As a business owner, you always try to expand your business online and offline. In today’s digital world, a strong online presence is no more a luxury, but a necessity for every business; small or large. In this blog, I am going to share with some technics for business owners that want to create a robust online presence for their business and subsequently increase their company’s sales potential.
Google is the most extensively used search engine ever, as of October 2017, it was found that 54 percent of U.S. online users accessed Google several times a day for researching, buying, and learning more. Whether people test Google with transactional queries or informational, a brand needs to resonate its presence in Google’s database. If your offline marketing is working fine, it may be the correct time to check out Google My Business for enhanced presence on Google whenever someone searches for your brand name.
Here we are talking about Google My Business (GMB).
Google my business (GMB) is a free tool from Google that helps business owners to manage and improve their business’ presence on Google search engine. GMB offers the best bang for the buck if you run a local business or have a chain of stores in one or multiple cities.
GMB is a business dashboard developed and evolved by Google for over past 10 years. After lots of tweaks, Google designed the analytics features to help businesses make their online presence stronger and more robust. GMB works with name, address, phone number and apart form this, GMB page lets you promote your business information live with name, address, phone number, business hours, and specifications. Google expands GMB for excellent user experience, and it also helps to make business owners build a robust online presence.
GMB is a free platform for every business, but of course it has some guidelines if you want to optimize your GMB page. While optimizing your GMB profile, it is important to understand whether you follow all of Google my business guidelines.
Interact with your customers and respond their reviews. It illustrates that your business values its customers. Positive reviews make a substantial impact for those who read others feedback before buying your product and services.
After years of expanding in GMB, Google has made a tremendous improvement with analytical data called Insights. Google helps business to understand how customers interact with your GMB listing such as :
GMB listing allows you to display a ton of details about your business. Here are two important points regarding Category. When you claim business and create a GMB listing, you provide Google the primary category of your business along with your business name and information. However, most of the times, the businesses feel that there is much more to them than just one category. Fret not, once you provide your single listing, add more service or product categories to your business once your Google listing is verified.
We all know businesses are dynamic and things change over a period. Whenever things change, update your business listing with the needed changes. These can be simple or complex changes.
Once you complete your profile and optimize properly, you need to find and eliminate duplicate business listings as these not only mislead customers also affect your local ranking. You can request a call within the GMB support portal for assistance, and they will remove duplicate business once you show proof of your real business.
In a nutshell, listing your business with Google My Business is one of the first steps that you can take towards a robust online presence. Google is world’s most powerful search engine and way beyond that. It helps to be found, and Google is where the search in the world begins.
Go list your business or claim it on Google now. If you need assistance, contact Cibirix.
Anoop Namdev serves as one of the lead SEO Analysts for Cibirix. He is passionate about his pursuit of SEO, local SEO, eBay advertising, and Craigslist marketing excellence for business clients. Digital media is one of Anoop’s native tongues, and he specializes in helping local businesses to expand their business online through strategic local SEO efforts. When he’s not busy strategizing, Anoop can be found in attendance at some of his favorite public events. He also likes to paint in his free time.