The vast majority of small businesses cater to a local clientele, which means that consumers search for them online using terms that are specific to their area. For instance, “plumber near me,” “restaurant with reservations tonight,” and “estate lawyer in Seattle” are all instances of search queries.

This indicates that your company has the potential to show up in the organic search results in numerous different ways, including through a standard listing, a rich snippet, and a Google My Business (GMB) profile.

Personalizing your Google My Business page is an essential component of optimizing for local search; but, the sheer number of available customization options on the platform may make things quite complex. The following is a list of the features of GMB, some of which have an impact on your local search rankings, and others, which do not have such an impact.

Google My Business Information That Is Considered When Calculating Rankings

 According to Moz, the following GMB fields are the ones that are most likely to have an impact on your local search rankings; therefore, you may want to give them the highest importance.

1. Business Name

If you can’t believe it, the one factor that has the greatest influence on the position that you hold in the results of local search engines is the business name field. This may be a source of frustration due to the fact that it is not something that you are likely to change in order to make Google happy.

If you are the owner of a firm, you might see the value of include particular keywords in your company name, but in most cases, this realization occurs after the fact. When trying to come up with something that will appeal to their target audience, very few businesses put this much effort into the process.

Some companies add descriptors to their company names and then notify Google of the change; however, Google does not want you to do this and will penalize your site if you do. You can even “out” competitors who are “gaming” the system by disobeying Google’s criteria by filing a complaint with the search engine.

The lesson to be learned from this is that even if you haven’t launched your company just yet, you should still think about which keywords to include in your content. If nothing else, having access to this knowledge is beneficial.

2. Categories

Your categories are the following factor that can affect your rankings. You are, to some extent, in command of this situation, which is fortunate.

The difficulty in using categories in GMB is in selecting the appropriate ones. You see, there are over 4,000 different categories that are offered, but you can only choose 10 of them. In addition to this, Google frequently modifies its categories by introducing new ones while eliminating others from the site. You may have a high ranking for a particular category, only to discover later that it has been removed. Alternately, there may be some additions that provide a more accurate description of your company.

Google has added a significant number of new categories in the past year, many of which are associated with restaurants and automobile dealerships. Another category that is still relatively new is “dental implants,” which enables dentists who provide this service to add the category and claim another map search place for themselves.

The bottom line is that you need to give great consideration to which categories you select and maintain regular visits to this page to check for any alterations or updates.

3. Reviews

It should come as no surprise that Google ads service provider  places a high priority on feedback from users when it comes to local search. When you consider this, it should come as no surprise that the amount of reviews you receive, how recent they are, and the average number of stars they give you will all have an effect on where you rank in local search results.

If you begin with no reviews, you will begin to notice improvements in your ranking as you add more reviews to your profile. If you begin with reviews, you will see improvements in your ranking. However, there will come a time when the benefits begin to decrease.

In addition to the improvement in rankings, customers want to know that other people are taking the time to provide feedback about your company and that you are responding to that feedback.

4. Website you have the ability to include a link in your Google My Business profile, and the quality of that link can have an effect on where you are ranked. The majority of companies will connect to their homepage, but you also have alternative choices.

A company that has multiple locations might, for instance, want to connect to the page that details each of its locations. You can also link to one of those pages if your company has a lot of departments or practitioners, which is something to keep in mind.

Testing out a variety of different links to determine which one yields the greatest results is essential to getting this right.

Local seo

Fields in Google My Business That Do Not Have an Effect on Rankings

Although these elements do not have an effect on your results, they can still help you gain traffic by engaging consumers and establishing the authority of your brand.

1. Services offered

You might believe that the services area of your Google My Business page has an effect on your results, but it most likely does not have this effect because keyword stuffing would be too easy to accomplish in this section. You have the option of inserting a variety of descriptions of the services that you provide in this section.

It is unclear how many people are going to view the description, despite the fact that you can spend some time crafting a great one. Regrettably, this section of your GMB profile is rather concealed from view. When viewed from a desktop, it is hardly noticeable at all. If a user is viewing your profile from a mobile device, they will not be able to see the “services” section unless they first click on one of the tabs.

2. Merchandise

Just as with “services,” whatever you list in the “products” section of your GMB profile won’t have any effect on your rankings in the local search results. This function is relatively new to GMB, but it is without a doubt worth the investment of your time.

Products is a great part because it is primarily visual, allowing you to submit photographs of the “things” that you are selling to customers. When conducting an appropriate search, these items may also appear in the knowledge panel provided by Google.

If you are a florist or a car dealer, for example, you should fill out this part and make sure to keep it up to date with your most recent product offerings.

3. Q&A

The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on your website is comparable to the Question and Answer (Q&A) feature that Google My Business offers. You won’t see any change in your search engine rankings as a result of this, despite the fact that it is helpful to customers. You will, however, receive a notification in the event that a customer posts a question to your listing. This provides you with the option to communicate with customers and increase website traffic.

Do You Require Assistance with Your Local SEO Program?

Any company that is serious about growing their customer base through “near me” and geographic searches should make local search engine optimization (SEO) their top goal. At Connection Model, our team of SEO professionals will evaluate the digital marketing approach that you are currently using and then build a strategy that is geared to provide results.