The New Year is here, and if you, like many others, have set a New Year’s resolution to grow your business, there is no time better than the beginning of the year to get started. One key way to help people searching for you find you, is with your business listings. You can’t be found if you aren’t where people are searching or inaccurate information is being displayed. Today we are going to specifically review one search engine’s business listing tool and dig into why it is important to claim your Google Business Profile.
What are Business Listings?
We have reviewed business listings and how they can help you market your local business in the past, but in case you need a refresher, we have got you covered. To put this simply, business listings are an online summary of fundamental information about your business. Here people can find your business name, address, phone number, website, hours, maybe locate your business on a map, and more. This information is what is used by customers to find you online and in real life.
Business listing management has become a key component to local businesses not only being found, but being discovered by the right audience and telling the proper story. The foundation of successful local marketing is clean data and accurate listings. Businesses lose a huge amount of local business every year due to inaccurate online listings (Marketing Land).
Search engines have become the yellow pages of our present, and people are looking for your business every day. If your information is missing, incomplete, or inaccurate, you are likely to lose business and customers’ interest.
What is Google Business Profile?
In today’s world, we certainly don’t need to tell you what Google is. Whether it is your preferred search engine or not, Google accounts for over 85% of the global search market, hence why it’s valuable for us to look further into this particular search engine’s business listing option and review why it’s important to claim your Google Business Profile. If you have never heard of Google Business Profile, that’s because it used to be Google my Business, and has recently had a name change.
What is Google Business Profile? We took the words directly from the source, here’s how Google describes it. Google Business Profile is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. To help customers find your business, and to tell them your story, you can verify your business and edit your business information.
Google Business Profile, like other search engines’ business listing tools, allows a company to increase awareness for their business and help customers and potential customers find them.
Why is it Important to Claim Your Google Business Profile?
Now that you hopefully have a better understanding of business listings, specifically Google Business Profile, we are going to review why claiming your Google Business Profile is so important for your business.
- Stay in Control of What Is Displayed: If you don’t claim your listing, Google will try to provide the best information available to searchers about your business. This information is not always correct and the wrong phone number, address, hours, website, etc. may be displayed. Imagine having a customer try to show up at your business and they end up at the wrong location. By claiming your Google Business Profile, you can verify, edit, and maintain all of the information displayed about your business.
- Customer Interaction: With Google Business Profile you can read and respond to reviews from your customers. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (Search Engine Land), so it’s important to gather and respond to business reviews. Post photos that show off what you do. Businesses that add photos to their Business Profiles receive 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps, and 35% more clicks-through to their websites than businesses who don’t (Google).
- Gain Insights and Grow Your Online Presence: By claiming and managing your Google Business Profile you can gain insights into how customers search for your business and where they are coming from. When you claim your Google Business Profile you also can increase your SEO. As we have reviewed before, over 50% of all website traffic comes from organic search (SEO), so SEO this is key to growing your business and online presence.
It is important to claim your Google Business Profile. Water Bear Marketing can help. We can handle your business listing management for you, all while focusing on surpassing your lead goals by Advertising With Intelligence®, instead of fixating on click costs, a click-through rate, or other industry jargon.
Contact us today to get started with a free advertising consultation. During the consultation we will review what has and has not been successful for your business in the past, discuss what products you are interested in, and review a recommended budget.