The Power of Google My Business for Manchester Local SEO
Google my Business is a free platform made by Google that acts as a virtual representation of your business. At a quick glance potential customers can see your business name, industry, reviews, location, and description. It’s not just an important addition to your business – it’s essential for local SEO. Let’s break down why that is:
Enhancing Local Visibility
With so many businesses out on the internet today – especially local businesses – it can be tough to stand out. Google my Business is one of the first things a customer will see when searching using a keyword related to your business. For example, if you are a roofer in manchester someone is likely to type:
“roofers manchester”
As of the time of writing, this is what shows up on Google:
Here we can see a quick breakdown of 3 of the top roofers in the area. Reviews, their years in business, contact info, are all visible, as well as links to their website and directions to their head offices. Below this section is where Google shows websites ranking on the 1st page.
To state the obvious – interested buyers will be seeing the Google Maps section (shown in the image above) before seeing company websites. Because of this it’s very important to try and get your website ranking on the 1st page for not just your website itself, but Google Maps too. There is an argument to be made that ranking in this top 3 ‘golden trio’ range for Local SEO for your business appears to be even more trustworthy than your website being on the 1st page – simply because of the huge amount of information shown at a glance compared to a website link, title and description (take a look at our website homepage for an example of how to lay out your title and description).
Don’t let this downplay the importance of getting your website on the 1st page of Google – 95% of people click on a website on the 1st page of Google, and if you’re not in that prized #1 spot you’re losing out on valuable leads and sales that your competition are getting instead.
Accurate Business Information
One quick win you can do to achieve higher rankings for your Google my Business page is by ensuring that your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) are all exactly the same, with the exact same formatting. For example, if your phone number is:
07654 123456
Then you would want to write this in exactly the same format on your Google my business. Not with any extra spacing – just exactly the same. The same goes with your business address and name. This makes it as easy as possible for Google to understand that your business is linked with certain websites, directories, and listings.
Customer Reviews & Reputation Management
One of the most powerful elements of your Google my Business is reviews. Take a look at this picture…
What do all of these top ranking businesses have in common?
They’re all high in reviews! In fact, Google even posts a small snippet of a recent Google review to many of the companies.
Think about this from the customers perspective – they see many companies, all in the area they’re looking to do business in, all offering the same service. What makes you stand out among the rest?
In my opinion, there are 2 key components:
- Reputation (Reviews)
- Branding (Website)
While we would recommend reviews are included on your website, reviews being displayed on your Google my Business page serve as an excellent “in” to get potential customers to click on your website and explore more about your business.
As we just saw in the last image, often with Local SEO yourself and your competitors will have a similar level of excellent testimonials, all with high rankings. When you’re in this (desirable) situation, often just one, single factor will mean the difference between getting a lifelong paying happy customer or losing the opportunity – your website.
This is one of the reasons why having a website not just ranking, but having a high quality website design that proudly shows your business while standing out from the competition is so important. Take a look at our Web Design Case Study to find out more about what the right website design can do to boost an existing business.
