Google My Business Local Search Ranking Factors

Having a good local ranking on Google can be the difference between your business surviving or failing in this digital day and age. People looking for the services a business provides—be it retail shopping, dining at a restaurant, or hiring someone for a particular job—by in large use a Google search engine.  To facilitate this, Google has created Google My Business and defines it as, “a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps”.

The basics of how to set up a listing for your local business, add information about your local business, verify your business, post accurate hours, respond, and manage your reviews, adding photos can be found on the Google My Business Help Page.

Here are the factors in how to improve your business ranking on Google:

RELEVANCE

As the name suggests, relevance on Google rankings has to do with how well your local listing matches what someone is searching for. So the more details you can add about your business to your company’s Google My Business with keywords and concise but accurate descriptions of what your business does, the more relevant your business will become and the better chance it will have of matching with search term keywords.

DISTANCE

Distance is how far away your business is from wherever the Google search is being made after the search matches with relevant keywords in your business description. So as long as your location for your business is accurate, the distance will be relevant to whoever is searching for your business. If you can broaden the distance in which your business operates, that may improve your local Google search capabilities as well.

PROMINENCE

Prominence has to do with how well-known a business or location is, based on how many people have searched for it in the past and also how many reviews the business has received. For example, museums or landmarks will usually come up first in search terms before businesses with similar names. However, prominence is also dictated by reviews the business has received, high-quality reviews, and articles that have been written about it. The more of these, the better prominence a local business will have in a relevant Google search. So try to add as many of these as possible, or foster their creativity.

There is no way to request or pay for a better Google ranking so that it is as fair as possible for everyone who uses their services, which is just about every business that operates online.

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