In 2022, Google Business Profile is probably THE most valuable tool for any local business, helping you acquire new customers, clients, and, most importantly, profit.
The problem is, many Google Business Profiles are plagued with all-too-common, significant problems.
Every day, people in your local area are searching for “[SOME BUSINESS] near me”.
Are you making it difficult for local customers to find your company when they search for it? If your company isn’t showing up for relevant search keywords, you should look at your Google Business Profile (GBP) .
The majority of GBP challenges cannot be overcome with brute force. You should start by reviewing your listing and then resolve each issue individually.
Here’s how to perform a technical GBP audit step by step.
Technical SEO Audit Items
1. Brand Dilution Diagnosis
We want to be sure that Google gives our company a particular level of recognition or credibility.
To find out what people see about your business when they search for you, do a Google search for your own company name.
- Does your company serve a Knowledge Graph?
- Do competitors or irrelevant content show up for your brand?
If a Knowledge Graph doesn’t appear for your brand inquiry and you only see irrelevant results, the following methods may help you:
- Brand Insulation. Establish and optimize authoritative profiles and social media accounts. Use schema and data aggregation tools to your advantage.
- Analyze your competitor’s Knowledge Graph and reverse-engineer it. See where they’ve established an online presence and build your company presence in the same areas.
2. Audit Your Business Address
Many local company owners fail to check the accuracy of their business addresses on different internet directories.
If you’ve ever switched locations, you may not have remembered to update your address on Google Business Profile.
To see if you have this issue, do a quick search for your business name and see what business address is listed for you.
Then update it if you need to.
You can also scan your business with our Local Reputation Analyzer. It will list any issues with your reputation, address, phone number and other business info across multiple directories.
Check Your Reputation For Free
You should also check your company pin in Google Maps to ensure that it is located within the actual city limits.
Here are some extra pointers for resolving address issues:
- Fix any missing or non-existent suites.
- Address formats should be updated.
- Change your service area expectations, if needed.
3. Overcoming the ‘Possum’ Filter
Low-quality or spammy-looking GBP listings may be removed from local search results by Google. Check to see if your company has any duplicate entries that might harm its visibility.
To verify:
- Copy and paste your company’s address into the Google Maps search field.
- Choose the “Nearby” filter.
This will show every other business that is registered at that address. Duplicate GBP listings are simple to manage when they belong to you.
While working with a big hospital chain, however, Mark and his colleagues at Local Viking ran into some challenges with practitioner listings.
They discovered that when two practitioners with similar categories have the same address, one may be screened out and receive no exposure in the area, while the other receives all of the views.
While it is not a simple issue to solve, proper categorization can help to reduce problems with practitioner listings. Creating a “filter flip” could be beneficial for a company located in major metropolitan areas with competitors in the same building.
The purpose of this strategy is to convince Google that your page is more credible than others at the same location, differentiating your firm from others through reputation.
It was a laborious process for Mark’s team, which entailed building a small outreach team for their client and performing traditional PR campaigns to increase the business’s reputation and distinguish themselves from the competition.
4. CHECK YOUR PHONE NUMBER’S HEALTH
In GBP listings, phone numbers might sometimes cause issues.
To prevent them:
- Make sure that multiple companies aren’t utilizing the same phone number.
- Assess any concerns with data consistency, business listing problems, and so forth.
To double-check the accuracy of your contact information, look for your phone number on Google using different variations.
Then, using Google’s advanced search operators, enter everything as a search query.
Our Local Reputation Analyzer checks for this across 18 top directories, as well as for potential optimization errors, bad reviews hurting your business, and more.
5. GBP Listing Audit
To improve your GBP profile, check out the following recommendations:
- Fill out your profile completely. Giving Google additional information about your company will help you appear more often in relevant searches.
- Go above and beyond with attributes, photos, Q&A, posts, reviews, and so on. This makes you stand out in the local map pack.
- Smart category optimization. Choose 4 of the most appropriate categories for your company and stick to those. Maintain as much of a niche as possible in order to get high-quality leads from your profile.
- Apply the “radii rule” to multi-location service-area businesses. When establishing your radius of service area with numerous locations in the same city, avoid overlapping with another one of your locations. These overlaps might hinder your company’s visibility.
6. Local Signals
Concentrate on important citations like Yelp and Yellow Pages, as well as certain niche directories.
Spend less work on citations and more time on high-quality local signals. There are several ways for creating hyper-relevant and geo-specific backlinks that do not use dodgy citation websites.
All right everyone, I’ve given you all a good foundation for auditing your business manually, but if you want a quicker way to audit Google, along with almost 2 dozen other directory sites at once, you can check out our Local Reputation Analyzer, which is free to try for small business owners.
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