Claim Your Google My Business Listing: 4 Reasons Why

WHAT YOU’LL GAIN FROM READING THIS BLOG POST

Understand how a Google Business listing can position your business for success
A resource for setting up your business’s listing
What you can learn about your target market through My Business insights
How often to update your listing with posts
What types of business models most benefit from a My Business listing

CLAIM YOUR GOOGLE BUSINESS LISTING: 4 REASONS WHY

Marketing is about compounding. It’s about setting into motion small tweaks that add up to make a big difference over time. Investing time into claiming your Google My Business listing, setting up the listing properly to provide easy access to customers who find you online, and managing the listing over time is one way to stand on the front lines before your target market.

BENEFITS TO CLAIMING YOUR GOOGLE BUSINESS LISTING

1. Powerful real estate in the top search engine

A Google My Business listing is positioned front and center at the top of the SERP (search engine results page). I’ve read statistics saying Google has anywhere from 60%-80% of the search market share. Holy smokes.

Google is in business to provide an excellent experience to its searchers. Where this listing is positioned front and center shines light on how Google is following through with delivering exactly the kind of information customers are looking for and doing it in the least amount of time possible. All of your information is positioned for easy access to customers already looking for your product or service.

2. Ability to add posts (functioning similarly to social media posts) about what’s going on in your business

Here’s a hard truth. Customers don’t know, talk, or care about your business unless you give them a reason to. That’s the reality.

A Google Business listing allows you to package up in post-style exactly what’s going on in your business and present in an organized fashion front and center on the main search engine your customers are using! It doesn’t get better than that.

Consider this, maybe your Facebook profile turns up at the #1 position in the SERP. That’s great! In fact, landing in the top spot on Google is ideal because spot #1 gets more click throughs than spots #2-#10 combined. (Let that sink in for a moment.)

But clicking through that link to find the information they’re looking for on Facebook is still one extra hoop customers have to jump through. Do you know what happens when customers have to take extra steps to find the information they’re looking for? Conversion drops. Yuck.

What does this mean? It means that as awesome as ranking high is for click throughs, there’s still a more prominent position you can place your business in for customers’ easy access to your business information – A Google My Business listing.

Take the content you’re already posting to your social media profiles. Tweak it as necessary, and leverage the posting feature in Google My Business to deliver that valuable information to customers who are primed and ready to receive it.

3. Easy access for customers to contact you

Again, let’s talk about the ease of having the information customers are looking for right at their finger tips. With one click (err, tap since the majority of the market share is using mobile) customers can reach out to you directly.

4. Powerful analytics providing insight into your target market

Originally this post only listed the three previous points, but because I’m a huge advocate for managing by numbers, and because the analytics Google provides through a My Business listing offers clear insight about the behavior of your target market (see screenshots below), I had to add this fourth point. Here are a few things you can glean about the activity and behavior of your target market:

PERFORMANCE

I can’t say it enough. Manage by numbers. Leverage analytics to find out what’s working and tweak what isn’t working. This allows you to invest time only in value-added activities.

KEYWORD INSIGHT

This is so, so important. Knowing which words customers are typing into the search engine to find your business is like gold. To leverage your digital presence, you should spend time learning and understanding what keywords customers are typing into search engines to describe the solution you provide and then sprinkle those everywhere – your website content, blog posts, social media content, emails, your My Business listing – everywhere!

Implementing keywords is one of those marketing cornerstones that add up to make a huge difference in your online presence over time. Leveraging keywords should be a process you invest time into clearly identifying and integrating into all content you create.

And boom, your My Business listing provides insight into exactly that. For the sake of protecting my client’s identity, I’m only including the first two keywords listed in this insight section in the screenshot below, but this Google My Business insight provides 161 keywords that my client’s customers are using to find their business!

UNDERSTANDING HOW CUSTOMERS ARE FINDING YOUR BUSINESS

WHERE CUSTOMERS ARE VIEWING YOUR BUSINESS

KNOWING WHAT ACTIONS CUSTOMERS ARE TAKING FROM YOUR LISTING

WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE COMING FROM

PHOTO VIEWS

INFORMATION A GOOGLE BUSINESS LISTING PROVIDES TO SEARCHERS

Busy Corner Restaurant in Goodfield, Illinois is NOT a client of mine, but I’m familiar with their web presence and they’ve got it going on. Here’s a screenshot of their Google My Business listing front and center on the SERP.

LIST OF INFORMATION YOUR MY BUSINESS LISTING CAN PROVIDE TO SEARCHERS

Business name

Business description

Clickable website link

Customer reviews and ability to respond

Photos – both photos that you add and photos customers add about your business

Address (for a brick and mortar business, please see the ‘Word of Caution’ section if you work from home

Menu

Services

Phone number

Reservations

Upcoming events

Customer questions and answers

Posts (these function much like social media posts)

Social profiles

Map for finding your location

HOW OFTEN TO UPDATE YOUR MY BUSINESS LISTING

The beautiful thing about a Google Business listing is that it takes all the information customers want to know about your business and places it front and center before your target market who’s already taking to the search engine to look for a company like yours.

With that said, I recommend updating the post feature in the listing as often as you update your social media profiles, which should be 3-5x per week.

A WORD OF CAUTION – DISPLAYING YOUR ADDRESS

Be smart about it. As with any business decision you make, please wisely think through how to set up your listing according to your business model and needs.

If you run a home-based business, I don’t recommend putting your home address on display. While Google will ask for your address, you can then opt to display the general vicinity of where you’re located without displaying the exact address.

To do this, read How to Hide Your Address in Google My Business.

DOES THIS WORK FOR EVERY BUSINESS MODEL?

Clearly, some of the features of a Google Business listing work best for a brick and mortar business model, but any business model can benefit from leveraging this powerful tool. Even if you’re in the business of providing services remotely, I still recommend setting up your Google Business listing.

Here’s mine:

HOW TO SET UP YOUR MY BUSINESS LISTING

I’m all for NOT reinventing the wheel when there’s already great information out there, so follow this link explaining How to Set Up Your Google My Business Listing.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Marketing is about compounding. It’s about setting into motion small tweaks that add up to make a big difference over time. Investing time into claiming your listing, setting up the listing properly to provide easy access to customers who find you online, and managing the listing consistently and well over time is one way to stand on the front lines before your target market.

COMMENT BELOW

Do you have special insight or tips and tricks for leveraging a My Business listing? Share them in the comments below.

WHAT WE COVERED ABOUT LEVERAGING A GOOGLE MY BUSINESS LISTING

Understand how a Google Business listing can position your business for success
A resource for setting up your business’s listing
What you can learn about your target market through My Business insights
How often to update your listing with posts
What types of business models most benefit from a My Business Listing

ACTIONABLE CONTENT

My goal in every post is to make the most of your precious time and pack these articles with insanely actionable content. Have I done that for you today? I’d love to hear your feedback. Contact me or comment below.

And please do me a little favor and share this post with one other person because there’s a good chance it will help them with their business.

Your business matters. Now go do something awesome in the world.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR, FRANCIE

Hi there, I’m Francie. I started my business, Simply Integrated, in 2015 and have fallen madly in love with helping small business owners start, run, and marketing the profitable and successful business they dream about.

My knowledge and experience comes from earning an MBA and from coaching small business entrepreneurs while managing and marketing their projects. I focus solely on business strategy and marketing, and created this blog to help others run more successful businesses. If you’re interested, you can read more about me on the About page of Simply Integrated’s website.

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