How to Promote Your Google Business Profile and Rank Number One Against the Competition

As a business owner, it's natural to want to promote your services and reach a clearly defined audience. Interested parties take various approaches, considering keyword usage, competition, or a possible position within the local market. But positioning a business has to start somewhere. A stable and easily accessible starting point is setting up a Google Business Profile and consistently keeping it optimized.

Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free tool available to everyone, and it makes it much easier to present basic information about your brand. This can include opening hours, phone number, address, product photos, or customer reviews. Setting up a profile on GBP is simple and intuitive and doesn't require having your own website. Filling out the profile as thoroughly as possible brings the greatest benefits, including a marked location on Google Maps.

A Google profile is a very important element in promoting a business, but it can't be positioned on its own. Creating a business profile is a foundation and a tool that, with proper optimization and regular updates, improves website traffic or redirects customers to an online or physical point of sale.

What is local SEO?

Unlike general promotion through media such as Google Ads, local SEO focuses primarily on reaching interested audiences within a specific location. This approach has huge potential. These are activities aimed at positioning a business as high as possible in the search results of users and potential customers in the area.

Local SEO is an opportunity for small business owners or businesses just starting out. Standing out in a smaller, local market feels intuitively a bit easier - and in reality, it is. This comes not only from having less competition, but also from how the algorithm behaves in the broader, general search engine.

Regional promotion - why is it worth it?

By setting up a GBP profile, you start building your business's image and secure a presence for your location on Google Maps, which is key for regional promotion. Nearly half of all Google searches are tied to local queries, and over 80% of users pay attention to a business's address and location, checking it through the Maps app.

Relatively few established business owners bother trying their hand at local promotion, which means the number of competitors in a given local market can be much smaller - and, as a result, so is the number of results shown in users' searches.

From a user's perspective, local SEO shows up mainly in everyday situations, relevant to both residents and visitors alike. To find a business, service, or location we're interested in, we type it into the search engine, and the results we see depend on the distance between us and the place we're looking for. Adding an address to a business profile improves its visibility online, putting it within easy reach of potential customers.

What affects a business's ranking?

Local SEO starts the moment you create a business profile. An attractive appearance, complete information, and clear, easy-to-reach contact details form the essential foundation. These are all changes to a listing that, once properly tailored to the subject and format you want to convey, improve a business's ranking.

Regional promotion also means taking action beyond a single platform. This includes external linking - placing links back to your site on various websites, such as local forums, topical pages, or city and municipal sites. This way, your site shows up across many sources at once.

When spreading links that point back to your site, it's worth paying attention to the consistency of the information you share. Building a reliable business image comes down mainly to honesty and consistency in what you say, which plays a major role when it comes to customer contact. User reviews matter enormously for building your business image, and misleading a customer with a careless, incorrect phone number can result in an immediate end to a potential partnership.

User reviews vs. local SEO

Having a Google Business Profile - and, by extension, a pin on Google Maps - automatically puts you into the ranking generated by the search engine. What's up for debate, though, is the order in which the results are shown. What determines this ranking?

According to Google's own information, Maps search results relate to how popular a given place is. That said, how long a business has been operating and customer reviews matter too.

User reviews aren't just an element of a business profile. The average score drawn from them is a significant ranking factor. It's worth paying attention, though, to how that average is calculated. The system checks not just the number of reviews, but also their quality, understood as the number of stars given, the length of the review, or the use of relevant keywords by reviewers. A business with more reviews and a slightly lower average will perform better than a page with a flawless average drawn from just five reviews.

Feedback has a real impact on SEO, which is why actively seeking it from customers is a worthwhile effort. Politely encouraging customers to share their thoughts as a way of thanking them for the service they received will always pay off.

Local SEO - hit or miss?

Positioning a Google Business Profile is a complex, long-term process that requires ongoing updates, new ideas, applied strategy, and constant analysis. That said, it's undeniably easier to stand out competing against a few businesses in a local market than to try starting from scratch across a much larger area.

Local SEO is a solid starting point for smaller or newer businesses. It's worth noting, though, that only consistently maintained effort will get you the results you want and keep your page performing well over the long term.

Google Business Profile with Sixteractive

A Google Business Profile is a simple way to kick off marketing efforts for your business. If you want a complete, compelling profile - get in touch with us. We'll help you make your mark online!