In the age of hyper-convenience, users want to be able to find local businesses that meet their exact needs, as quickly as possible. Whether someone wants to find a hair salon that’s open until 6pm or the best burger in a 5 kilometre radius, Google is the go-to. Helping people find the relevant local businesses is central to the role Google plays in our daily lives – and they’ve been working hard to get better at it.
Google My Business is one of the most important digital business tools you can harness. It uses a combination of supplied and crowd-sourced information to better provide users with exactly what they’re looking for at a glance in search results. This includes (but isn’t limited to) information like business hours, location, contact details, and customer reviews.
Why we and
our solutions are
different
Google My Business
When properly harnessed, Google My Business helps you manage how your business appears across the Google-sphere – most notably, in Search and Google Maps. It’s a neat package of information that follows your business across the web. The added benefit (or challenge, depending on how well you manage it) of Google My Business listings is that users immediately give more weight to this information, meaning it can be the reason why users click through to your site, immediately make a booking or give you a call – or skip your business altogether.
Google Research
Research has shown that 50% of users who completed a local search on their phone, visited a store within a day. In addition, 78% of local mobile searches result in offline purchases. Local searches are high-intent searches – meaning the traffic they generate is not traffic you want your business to miss out on.
Here’s how
We do it
Audience analysis
As with all of our tactics, we start by analysing the data to find the right opportunities. We look at the most popular local search terms related to your business and assess the competition. We also do a deep-dive on user behaviour data to understand which search terms have the highest intent and what the user journey should be for the search queries we believe will result in more business for you.
Localising content
On the back of identifying the key local search terms relevant to your business, we then go about making sure your site content answers the local search questions best. This is done by both optimising your existing content, and writing new content and landing pages where necessary. This is especially important for businesses with multiple branches.
Claiming and verifying your Google My Business listing
It’s vital to take control of your Google My Business listing to improve your chances of showing up in local search listings and Google Maps. We will help you with this process to make sure your listing has the correct contact details, address and other important information. Based on the type of business you have, we are also able to optimise your listing for conversions with an online booking button or easy query submission. These tools help encourage user action by making it as easy as possible to do, without leaving the Google search environment.
Optimise and maintain
Since a Google My Business listing is created by combining supplied, verified and crowd-sourced information, it’s very important to stay on top of it. Any user who sees your listing has the opportunity to suggest edits to Google. These edits may not always be 100% accurate, depending on who submits them, so Google allows you to query them.
Beyond maintaining the basic operational information about your business, your Google My Business listing also offers the opportunity to create posts which appear as thumbnails in your listing. Posts can include anything from a promotional offer to details about an upcoming event – making them a great tool to build your online profile and encourage users to engage with your business.
Let’s set up a chat
To get results
As with everything we do, we ultimately want our activities to give you results that prove ROI. In this case, sending a piece of content out to 200 sites and getting 2 pieces of coverage is not a success. Neither is getting a low quality backlink from a site that scrapes content from around the web without adding any value. We help you understand what outreach wins you want and give you a transparent view of what’s working, what isn’t and how to keep refining it.
