How to Improve Your Google My Business Ranking (How To Rank Higher On Google Maps)

How to improve your Google My Business ranking is a question EVERY local business needs to ask of themselves from time to time.

If you don’t, you’re already losing out on a huge stream of organic traffic.

It doesn’t matter what you sell really – as long as you have a storefront your customers can visit (or even an office), you’ve got to make Google My Business work for you.

In this post, we’ll take an overview of what Google My Business really is, and how you – as a local business – can push your listing to the top of the local rankings.

Google My Business Is The Quick Reflection Of Your “Google Places Ranking”

One of the most important steps to improve your local SEO strategy is to claim and verify your business.

You can do this through your Google My Business listing.

Using Google My Business can increase any chance you have of showing up in local searches for businesses of your industry type and by showing up in other applications.

Improving Your Google My Business Ranking Has Many Implications!

Google My Business is an umbrella listing that shows in various Google products including:

• Google Maps
• Google Local Pack (In Regular Google Search, On Mobile + Desktop)
• Google Places (Now Integrated Into GMB)

You want to show up in these in order to increase your organic ranking.

How do you accomplish this? What do you need to do in order to improve your Google My Business ranking in order to make your business stand out?

Let’s try to find answers to these (and more)!

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free and very simple tool that businesses such as yours can use to help you manage your online presence. The need to ask how to improve Google My Business ranking comes essentially from the very fact that hundreds of millions of internet users have an implicit trust in Google and its ability to furnish high quality information.

Managing your presence in many different ways including searches and via Google Maps will help you to stand out among competitors who don’t take the time to do this. By verifying and editing all your businesses information, you will be able to help searchers find you and tell them what your business is about.

You want searchers to know who you are and what you do. If you can’t, they won’t take even a moment before taking their business to your competitor! 

Why It’s Important To Improve Google My Business Ranking For A Local Business

There are many advantages to using Google My Business. These include:

• The ability to manage all your information to ensure clarity and accuracy.
• You will be able to interact with your customers by reading and responding to reviews, posting pictures and even adding a map.
• See insights on how customers have searched for your business and understand what your presence is online. Furthermore, you can expand on your online presence to go beyond what it currently is.
• Manage your organization through the Google My Business app so that you can add to it anywhere you are and at any time. Simply download the app via iTunes for iOS devices and the Play Store for your Android devices.
• When you improve the Google My Business Ranking for your business, you automatically improve organic traffic to your website/listing – a high-quality indicator that will eventually help you improve your Google ranking on the whole (for more organic traffic).

The very first thing you must do to improve your Google My Business ranking is to verify and claim your organization. You can do this by going to www.google.com/business.

Since most businesses go and verify their organizations and forget about it, you will have an advantage since there are many other features that Google provides you that will let you optimize your Google My Business ranking.

How do you improve your Google My Business ranking? There are many different ways you can improve your ranking using the variety of features Google provides you, but here, we are going to list 5 of them.

Don’t Overlook The Importance of Local SEO!

Improving your Google places ranking or your Google My Business ranking form just one aspect of local SEO.

If you run a local business or have a physical office address, it’s a cardinal business sin to not pay enough attention to local SEO.

A quick look at the numbers above should be able to convince you that local SEO is not just important – it’s indispenable.

At HQ SEO, we have helped hundreds of local businesses (not just in and around Cardiff – but around the world!) harness the real power of 100% organic marketing and local SEO through our end-to-end local SEO services.

To request your free proposal, just drop us a line here and we’ll get back to you in no time!

How To Improve your Google My Business Ranking – Quick Fixes

Improving your Google local business ranking is all about following some basic local SEO tenets. You will find all about them in this local SEO guide that also includes a free local SEO checklist.

Verifying Your Google My Business Listing

The only way of ranking in Google places and taking complete control of your business’ online is to allow Google to verify that you are indeed a business and that you are real.

By simply verifying your business with Google, you can rank higher in local searches because Google will know who you are – the very first trust measure for your business relationship with Google. 

By determining your business name, address and phone number, Google can then rank you locally. How this works is the same way it would with back linking from your website. Google explains this process in this guide.

With so many factors to consider when assigning a rank in Google, sometimes it simply comes down to verifying who you are and where you are located.

Creating Google Posts For Your GMB Listing

Creating Google posts is similar to creating mini-ads or placing social media ads. These ads say things about your business that you wouldn’t always say in a regular information post. You can make posts on deals or monthly specials. You can highlight whatever you choose doing these posts and they will help to improve your Google ranking because the more posts you put, the more exposure your business gets.

These posts can show up in any other Google search. They can show up in your Google My Business listing under the Knowledge Panel or in Google Maps. A sample GMB Post (posted by Target) is show above.

You can create Google Posts using your Google My Business Dashboard. On the left hand side you will see an option for posts. Make them engaging and interesting. You can add a call to action or advertise a special product. The choices are endless.

Here are a few Google Post ideas For Your Googe My Business Listing:

• Highlight a sale that you are having for a special occasion.
• Introduce a new product or service that you may be offering.
• Advertise your latest blog posts if you have an online blog.
• Spread holiday cheer through a greeting of your choosing.

Whatever you choose to post, it is sure to help you increase your rank in Google My Business.

Remember the whole point is to keep things short and sweet – this is NOT content marketing. If you are looking to develop a full-fledged SEO content marketing strategy, it requires a whole new level of consistent efforts.

Our 360-degree local content marketing services are designed to work in tandem with our local SEO services. Combining these two means that your business website will fly in no time – thanks to the huge surge in organic traffic as well as local indicators.

Add A Google Map To Your Website

You can see embedded maps on many different websites. A perfectly SEO friendly way of adding maps to your website is to directly instruct search engines via proper schema.

In other cases, it’s just as good to embed a simple code on your website. You can get the Google Maps embed code here. You can also find the step by step directions below.

Here’s how the HQ SEO office in Cardiff looks like on a webpage that embeds Google Maps API:

Verifying your business through placing a Google Place listing will help searchers to find you and increase your local SEO results. Embed this map into your “contact page” or into your “about” page.

If you aren’t sure how to embed a Google map into your Google My Business listing, here is how.

Gain, Manage & Respond To Reviews

As you know, most of your business is generated by word of mouth type advertising. What this means is reviews. People will generally look at reviews before trying a new place or when they want to find out information about a place. If Google sees that you have a variety of reviews, they are going to want to highlight that.

How do you go about gaining reviews? Well, here are a few tips to help you with that.

Don’t hesitate to ask customers who are happy. Just outright ask them if they would be willing to post a review about your business into Google.

Send out review requests via text message or email to your valued customers or those on your customer contact list. When you go about this method, be sure to provide them the information they need to post the review. Here’s more about getting Google My Business reviews from your customers.

What Do Customers Need To Post Reviews On Google? 

• Step by step instructions how to post the review. (A great way to do this is by sending screenshots showing them how).
• What your values are in regards to the review. (Be sure to not sway the review, but rather state that personal attacks or vulgar language is unacceptable).

Gaining reviews is a sure way to get noticed on Google and can potentially bring more business your way. You have nothing to lose asking for reviews.

Don’t Just Solicit Reviews – Curate & Manage Them!

‘Talking to customers’ is more important today than ever – because therein lie answers to most questions you have (and how to rank higher on Google Maps is definitely one of them!).

Once you start getting reviews, engage with them by responding to them.

A good review should be responded to with a heartfelt ‘thank you’ message.

More importantly, a bad review should be dealt with with respect. Don’t abuse, insult or attack the reviewer – instead, ask them politely what went wrong and how you’d fix the problems so you won’t lose their business.

Here’s a good example of review engagement:

If you are experiencing trouble soliciting reviews to optimize your Google My Business listing, our custom-designed local review generation services are just the right fit for your requirements.

Reviews help sales better than any other factor – period. So, it’s worth investing a fraction of your weekly sales into generating reviews that pay for themselves in no time. To request a free proposal, please get in touch with us.

Have Up-to-Date NAP Details On Your Website

As mentioned above, you need to have your contact information listed in Google My Business so it can be verified. However, it is essential that your NAP is kept up-to-date. What NAP stands for is name, address and phone number. Since your business is listed in multiple directories, you need to make sure you NAP is correct and accurate in each of those places.

We have discussed the importance of NAP details while drafting our free mini local SEO checklist.

Make sure to have an up-to-date NAP that is consistent in directories, your website contact page and of course, within Google Places. All of these need to be showing the same information. If you want to find out how to make sure your business NAP is the same across the web, you can find out how to do so here.

How NAP Inconsistencies Impact Your Google Maps Ranking

Having inconsistent NAP details scatters across directories, listings, citations and your own website/social media mean only one thing – Google can’t tell which one’s the right one.

Once that happens, it’s easy to guess that such ‘faulty’ listings are automatically pushed down the local SERPs by Google.

How do you make sure your NAP is consistent?

The process is pretty easy.

The first step – and this is important in order to improve your Google Maps ranking – is to manually verify your NAP details on your website, social media, schema and the Google My Business listing. Once you’re happy that these are all consistent, it’s time to scan the internet for NAP errors.

Moz’s Local Search Tool is incredibly helpful in this regard. Just enter your business’ name and make sure that a singular result is returned. If there are conflicting details, it’s probably a good idea to go looking for erroneous citations.

Have Business NAP on Your Website

As it is important to have your business NAP consistent across the web, you would be surprised how many forget to check their own website. Therefore, make sure you check your website to be sure that it is always up-to-date with your business name, phone number and address. To increase organic local SEO, put your NAP either in your Footer or Header in addition to your contact page. To learn more about various local SEO strategies and how to implement it, you can contact us.

Increasing your Google My Business Ranking is especially important when it comes to your local SEO strategies. You want people to find you and to know who you are. You also want them to know what you offer.

When you want to increase your Google My Business Ranking, these five strategies will help you dramatically do so. Once you implement these, you will soon see that your ranking will increase.

Evaluate

If you notice that your ranking is still not quite where you want it to be after you make these changes, then you probably need to cite your business more. Citing is similar to SEO as Google will use these citations to provide searchers with relevant Google Places rankings. You can check your citations by seeing where businesses like yours are cited and find out what directories they may be in that you aren’t. Once you know where you aren’t cited, make sure to add your business.

At HQ SEO, we offer large-scale citation services for local businesses. Through these services, you can create dozens of high-quality, accurate and premium citations in directories that matter to your business. These will not only give more backlinks to your website, they will immensely improve your Google Maps rankings – an invaluable asset.

To request a free citation building proposal, please contact us.

Ranking Higher In Google Maps Directly Translates Into Money!

There are many things you can do to improve your Google ranking. By looking into your Google My Business ranking and taking steps to improve your local SEO, you will find that you will rank higher than you ever have. Due to it’s importance, again, make sure to claim and verify your business. Then proceed to increase your Google My Business ranking.

Need help or want to learn more about how to get your business noticed? You can do so by getting in touch with us. Also, you can fill out the form below to get a no obligation quote for our services.