Google My Business Focus: Local Business Tips

Google My Business For Local Small Businesses should never be underestimated. Yet It’s Easy To Lose Your Focus!

This article will look at what you should be focusing on when you optimise your Google My Business listing. Most users tend to focus on the wrong things. It’s easy to want to do everything and succeed at nothing at all. So today my video along with this article is going to sharpen your focus on tips for your local business, so it can grow long term.

Google My Business Focus: Local Business Video Tips

Pareto Principle is at work here on your local business

Sometimes its good to analyse your focus and put effort into the area that will give most results. Its a case of using the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. You know what that is right? Amazingly most of the business, sales, customers, marketing, stats, in fact, any business-related trend tends to fit in this ratio of 80/20

Focus on how you help customers. Use social media, your website and Facebook to focus on improving your authority in Google. Remember it’s not about you it’s about them, the customer when you are writing.

Talk Local

If you want to locally connect, then you need to talk their language. Use their expressions, use their questions (see https://answerthepublic.com/) Be where your customers are, so you don’t need to be everywhere, eg Instagram, Facebook is big in Google ranking.

Find out what they want by asking, have community and feedback forms and remain approachable. Notice where the focus is.

Google My Business Control

Did you know that Google themselves are clear that you cant focus on everything? They are very clear that 2 out of 3 things are out of your control. So it’s worth taking a few minutes out and thinking about all the things you can control about your local business.

Google says you can’t control everything in Google My Business. So surely its best to focus on what you can change and control. The basis for today’s local business tips and tutorial.

If you want to read Googles article and video in full you can find it on https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en-GB

On that page, it reveals how Google determines the local ranking. It says it primarily on relevance, distance and prominence. A combination of these factors helps us find the best match for your search. So can you control these?

Google Business Tips

Google is semi-transparent on its map ranking. So taking each of the 3 main areas it ranks your GMB on , do you think you have control on the main 3 factors? Does it fit into the 80/20 pareto principle? Almost.

Can you Control Relevance? – YES

Relevance refers to how well a local Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. Add complete and detailed business information to help Google better understand your business and match your profile to relevant searches.

Can you control Distance? – NO

72% of clients using a local search, visited a business within 5 miles. Can you control this though? Distance considers how far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search. If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, we’ll calculate distance based on what we do know about their location.

Can you control Prominence? – NO

Prominence refers to how well known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels or well-known shop brands are also likely to be prominent in local search results. Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles and directories. Google review count and review score factor into local search ranking.

I use the analogy of “You can’t expect to boil the ocean” it’s just not going to happen. You will just boil yourself. So the idea behind this is to make your effort count.

Why not write a list of all the things you can control and a list of the things you can’t. So for example more reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’ local ranking. You could increase that probability by asking more people for reviews. So here are a few things that will get you.

Local Business Tips: The Things You Can Control

• Photos
• Videos
• Opening times
• Special hours
• COVID updates
• Questions and Answers
• Adding new updates
• Attributes
• Adding products
• Adding Offers and promotions
• Keywords in description
• Correct categories

Local Business Tips: The Things You Can’t Control

• GMB Reviews
• Other Google My Business listings
• Google Algorithms
• Your authority through external linking
• What potential clients are searching for
• Clicks
• Google knowledge panel layout
• The business demand in your area.
• Where someone is searching from
• Appearing top in maps
• The negative impact of other optimised businesses
• The fluctuation of traffic due to time of year

What to do next for your local business

If you then want more support videos and learn how to really push your listing up another level head over to the Zanet YouTube Channel

Zanet Design Ltd is based in the Bournemouth. If you want a reliable web design manager or just need some type of benefit from my experience, then book a consultation with me and I will do my best to give you the best advice tailored for your business.