In this week’s blog we will discuss what is the best content to add to your Google My Business account to increase your ranking.

Welcome back to another installment of our Google My Business series! This blog is a follow-up blog from our last blog of the series, What is a Google Short Name & How to Create One for Google My Business.

Google My Business is a free easy to use tool that allows businesses and organizations to manage their accounts across the platform! Not only that but within the past year, 64% of consumers have used Google My Business to find contact details for local businesses. 

This means that ranking well within Google is incredibly important towards reaching potential clients and thus growing your business overall. 

Keep reading to learn more about how you can increase your ranking through 5 specific content tactics that Google loves!

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again that you should try your best to fill out the entirety of your Google My Business account. This helps Google both trust your page as well as provide legitimacy to your potential customers. This built in trust with Google will help increase your rank later on!

Moreover, there’s specific content that Google crawls (or reads) through better than others. This content will help boost the rank of your Google My Business page within the map-pack (what is the Google map pack)as it not only provides legitimacy and trust, but is also crucial to your customers’ experience on your page.

Top 5 Strategies (let’s review):

1. Customer Reviews: 

• Reviews are seen as contextual content for your business listing and therefore showcase only activity and customer experience. With multiple 5 star reviews you can easily out-rank your competition. 
• These give credence to your business as it not only tells Google you’re a credible and operating company, but it also allows potential customers to read through others personal experiences with your brand.
• This also offers a perfect way for you to interact with your customers by responding to reviews and even offering potential deals or offers for returning customers who have left reviews! 
• This ability to create an interactive and credible environment with tons of customer feedback appeals to Googles’ algorithms. 

2. Pictures, Images & Video:

• Image and video based content is incredibly important towards catching the eye of any potential customer, but what you may not know is that Google loves them too!
• Consider uploading pictures of your business, services or products, even your staff. The more quality and relevant pictures you have the higher you will appear while ranking.
• Pictures are easy for Google to read which can massively boost your ranking within the local Map pack and trust with the consumer as well. 
• As you add more content you’ll be able to see how much your content is getting viewed (even per post) in the Google My Business page and app.

3. Profile Logo & Cover Photo:

• An important aspect of your business should be its ability to be recognizable. 
• This can be found within your identity tab of your Google My Business account. Remember to upload and optimize as its the first thing that people will see!
• Google, as well as potential clients, look for familiarity as they scan their suggested page. By creating a logo unique to your business as well as a cover you can draw clients in while increasing your ranking.

4. Creative Google posts:

• Quick read on “What are Google Posts?” by SearchEngineLand
• An aspect that’s often overlooked on Google My Business accounts is the ability to create posts within the page. Especially as Google leans heavily into their short name feature which puts emphasis on the more social aspects of the site.
• This is super important towards building a loyal clientele as it allows you to interact with your clients on a more personal level. You might post important information about new services or products as well as upcoming sales or offers. Or even (like us!) post blogs relevant to your industry.
• However, outside of simply connecting with your audience it is also important towards increasing your Google credibility with consistent posts. 
• This is because Google heavily values ‘freshness’ which means how often a website is updated. So considering implementing a consistent content plan into your business model. 

5. Virtual tours:

• Last but not least, virtual tours can help benefit any business within Google’s ranking algorithm. 
• Since Google is partnered with Matterport, it allows clients to visit your store online before even coming in. This is extremely rich content that Google loves.
• If you’re looking to create a tour for your own business you can contact our side branch at Momentum360.

The google algorithm is not as complicated or scary as people make it out to be. With these 5 content steps you can lay out a successful plan that will benefit your Google map pack ranking. These features are important because Google can crawl through them easily!

Not only that but your clients will love your accessibility on the platform as well!

What step are you most excited to try out? Which are you most daunting by and how can we help you through it. Comment in the section down below! 

Written by Samantha Hughes.