When you have your web and social presence established, one important part to remember is your Google My Business page. By setting up this page and updating it as changes happen across your company, you are enabling Google to work harder for you.
This listing is one of potentially thousands of sites with which a business can be associated on the Internet. We’ve seen stats that from 80-87% of searches are performed on Google, as opposed to Bing, Yahoo, and the laundry list of other would-be web wanderers. In the US, Bing is the runner-up but still only has about 5% of the search market. As you may have surmised, the name Google carries weight that others do not. And, as the number-one search engine, Google gives precedence to people who play ball with how they like to do things. So, of course, if you have your keywords in order, your site optimized, and your WordPress set up and SEOed out the ying-yang, you still won’t garner the traffic you can by being on their little ol’ Google My Business page (GMB).
Mosey over to business.google.com. This is where the magic begins. If you have a Google account, you will sign in. You will then search for your business. If Google has indexed it, it will come up, but you can always add the business. Google will want to verify your ownership of the site by having you paste some code into your website. (Their instructions tell you how to do that. If someone has already claimed your business – an associate, manager, former owner, etc. – Google lists ways to reestablish your Google page ownership and even share it with a partner.)
Once your site is verified, you want to start filling in as much information as possible on your GMB. Your hours, photos, posts, business characteristics, and everything that will make your business listing as complete as you can get it. Don’t have everything? Don’t shy away… a mostly complete GMB is better than no GMB at all.
When you are an individual or entity that is not a business, you have something called a “knowledge panel” made from the data Google can accumulate about you from across the web. Once you establish your business website with Google by following the steps above, this becomes your business profile. If someone does a search for your business, they will see the commonly associated information about you on the right hand side of the results. These are the types of things that will be updated on your Google My Business page.
But what if you want your site to look better and perform better on Google? They offer some free tools that anyone can use to boost their Google performance. A couple of these are the Rich Results Test and Search Console. While they may seem intimidating, it is possible to gain a wealth of information from these services if you are willing to put in the time.
The Rich Results Test is found at https://search.google.com/test/rich-results. By entering your website into this page, you can run the test and therefore see what features on your pages are or aren’t working for Google. This is their way of saying, “It’s not me – it’s you.” Depending on the complexities of your site, you may get simple page loading errors, or ones that involvemore elaborate coding and features of your build. From there you’ll know some things that need fixing. Some may be things you have no idea how to fix, in which case you want to have a pro on speed dial. Kidding! Don’t freak out. If you’ve visited your site, and you know your pages are loading and links are not broken, the errors are likely things to look at to improve your site’s Google performance.
Search Console is another tool that makes optimizing your site a little easier. It’s located at https://goo.gle/searchconsole. You can verify your website by plugging some code into your Domain Name Server (DNS) record (likely a job reserved for your webhost), or if you know you are already linked to Google Analytics, you can use the “URL prefix” option to verify the code that Analytics already uses for your site. Pretty snazzy, eh? Ther are reports for how well Google indexes your pages, how your site performs on mobile, search performance, and more. You can even submit a site map to make Google’s job easier for them, which seems similar to giving your teacher a present the day before the test. But if it works, it works! The downer is that the first time you log in, Google has to do some housekeeping to get all your data flowing. So put it in your calendar, take a day or two, and come back to see your results.
Today’s post has a lot of information from the vast Google landscape. We only scratched the surface. Hopefully, you now know that there are many ways to get your site up to speed with the world’s number one search engine. If, like many professionals, you could use some help evaluating and updating your Google performance, reach out to us today for a free consulation.