Learn how to edit the most impactful parts of your free Google Business Profile listing in 20 minutes.
Resources
Google Business Listing Checklist
Google Business Listing Free Email Course
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Raw Transcript
Hello, hello, today this episode is about probably the most underutilized tactic in SEO, which is the free Google business profile listing that we have access to. And as this title suggests, you can optimize it in just 20 minutes. However, there is a catch to that.
It will depend on what you have at the ready.
You are listening to the small business sweet spot. I’m Barb Davids, and this is a place to get direct, actionable advice around SEO and content marketing so that you can make better informed marketing decisions.
Now let’s get into optimizing your Google business profile listing.
So at the beginning I talked about it will depend on what you have at the ready. If you haven’t already claimed your listing, you will want to do that first. That takes a couple days and involves getting a code to verify that you are the owner of the Google business listing.
Maybe you’re wondering why would you optimize your Google business listing if you don’t have a physical presence somewhere. And I will tell you that you don’t have to have a physical presence. You can hide your address. And I have seen people get significant amount of traffic from their listing without having that physical address,
So let’s get into optimizing your listing.
First is the name of your listing. And you might be thinking, um, okay, it’s my name, but there are times when people want to add keywords to the name and that is something you should not do. So I want to make it very clear. Just put the business name alone. If you put in keywords or something other than what your name is, it is possible that your listing would be suspended and it wouldn’t show it all from Google.
The next part to optimize is the category that you’re in. Choose the one that is the most close to your industry, of course, and there is subcategories. However, doing more than two to three subcategories really isn’t necessary.
The next part is to add a description to your Google listing.
Here are some pointers. Keep it less than 750 characters.
I’m going to tell you to add your target keyword for your overall business into this area, but it’s not for ranking purposes as much as it is for resonance and frankly it’s probably going to be in there anyway as you’re describing what your business is.
Write in sentence format rather than all caps or bullets. Any formatting doesn’t even work in there as in addition to not putting URLs, those don’t translate well and they don’t click off the screen.
Save any information like news or available for travel or contact me for other places like the posting, which we’ll talk about or other parts of your Google listing. Those don’t. Resonate well in the description. It’s literally just for the description of your business, not for sales or promotion.
Okay. The next thing that we want to ensure doing with our Google business listing is to add a tracking URL. By default, any traffic that comes from your Google listing goes into Google lay analytics into the just general organic section. So when you’re setting up your Google business listing, there’s a spot for your website, and that can be either your homepage, or if you would prefer, it could be a product page or a service page.
However, at the end of it, you will want to put a tracking URL. Now I’m going to go ahead and say it out loud for the audio version of this podcast, and then for the video podcast, it will have it on screen. And of course, any of any time you want to go to the show notes, it will be there for an easy copy paste.
So here is the. End of, or the tracking URL that you can use.
We’re gonna put a question mark. UTM underscore source equals Google listing. And I tend to use a capital G and do I use a yep. Capital L on that ampersand UTM underscore medium equals. Organic, ampersand, UTM, underscore, campaign, equals, homepage.
Basically what that’s doing is anything that comes in from the Google listing will then still go into the organic section of your analytics, but it will be explicitly attributed to the Google listing.
Another optimization technique is to post once a week. It can be super simple. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. It’s just more to show that the business is growing. Actually in business and that there’s things happening and showing that there’s something going on. So post once a week, it could be a photo of you at the coffee shop, or it could be a screenshot of your desktop.
In any case, again, when, um, if you listened to the previous episode, we talked about what kind of images to use on your website here again, it is encouraged to use personal photos of some sort, but not stock photos.
And frankly, you don’t even have to use photos at all for the post.
And the last part that,, we’ll talk about for optimizing is the reviews for your website. This is something that Google looks at when it comes to SEO and what kind of reviews are happening, how many are happening. Of course, they don’t tell us any of the details of how they look at it, but having reviews on your website does help your SEO presence.
One catch to this is if you don’t have any yet, or if you’re thinking about getting more, ensure that you’re doing it in a consistent manner. Doing a whole bunch at one time could look a little spammy, so you don’t want to, like, throw a whole bunch on there at one time in one day, or even one week.
All right, that was it. That’s a 20 minute optimization checklist for your Google business listing. And if you are interested in learning more about how to optimize your Google listing, I have a free email course and a checklist that is available. And I will put those in the show notes for your convenience and stay tuned for the next episodes to help your business thrive online. We’ll see you in the next sweet spot. Cheers.
