Check out the Neoreef blog for the latest industry insights and guides.
Are you currently leveraging your Google My Business (GMB), or did you just set up your GMB and let it sit?
Whether you answered yes or no to either of these, we will walk through together on how you can boost your Google My Business profile, as well as the tools you can use to give you a leg up on competitors in your space.
Now let’s jump into the tools you can use when it comes to boosting your Google My Business profile.
Read our Recent Blog post on: “Rising Above the Competition: How to Take Your Google My Business Listing to the Top”
Whether you just set up your GMB, or if your profile has been set up for a while now, you will want to encourage your customers to leave and write reviews, since reviews are the quickest and best way to grow your GMB profile.
Reviews cost you nothing but they help your profile show up in organic search results. Reviews also help potential customers and users weed through and find what they are looking for.
Another thing that reviews help with is building a sense of trust in your business. Don’t think, though, that reaching out for reviews will happen over night-- you will have to do some work to get your happy customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business profile.
One thing to not forget about during this process is using social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook so customers can engage with others, and talk to fellow customers about a potential product they are interested in. Ultimately, your Google My Business profile is the launch pad for any online review marketing strategy out there.
Your Google My Business reviews and ratings will help determine your star rating in Google Maps results, which show up when users perform a local search.
Whether your company is fully online or local, you will want to make sure to have reviews either way. But if you are still wondering how you can get Google My Business Reviews, here are a few things you should do. First you will want to put your Google My Business review link in your email marketing campaigns, such as using your email signature as a place to ask your customers to leave you a review.
Next, you will want to break up your audience and look into correlations and interactions, since it is best practice to request reviews from those in your audience who are the most likely to be long-term customers.
Another thing you will want to do is make asking for reviews as part of the training for your customer-facing staff, especially when customers seem to be satisfied.
Two things you may want to consider:
It is beyond crucial you take these steps we have discussed when asking customers for reviews, since their review is a crucial part of the success of your business.
You will want to stray away from tacky tactics because Google is smart enough to know when someone is trying to cheat the system.
These tacky tactics include everything from automating content, creating doorway pages, and keyword stuffing.
You should also stray away from posting phony/biased reviews and duplicating a listing for your business, since Google will flag this as spam and cause your business to get forgotten in search results.
So stray away from any of these spammy tactics at all costs, since they will not help your business in the long run.
But you may be wondering what you should do if you encounter spammers who flood your GMB listing. Here are some ways you can combat GMB spam.
So whether you are using tacky tactics, or facing others who use them, pride yourself and your business on putting people first when it comes down to it.
When you receive a bad review on your Google My Business profile or listing, you should reach out and respond to it. A good response shows you are addressing your clients or customers needs and concerns at all times.
Also, make sure that you show understanding and that your customers leave happy. Empathetic review responses demonstrate to the general public that you care about your clients, even if they no longer want to use your services.
By replying to reviews, positive or negative, you can build trust with your customers. Some ways you can respond to negative reviews are:
So whether you get the best or worst Google review, reviews will help you show up in search rankings.
When you show up in search rankings, your business is most likely to show up in the top search results for your niche. And, if you are still wondering how to go about responding to good or bad reviews that are getting on your Google My Business, you will want to always think positive, put yourself in the customer's shoes, clear up any confusion, and look for ways you can improve your customer experience.
At the end of the day, whether you get negative or positive reviews, you can always learn and make for a better overall business, and customer experience.
You can also leverage your listing with some fairly new Google My Business tools.
One of these new GMB tools is the Google Marketing Kit, which allows you, the business ower, to create free stickers, posters, and social media posts for advertising your business’s promotions and events.
The social posts should be a big boost to your online presence. You can also make creative posters of your good reviews, featuring blurbs of text, and share them on social media platforms.
Another cool new feature you can use to leverage your Google My Business listing is inviting users to follow your profile as they would on a social media platform, such as Facebook or Instagram.
From there, your followers can gain insight into your promotions, products, and blog posts, which helps increase brand awareness among your followers and potential customers.
Using Google My Business and the tools it offers can help your business control and index important business information, interact with potential clients, help manage your online review reputation, create user-generated content, and get insights into how your customers are getting to your site. These signals sent from Google My Business can provide insight into your local SEO.
You will also want to showcase your positive reviews and add a call to action with a link to the service they are talking about, so you can drive potential customers to that page on your site.
Don’t forget to use those new GMB tools, and go through this checklist below to improve your profile:
At the end of the day, you will want to use these new tools to not only leverage your Google My Business, but also test them out and see what will work best for you.
You will want to make sure your Google My Business listing is relevant.
First you will want to keep your GMB profile information up to date, as well as doing a check up every three months to see if everything there is up to date.
Another thing you will want to do is add special opening hours to your profile if your hours differ during the holiday season. Also, don’t forget about adding eye-catching pictures to your profile, especially photos that showcase the interior, exterior, product and team photos. Doing all these things we have discussed will help you stay relevant.
Not only will you want to be relevant, but you also want to be prominent to your audience. To do this, you will want to encourage reviews by encouraging happy customers to leave a review.
Then, once you get reviews, you will want to respond to them. Responding to reviews will increase the relevance of your listing to Google and help you show up higher in the search results.
Now that you know the steps you can take to get your Google My Business profile off the ground, you can focus on making a standout profile.
Having a presence on Google My Business will help not only you, but will also help your local customers find you.
Your GMB profile will also encourage your customers to leave positive reviews, which in return will drive even more clients to your website and business. All around, this is a win-win situation for your business.
Neoreef addresses the two biggest issues with websites: lack of control and lack of support. We enable easy control of your website, while a dedicated support team provides you with training, mentorship, and specialized skills.