97% of smartphone users find local businesses online through search. Most of these searches happen on Google, the largest search engine with a 92% market share. Thanks to the location tracking capability of our smartphones, every 2nd search on Google is now a location-specific ‘Near Me’ search. ‘Near Me’ searches showcase information about locally relevant businesses to consumers and are fast growing, 900% in 2 years. 

If you are a retail or service business with one or more physical locations, ensuring your locations get found online during local ‘Near Me’ search is key to maximize offline leads and sales today!

So how do you get your locations to rank at the top for local ‘Near Me’ searches? How can you get found ahead of your competitors? What sparks consumers’ interest to choose your business over competition? How do you make these high-intent consumers your customers?

An optimized Google Business Profile (GBP) is the simple answer to all these questions. Whether you are a new business that’s just getting started or an existing business that’s been around for a long time, this guide will help you improve your GBP, enabling you to maximize online-to-offline leads and conversions. 

Google Business Profile – Key Entry Point For Local Searches

Google Business Profile (GBP) helps local businesses establish digital presence across Google’s network – search, maps etc.  

Similar to our personal social profiles on platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc, GBP is the location-level digital profile of the business on Google. It has all relevant details about your business – name, description, working hours, contact info, products/services offered, customer reviews, offers and more – enabling you to manage how consumers see your business on Google. 

Here’s why you need to optimize your Google Business Profile to be found when people are searching for their needs locally:

• GBP Enables You to Appear in Local Pack Search Results

First things first, when you search for anything local, say an ice cream shop near me – what you get is a “Local 3 Pack” result from Google with a map.

So the searcher’s very first interaction with your business consists of essential information like – Business Name, Category, functioning hours, Reviews and more. Also, take a look at the map marked with ice-cream shops in this case. Google doesn’t only give comprehensive information but also directs the users to the business locations mentioned in GBP results.

• Heavy Visibility 

When we tried searching for ‘ice cream shop near me’, did you notice that nothing apart from local results came to the top? Neither online ice cream selling websites nor aggregators came to the top of the search because the Google local pack (which comprises Google Business Profiles) is a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). So the maximum real estate coverage is done by GBPs relevant to the search query.

• Customer Reviews – Build Your GBP Visibility & Credibility

In today’s digitally influenced world, your online reputation is critical in attracting more customers and driving growth revenue for your business. Reviews play a vital role

• Simply help you in ranking higher for search engine results – more your reviews, higher your rank
• Positive feedback and reviews help you win trust of prospective customers
• They also enhance local SEO – specific keywords in customer reviews improve relevance
• Improve your leads and conversions
• Help you improve your offerings and customer experience

• Insightful Information for Businesses

Some of the deeply analytical features of Google Business Profile enable you to create strategies and make decisions as per your audience statistics:

• Views
• Search queries 
• Engagement
• Audience
• Website link clicks

Steps to Optimize Your Google Business Profile 

Now, let’s dive deep into the key steps to optimize your profile. If you’re looking to create your Google Business Profile, you can do it from here. Once created, Google will verify your listing for accuracy. After verification is completed, your business listing becomes live. It will now start appearing on consumers’ Local Pack search results. This is where it becomes important not just to ensure that all the correct details are present, but also to optimize it to ensure it ranks on top.

1. Business Description

Google Business Profile wants you to describe your business within 750 characters. The best practice for drafting an ideal description involve – including keywords for local SEO performance and answering questions like:

• What makes your business stand out?
• Why should people visit you?
• What should consumers expect from you?

A business description is pretty much similar to the “about” section on your website. So ensure you highlight your uniqueness, what problems you solve or your services/products. Highlight your customer service aspects & provide info on product benefits.

2. Categories

Another critical piece of the puzzle is the category you choose for your business. Google allows you to choose from over 4000 categories. This is a key local seo ranking factor & Google allows one business to have upto 9 additional categories along with the main category. Use & choose these 10 wisely as they’re mapped during keyword search on Google. Choose the most relevant categories for your business.

While this aspect hugely contributes to the Google local pack and your business profile rankings, it usually gets a bit trickier for businesses. Why? Google keeps updating the categories and hence you need to keep a consistent check on relevancy. The categories and subcategories that you choose for GBP tell Google a lot about your business and what you offer – and play a direct role when consumers are performing “category searches” such as “chocolate cake near me” or even “desserts near me”

3. Business Operating Hours

We saw in the ice cream search example above, active business hours for all businesses is a very important piece of information for customers before they visit you. Not mentioning the open hours can make the difference between getting a new customer or not!

Google allows users to enable filters during search – one of which is to only check out the stores that are open at the time of search. This is another vital GBP aspect that directly affects your business and online-to-offline traffic.

4. Customer Reviews

How often do you check reviews before buying anything- no matter if it is online or locally? 

97% of the surveyed customers say that reviews influence their buying decisions! No doubt encouraging and managing reviews has to be a priority for all local businesses. 

Ratings are also part of the Google local 3-pack results and play a vital role in building the first impression and influencing the instant buying decision of consumers. More importantly – Google being the biggest business discovery platform in the world – Google Business Reviews have maximum impact on your business’s online and overall reputation.

Managing reviews effectively involves – pro-actively inviting customers to review your business and responding to all reviews whether positive or negative. If you are a multi-location business, you absolutely need a strategy to incentivise employees to request reviews & a tool to manage the whole process. #Zceppa Review Manager makes it super easy to do that!

5. Photos and Videos

Adding relevant pictures and videos to your Google Business Profile not only helps you in appealing to the searchers but is an important ranking factor for Google search results – Make sure your profile has the Logo, Cover Photo, pictures of interiors with your team.

Consumers prefer businesses with relevant and real photos on GBP, it helps them form an opinion about whether it’s the right choice for them or not. 

Google recommends adding photos and videos that have been shot from the same location, with minimal edits, sufficient resolution and relevant superimposed graphics (can be added but not more than 10%). 

6. Social Posts on Google

Social content is a major contributor to local search rankings based on relevancy and engagement. Google posts are undoubtedly one of the most under-utilized features of Google Business Profile. Being active on various relevant social channels like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn is important – #Google Business Profile should absolutely be in this mix as your searchers can view posts directly from your GBP search results. 

Be proactive on Google posts – share your announcements, offers, new stock updates, events and more locally relevant content for optimizing your GBP. 

Additionally, GBP posts also allow setting the active time for a post. For example – in cases of events and discount offers, you can schedule the end date for the posts. 

7. Q&A

The Q&A feature of GBP is another hidden gem that enables businesses to interact with their audience and build credibility. It allows searchers to ask questions about a business, place or landmark and allows business owners to answer those questions.

Once someone asks a question about your GBP, you get notified about it through email – with Zceppa, you also get our app based notifications. Post which, you should answer the queries as soon as possible. This feature adds credibility and builds your profile engagement – that further contributes to your search result rankings.

8. Products and Services

GBP also allows you to add products and services to your profile so that visitors can instantly start interacting with your business.

This is particularly helpful when you offer various services and products so that you can describe them in detail. To add a service – just go to the GBP Services dashboard, add categories and then add your services. If the service choice you’re looking for isn’t available, you can also add a custom service. 

In the case of products, GBP allows you to create entire product catalogs for your business. For adding each product to your GBP, go to the Product dashboard – add the product name, image, category and product description. You can also integrate your product catalog via the Google Merchant Center so users can see it on the Shopping tab.

9. Bookings and Appointments

Appointment booking is one of the popular and efficient features of Google Business Profile. For services like healthcare, self-care, wellness, consulting and more – appointments are often required. Users can choose from the available time slots, and book your services and they will also be guided by Google till they reach there.

There are actually 2 ways to enable bookings and appointments on your Google Business Profile:

• Add a simple scheduling link to the URL section of your GBP – The link provides the consumer an easy way to click and book an appointment with your business. With #Zceppa Appointments, you can easily add an appointment booking feature to your GBP and ensure a seamless experience.

• Integrate a scheduling button that redirects to your profile on domain-specific aggregator platforms. Example – Dineout for restaurants, Zooty for Spas and Salons. It would take around a week for your booking provider to integrate with your GBP, once done – you can check your bookings, ask for rescheduling, manage the revenue and get access to important metrics defining your business direction. 

Manage Your Chain/Multi-Location Business with Zceppa

• 78% of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase.
• 64% of customers use the phone number listing in Google Business Profile to connect with local businesses. 
• Complete listings are 7x more likely to get clicks than those left unfinished

Every fact and figure that we’ve discussed so far tells us one story – you need to optimize your Google Business Profile. However, GBP and digital discovery are not one-time destinations, they are continuous processes. Managing your business and maintaining its digital presence can be overwhelming – especially if you’re running a multi-location business with numerous stores.

Zceppa is your one-stop solution to scale your location marketing across all your locations. Our comprehensive SaaS platform helps you optimize your GBP and manage it efficiently whether you have 1 or 100s locations. 

CTA: SIgn Up for a Free Trial

Statistics Sources:

• Oberlo
• Magnified Media