The Stained White Hatter’s Guide to Google My Business Optimization

I was originally going to make this a case study then decided against it because it’s a no brainer that if implemented, these tactics will increase your rankings. Not just some of the time, pretty much 100% of the time.

Some of this stuff will be pretty simple and many of you will know it, but there may be some hidden gems in here for you.

What you will learn:

• How to stain your little white hat with absolutely no risk
• What every GMB listing needs in order to rank
• Why following Google guidelines can be quite foolish
• Step by step details on how to optimize your GMB for clients or yourself
• Understanding the different types of suspensions and how to get around it

So here we go

Simply Having a GMB isn’t enough.

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of people doing client work, some of which have large billing SEO businesses but aren’t doing one of the easiest parts of local SEO.

It seems like people think that they can just create the listing with the business name, number and address and call it a day. No pictures, no business description, nothing else filled out.

That’s not good.

Compare that to Pure Dental Health in Atlanta GA:

That’s quite the difference isn’t it? You have everything filled out, business description, pictures, lots of reviews, questions and answers, etc.

There’s no reason to be lazy about it. If you or your client is a local business, chances are more people will see your GMB listing than the website itself.

Step by Step, Here is How You Optimize GMB

I won’t be giving screenshots showing how you should create your listing, it’s pretty self explanatory. The specifics of optimizing it to the fullest potential may not be that obvious though.

Here’s what we’re going to focus on:

• Business name
• Business description
• Reviews
• Pictures / Videos
• Questions and Answers
• Posts
• and more

Optimizing GMB Business Name

If you’ve been following the blog for a while then you know I’m a big fan of using keywords in the business name.

Jack’s Auto Repair, is not good enough to rank on its’ own in most cases. Why? Because Google still places a ton of weight on exact match domains for local SEO, as well as business names that include a keyword and location.

If Jack’s Auto Repair was in Houston, TX, then I would add the business name as Jack’s Auto Repair Houston.

Always add the city name to get an extra boost for location relevance.

But isn’t that against Google Guidelines?

Yes.

There’s little that Google can do about that though and as long as business names are a heavily weighted factor in local SEO, people will continue to do it.

You may want to be the most ethical person in the world, and play by the rules here. While that may feel rewarding, I promise you that Google will not be the one rewarding you.

I consider it a MUST HAVE, for every business listing to have the city they’re located in.

Couldn’t that cause my listing to be suspended?

Most likely no. The vast majority of “issues” you’ll have is when people suggest an edit, and have the city removed from the business name. 99% of the time you can simply not approve those edits, or edit the business name if it was changed.

If you are one of the very few unlucky ones that have somebody complaining in the GMB forum, sure, you could risk a suspension.

There’s 2 types of suspensions that GMB has. A soft suspension and a hard suspension.

A soft suspension is when you’re basically locked out of the GMB page, and can no longer make edits on the listing(except through suggested edits). A hard suspension is when you actually get your listing removed.

Neither of these are a big deal.

A soft suspension you can still make edits to via another account. A hard suspension removes the listing, but you can continue re-adding the listing an infinite amount of times on the same exact account. Neither will impact rankings. One a hard suspension is applied, re-adding the listing will usually bring back your rankings within a few days.

How To Avoid a Suspension Entirely

It’s actually pretty easy. GMB mods or whoever polices this stuff, will usually not suspend an account (hard or soft) for business name changes that have a city included as long as you have a picture or logo with the business name that includes the city. You don’t even have to have the logo of your website to include a city, but having it as a GMB cover photo will usually be enough.

They will not do anything about it if you’re able to convince your client to allow you to have an image with their logo, and adding the city name to it somewhere.

Ez pz right?

Related Reading: SEO in the Boonies – Marketing a Business in a Small City

Your Business Description

It’s pretty self explanatory what you do here so I won’t go too in depth.

A while back, we had no chance to add a business description. I guess Google thought they were being abused back in the days of Google places but they’re back and very few businesses are actually using them!

It’s been a while since I’ve done extensive testing on business descriptions, so it’s very possible it carries less weight nowadays than it did before.

However, you should still use keywords that targets services your business offers, along with specific mentions of the main city you’re optimizing for.

I do know of a few businesses that are ranking outside of their own city simply from mentioning those surrounding cities. Will probably only work for low competition areas, but why not do it anyway?

You have 750 characters to make a keyword loaded sales pitch. I guess it depends on the industry you’re in, but it seems to me less than 10% of listings are utilizing business descriptions, which could open up some opportunity for you.

Using Reviews for a Big Ranking Boost

On the surface, people think that the more reviews you have, the better you rank. Sure, that definitely has some correlation but it goes much more in depth than that.

I have a pretty detailed post I wrote a couple months ago that should help you understand everything you need to know when it comes to reviews and their impact on rankings.

I’m not going to explicitly tell you to fudge reviews for ranking purposes, but if you did encourage clients or customers to use keywords and specific cities in their reviews, you would see an almost immediate impact on rankings.

Consider these 2 reviews:

John was very polite and careful in his work. Would definitely recommend his company to others.

While that may be a nice vouch for John, it’s pretty ineffective other than to tell people that whoever John is, he’s a good guy. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t care about John and whether he was polite or careful in his work.

Compare that to this:

My roof was damaged after a round of storms and hail so I was looking for a roofing contractor in Dallas. I came across John’s Roofing company and was very impressed with how they handled the entire process with care. From the initial quote on roof repair, to the actual labor and clean up, he treated our home like it was his own. If you need a roofer in dallas, I highly recommend John’s Roofing.

Look at that keyword loaded review. Roof, damaged, hail, roofing contractor, dallas, roofing company, roof repair, etc. You’re essentially keyword stuffing in a very natural way that adds value to whoever is reading reviews, as well as telling Google that this business is relevant to Dallas, and all of these keywords.

5 star reviews are no longer the focus point… Helpful, optimized reviews is what will move the needle.

Related Reading: Local SEO Case Study – Sneaky Citations [Easy Trick to Bring in Rankings and Calls]

Using Pictures and Videos

Back in the day of Google places you were able to add a maximum of 10 pictures. In fact, if I remember right I think when local actually started picking up steam, it was less than that. I think I remember 5 max pictures being the limit but I may be making that up.

Nowadays, you’re not that limited. I’m not even aware of an image limit, though I’ve heard rumors of it being around 500 images.

My main observation (along with others in the industry) is that businesses with more images tend to do better than those with fewer images. 

Does that mean you should just find as many stock photos as possible and hit the maximum limit if there is one? No.

This can mean a couple things.

1. That image quantity actually plays a role and has a high correlation with pack rankings
2. That image quantity is impacted by pack rankings

Can images increase ranking?

As I said, there’s 2 possible explanations of why businesses with more images do better.

The first point was that image quantity actually plays a role in GMB rankings. I believe it does, to an extent.

For example, if we have a new GMB, in an industry where the average images are around 10 total, then it would benefit us to add more images than the average listing. That’s a no brainer. In fact, I would recommend taking the average of the 3 businesses in the pack, and shoot for more.

My second possible explanation was that image quantity is impacted by pack rankings.

That is also true, as businesses with a better position in the SERPs tend to perform better when it comes to user generated images. A business with more visibility, will have more 3rd party content than someone with less visibility.

How to use images to boost your GMB

Remember a while back when there was a lot of talk about the “freshness” of a site. How google prefers sites with updated content?

Well, it’s still true. I even see it on my blog, when the poor blog goes through months of neglect, my rankings suffer. When I make a couple new posts, rankings come back.

The same is true for GMB when it comes to images.

A guy I was consulting has a pretty large roofing company in 4 states. What we tried doing was using user generated photos from secondary accounts / local guides to regularly add images.

His daughter in law was a photographer, and she went to job sites to take pictures and took pictures of the finished job. We then used different accounts to upload the photos.

Staggering uploads to a new job site once a week, seemed to help all of their locations. It’s impossible to say how much since other things were being done, but I do believe 100% that freshness of user generated images will help with rankings.

Pro Tip: You don’t need to worry about EXIF data. There’s people that peddle those services and while it doesn’t seem to do any harm, it doesn’t do much good either. The pictures had geo coordinates in the EXIF data of the original location the picture was taken, and like I said, they had different locations in 4 different states. If EXIF data was a ranking factor for images, then data that was very far off from the original location would theoretically cause issues, but it didn’t.

2nd Pro Tip: In your GMB dashboard, click on insights and check to see if you’re doing better than “similar businesses” with your photo views as well as the amount of owner photos vs user generated photos. Staying above the average for “similar businesses” shows Google you’re embracing their technology and are ahead of the curve for your industry.

Questions and Answers Help You Rank!

It’s obvious that questions and answers about a business could help for conversions. That fact alone should convince people to utilize this feature.

But there’s more that can be done.

There’s roughly 100 different terms I track for local SEO, very competitive industries and cities. It’s not exactly scientific but I do find it interesting that out of those ranking in the pack, over 75% have questions that have been asked, and answers that are published.

Supposedly 25% of all listings have had a question asked, and the fact that these more competitive industries and cities have more questions and answers by a significant amount, it tells me we should think about using this GMB feature a lot more in local SEO.

How to Use Questions to Boost Rankings?

Some people recommend that a business shouldn’t ask questions on their own listing. I disagree. It makes sense to ask your own questions since you know what people will be wanting to ask, so it’s better to use the QnA sections as a sort of FAQ for your potential customers.

This means you need to answer common questions that people will have, and this doesn’t necessarily mean that it will help you rank. It does help with conversions though, and showing that your listing is “complete”.

There are types of questions that will help you rank though.

Here’s what you should consider:

• Location specific questions
• Surrounding city questions
• Secondary service questions

Location specific questions – if the business serves clients at their location, then asking questions like “which floor of the X building is their office”, “is there on street or off street parking”, “is there parking validation for X garage”, etc. are questions and answers that can help establish location relevance. You’re likely going to be unable to find a decent question that looks legitimate and allows you to stuff keywords in for the city, but if you can, go for it!

Surrounding city questions – This is usually most effective for businesses that want to target other cities outside of their GMB city. Think smaller suburbs around your city. For example, “I know John’s Roofing is in Houston, but do you do work in Sugar Land as well?” This type of question helps with surrounding cities, as well as showing relevance to John’s Roofing, in Houston.

Other questions would be like, “What is the radius you do business in? What cities do you cover?”. This gives the business owner or whoever is managing the listing, an opportunity to throw in a lot of city keywords in their answer.

Secondary service questions – This is where you ask questions about specific services. For example, not all roofing companies will do the same type of roofs. Asphalt shingles may be the most common but a lot of companies won’t do flat roofing. Asking if the company does flat roofing, would help them rank for that specific keyword and be helpful to the potential customer. Pretty much every company has a main service, but also offers secondary services to their client base. Use these services in questions as an opportunity to rank for additional keywords.

Related Reading: The State of the Industry: What are Top SEO Companies Doing?

Implementing a QnA Strategy

So how do you implement this?

It’s actually pretty easy. You can use the account you’re using for the GMB to artificially ask questions if you want, and then answer it yourself. Or, if you’re paranoid then go ahead and use a second account. It doesn’t make a difference.

Just click “Ask a question” and get started:

You’re not done yet though. Once you ask and answer questions, you’ll want to use a couple other accounts and upvote a selection of your most important questions. My rule is a minimum of 3 upvotes on everything that includes keywords and picking 2 more popular questions and give them 5 upvotes.

Doing this will make it so your genuine customer questions will appear above your keyword optimized questions.

Pretty easy to implement and the benefit is pretty big.

Use Google Posts for Indirect Ranking Benefits

A somewhat new feature for GMB is Google Posts, but the word is that they don’t produce any ranking benefit. I have an inclination to not really believe that the posts themselves have no ranking benefit but have had mixed results in some of the tests I’ve run so I have nothing conclusive to provide you there.

Google plus posts used to be indexed by the big G but these are not indexed in the same way. They simply show up in the knowledge graph or the GMB listing itself.

However, I do believe that general use of Google Posts DOES in fact help with rankings. Similar to how the “freshness” works for images added to GMB, I believe businesses that actively use Google Posts, benefit from the freshness it provides.

Going back to the 100 searches terms / locations / industries I regularly monitor for changes, 35% of the top 3 rankings in the pack are actively using Google Posts.

Here’s an example of Google posts that was shared by LunaMetrics:

I don’t really consider those posts in the example to be very effective in terms of conversions, but using Google Posts should provide some benefits either way.

Tips for Google Posts

A few things you’ll need to remember when utilizing Google Posts:

1.) Use an eye catching image. Similar to what you would do for Facebook ads, you want something that will catch attention. Using stock photos should be fine, but if you want something more customized you can always use canva.

2.) Google Posts are only live for 7 days. If you manage the GMB for a lot of clients, it can be a bit tedious to stay on top of the posts. However, you can easily outsource that specific task or you can just schedule the posts for all your clients using a tool like Sendible.

3.) Vape shops, cigar shops, alcohol, strip clubs, and other related businesses aren’t getting any love from Google with Google Posts, and have been deactivated for most of these categories. I’m not sure what’s to gain from doing that but whatever, Google will be Google.

4.) The recommended image size is 750×750 with a minimum size of 250×250.

All in all, it’s a cool feature for GMB, and those that use it see some benefit to it. The content inside the post should be created with a focus on conversions and user experience and not SEO’d. Simply using posts will help, nothing else needs to be done to give you a boost there.

Related Reading: Local Search Domination in as Little as 26 Days [Case Study]

Selling Local SEO is MORE Than Just Ranking

As you can see in this post, just GMB optimization is something that can take time, and be done on a recurring basis.

One of the most common questions people have in my coaching program is “how do I keep people paying after they’re already ranking?”. You still have to show value, whether it is convincing the client they need to keep paying you to maintain their rankings, or the more tangible route, showing that you’re actively maintaining their GMB and staying on top of things for them.

Doing local SEO can be much more than just on page optimization, citations and some links.

You can be managing Google Posts, reviews, responding to reviews, adding new images, etc. on a regular basis.

All of the stuff mentioned in this blog post, is JUST GMB! If the actions you take are this specific, this targeted with just one platform, you have the ability to show value to your clients in a wide variety of ways. Just have to think outside the box.

Final Thoughts

I know the concept of this post is pretty primitive but for some reason a lot of people aren’t utilizing everything they have available in GMB.

As the cornerstone of your local SEO efforts, I figured it would be a good place to put together a detailed guide on the different things you should be doing and optimizing.

Some of you are pretty advanced, but hopefully you find some nuggets in here that makes it worth it.

Anything you notice I missed? Any questions? Sound off in the comments below!

And a freebie! Right now Google is doing a special thing where anyone with a GMB can get a free marketing kit. The initiative is Small Thanks With Google. Limited to the 1st 10,000 submissions I guess, but it includes a poster, sign, stickers, table tent, and window cling. Claim it for free now, as it probably won’t be available for longer than a few days.