Ebunoluwa Akinola
Making your business outstanding is more important than ever.Every business out there wants to attract more online visibility – especially on Google.
How can you get in front of just the right people in local search listings?
Optimizing your Google Business
Profile (GBP) listing puts your business in the best position to get found and convert motivated searchers to paying customers.
Here are a few simple tips to get quick wins for your business
1. Encourage Reviews
Reviews are one of the best ways to grow your business on google. They cost nothing but do much to raise your business’s profile to organic searchers.
In this case, what you need are GBP reviews to raise you up in local searches.
People who look up to what you sell will be more likely to trust your business if they see you have 10 or 15 reviews in the four-to-five-star area.
Ask them to provide original photographs of the work you did for them or a product you sold them.
Videos and Pictures are great for increasing your GBP’s visibility even more.
2. Avoid Spammy Tactics
Google is definitely smart enough today to know when someone is trying to cheat the system by, for instance, automating content, creating doorway pages, and keyword stuffing.
The same idea applies to GBP.
This is Google’s own tool, so why would the largest, most robust search engine in existence let you get away with spammy tactics such as paying people to leave positive reviews?
Potential customers are going to trust real, honest reviews.
Google and those review sites do, too. They know when you’ve paid some dubious website to provide a fake five-star review for your business.
3.Respond To Negative Reviews
Instead of working harder than you need to by engaging in these kinds of tactics, simply to preempt negative GBP reviews before they happen or to respond diligently to bad reviews that do come through.
The former would obviously require you to dig in and make sure that every aspect of your enterprise is running smoothly.
Cater to your customers at all times, and if something goes wrong, be understanding, address it then and there, and make sure people leave happy.
When negative reviews do appear online, reach out to those customers to apologize and empathize. This shows the general public that you care about your clients even after they depart your establishment.
Leverage GBP Tools
Take advantage of the tools Google has for its online business tool.
One such feature is the Google Marketing Kit, which allows you to create free stickers, posters, and social media posts for advertising your business’s promotions and events.
In particular, the social posts should be an enormous boon to your online presence.
You can create cool posters of your positive reviews, featuring blurbs from the text, and then share them on your social media platforms.
GBP also lets users follow your business’s local profile just as they would on a social network such as Facebook or Instagram. Followers would then get access to your business’s:New social posts,Offers, Blog posts, Events, Product updates.
All of these things help to increase brand awareness among your followers.
Lastly, Google Posts let you advertise new coupons, deals, and events in creative ways. You can even use images, videos, and call-to-action buttons to drive up user engagement.
Google Posts is a great GBP advertising method because its analytics feature lets you see how users interacted with whatever you posted. You can use the data you discover to craft even better posts next time.
In conclusion, google wants you to optimize your business’s local profile. It wants to create that healthy competition that exists among local businesses.
