How Google Maps are important for SEO

Google Maps is an important tool for local businesses to improve their search engine optimization (SEO). It can help businesses to rank higher in local search results, which can lead to more traffic and sales.

Here are some of the benefits of using Google Maps for SEO:

  • Improved local search rankings: Google Maps is a major factor in local search rankings. When a user searches for a local business, Google Maps is often one of the top results. By having a complete and accurate Google My Business listing, businesses can improve their chances of ranking higher in local search results.
  • More sales: Increased traffic can lead to more sales. When potential customers are able to find a business easily, they are more likely to visit the business and make a purchase.
  • Google Maps is a major source of traffic for local businesses. According to Google, over 60% of local searches on Google end in a visit to a store or business. This means that if you want your business to be found by potential customers, you need to make sure that your Google Maps listing is up-to-date and accurate.
  • Google Maps SEO can help you rank higher in local search results. When Google ranks local businesses, it takes into account a variety of factors, including the quality of your Google Maps listing, the number of positive reviews you have, and the proximity of your business to the searcher. By optimizing your Google Maps listing, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in local search results and attracting more customers.
  • Google Maps SEO can help you drive more traffic to your website. When people find your business on Google Maps, they can click on the link to your website to learn more about your business or to make a purchase. By driving more traffic to your website, you can increase your sales and grow your business.

Here are some key points to keep in mind when using Google Maps for SEO:

  • Complete and accurate listings: Google My Business listings should be complete and accurate. This includes the business’s name, address, phone number, website, and hours of operation.
  • Reviews and ratings: Positive reviews and ratings can help businesses to improve their local search rankings. Businesses should encourage their customers to leave reviews on Google Maps.
  • Claim and verify your listing: Businesses should claim and verify their Google My Business listing. This will ensure that the business has control over its listing and that it is accurate.
  • Stay up-to-date: Businesses should regularly update their Google My Business listing to ensure that it is up-to-date. This includes changes to the business’s name, address, phone number, website, and hours of operation.
  • Optimize your Google My Business listing for local keywords. This will help your listing appear higher in local search results for relevant keywords.
  • Use Google My Business posts to share news and updates about your business. Google My Business posts can help you stay top-of-mind with potential customers and drive more traffic to your website

Google Business Posts

Google My Business posts are a great way to stay top-of-mind with potential customers and drive more traffic to your website. Here are some tips for using Google My Business posts effectively:

  • Share news and updates about your business: This could include new products or services, upcoming events, or changes to your hours of operation.
  • Promote special offers and discounts: This is a great way to attract new customers and encourage existing customers to come back for more.
  • Run contests and giveaways: This is a fun way to engage with your audience and generate excitement about your business.
  • Ask questions and get feedback: This is a great way to learn more about your customers and what they want from your business.
  • Use images and videos: Posts with images and videos are more likely to be seen and shared.
  • Post regularly: The more you post, the more likely your posts are to be seen by potential customers.

Optimize Your Business

it is important to optimize your Google My Business listing for local keywords. This will help your listing appear higher in local search results for relevant keywords. Here are some tips for optimizing your Google My Business listing for local keywords:

  • Use relevant keywords in your business name: The name of your business is one of the most important factors in local search rankings. Make sure to use relevant keywords in your business name so that your listing is more likely to appear in local search results for those keywords.
  • Use relevant keywords in your business description: The business description is another important factor in local search rankings. Make sure to use relevant keywords in your business description so that your listing is more likely to appear in local search results for those keywords.
  • Add photos and videos: Photos and videos can help to improve your local search rankings. Make sure to add photos and videos of your business that are relevant to your keywords.
  • Get reviews and ratings: Positive reviews and ratings can help to improve your local search rankings. Make sure to encourage your customers to leave reviews and ratings on Google My Business.
  • Claim and verify your listing: You can claim and verify your Google My Business listing by going to https://www.google.com/business/. Claiming and verifying your listing will help to improve your local search rankings.
  • Keep your listing up-to-date: Make sure to keep your Google My Business listing up-to-date with the latest information about your business. This includes your business name, address, phone number, website, and hours of operation.

By following these tips, you can use Google My Business posts to reach more customers and grow your business.

Diagnosing a traffic drop? Just breathe! –

A traffic drop or decline is something all of us have come across on multiple occasions. A four-step guide to help you tackle this problem
The post Diagnosing a traffic drop? Just breathe! appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Source: Read More
SEO, evergreen content, Google Analytics, influencer commentary, organic search, organic traffic, SERPs

Google’s next anticipated update measures and benchmarks website performance, putting user experience at its heart. But understanding Core Web Vitals is key and optimizing for these new rankings isn’t something you can do overnight!

The Way To Diagnose A Website Site Visitors Drop

If you have seen shifts in traffic throughout the website because of a few keyword phrases, then there can be multiple causes. There may be any number of the reason why your Google site visitors dropped suddenly and significantly.

Four Ways To Audit Your Website’s Rating

  1. Google Search Engine Updates

To keep away from being crippled by Google’s updates, use an efficient cross-channel marketing and visitors strategy that features social media and other marketing channels. If your website continues to rank on other search engines like google like Yahoo or Bing, this is an almost positive sign that you’re affected by a Google penalty. The key to figuring out if your web site was impacted by a recent Google update is to verify multiple data factors.

  1. On Page Optimization

The cause might be on-web page optimization. However, there can be multiple areas subject to modifications and consumer interactions which may also affect site visitors. These embrace website redesign, the addition of recent sections, merchandise stock, negative evaluations about Website/Brand, Paid Marketing price range, holidays, global events etc.

  1. Your Competitor’s Efforts

It is also possible that a competitor is probably updating their pages one by one, improving the content material, optimizing key phrases, headers, and HTML tags. In this case, go to the pages in query, see how they compare to your individual pages, and borrow optimization ideas.

  1. Links to your Website

To determine in case your website visitors was impacted as a result of your website having too many low-high quality links, you will want to do a link audit, which begins by exporting your hyperlink graph and doing a deep evaluation.

Five Tips On How To Uncover Potential Causes On Your Traffic Drop Workflow

  1. On/Off Page Optimization

Technical adjustments to the site can alter the way search engines like google and yahoo crawl, render, and index a website’s content. Examples include canonicalization, modifications to URLs, and crawl directives. Take a have a look at the SERPs for a number of the web site’s most essential key phrases. How do they appear now in comparison with before the drop in visitors occurred? Doing this evaluation can offer important clues about the nature of the problem. Once you’ve verified that there is in fact a major drop in visitors and it’s not the direct results of indexing issues, the real detective work begins.

  1. Site Map

Follow Google’s search engine optimization tips and business best practices to attenuate the risk of shedding your site visitors or being penalized. Make sure you submit sitemap with Google Search Console. An often-ignored facet of SEO is just making sure search engines like Google are in a position to correctly crawl and index your web site. A internet crawler needs to be able to crawl a page so as to see its content and needs to have the ability to index a page so as to rank it.

  1. Redirects

Redirects are used to transition users and search engines like google from an old page to a brand new web page. Using 301 redirect indicators to Google that the page has permanently moved. Change the text of your robots.txt file and remove the hyperlinks that disallow the major search engines from accessing these pages in your site which might be essential for natural search visibility.

Similarly, check for incorrect usage of noindex or nofollow tags. If a nofollow attribute is applied to your website’s internal pages, it will immediately influence the PageRank and trigger the location rankings to drop.

  1. Duplicates

Multiple posts on the identical exact subject – If you write two posts on the identical exact matter, Google can have a hard time figuring out which to rank. This could result in your preliminary submit really dropping in rankings. This doesn’t apply to the identical class, but the identical focus keyword.

  1. Google Trends for Research

You can look at Google Trends to see if there are any adjustments that might clarify those discrepancies. You many need to update content.

  1. Google Analytics

Use Google Analytics as your weapon, and restore your web site to glory. It’s very important to look at the big picture in terms of visitors drops.

Summary

It’s essential to notice that there isn’t one single rating factor that can make or break your SEO. It’s the combination of all of your technical, on-page, and off-page efforts that work collectively to construct a search engine optimization-friendly website. Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website to rank as high as attainable in organic search engine outcomes.

How to Create & Verify Your Google My Business Account

Your free Google business listing (known as your Business Profile) can do more than you think. When properly optimized, it showcases your best features and makes it easy for consumers to discover, learn about, and contact your business. But in order to properly optimize your Business Profile, you need access to it, and in order to access it, you need to verify with Google that you are the rightful owner.

While it seems as though it should be as simple as “step one create, step two claim, and step three verify,” the process is neither that simple nor that linear—which, if you’re reading this post, you have already figured out. That’s because it requires three different Google accounts and two different Google platforms, all of which have very similar names. Talk about a brain bender.

So, in this post, I’m going to first iron out for you exactly what’s what in Google, and then give you a clear-cut roadmap to creating a Google My Business account and using it to claim and verify your Business Profile on Google.

Why create a Google My Business account?

Your Google My Business account makes it easy for consumers to discover, learn about, and contact your business online.  These are the core benefits of a Google My Business account, and if that’s not enough to convince you, consider the disadvantages of not having one.

You risk losing customers. Without a Google My Business account, you don’t have control over the information displayed in your Business Profile, and according to a BrightLocal study, 68% of consumers would stop using a local business after finding incorrect information online.

You risk a poor reputation. Without a Google My Business account, you cannot respond to your Google reviews. And with reviews being both a Google ranking factor and the number one influence on consumer buying, being able to manage them is a must.

You lose out to competitors. An empty or bare-bones Business Profile is akin to having an unkept storefront. If you don’t take care of your business, how can consumers trust that you’ll take care of them? They’ll be much more likely to click on and engage with a Business Profile in the search results that has lots of attractive information and looks lively.

You lose SERP real estate. Google ranks Business Profiles according to their quality, and a Business Profile alone is not enough. A Google Business Profile managed through a Google Business account, however, can be optimized to rank above competitors for relevant keyword searches.

Which listing would you choose? The unclaimed one on the left or the one optimized by Google My Business account on the right?

What you need in order to claim and verify your business on Google

By now, it should be clear that creating a Google My Business account and verifying ownership of your business is crucial if you want to provide accurate information, respond to reviews, attract customers, and rank higher in local search.

As mentioned earlier, however, the process is not super simple. It involves two different Google platforms and three different Google accounts, all of which have similar names, and some of which you likely already have. So to get you off on clear footing, let’s first iron out the terminology.

Google Account: This is the free account you create with Google so you can have access to Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, and more. Many call it their “Gmail account,” but Gmail is just one of the features; you can actually use any email to set up a Google Account. In this post, I’ll use the term “standard Google Account“ to refer to this account type, just to avoid confusion. Most business owners already have two standard Google accounts—one they use for their personal life and one they use for their business.

Business Profile: This is your free business listing on Google that appears on Google Maps, the local results of Google Search, and the right-hand Knowledge Panel of Google Search.

An example of a Business Profile on Maps.

Google My Business account: This is the free account you create that gives you a dashboard to manage and enhance your Business Profile.

Your Google My Business dashboard.

How to verify your business on Google

Now that you have the proper terminology laid out, let’s put the pieces together to form a full picture of the process.

The goal is to gain full access to your Business Profile on Google.

The means by which you do this is your Google My Business account, which you sign up for using a standard Google Account.

The steps to complete the process are as follows:

Make sure you have a standard Google Account for your business.
Make sure you have a Business Profile.
Create a Google My Business account.
Request to claim your Business Profile.
Verify ownership of your business.
Now, with the groundwork laid out, you are armed and ready to successfully claim and verify your business on Google. The steps outlined below are written linearly, and in some cases, you’ll need to skip down a step. But I’d still encourage you to read them all carefully to avoid hitting roadblocks or creating duplicate accounts.

Step #1: Make sure you have a Google Account for your business

This is the standard Google Account we described in the terminology section above. If you already have one (make sure it’s not your personal-use Google Account), skip down to Step #2. If you don’t have a Google Account for your business, follow the steps below.

1. Go to accounts.google.com/signin.
2. Click “Create account.”

3. You’ll see a drop-down with two options. Choose “To manage my business.”

4, Supply the necessary information.

Step #2: Make sure you have a Business Profile

Your Business Profile is the official term for your Google business listing. As mentioned above, Google Business Profiles are separate from Google My Business accounts. A Business Profile can exist on its own, without Google My Business account. The problem with this is that the business owner has no control over the information in that Business Profile until they claim it, and this is done through Google My Business. Bottom line: You’ll want to make sure you have a Business Profile to claim once you’ve set up your Google My Business account.

If you know you’ve already created a Business Profile, skip down to Step #4. If you haven’t created one or are unsure, follow the steps below.

Note: Even if you didn’t create it, there’s a good chance your Business Profile already exists. This is because a Business Profile is simply a place on Google Maps, which any person or computer can add. So to check and see if you need to create a Business Profile, follow these steps:

1. Go to Google.com/maps.
2. Search your business name.
3. If your business name populates in the drop-down with an address next to it, this means your Business Profile already exists. Great! You can move on to Step #4.

If your business name does not populate with an address, select it and you’ll see something like this:

4. Select “Add a missing place,” and you’ll see a screen like this:

5. Provide the requested information. Notice that you’ll have the option to claim the business within that same window. Since you don’t have a Google My Business account yet, you’ll need to move on to Step #3. If you already have a Google My Business account, you can follow the prompts and you’ll end up at Step #5—look at you go!

Step #3: Sign up for a Google My Business account

The means by which you claim your Business Profile on Google is through a Google My Business account. Provided you have a standard Google account (see Step #1), here’s how to sign up for a Google My Business account.

1. Make sure you are logged into the standard Google Account for your business (and not the standard Google Account for your personal life).
2. Go to google.com/business.
3. Select “Manage now.”

4. Provide the basic information Google asks for, including.

Business name
Address
Website
Phone number
Delivery area (if applicable)
Category
Once you connect this account with your Business Profile (the final step of this post), additional fields will open up in your dashboard so you can provide even more information about your business. This information is the key to optimizing your business for local SEO and attracting more customers through your free listing.

Step #4: Request to claim your Business Profile

This is where we start putting the pieces together. Unfortunately, creating a Google My Business account (from Step #3) does not automatically connect it to your Business Profile (from Step #2). You need to tell Google to connect them, and you do this by verifying ownership of your business. To do this, start by locating your Business Profile on Google Maps or Google Search and requesting to claim it. You can do this one of two ways:

Claim request method #1:

1. Go to google.com and search for your business name and location. If your Business Profile appears on the right-hand side, find the “Own this business?” option and select it.

2. From there you’ll be taken to a screen that says “Manage this business so you can reply to reviews, update info, and more.”

3. Click “Manage now,” and follow the prompts to claim your business. Once again, make sure you’re logged in with the standard Google Account used for your business, and not for your personal life, referred to in Step #1.

Claim request method #2: Google Maps

1. Go to Google.com/maps.
2. Type in your business name.
3. Click on your Business Profile, which will expand.
4. You’ll then see an option to “Claim this business.”

Clicking on “Claim this business” will then overlay the same screen you saw in the first method, but this time right over the map.

4. Click “Manage now” and follow the prompts. Again, make sure you’re logged in with the Google Account you created for your business referred to in Step #1.

Step #6: Verify ownership of your business

This is the home stretch! If you need to grab a Gatorade or some orange slices, I’ll be right here when you get back.

When you click on “Manage now” as instructed in Step #5, you’ll be asked to provide information to prove you are the rightful owner of the business. Depending on the type of business you have, if you created the Business Profile and you’re logged into your Google My Business account, you might get validated on the spot. If you aren’t the one who created the Business Profile, Google will send you a verification code that you’ll enter into your Google Business dashboard. Depending on the circumstances of your account/security requirements of your industry, you may be given your verification code via regular mail, email, or text.

Once you receive the code and enter it into the box, you will have full ownership of your Business Profile on Google! You can now manage reviews, update information, add more attractive details, and optimize it for successful local marketing.

Take the time to verify your business on Google

Google is changing the way consumers find and engage with local businesses, so if you want to continue reaching your audience and attracting customers with your free Business Profile, be sure to follow the above steps. The process has different parts and pieces, but it doesn’t have to be quite so complicated with guides like this and options like doing it on mobile. Get started with creating, claiming, and verifying through Google My Business today so you can get the most out of this incredible and free tool available to you.

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What Is Google My Business & Why Do I Need It?

In an effort to gain more visibility on Google, many businesses create a Google business listing (known officially as a Business Profile).

If you’re one such business owner, something you might not realize is that creating a Business Profile does not give you management over it, and you need those management and editing capabilities if you want your Business Profile to work for you as an effective SEO and lead generation tool.

So how do you gain management over your Google Business Profile? The answer is that, in addition to creating a free Business Profile, you must also separately create a free Google My Business account for that profile.

You need a separate Google My Business account to manage your Business Profile.

A Google My Business account is the only means by which you can claim ownership of your Business Profile, attain management rights to it, and unlock additional free features to increase your visibility on Google. In this post, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about Google My Business, including:

What Google My Business is
How to use Google My Business effectively
How to use Google My Business for SEO
How to create a Google My Business account
Read on so you can incorporate this free and powerful tool to your marketing toolkit!

What is Google My Business?

As mentioned, Google My Business is a tool that enables you to manage and optimize your Business Profile on Google. So to explain what Google My Business is and how it works, let’s first make sure we’re clear on what a Business Profile is.

Your Business Profile is Google’s term for your Google business listing. Business Profiles appear in Google Maps and in the local results of Google Search.

Business Profiles on Google Search look like this:

Business Profiles on Google Maps look like this:

 

And Business Profiles on mobile look like this:

Creating a Business Profile is the same thing as adding a place to Google Maps—which is something that anyone (including a random stranger or an automated listing generator) can do. All that Google requires is the business name, location, and category. Once Google confirms it is not a duplicate, they will create the Business Profile for that location. The Business Profile is then open to consumers to leave reviews, add photos, ask questions, and even answer questions. The Business Profile may also get populated with information that Google pulls in from across the web.

What this means is, a Business Profile can exist on its own, apart from a Google My Business account. And whether you created your own Business Profile or not, you don’t have the ability to manage the information it displays or the reviews it collects.

That is where Google My Business comes in. By creating a Google My Business account, you can access, customize, manage, and enhance your Business Profile on Google, all still for free, which we’ll get into next.

How to use Google My Business for local marketing

So we’ve established that Google My Business is not your Business Profile, but rather a tool by which you enhance your Business Profile to boost its visibility and effectiveness. Let’s cover the four core ways you can use this Google My Business to make your profile on Google listing a better local marketing tool.

1. Engage with consumers

There are a lot of ways consumers can interact with your Business Profile, and you use your Google My Business account to engage back with them. You can respond to reviews, answer questions, enable direct messaging, and set up associated alerts. You can even use Google My Business to publish posts to your Business Profile, much like you would with Facebook and other social media platforms.

Your Google My Business dashboard is where you can respond to reviews, publish posts, and answer questions asked on your Business Profile.

2. Highlight your business

A Business Profile alone contains limited information about your business. But through your Google My Business account dashboard, you can provide hours, a link to your website, products and pricing, attributes, and other details that make your business unique. You will also use your Google My Business to make edits and updates as needed.

A complete Business Profile offers a complete snapshot of your business, including its best features, right in the SERP.

3. Gain insights

You can use the Google My Business dashboard to gain key insights on your audience and local search performance. In the analytics tab of the platform, you can see the queries customers are using to find your Business Profile, whether they found you on Google Maps or Google Search, a breakdown of actions taken on your listing, and how your photos are performing compared to other profiles in your category.

4. Perform local SEO

Just as Google has algorithms for ranking its ads and websites, it also has one for ranking Business Profiles. Through your Google My Business dashboard, you can incorporate keywords into your Business Profile and perform other optimizations to help it rank in local results, which we’re going to cover next.

Google My Business can help you optimize your Business Profile to show up in the coveted 3-Pack.

How to use Google My Business for SEO

Google Business Profiles are dynamic. Not only do they change form based on platform, but Google will also prioritize sections of your profile according to the term that was searched as well as the type of information most important to consumers in your category. Even better, Google will embolden keywords in the content of your profile that it thinks are relevant.

But there needs to be information to prioritize and keywords to embolden in your profile in the first place. Just as you (or your agency) would use a content management system like WordPress to optimize your website for search engines, Google My Business is used to optimize your profile and expand your reach. How do you use Google My Business for local SEO? Well, since optimizing for Google is essentially optimizing for searchers, it all comes down to the same three things: targeting, quality of information, and trust.

Target your information

To use Google My Business for SEO, make sure to incorporate relevant keywords into your Business Profile so you can tell Google what you’re trying to rank for. Use them in your “from the business” description, your responses to reviews, your answers to questions, and in the posts you publish. Make sure to incorporate them naturally just as you would with any other SEO strategy.

Include keywords in your description, editable through your Google My Business dashboard.

Maintain quality of information

The completeness and accuracy of your Business Profile impacts its rank, so make sure to provide the requested information in every section of your Google My Business dashboard. Especially important here is your contact information, special hours, and attributes.

Build trust

The final approach to using Google My Business for SEO appeals to the trust component of Google’s algorithm. Keep your information updated and accurate as your business evolves. Keep a steady stream of reviews coming in and respond to them. Also, signal to Google that you are active by regularly uploading photos and publishing posts to your Business Profile through Google My Business.

Reviews and responses appear on your Business Profile. Be sure to manage them through your Google My Business dashboard.

SEO is important for any business, but particularly for small businesses that can use local targeting to compete against large competitors on the SERP. Google is making local SEO even easier with its robust Business Profiles, so a Google My Business account is essential for any business trying to maximize visibility in their local market.

How to sign up for Google My Business

A free tool that turns my Business Profile into a power marketer for my business? Where do I sign up?

To get a Google My Business account, go to google.com/business and click “Manage now,” which will take you through the steps of creating an account. Remember, a Google My Business Account does not automatically create a Business Profile—it gives you access to it and the ability to add more to it. So you’ll want to make sure you have an existing Business Profile to access.

Also remember that creating Google My Business account does not give you automatic access to your Business Profile. Once you create and are logged into your Google My Business account, you will then need to locate your separate Business Profile on Google Maps and then select the “Claim this business” or “Own this business?” link seen right on the profile. Once you complete that process, your Google My Business account will then be connected with your Business Profile and under your management.

Get started with Google My Business today

With a clear understanding of exactly what Google My Business is, how it works, and how to use it, you can now see that using this free tool isn’t just a good idea for local marketing but a must. Get your Google My Business account up and running now so your Business Profile can outshine your competitors and attract more customers on the world’s most popular search engine.

Source: WordStream

What are the SEO challenges for a Multi-location business?

businesses commonly have these challenges when it comes to meeting consumer needs:

  • How can they quickly and easily give directions to consumers?
  • How can each location’s landing page be optimized for local search?
  • How can the ever-increasing mobile shopper surge be leveraged?

Issues Facing Multi-Location Businesses

  • Make sure each store location should have its own unique, well-optimized page. 
  • Make sure your page is indexed and discoverable via internal links.
  • Add opening hours and parking hits.
  • Clearly identified NAP (name, address, phone) information.
  • Local news / identity

Google Ads: Location extensions help customers

What is Google Business Profile Manager ?

Google Business Profile Manager is a free service that lets you keep your business information updated across #Google Search and #Google Maps. With Google Business Profile Manager, you can make sure customers are seeing the correct information, like your business description, hours, phone number, and more. Learn more about Google Business Profile Manager.

Curated from Manage your local business presence on Google – AdWords Help


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Your Google Business Profile is a FREE tool that allows you to show how your business appears on Google Search and Google Maps.

The Business Profile is then open to consumers to

  • leave reviews 
  • add photos
  • ask questions and answer questions.
  • Google populates with information that it pulls in from across the web, like Yelp, etc.

We are here to help you with complete management and solution for managing your online presence.


Contact us today to help you with your Google Business Profile


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