Google Business Profile formerly known as Google My Business amounts to over 1000 searches on average for a Local Business. Local businesses can benefit immensely from this feature provided by Google.
Here a customer/user can directly visit your Google Business Profile and access your business’ phone number, directions, address, website, menu, photos, reviews, etc with one click. You can hire an SEO Company to do all the hard work.
Below are the 5 factors you need to consider to rank your GBP:
1. Citations
Citations play an important role in the rankings for Local Business Profiles. It works like this, the more the citations a Google listing has the better are the chances to rank at the top.
Citations can be easily built with numerous citation sites and reverse engineering your competitors by typing in the business address.
2. Reviews
It’s often seen in Local Pack that listings with positive reviews and better engagement tend to rank higher.
Negative reviews must be addressed very assertively to be made sure that the customers are happy with your service. To avoid negative reviews you can add Q&A to your listing.
3. NAP Consistency
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number. There must be consistent NAP across all your citations that you have created, even a comma matters in this regard.
You can use various tools to find NAP Consistency and rectify errors made previously.
4. Photos
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but we have seen listings with more photos engage a lot better and hence rank better than those who have less.
The photos must be of HD quality and correct size, ideally, 1024 x 576 pixels is the standard. Photos can be your physical business images, graphics, services, etc. that represent your business.
5. Categories
There are two types of categories, Primary Category, and Multiple Secondary Categories. Your Primary Category can be the primary service/product you are selling. You can up to 9 Secondary Categories in GBP.
The best practice is to reverse engineer your competitor and find out all the secondary categories it has optimized for.
You can simply view the page source of your competitor’s GBP and find all the secondary categories.
