Google Business Profile is the integrated platform that replaced Google My Business. Google prioritizes its platforms and solutions.
The planet’s biggest search engine offers Google Business Profiles top billing and a more prominent spot on the SERPs. The natural priority to Google Business Profiles is a relief, but that doesn’t mean you can make a profile and abandon it for months (or years).
There’s so much more to it than updating a logo and filling your business hours.
A Google Business Profile manager takes care of all the hard work in updating and completing your profile.
What Does a Google Business Profile Manager Do?
The specifics of Google Business Profile management vary from one professional or SEO team to another. Still, here at Bruce Jones SEO, we can share with you some of the most important things we do that make our clients successful with the help of their Google Business Profiles.
Improving the Google Business Profile Name
Your name on your Google Business Profile has an impact on search results.
There’s nothing wrong with changing the business name to make it more precise and descriptive.
We had a client once who ran an immigration law firm, but “immigration law” was nowhere in their profile name.
I had to tell the owner that we had to change it to get better results.
They didn’t realize early on that the most superficial details had a significant impact on how the crawlers perceived the profile in its entirety.
As your Google Business Profile manager, we ensure that the most minor details are taken care of correctly. Sure, that makes profile management more time-consuming and resource-expending, but that’s why you signed up for it in the first place.
You want your Google Business Profile to be more competitive. Folks who were already around before the change in name (Google My Business) know there’s more to these profiles than meets the eye.
These links get prime real estate on SERPs, so Google must be extra-careful about what they present to users because they want only the best businesses to surface during searches. The more relevant and updated the Google Business Profiles, the happier the customers will be.
A Google Business Profile Manager Optimizes Your Info Tabs and Categories
Did you know that users can use up to ten different categories on their Google Business Profile listings?
You might wonder why anyone wants to use different categories on their profiles. Wouldn’t these additional categories negatively impact the search results? And the answer is no, and they won’t.
However, there’s plenty of work involved in identifying the correct categories that apply to your business.
Due to Google’s size and scope in just surfacing all the businesses that the world has to offer, its list of business categories has ballooned to the thousands.
Business owners must pick the correct categories from about four thousand categories. They must nail it because once the Google Business Profile goes live, it goes live alongside other profiles and existing competitors in the same space or niche.
I guess what we’re trying to say here is that businesses will get better results if only they prepare their Google Business Profiles properly before going live.
Now, if yours is already published but is not bringing in the expected foot traffic to your store, the phone calls, or the emails you need to bring your sales up, there’s something wrong with the profile’s setup. So, again, hiring a Google Business Profile manager is a logical solution.
Of course, it doesn’t always have to be ten categories. For example, if you have another business offering similar products or services in the exact location, you wouldn’t want to step on your toes in the process.
So, in the case of my two businesses, Bruce Jones SEO Consultant and 1on1 SEO Training (where I offer SEO coaching services and SEO training), I only use four categories for 1on1 SEO Training:
– Tutoring service
– Training school
– Private tutor
– Internet marketing service
Through time, I’ve found that these categories work best to my advantage and bring focused and interested traffic to my business on autopilot through my website’s Google Business Profile.
I didn’t conclude when we set up the profile with our in-house Google Business Profile manager.
We read through the guidelines, applied the best practices, and measured effectiveness over time. Without this period of adjustment and constant improvement, we wouldn’t have obtained the same results that we have now.
A Google Business Profile manager will also refine the location tab on your profile. For example, a business with a physical office or store would need customers to come to visit. But not all businesses function like that.
For example, no one goes to a plumber’s home to ask for help (unless it’s a neighbor nearby, I guess).
The service area optimization model kicks in if the business serves several areas. If you don’t do it right the first time, you risk Google discarding the profile because you didn’t accomplish the location/service area tabs.
Generally, a lot of SEO involves taking the time to fill in information tabs and sections correctly. It sounds simple in theory, but once you realize that there is an art (and science) to it because you’re optimizing the profile, the entire process can take many hours—and that’s just the initial setup.
Products and Services
The main aim of a Google Business Profile is to provide customers with the most accurate and comprehensive view of your business. So there’s no gap if you place your profile alongside your website. However, both need lots of TLC to work better. For example, if you’re selling products, you can add different products and offers on your profile and special promotions that customers can check out.
If your business offers different services, on the other hand, we need to address that, too. If you click on the Services tab on your Google Business Profile dashboard, you’ll see that each service that you list on your profile requires a succinct and direct description.
Google also reads each description for each service, and you can bet your last penny that Google uses these short bursts of text to evaluate whether your business is relevant and accurate enough to present to users.
Unless you’re the only business in your city offering a specific service (which is highly unlikely as Google also pulls up results from outside the city’s boundaries), you must complete and update these tabs as regularly as possible to get ahead.
A Google Business Profile manager ensures that these details are correct and updated, as they matter to the search engines.
Photos and Videos
Having a professional Google Business Profile manager also means having an expert look over your current set of images and videos, making suggestions as to what you can post, and then posting them for you. So while you may be tempted to upload a hundred images to your profile “and be done with it,” that doesn’t send the right signals to search engines and customers.
Images on your Google Business Profile will display the posting date of your media items. If you upload everything at once, those images will be largely outdated in a couple of weeks. Now compare this scenario with a trickle of images and videos daily or weekly.
Your Google Business Profile will look fresh and constantly updated, and customers will have new material to look at whenever they visit your profile.
Adding images and video is a necessity and not an option. The internet is a predominantly visual landscape, and people expect profiles like yours to have a rich collection of images and videos (and posts, too!)
I see images and videos as valuable, and not having a professional service handling the updates means your business is missing out on innumerable opportunities to engage your target audience. Lost engagements online translate to lost leads or sales. Indeed, no business wants this.
Reputation Management: Responding to Customer Reviews
Another critical task of every Google Business Profile manager is managing your online reviews and responding to them.
Customer feedback has always been important to the business. Still, they become critical because everyone can see your Google Business Profile reviews. Resolving issues and responding to negative and positive feedback shows people that you care about people. You’re not just there to run a business.
Responding to positive reviews is a little-known tactic to generate more sales and leads. Why? Because you don’t want to give people the wrong impression when they give your business praise. Responding to each review shows people that you give equal importance to each piece of feedback, good and evil, and that you’re there as part of the community.
Creating a sense of community is super important for online platforms because people naturally gravitate to businesses that highly value their customers. Everyone wants to feel cared for, and to a Google Business Profile manager, responding to queries and reviews is just part of their daily tasks.
Creating, Scheduling, and Publishing Posts
You can use your Google Business Profile as a hybrid channel for your website’s content. While it can’t replace your website, all your images, videos, news updates, blogs, product updates, service descriptions, and new pages can all be presented to customers immediately through the featured posts on your profile.
A Google Business Profile manager performs several functions related to creating, scheduling, and publishing posts on your Google Business Profile:
- Determining the right pages to link to. You can link to different pages on each post on your profile and add an excellent CTA (a button) that also leads to another page.
- Writing the copy for each post and maybe adding a photo if the linked pages don’t have lovely photos.
- Scheduling the posts ahead of time, so there will be a trickle feed of posts, keeping the profile fresh and updated throughout the month.
- Check if the posts are appropriately published and look right for your customers.
Combined, these “small tasks” comprise a full-time project requiring multiple staff members to work on a single profile over months consistently.
Suppose you plan to perform the optimizations in-house while maintaining website quality and generating content and other promotional campaigns. In that case, you will undoubtedly need the help of a small team of highly skilled staff working with you to attain the same quality and consistency.
Summary
A Google Business Profile manager enhances your online presence by improving the content of all your categories and information tabs. They help update your profile to keep the multimedia assets and other content fresh, updated, and, most importantly, accurate to facilitate customer engagement and increase leads and sales.
The work of a Google Business Profile manager follows a general framework and processes. Still, the workflow and content will follow the business’s aims and the business owner’s needs at specific periods of the year.
By working closely with your Google Business Profile manager, you can make your Google Business Profile more competitive and attractive to your customers. In addition, Google will naturally give these profiles top billing and prime real estate on SERPs because Google Business Profiles are part of the company’s products.
Profile management is more effective if you have a manager for each location your business serves, and all those profiles are regularly updated with specific content for each location. The more specific and helpful the content for each location, the better the results because people would want to read content about their city or state instead of information, promotions, and offers for other areas.
While business owners can update their profiles, the ongoing work is often time-consuming. It is better handed over to a specialist manager who already knows how to optimize the update process. The manager will also know which parts of the profile need work, and the improvements will accumulate over time.
