Claim, Update and Protect Your Google Business Profile
Ignoring your Google listing is more than just a missed marketing opportunity. If you don’t claim and maintain it, someone else could.
While some small businesses are disciplined about maintaining and updating their Google Business Profile, many are too busy to worry about it. That’s especially true if you don’t have a physical location or run a B2B business.
But ignoring your (free) Google business listing is more than just a missed marketing opportunity. If you don’t claim and maintain it, someone else could - creating a big headache for your business.
If you have not yet claimed your listing, you can do that by following these instructions. After claiming the listing, you’ll need to verify it’s you. You can do that by following these instructions. Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to make your profile as robust as possible. At minimum, that means making sure your address and contact information are correct. To further optimize your listing, you can add photos, updates, and ask customers for reviews.
Be especially cautious of someone claiming to work for Google or offering to manage your business listing on your behalf.
Once you’ve done the basics you can take your Google Business Profile to the next level by optimizing it to improve your search ranking locally. Google determines local search ranking (meaning how high up in search results you appear when a potential customer is searching for a business like yours in their area) based on three factors. They are: relevance, distance, and prominence.
While you can’t fully control how your business performs in each of these factors, there are things you can do to improve the odds of ranking more highly. Two things you CAN do to improve your local search performance including making sure your business profile is complete and ensuring your website uses best SEO practices. There are lots of ways to do that but the most important is to be clear about exactly what your business does and the problems it solves for customers.
And be on the lookout for Google Business Profile scams. Be especially wary of anyone calling your business and offering to manage your Google listing or anyone identifying themselves as calling from Google. You can learn about more common Google Business Profile scams here.