Google My Business & SEO

If your business is local – and by that I mean that you target local customers in your area then you may find the following quite useful when it comes to gaining more customers via Google.

If you search Google for a local search term for example "web design blackpool" then Google will not only return it's normal search results but it will also show GMB (Google My Business) results at the top of the page in form of map results.

It only shows the top 3 results on both desktop and mobile search results – so how do you get your business to not only show in these results but also show in the top 3?

Firstly (if you have not already done so) you will need to add your business to Google My Business. The service is free but does require you to "verify" your business address – this is done the old fashioned way... Google will send a postcard to your address with a code on it and you enter the code into Google My Business to verify your address.

Once verified you can then use all the features of GMB – and you really should.

Google wants you to actual use GMB and not just setup your profile and forget about it (the mistake that most people make). It has sections for your business info (name, address, phone etc) plus sections where you can add images / photo's and also add your latest news and updates etc.

I would recommend that you set aside 10 minutes every couple of weeks to log into your GMB account and update a few things – this keeps your listing fresh and current (Google just loves fresh content!).

The next step to pushing your GMB profile up the rankings is what is known as "local citations" – citations are basically listings elsewhere on the web that Google can see and index that include your NAP (Name, Address and Phone number). The more citations you can get for your business the more Google trusts that the information on your GMB profile is correct.

So where do you get these citations?

Basically from web directories – that is websites that are just directories of other websites and businesses... websites like Yell.com etc

If you are a local business then you should also get citations from local web directories too – these local web directories can be gold when it comes to boosting your GMB profile.

The best way to find the "good" ones is to just do a basic Google search for "Web Directory " and see what turns up – the ones near the top are the ones that Google trusts the most so start there and work your way down.

Make sure you enter the same details into these web directories that you have entered into GMB (your business name, address and phone number must match) and also take the time to fill out your profile on each site so that it contains as much details as possible – add images where you can and add your business social network profiles too if you have them.

You can of course outsource / pay someone to do all this work for you – we offer a manual citation service for clients but if you want to DIY then it's easy enough to do if you set aside a few hours over a few weekends. Be very careful of cheap citation services though – these are usually automated and they are prone to entering your details incorrectly or into the wrong fields in the web directories which can look bad and also mess up your GMB rankings. They also tend to use lower value directories which don't carry the same weight as the larger citation sites.

The above advice covers the very basics of getting a Google My Business listing to rank better – there are more advanced methods but they are not really suited to a general blog post like this because they can be business specific (not all businesses are the same).

So good luck with your GMB optimisations and we hope this helps you get a good boost in your rankings on Google, if you would like us to do the heavy lifting and optimise your GMB profile as well as get your citations for your business then feel free to give us a shout via our contact page.