Google my business- how to crank it up

So when you think about google as it pertains to your business the most important thing to consider is that Google doesn’t care about your business, it doesn’t have an opinion and doesn’t really know you exist, sorry nothing personal. Google is an engine, a machine, a robot, whatever you want to call it- its scale is on such a high level that it becomes difficult for the human brain to fathom.

So folks just “google it”, without any real idea how it all works.

So lets assume you have your business GMB profile set up with the basics, You’ve added business categories, hours, location(s), brand, and brief description. You publish all this info and wait a couple of days. When you do search for your own business, under the category type choices you picked when you set the profile up, you are now visible but way down the rankings.

What do you do now?

Your most important initial task,which is regrettably harder than it’s seem on the surface, is garnering favorable google reviews from existing/prior clients. The importance of positive reviews cannot be understated. Real or fake, right or wrong, this is what potential clients look for. Folks tend to have a perception that posting a review will be a hugely time intensive undertaking, which just isn’t the case. Providing a link to review your website is easy from GMB tools, and offering a review in turn to your client’s profile, sweetens the offer.

Negative reviews of course do happen. If such reviews are fake they can be challenged in your google console. The overall review score matrix (eg 4.8 from 20 reviews, or 4.9 from 15 reviews etc) is critical to rankings. To make your overall review score simple to grasp we can use an example of a recipient of 10 reviews- 9 were 5.0= 45, 1 was 1.0 for a total of 46. We divide 46 by 10 and we’ll end up with an overall review rating of 4.6.

Add 5 more 5.0 ratings will mean a total of 71 divided by 15, and so forth.

Of course the credibility of that ratings, how well they were written, whether they appear genuine of not, also plays a crucial role in your efforts. If someone puts 5 stars and doesn’t write a word (which you can do), it doesn’t hold much water. While if your business is reviewed in depth by an acknowledged google guide profile with many prior reviews and photos, it will achieve a higher level of trust from both viewers and google’s own algorithms.

In the next article of this series we’ll move on to discuss content and photo updates (hint, keep it frequent).