Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business page is an effective way to smash your local SEO, drive more traffic to your website, and ultimately dominate in your local community. However, making one wrong move could result in your page getting suspended – which is not ideal.
In this article, we’re going to show you how to avoid some of the most common mistakes so that you can keep your page above board and operating as intended. Here’s what you need to look out for.
1. Make sure your business name is 100% correct
This mistake is far more common than you might imagine; registering the wrong business name. The fact is, Google My Business is all about providing a service to the users who are actively looking for businesses in their local area and as such, the information provided has to be accurate. Unless your GMB profile has a business name that perfectly matches your registered business name, you could get into trouble.
Make life easy for yourself and go through your website, socials, directories, and GMB profile, and ensure that your business name is 100% consistent across them all.
2. Don’t list your business in more than one location (unless you have multiple offices)
There’s a big difference between selecting the surrounding areas and cities as a service area and listing yourself as being present in those physical locations.
Do not list your business in more than one location unless you genuinely have multiple offices. (e.g., a Miami SEO company can effectively service nationwide, but they must only register themselves at their physical locations when using GMB).
You can easily register your business as a service in the various areas that you can accommodate. Make sure you do it right.
3. Don’t buy fake reviews or incentivize customers
Offering customers 10% off their order if they promise to leave a 5* review might seem harmless enough, but it will get your GMB suspended.
Encourage customers to leave feedback by all means; however, if you are incentivizing them – or indeed buying fake reviews (which is almost as bad as buying Instagram followers) – then it will catch up with you.
4. Using photos or videos that do not belong to you
Unless you are taking stock photos from websites like Shutterstock or Canva Pro that are registered as copy-write-free, there’s a good chance you are stealing from someone else.
Just because there are images shared on Google, it doesn’t mean you can save them, edit them, and pass them off as your own.
Either take unique photos of your own, hire a graphic designer to create your own visual content, or use the appropriate stock-photo websites.
Failing to check can result in Google penalizing you and ultimately shutting your GMB down for plagiarism.
The same applies to your written content as well!
5. Don’t keyword stuff
Keyword stuffing is one of the biggest no’s in digital marketing, and yet so many people insist on doing it to this day.
Yes, add your keywords to your titles and content; however, do so naturally. It’s better to have one or two mentions than to feel obligated to hit a certain ‘quota’ and then force them in, making the content read unnaturally.
Google does not approve – and neither do your readers!
Conclusion
The key to keeping your GMB profile up and running is quite simply authenticity. Be true to your brand, register your NAP details accordingly, make sure that everything is consistent across all digital platforms, share unique content that you own outright, and you shouldn’t run into too many issues!
