The free marketing tool, Google My Business, gives your business a sense of credibility when your existing or potential customers search for you on Google. This feature ensures that your business name with all its details such as location, opening hours, website, photos, customers reviews, your business social media profiles and much more appears in the right-hand side of the search engine.
Don’t worry if you’re in a business that doesn’t require customers to visit your location, you can still create your business profile on Google’s listing. Google My Business allows you to hide your exact location on the map if your business address is the same as your home address. Google does, however, need to verify your location and your ownership in order to add a business onto its listing. This means you must provide them with the exact address of your business and they will send you a code via post or email for verification. Upon receiving the code, you need to enter that to your Google My Business account to complete setting up the profile.
As noted above, your business social media profiles from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc can be added to your Google My Business. To do this, you need to add a script for each of those profiles to the back end of your website. Remember to connect your business profile to your website so that scripts can do their job. If WordPress is your website hosting platform, this step by step guide will help you integrate the two accounts – if you have already set up your Google My Business Profile before this integration, you may see different Call-to-Action buttons from what’s in the guide.
Certain business categories can benefit from specific features available on Google My Business. For example, bars and restaurants can have links for online reservations, orders and even menus added to their business profile. There are also options available for adding events information or special offers to your profile, depending on the type of business you’re in.
And finally, something exciting for those who love details and numbers. There is an Insights section on Google My Business that provides data concerning visits to your business profile. For example, you could learn how customers searched for your business, what queries they searched to find your business, what actions they took on visiting your business and much more! If you integrated your WordPress website with your Google My Business profile, all these stats would be available in your website dashboard too.
We hope you found this article helpful. If interested in setting up your business profile on Google My Business, here is where you can get started.