local SEO / risk-avoid

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...

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...

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.