Your company profile is the online presence of your company on Google Search and Google Maps. With this tool you can easily keep your customers up to date on a regular basis, such as opening hours, articles or pictures. The individual reviews of your existing customers make it easier for other potential customers to form an opinion about your company.
In five simple steps you can check if you are using your Google business profile optimally:
Tip 1 Check entry
For the company profile on Google, you should take time once and check all possible options/entries. Are already existing entries correct and where is perhaps still a piece of information missing? In addition to obvious entries such as the telephone number, the correct name of the company or the website address, entries such as the catchment area are also important. A well-chosen catchment area is important for the desired reach. When browsing the possible entries, you will also be offered the short name of the profile as an option. Here I recommend to assign a short but unique name. This short name will then be used when sharing the link to the profile. This is relatively rarely needed, but I often see this option not being used. And a name is much better than a meaningless numeric code in the URL. For example, the URL of Studio SeeYa is: https://g.page/studioseeya
Tip 2 Check your entries regularly
Schedule yourself once a month to review your listing to make sure it is up to date. Your customers can also make suggestions for changes. You should check these and accept or reject them if necessary.
If there are changes in your opening hours, if you are closed on a holiday or if you are on vacation, you should always keep all these details up to date. For extraordinary closures or holidays there is an extra field in your MyBusiness entry. Many customers rely on the timeliness of this information and it would be annoying if he is unnecessarily in front of closed doors or? If a customer starts the navigation to your company with Google Maps, he will even be informed if your company should be closed at the time of arrival.
Tip 3 Keep images up to date
A picture is worth a thousand words! Are your pictures in your profile of, for example, your premises up to date? Is the profile picture you uploaded still up to date? It's important that if your customers only see you in the picture, they will recognize you on the spot. Also important to know: Google users also have the option to upload images of your business themselves. These pictures do not always have the best image quality or show, for example, your company on a rainy evening from the outside. Therefore, it is even more important that you upload beautiful and high-quality images yourself, as these are usually displayed first.
Tip 4 Google Rating
As you probably already know, you can get reviews for your business from Google users. These are very important as they have a great impact on potential new customers and even your regular customers might read them. You already get many reviews? Then answer them, thank them or take a friendly stand on a negative review.
You want to have more reviews? Then make your customers explicitly aware of it. Many customers only rate when they are asked about it. For example, you could also put out a flyer with the link generated accordingly. Google reviews also improve local SEO. Google highlights the keywords in their ratings in bold. This gives the customer a quick overview and makes it easier for them to make their decision to visit your business.
Tip 5 Post regularly
Why should you go to the trouble of posting regular amounts to your listing?
On the one hand, your customers can follow your listing on Google and thus always receive the latest information or offers. Secondly, posts increase the possibility for your customers to interact with your profile.
In addition, regular posts and regular updates of information send positive ranking signals to Google. Also, your posts appear with the appropriate keywords in your customers' searches.
Another important factor is that your posts will also show up on Google Maps.
Interesting posts would be for example, events, general news, small posts about professional updates etc.
