Google Business Profile Optimization & Management

A Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly known as a Google My Business listing, is a free online listing profile provided by Google that allows local businesses to create a prominent online presence, to help local consumers find them. It provides essential information about a business—such as its name, address, phone number, website, hours of operation, and customer reviews.

When a consumer searches for a specific business or related keywords on Google Search or Google Maps, the Business Profile appears within the Google “Map Pack” within the search results. Business owners can claim and manage their Google Business Profile to ensure accurate and up-to-date information—and they should! Google also allows business owners to interact with customers by responding to reviews, sharing posts/updates, and adding photos or videos to showcase their products and/or services. The profile provides valuable visibility to businesses and helps them effectively connect with local consumers.

Google Business Profiles are particularly beneficial for local businesses, such as contractors and other local service businesses—even if they do not have a brick and mortar location that customers visit. Optimizing and maintaining your GBP can help increase your online presence and make it easier for customers to discover your business, and has even shown to positively impact a business’s search engine visibility and local search rankings.

Yes, a complete, well-maintained, and optimized Google Business Profile can significantly improve your local SEO rankings. That is why it is important to meticulously maintain your GBP and drive good reviews to your profile on a constant basis. If you’d like to fill the holes in your local-online presence, you should also employ an efficient citation aggregation and listing management strategy.

To create a Google Business Profile…

1. Visit the Google My Business website and click the “Manage Now” button. You will then need to sign in (or create a Google Account)
2. If you already have a Google Account, sign in using your credentials. If not, click on the “Sign In” button and then select “Create account” to create a new Google Account.
3. Enter your business name into the search field. If your business name appears in the suggestions, select it. If not, click on “Add your business to Google” and enter your business name.
4. Complete the following steps the select your business category, service location(s), contact information, etc.
5. Google may require you to verify your business by mailing a verification code to your listed physical address. This is to ensure that you are not location-spamming for higher local SEO rankings.
6. Optimize your profile to add additional information such as, business hours, photos, videos, products, services, business description, posts/updates, and more.

To optimize your Google Business Profile, ensure all of the contact information is complete and consistent with that shown on your website and across other online business profile listings across the internet. You should also add your hours of operation, photography of past projects, videos (if possible), contracting services you offer, an informative business summary, business posts/updates, and more. To improve the impression, traffic, calls, and clicks generated from your GBP profile, it is critical to employ a review generation strategy.

You will need to leverage an online Google Business Profile auditing tool, such as we use with BrightLocal, in order to conduct a thorough audit of your GBP profile.

Getting started with our Google Business Profile optimization and management services is easy! Once you come aboard, we will simply give you instructions to add a member of our team as an administrator on your GBP Profile. Once we have access, we will start with a GBP listing & SEO audit, then move to profile repair, optimization, daily monitoring, data-collection, and updates/maintenance.

Google Business Profile is the new name given to what was formerly known as Google My Business. While there have been updates since the name change, both names effectively refer to the same platform.