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Are You Making These 3 Mistakes Related To Your Google My Business Profile?

As part of our organization’s organic SEO (search engine optimization) services, we ask to have access to a client’s Google My Business Profile, or at least have a chance to review the behind-the-scenes information/set-up with our SEO clients via a Zoom call where they access and share their Google My Business Profile dashboard.

Whether you want to think of it as a mistake or a missed opportunity, here’s three Google My Business capabilities you may be missing out on to get your organization ranking better locally on Google (remember, Google is more likely to serve up your Google My Business Profile vs. your website) for “near me” or “city/town” terms) :

  1. Providing Google with 20 services areas. Make sure you capitalize on these. And, remember, the further out your business is physically from the geography in which a searcher is searching on relevant terms, the less likely Google is to serve up your Profile, so keep any service areas you add to your Profile within a two-hour drive of your physical office, and ideally far less than two-hours.
  2. Identifying up to 10 business categories. You need to pick a primary category — a category of business that best describes your products and services, but you can pick 9 additional “secondary” categories. Right now, there are over 4,000 business categories in Google My Business from which you can select. And, Google keeps adding to the list, so even if you don’t see a category that fits a particular product or service you offer now, you should revisit your Profile information every 3 months or so to see if there are any new categories you can select that are appropriate to your business.
  3. Providing specific product or service lists underneath your various business categories that employ keywords (search terms) on which your target audience(s) may be searching. See example below where we listed our SEM (paid SEO/Google and Bing Ads) and organic SEO services under our primary business category.
This image shows information you can see within your Google My Business Profile dashboard. It shows an example of service listings that have been added under a primary business category in Google My Business. The primary business category says "Marketing agency" and underneath it there are service listings for "Local and Global (Organic) SEO and "SEM/Paid Search."

We Can Help You Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

Reach out today to learn more about our local SEO services! And, learn about another Google My Business best practice!