A strong Google My Business listing is a crucial part of your local SEO strategy. Without one, you’ll really struggle to be found in Google’s Map pack. Your organic rankings may also take a hit, too.

What position and how often you show up in Google’s Map results depends on several things, including relevance to the search, distance from the searcher, and the quality of your profile. That means if you don’t have a complete and well optimized GMB Profile, there’s a good chance you won’t appear at all.

Optimizing your Google My Business profile needn’t be complicated, however. Here are some simple steps to get you started.

1. Claim your profile if you haven’t already

You can only optimize a GMB profile if you have one in the first place. If you haven’t claimed your business’ profile yet, get started by visiting google.com.business, claiming your page and verifying your account. Once it’s claimed you can move on with optimization. If your business is brand new, you might not have a listing to claim. In that case, you’ll need to create one first. Don’t worry, it can be completed in a couple of minutes.

2. Fill in all your profile information

The more information you give to Google, the likelier it is it will show your business in search results. That’s because it will be able to understand exactly what your business does, where it does it and how good you are at it.

You’ll need to fill in everything including:

• Your business name
• Address
• Category (what type of business you are)
• Opening hours
• Phone number
• Your website
• Your attributes (other services you offer to customers such as WiFi or outdoor seating

3. Add photos and possible a virtual tour

You’re going to want to upload high-quality photos of the outside and the inside of your business so that potential customers can get an idea of what you’re like. Make sure to include images of your logo, your products and your service. Customers can add their own images to your business, but it’s good to use this as an opportunity to properly brand your profile.

If you want to go one step further, you can hire a Google-certified photographer to take photos and use them to create a 360-degree virtual tour. Google says that business with virtual tours generate twice as much interest as those who don’t.

4. Get as many high reviews as possible

Reviews are one of the biggest local ranking factors. Not only do large numbers of positive reviews improve your business’ reputation and encourage searchers to choose your establishment over a competitor, they can also help you show up more often in searches, too.

Some customers will leave reviews on their own accord, but most customers will need a little nudge. Don’t be afraid to ask customers for a review. Make it as easy as possible to leave a review, too, by generating a link and emailing it to all previous customers.

When customers do leave reviews, make sure you respond to them regardless of whether they are good or bad.

If you complete every step on this list, you’ll be well on your way to having an exceptional Google My Business profile and increasing your local digital presence.

Pay per click marketing (or PPC for short) is a method of advertising on search engines. Rather than try to rank organically in Google’s search results, you pay for the ads that appear at the top of the results. What’s different about PPC compared to other online advertising methods is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad (hence the “per click” in the name).

It can be a great way of getting customers to visit your website without going through the hard work of getting your website to rank organically. This makes it particularly enticing for new websites who will struggle to rank organically anyway.

But it can also be expensive. If you have a high CPC (cost per click) you could be paying north of $10 every time someone clicks on your ad. And you have to pay regardless of whether they become a customer or not. Knowing whether you should invest in PPC ads is tricky, but here we’ll give you all the details you need to know.

How to PPC ads even work?

Let’s get things started by looking at how PPC ads work. Compared to explaining how Google ranks websites in its organic listings, this is relatively straightforward.

Once start by creating your ads in your Google AdWords account. You’ll need to write a title, a description and include a link to the page you want to send users to when they click. You’ll also need to choose the keywords that your ads will appear for and set a budget.

Once you’ve created your ads and Google has approved them, they will start showing in Google. You’ll notice that there are normally several ads that show in Google for every search. Google decides which ad goes where based on a number of factors.

These include:

• The quality score: This is a score out of 10 that works out how good your ad is. It is based on the relevance of your ad to the search term, the quality of your landing page, and the CTR of your ad. The better your quality score, the higher your ad will show.
• Ad extensions: you can add extensions to your add such as a link to your website, a call out or the option to call your business at the touch of a button. Extensions make your ad look better, so if you can add one, Google will usually give your ad preference.  

What are the benefits of PPC?

There are several benefits to PPC that business owners should know about.

The first is that you can see much faster results with PPC ads than you can with SEO. It can take months to get onto the first page of Google, whereas PPC ads can put you there in minutes. You’ll also know how many people you are likely to drive to your website to based on the CPC and your budget.

You also only pay when someone clicks on your ad. That means it doesn’t matter if thousands of people see your ad in Google but never click, you’ll only be charged when someone actually does.

Google also gives business owners a huge amount of control over their ad spend. They can set strict budgets on how much they want to spend in total, on each click, and when they want their ads to stop running.

Of course, PPC isn’t perfect. You’ll need to keep investing in PPC if you want to see continuous results. Unlike SEO, the traffic dries up as soon as you stop paying Google to show your ads.

Local SEO has become much more complicated and much more competitive than it once was. There are now almost as many local SEO ranking factors as there are organic ranking factors. Spamming a load of citations isn’t enough to rank at the top of local results anymore.

That’s why this guide is going to set out exactly what you need to do to get to the top of Google in 2019.

Make sure your address is in a relevant location

This might be harder for some businesses than it is for others. But the closer your address is to the center of the town or city mentioned in the search, the more likely your business is to appear. This also means it’s impossible for a business to rank in the local results of a city it isn’t based in.

Get your Google My Business profile sorted

It’s crucial that you have a fully completed and verified Google My Business profile if you want to rank successfully in Local SEO results. The good news is that it’s easy to optimize and fill out. Make sure to include everything that your customers could ask for, such as opening hours, photos, a phone number, and your menu if you’re a restaurant. You’ll also need to select the most relevant categories for your business.

Create and optimize your citations

While citations alone won’t get you to the top of Google local results, they still play an important role. You’ll need to make sure your business is listed accurately on all of the biggest and most relevant directories. But you’ll also need to make sure any existing citations you have are accurate. Go through everything with a fine toothcomb to make sure your business’ name, address and phone number are exactly the same on every single listing.

Optimize your website for local search results

Yes, you still need to do on-page SEO if you want to rank in Google’s map pack. Make sure your locations are included in page titles, meta descriptions, heading tags, and your website’s copy. Your phone number should also be listed along with your address.

Get more great reviews

Getting more reviews is the single most impactful thing you can do to improve your business’ local SEO. You don’t need to go out and spam your customers’ inboxes begging for reviews, however. It’s much more effective to take things slow and focus on getting one good review a month. After a few months, you’ll have a bank of great reviews that can boost your ranking. Don’t just ask for Google reviews, either. Yelp, Tripadvisor and other review websites can also factor into your ranking.

Make your site faster

Google is placing more and more importance on site speed. So the quicker your site loads, the more likely you are to rank. It will also improve the user experience of your customers and make them much more likely to stay on your website when they land on it.  

Long tail keywords are a great way to ensure that your website gets some traffic from Google. These are very specific phrases, usually containing several words, that get less traffic than broader search terms. But because they are more specific, it is often easier to rank for them and conversion rates are higher.

Here’s how your website can profit off longtail keywords.

Long tail keywords explained

Long tail keywords are both much more specific, longer, and less searched than other keywords. Because the internet is so big and used by so many people, you will almost always be able to find a few hundred people searching for the most specific of phrases. And if you can give them content related to their very specific search, they are much more likely to convert that they would if they searched a broader keyword or phrase.

It all starts with a main topic

The vast majority of websites will have one major topic or theme. This could be a type of food, a specific service, or a product. Whatever that main theme is, that will be the main keyword or phrase for your blog.

Long tail topics come off the main theme

You’ll quickly run into trouble if you try to optimize every page on your website for your main topic or theme, however. That’s where the long tail comes in. Every other page on your website should be focused on a long tail variant of your main search term.

Let’s say your main search term was “lawyers in Phoenix”. If you had a post about criminal defense, the long tail search term would be “criminal defense lawyer in Phoenix”. But you could get even more specific still. A long tail phrase might be “what does the court process look like for divorce” or “how can I sue after I’ve had a fall”.

Why the long tail is important

The simple answer is that it is much easier to rank for longtail keyword phrases than it is to rank for broader, more widely searched terms. That’s because there are fewer websites to compete with. There’s also no shortage of search terms for your business to rank for, either. It’s much better to rank for dozens of long tail keywords than it is to try and rank for one single broad topic.

The other benefit of these search terms is that searchers are much more likely to buy from you. When searchers start looking for more detailed information, it is usually a sign that they are ready to buy and are looking for the exact thing they want. If you can deliver that for them, you have a high chance of making a sale.

Make sure you are creating great content

Focusing on long tail keywords is a fantastic SEO strategy. But it only works if you are also creating great content to go with those keywords. The better the content, the more likely you are to rank and the more likely you are to convert your customers. So get writing!

Cornerstone articles are the most important, topical and relevant pieces on your site. These are the pieces that you really want to rank high in Google and the ones that will bring in the most traffic if you do. Unfortunately, they are almost always focused on the most competitive keywords. So how the heck do you get them to rank?

In this post, we’re going to let you know everything you need to do rank with your cornerstone content.

Step 1: Create kick-ass content

The first step in ranking with cornerstone content is to make sure your cornerstone content is the best it can possibly be. It needs to exceptional in every way possible. That means it needs to have a great headline, it needs to be really well optimized for your target keyword, it needs to be long, it needs to have great images, it needs to be grammatically correct and it needs to be incredibly valuable.

And because this is going to be one of the most visited websites on your site, it should also have a great call to action or link to a sales page

Step 2: Focus on the right keyword

You’ll want to target the most competitive terms you possibly can with your cornerstone content. That’s not to say you should be unrealistic, but if you think there’s even a slight chance you could rank for the topic then you should. Within the content, you should also target other long tail versions of this main keyword. This will make your article as rich and topical as possible and ensure that it ranks for as many keywords as possible.

Step 3: Start building internal links

Internal links will be crucial to the success of your cornerstone content. Your site structure needs to be excellent if you want these major pieces of content to rank. What you might not know is that Google considers the pages of your site with the most internal links point to them as the most important pieces of content. That means you need to go through your existing articles and link back to your cornerstone content in every relevant place. When linking back to your content, you’ll want to use a mix of anchor tags. Some should contain the keyword that you want to rank for, others should simply say “click here” or something similarly generic.

Step 4: Promote your cornerstone content

If you have followed the steps this far, you should have an excellent piece of content that is well optimized and that you are happy to show off. This is important because the final step is to promote this content and ask for links from other website owners. You’re going to get rejected a lot here, but that’s okay. Getting just a dozen links can be enough to get your content ranking. And the better it ranks, the more links it will gain over time. This is the most important step of the entire process, so make sure to give promotion the attention it deserves.