If you're a local business, your Google Business Profile is probably even more important than your website. And this is why it seems like a good idea to pay a company $500 a month to manage and optimize your Google Business Profile. But it's not.
These companies are ripping you off. Now to be clear, I'm not talking about all local SEO agencies. I'm one of them.
A good SEO agency is worth a lot more than $500 a month. I'm talking about a specific type of agency, if you can call it that, that only manages your Google Business profile. The problem is that even though your Google Business profile is very important, there's only so much you can do on the Google Business profile itself to improve your rankings.
So I wanna talk about what actually matters for rankings on your Google Business profile and what's actually worth doing on a monthly basis. In terms of ranking, there are four things that matter a lot and then about a dozen other things that make a tiny difference. So let's talk about the four that really matter.
The first is your location. You're gonna rank a lot better in a proximity around where you verified the business, whether or not you show the address. The second is the title of the profile.
This should be your legal business name, but if you're able to get common search terms into the title, you will rank higher. When people are searching for those terms. The third is your primary category.
Additional categories also matter, but primary category really matters. And the fourth is reviews. But it's not so much the total reviews that matter, but the frequency of reviews.
Think how many reviews you've gotten in the last month. For some businesses like home remodeling, one review a month is plenty. For something like a restaurant, you should be trying to get mult
last month. For some businesses like home remodeling, one review a month is plenty. For something like a restaurant, you should be trying to get multiple reviews every day.
Now again, there are other things like services and business hours to impact ranking, but those are the four big ones. And at this point you might be saying, but TJ, my competitor has less reviews than me and is in the same primary category. Why are they outranking me?
If it can't be explained by one of those four things, it's probably not something on your Google Business profile. In most cases, your competitor is just a more well-known brand, which means more people are searching for them, interacting with their websites, talking about them online, linking to them. All those signals are also important for ranking in Google.
And there are dozens of effective strategies for improving those signals, but very little of that work is actually done on your Google Business profile. So obviously I don't have enough time to go over all facets of an effective SEO campaign. The point I'm making is just that an effective local SEO campaign involves a lot more than just your Google Business profile.
That is the place you should start. In addition to making sure those four factors are optimized, you should completely fill out your Google Business profile. And there are a few things worth doing on a monthly basis, just not $500 worth.
You should be posting new images that can impact ranking. You should be asking for reviews, of course. You should be checking for competitors who are cheating with fake listings or by shoving a bunch of search terms in their name and edit their profiles.
This is remarkably easy to do and your competitor doesn't even know that you did it. You should check Stirling Skies website to se
dit their profiles. This is remarkably easy to do and your competitor doesn't even know that you did it. You should check Stirling Skies website to see if Google introduced any new categories this month that you might want to add to your listing.
And if you have any offers, promotions or messages you want to share with your audience, you should make a Google post about it the same way you might share it in your email newsletter. Now, despite what these local SEO companies will tell you, charging $500 a month posts do not impact ranking. This is just a bulletin board for you to share messages with people who are already searching for your company by name.
