Being found is among the biggest challenges for every business. A large number of players in the market and cut-throat competition makes this first step towards lead generation even more difficult.
In the present era of digitization, the meaning of being found is completely changed and redefined as your presence and domination over the Internet. Data appending services provide you authentic and accurate data about your prospects and communications are established through tools like email marketing.
Since its inception in 2014, Google My Business is leading the way to achieve a competitive edge and being found by potential clients. It is a powerful platform to register your presence before consumers, explain your products and services, and guide them to your CRM executives for conversion. You must utilize this free platform to its full potential to gain a remarkable boost in your business.
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Understanding Google My Business
While managing your customers’ contact details and reaching out to them is an effective way of generating leads, allowing them to find you and contact you is even better. As your potential customers connect with you by themselves, it will automatically append your customer data with reduced efforts by your email appending services. You would be able to create a large, rich, and strong customer-base faster.
Enhancing your Google presence can significantly impact your business. Organizations make several efforts to boost their presence on Google platforms. To simplify this job, Google introduced the Google My Business dashboard. This dashboard includes all the tools and methods you need to promote your website or business profile in a single place. This consolidated platform can reduce your digital marketing efforts and ensure incredible results.
Importance of Google My Business for SEO
SEO is quintessential for every online business to flourish. Businesses spend a significant amount on services like data collection, email data validation, etc. Google My Business provides you a much simpler way to achieve quality SEO results and boost your business.
A well-formed Google My Business profile can help you proliferate your SEO ranking to a great extent. It provides an opportunity to optimize your presence on different Google platforms such as Google maps, local 3-pack, and knowledge panel. While maintaining a GMB profile, you can still utilize older features such as google business pages, Google listing, etc. This assists your customer base in data verification and helps in gaining their confidence.
Effective methods to optimize Google My Business
Creating a Google My Business profile is simple and straightforward. All you need to do is to sign up on the Google My Business website and follow the screens to complete your profile. Once you are done with the creation process, it’s time to optimize your profile. It is essential to draw the maximum benefits of the platform to elevate your business. Here are some effective and easy methods you can use to optimize your GMB profile.
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Lay a rock-solid foundation
It is the most basic step in creating and optimizing your profile for effective digital marketing. You need to make sure that information including business name and contact details are all filled in and up to date. Information such as your contact number, website, and operation hours is fundamental in drawing your customers and commencing effective communication.
Ensure that your business name is the same as used for the signage and is consistent on different web platforms for avoiding spamming by Google. Reflect accurate working hours and holidays to avoid inconvenience to your customers. While your email marketing team will try to find and contact potential customers, this information will bring them to you effortlessly.
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Create an impressive business description
As you create your GMB profile, Google will generate your business description automatically. To ensure consistency across all platforms, this step does not allow you to intervene. However, you can enhance your description using the ‘From the business’ section on your dashboard.
Remember, this description appears just before your business name, it must be impressive and compelling to your customers. You can utilize your data mining services through various data companies like Bizprospex to understand the market trends and customers’ inclinations and draft an impressive 750 characters description accordingly. Make sure that you provide the most important information that is not mentioned elsewhere in the profile in the first 250 characters.
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Pick an appropriate business category
Customers often search for products and services rather than business names. For that reason, selecting an appropriate business category can significantly impact the results. Try to be as specific as possible while selecting the category. For instance, for a hair salon, avoid picking a generic category such as salon that can include other similar businesses. However, if your business falls in multiple categories, you can pick secondary categories as well without overdoing it. You can also use category-specific features from Google to further optimize your profile.
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Enhance business profile with suitable business attributes
The next optimization step is to add attributes to your GMB profile categories. This is where you bring in the services and products you offer. It is these attributes that your potential customers use in their searches. For simplicity, you can consider these as the keywords you need to base your search optimization. Several data appending services will provide you insight into the current as well as legacy data to know and predict market trends. You can base your attribute selection on this information and aim at answering customers’ queries before they ask.
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Quality images are important
A picture can communicate what even thousands of words may fail to convey. According to Google customers are more likely to incline towards your services and products if images are included. GMB profiles allow you to add a logo as well as a cover image that describes your business the best. You can also create a photo album with multiple pictures depicting not only your services and products but also your culture. Keep this album updated to mark a good first impression on your prospects.
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Improve your ranking with quality reviews
Word of mouth has always been an excellent tool in escalating b2b lead generation. In the age of the Internet, mouth publicity comes through reviews and ratings. Reviews deliver double advantages as they attract customers and enhance your Google ranking as well. All you need to do is simply ask your customers to write a review, which over 60% of customers do happily. You can start with your loyal customers and also respond to both good and bad reviews to show your sincerity. By apologizing and rectifying issues of unhappy customers, you can convert bad reviews to good and also gain their confidence and loyalty.
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Grab attention with interesting and relevant posts
Google My Business profile brings everything on one dashboard. It eliminates the need to post on several profiles by including this feature in your business profile. You can educate your customers easily about new products and services, the latest discount offers, and upcoming events.
Again resort to your data mining services to acquire insight into the current and future trends. This will help you generate content that is most relevant to present-day customers. It is important to stay active and post regularly on your profile. This is an effective way to increase your customers’ interaction on your profile/website and improve your Google ranking.
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Answer queries and draws benefit from such engagements
The question and answer feature of Google My Business profile is a powerful tool to commence and maintain engagement with your prospects. It is an opportunity to personally interact with them and provide additional information related to your business that interests individual prospects the most.
You can also include frequently asked questions and their correct answers to provide information to the customers without asking. This encourages them to further involve in Q and A and provide you an opportunity to increase conversions. Using appropriate keywords in these questions and answers you can also improve your Google ranking.
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Allow messaging
While conventional outbound email marketing is an effective marketing tool, it needs significant efforts from email appending services. You also need email data validation to minimize the wastage of efforts and money in this direction.
GMB profile provides you a more efficient messaging method as it allows visitors to your profile to initiate communication. They can send you text messages which you can respond to in real-time to showcase exceptional customer services. With little data verification, you can authenticate your customers and ensure effective results. You can use the dashboard from your mobile device for quick responses.
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Showcase your products and services in your profile
Your business profile is not complete until your products and services are showcased here effectively. You can utilize large volumes of data and data scrubbing services to select the most relevant products and services for displaying on your profile. This way you can clearly describe to your customers what your business offers. This also adds plenty of data to your profile, which helps in boosting your Google ranking.
Take away
Having a Google My Business profile is imperative to create an impressive online face for your business. A regular profile will not do much whereas a properly optimized one can make a huge difference in business growth and local SEO. It is an excellent way to enhance interactions, local rankings, and b2b lead generation. In many cases, an optimized GMB profile can mean the difference between success and failure of the business.
Author Bio: Murtaza is the Founder and CEO of Bizprospex: A Data mining, CRM Cleaning Company. He runs a moderately successful web-based business helping B2B companies clean their CRM/Data/Lists. He was also featured on Entrepreneur.com, Ceo blognation, Forbes, True viral news, Tech panda, the policy times for work.
I am a passionate blogger and developer sharing business tips. I Help others solve programming problems on various online forums.
You must follow these marketing tactics to promote your business online.
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