In this lecture, we're going to walk through the basics of Google My Business, how it works and its importance in local search. We'll then wrap it up with a short quiz to test your knowledge!

When it comes to local SEO, a Google My Business listing is one of your greatest assets you have online as a brick and mortar business. Not only do Google My Business listings show up for local searches, they are at the very top of the organic results, giving you plenty of free opportunity to claim your space!

While often forgotten about due to the sheer market share that Google owns, Bing Places and Yahoo Local offer a similar experience and are often worth setting up a business listing with and optimizing as well. We won't dig into these two in this lecture, however, it'll likely be part of a more in-depth topic and review in one of our future courses.

To start things off, let's review what makes Google My Business listings show up at the top for your most coveted search terms.

Proximity

The first thing is proximity, which was especially heightened with the Possum update. Proximity, with the changes from the Possum algo update as we learned a little about in the algorithm updates lecture, is something that you don't really have control over. As much as you may want to rank for a given search term in a certain city, it's just not always possible. Especially if your business is nowhere near where the search is being conducted. It's a tough reality to face, but what you can do as a business owner or marketer, is put your best foot forward with what you can control.

Image Source: moz.com

So let's take a quick look at the four important areas of focus that you can control for your Google My Business listing. They are:

1. Categories
2. Keywords in title/description
3. Photos & Videos
4. Reviews

So what does each of the above mean and how do you optimize them? We'll take a second to review each below.

*For further reading, I also recommend checking out Google's guidelines on how to represent your business here.*

Areas to Focus On and Optimize

Categories

You are allowed to select up to five categories that your business falls under. For example, if you are an Italian restaurant, one of the categories you would choose is "Italian restaurant."

Per Google guidelines, you should make your categories as specific as possible, as well as choose as few as possible.

Keywords in title/description

This doesn't mean spam your listing with keywords, rather, make sure to include a couple of important and relevant ones in your business's description.

Photos & videos

Add as many photos and videos that you can to your listing. The more, the better. Make sure they're high quality and that they represent your business appropriately. After all, these show up on Google!

Reviews

Reviews not only help with converting an online browser into a paying customer, but positive reviews may help your business listing perform better overall.There are many ways you can go about obtaining reviews from your customers, from sending them an email post-purchase to picking up the phone and more.

Another way to do it is with this convenient review handout generator provided by Whitespark.

Whichever way you choose to get reviews (I recommend a combination of the approaches above), please remember two things:

1. Make sure to make it as easy as possible for your customer to leave a review
2. Do your best to obtain a valuable and descriptive review by giving proper instructions on how your customer can leave one

So now that we kind of covered what you can control when it comes to your Google My Business listing, let's move on to the great customer data and marketing insights you can get from having a GMB listing, and using that to your advantage to help your listing stand out and help you in other areas of your marketing.

Business Insights to Help Your Listing Stand Out

One of the biggest nuggets of customer information you get with your listing lies within the insights section of your GMB listing. There, you can see where your visitors are coming from, whether they visited your website, requested driving directions, the number of photos viewed, and phone calls.

Talk about great customer data with little to no effort!

As you can see in the image below, you can filter driving direction requests by date and see the top cities where people are requesting that information. You don't have to guess where interest is, it's served up on a platter for you right here - so use it to your advanage!

Similarly, you can see the most common actions customers are taking on your listing in addition to requests for directions, including website visits and calls.

Are people looking at your photos? How do you compare to other businesses like yours? All that information is in here for the taking.

Image Sources: google.com/business

As you can see from the image snapshots above, there is a lot of great customer data you can take advantage of from your Google My Business listing and use for your local marketing campaigns in addition to optimizing your listing(s).

If you ever need help with anything Google My Business, I highly recommend checking out the Google My Business Community Forum. You can follow discussions and get on specific topics you may need help with like enhancing your presence or getting help with managing businesses with 10+ locations.

Now, let's wrap this up with a quick quiz!