Use these tips to boost your content marketing potential with Google My Business

People all over the world rely on search engines to find answers to their most pressing questions. Google is the top dominator of the search engine market, meaning that people who need answers use Google as their first point of search call.

In fact, according to Internetstats.com, Google processes over 40,000 search queries per second on average, which comes up to over 3.5 billion searches per day.

Get in front of potential leads 

When customers search for products or services near them, they’re usually ready to make a purchase. What this tells you as a business owner, is that you need to use every available resource to get your business in front of these potential leads. So, if you want to improve footfall into your store, then Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most valuable tools available for increased visibility. 

It helps customers find businesses related to their search query, and it provides customers with information on what services or products you offer, trading hours, location, maps and more. 

Digital marketing companies in South Africa will tell you that if you do it well, you’re guaranteed to reap measurable rewards. And, with a clearly defined content marketing strategy, which includes search engine optimisation, your efforts on Google My Business can get you the results you seek. 

So, let’s take a look at how you can use Google My Business to boost your content marketing potential.

Get the basics right

To maximise your chances at success, get the basics right first. This refers to the summary of what your business does, the services and products you offer, business hours, contact number, address, link to your website, links to your social media pages and all sources of information relevant to your business. 

Create the right type of content and optimise it

As a B2B marketing agency offering content marketing services, we cannot stress enough the importance of creating the right type and optimised content for the GMB platform. GMB allows you to experiment with a variety of content such as specials and offers, unique to your business. You can also add photos and videos in your business profile to give customers a visual preview of what they can expect when interacting with your business. According to Google, businesses that add media to their profiles receive 42 percent more requests for directions on Google Maps and 35 percent more clicks to the websites than businesses who don’t. 

And, through the reviews section on the GMB, you can learn a lot about what your customers think about your business, services and products without breaking much sweat on surveys and polls, etc. Reviews also give you an opportunity to interact with your customers by responding with words of appreciation or answering questions and fixing problems your customers bring to your attention.  

How does all of that help with SEO? 

Customers are twice as likely to consider your business reputable if it’s present on the GMB platform. That’s already an advantage to work with. If optimised correctly, your listing has a better chance of being part of the local 3-pack, which is Google’s method of displaying the top three results for local searches. 

For example, if a user searches “business to business marketing agency near me”, Google’s 3-pack will display the top three agencies near the user’s location. Your visibility on the top three search results puts your website in a better position to rank. Google My Business for SEO is crucial in this aspect as Google considers relevance, distance and prominence for local search results. The content on your GMB has to be relevant to the user’s intent, be verified in close proximity to the user and be well-known to be considered for the local 3-pack.

Get cracking with a content strategy that includes GMB

Adding GMB optimisation to your content marketing solutions will be beneficial to your business. It ensures that GMB is not a forgotten task and that it’s done in a way that will yield results. It also ensures that you have access to analytics, which tracks your progress and provides you with insight on what’s working, what’s not working and how to improve and optimise for even better results. Reach out to a performance marketing agency which offers SEO services in South Africa, like us here at Rogerwilco. We can help you optimise your Google My Business listing and basically, all of your Google My Business optimisation services.