29 Jan Why is it important to have an up to date and optimized Google My Business and Google Maps listing for your business?
When it comes to today’s local businesses, probably THE most important online things they need after a well-designed and laid out website are complete and accurate Google My Business and Google Maps listings. In this post, I would like to explain why.
Up to a few years ago, SEO was a mysterious and expensive proposition. Especially for small local businesses who had to compete for high value keywords with deep pocketed, large national brands. Add to that the constant changing nature of SEO and the algorithm’s used by Google to rank pages.
Because of this it was practically impossible to have an ongoing SEO strategy unless you were willing to invest a large amount of time and money to do so.
However, especially for local businesses, all of that has changed dramatically.
Several years ago, Google got serious about local business, mainly because so many of their search inquiries were local in nature. If someone is looking for a “dentist in Tampa”, they didn’t want to wade through a bunch of results not related to, well A Dentist IN Tampa.
So, Google devised a way to serve results much more relevant to the actual intent of the searcher. When it came to localized searches, this involved proximity to the actual result (because they know where you are based on your computers IP address), as well as matching the actual service or product the searcher is looking for.
Google relies on businesses to provide them with the information needed to serve these results, and they do so through their Google My Business and Google Maps platform. If they don’t have that info, they can’t use it to populate results from inquiries.
Along with serving very relevant results to local searches, Google also put these listings AT THE TOP OF THEIR SEARCH RESULTS and pushed down the organic results that people used to try to compete for (and pay big bucks to get). Try it yourself, go to Google and type in “Dentist, your city, state (putting the name of your city and state after Dentist). You’ll see how Google serves results near you at the top of the page (after the paid ads).
Most businesses don’t know how to make their listings as effective as possible or are too busy running the business to do so. And leaving out or not completing even one aspect of the listing will directly affect the results.
That’s why it is better to leave it to an expert to do it for you. One who understands the nature of each listing and how to best use the things Google provides a business to work in their advantage.
At GM Simmons Company, we are experts in optimizing listings to make them produce ongoing results. We’ve worked with client’s listings for years helping them make theirs as complete and effective as possible. And what’s best is there is only an upfront investment to do so, unlike traditional SEO which was ongoing and very expensive. With local listings optimization the costs are one time but the return on investment continues for years to come.
We have always said that businesses need to optimize their business, NOT just their website. With this service that’s exactly what they do.
