branded searches and display them prominently on your company profile.
Another important aspect of reviews is always replying, which encourages customers to leave reviews and increases your credibility.
Reviews may bring in additional consumers, provide insightful criticism, and reveal problems or successes in the customer service department.
When updated regularly, the Products section can be a powerful lever to generate revenue. It is placed higher up than the Services category so it is more prominent.
3. Products
In this section, you can include:
– Images
– Call-to-action buttons
4. Images
Images heavily influence customers during their research phase before purchasing. Google is making information more useful, allowing users to do searches with images and text and get relevant results.
However, adding images (especially logos) to the Image section of your GBP can be tricky. Ensure the pictures you upload for your products, logos, and general imagery are high resolution.
When adding images to your Product section, make sure it complies with Google’s guidelines for Business Profile photos.
5. Posts
Publishing posts on your Business Profile provides an excellent opportunity to promote new products, events, workshops or special offers.
You can add call-to-action buttons on your posts to help increase transactions and revenue and most of all, make it easy for your customer to complete a purchase.
Posts should not be used to turn keywords into topics and create unhelpful content to influence the search result pages. It will not work, and this practice is considered spam.
Instead, your posts should be brief, concise, informative and useful to your customers.
6. UTM tags
UTM tags are crucial to track precisely how many visits, transactions and revenue your Google Business Profile drives to your website.
Here is how to add UTM tags to your website URL.
Go to Google’s Campaign URL Builder (bookmark it) and enter the following information in lowercase:
– Website URL.
– Campaign source.
– Campaign medium.
– Campaign name.
Then, at the bottom of the page, you should end with a URL such as this:
https://margaritasflowers.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-listing
Now go to the info section on Google Business Profile and paste the URL you just created on the blank space with the earth icon (which stands for a website).
Then if it doesn’t have any errors, it should start tracking and, in a few days, you will be able to see its data on Google Analytics. To see its data on GA, go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns.
Then you will be able to see all the campaigns. Look for “gbp-listing.”
UTM stands for “Urchin tracking module.” UTM tags or codes are added to the end of a brand’s URL and are designed to relate specific info about each link.
Using UTM codes ensure your destination URLs are labeled with specific campaign names when they’re reported in analytics. This enables dissemination of traffic that’s usually only reported by its source and attributes traffic to paid search ads or campaigns.
Optimizing the above features of your Google Business Profile can increase visibility within specific search perimeters and draw potential customers to the website.
