The Importance of Google My Business in Local SEO

Using local SEO to boost your business ranking on Google is a big deal right now, giving more click and convert rates than with broad SEO alone. Google My Business can help businesses gain an edge in local visibility. In the light of recent adoption of local SEO to businesses looking to grow their visibility and customers, just how important is it?

GMB helps to enhance the results from local SEO. At least that is what everybody says, but before you agree to it as a business strategy, you need to know just what Google My business will do for your business. This way you can tell if it is the right strategy.

Before you apply a strategy to growing your business, it is important to ensure that it actually offers expected benefits. It has to be a strategy that not only gets more customers and visitors to the website but also converts and increases sales. To help you understand, this article will answer two questions; What is Google My Business? and What is the importance of Google My Business in Local SEO?

What is Google My Business?

Google my business allows businesses to create a Google profile with tailored features. 

It’s more than just having a website or an online profile, it is having a google business ID. It creates an avenue for businesses to meet their customers and interact with them and vice-versa in a way that is beneficial to the business and customer.

It is important that you know the roles of Google My Business and see a clearer picture of how it may benefit your business.

Features of Google My Business in Local SEO

Google My business offers different features that include:

• A customer review session: in an age of millennials, people buy things recommended by others. Which means that, not only is a customer review now meant to give feedback to business owners, it is now a way to communicate with other prospective buyers. And trust that they are listening.
• Business contact information: With Google My Business, you can now provide all your necessary contact information to be used by customer’s, from phone number, mail address, business location etc.
• Information about business’ operation: It provides a place for people to know more about a business in one glance. Which is important considering that internet users spend a shorter time on pages before they click on another page. Now businesses can display real-time information about their business operation schedule.
• Google maps link: Google my business is integrated with google maps in such a way that, it becomes easier for customers to find business locations. All they have to do is to use the assistance of google maps, which helps a great deal compared to them having to use addresses without a map link.
• Google analytics: ever since search engine optimisation, businesses have been looking for a way to get feedback on any strategy they apply. Google analytics is that opportunity. By employing the necessary information, businesses can get an idea of the effects of their strategies.
• It is linked to other Google functions: Asides the functions available on Google My Business, it is linked to other Google functions. Which means that you can easily integrate any google service your business already uses or plan to use with the Google My Business profile.

At the end of the day, Google My Business is just an outlet for businesses to be more efficient at reaching their customers. However, since a lot of success with using Google and being listed early comes from ranking, it is important to understand how Google My Business could help the local ranking of a business. 

If you haven’t grabbed your Google My Business listing you can do this at: https://www.google.com/business/

What is the importance of Google My Business to local SEO?

Local SEO targets local visitors to a site. It is a beneficial strategy for businesses that get a lot of sales and traffic from local area and people around them. i.e. people either want to visit the business outlet, or proximity is an important factor to the ability of the business to provide services.

With this understanding, it is easy for Google My Business to be an asset to local SEO since it provides more insights into a business and customers alike. By being important and helpful to a business in ways that align with the goal of local SEO, Google My Business can now be a useful tool. 

The following ways are exactly how Google My Business is important to Local SEO:

1. It is easier to get feedback of local SEO strategies: When any business employs local SEO to improve their visibility and grow the business ranking organically, there ought to be a feedback system. This way, they can know exactly how these strategies are faring and adjust accordingly. This is even easier with the Google Analytic feature on Google My Business. Even more detailed than Insights, Analytics allows a business to see necessary information of how the audience interaction with a website.

2. The inclusion of business location information optimises it for local searches: It is no news that the number of google searches with a local intent has increased. People are more interested in looking to find solutions around them that are easily accessible when they search online.
The inclusion of an address and other relevant contact information on Google My Business profile, allows a business to be displayed as suggestions when visitors search for related services within that location. Since the essence of local SEO is to make sure that the right people are the ones seeing your webpage, Google My Business helps to achieve that.

3. More click-through rates and/or offline patronage: Nowadays, people have a shorter time they spend on a web page before they decide if they want to click through or check another. This means that the earlier your webpage can provide what visitors search for, the more likely it is to retain visitors and result in a good click-through rate.
A Google My Business profile displays information in a simple way, visitors easily understand what the page is about, the working hours, contact address etc, of a business within seconds. It is safe to say that Google My business optimises the information of a business in a way that suits the visitors.

4. The presence of customer review improves a website’s relevance: Google is getting smarter with their ranking, always pulling out new updates that even creates a smaller mesh to sieve out the truly helpful websites from the rest. Local SEO helps a business stay relevant in Google’s ranking system, however in an attempt to be ranked highly, nothing beats usefulness of a website. If a website can be useful to the visitors and online community, it is ranked higher in Google. The inclusion of information like the customer’s review and viewing details via Google My Business boosts interaction and shows that a web page is useful to visitors.
This interaction will be flagged by Google as a sign of relevance especially with the inclusion of keywords. Hence, it is a useful feature that local SEO can use to boost a website’s ranking.

5. Google My Business helps a business convert online presence to actual sales: Local SEO is applied to improve sales, to reach newer customer base by making a business more visible. Visitors who view Google My Business are mostly those looking to purchase rather than ones just surfing or looking for generic information.
This helps a business to target the right audience. When they like what they see, the visitors are likely to either make an order or visit the offline store of a business, hence online visibility in converted to actual sales.

6. Increased visibly of a business: Because Google dedicates a part at the top of the result page of any local search to three Google My Business profiles otherwise know as the ‘3 pack’, it means that businesses have a higher chance of being visible. All they have to do is enter the necessary information that will allow them to be recognised for local searches.

In conclusion, the plethora of benefits that Google My Business brings to businesses is exactly why it is useful to local SEO. This is because all of these advantages align with what local SEO is trying to achieve, which is to improve the visibility of a business and click-through rates. Since Google My Business can help achieve both, it becomes incredibly important to use as a Local SEO tool.

We offer Google My Business Management as part of our SEO and Business Growth Packages