Of course every business wants to rank as high as possible on Google but what exactly affects your ranking? There are so many pieces of your Google My Business and it can be hard to perfect each piece while also working on your business. However, according to Moz not every Google My Business field will actually affect your ranking. So which ones will actually affect your ranking? Well let’s take a look at a few important fields to focus on. 

1. BUSINESS NAME

This field may seem pretty self explanatory, but it can also be one of the most hindering. Unfortunately there is not always much you can do to help your business when it comes to this field, especially if you have already created and named your business. This is because when naming your business you probably did not focus on keywords and so your name is not going to help your ranking as much. Now if you are just now starting a company it can be good to keep this field in mind to try and find a name that not only has the right style that you want but also can help with rankings. 

This field does have a decently big weight when it comes to ranking but that does not mean you should try to fill your business name with as many keywords as you can. In fact this is actually against the rules when it comes to Google (on the other hand this is allowed on Bing). With this being said the fact that this is against the rules is where you can do something for your ranking. Keep an eye on your competitors. If you see that they have started trying to up their ranking by messing with their Business Name field you can actually file a complaint to Google using the Google business complaint redressal. 

2. REVIEWS

Everyone wants their customers to give them a good review and these reviews can actually help your ranking. Of course you want your reviews to be good reviews so that others will trust your company; however, you also want to make sure you focus on the quantity of reviews that you get. This is because the amount of reviews you get is what affects your ranking the most. However, according to Moz, reviews actually have a “diminishing return.” This means that if your business goes from 1 or 2 reviews to 20 or 30 reviews you may see a substantial jump in your ranking, but if you go from 40 or 50 reviews to 70 or so reviews your ranking will not jump as much. Because of this gathering reviews is most helpful when you are first starting out when it comes to ranking. With that being said, positive customer reviews are always a good thing in other ways. If you want to learn more about how to gather more 5 star reviews make sure to check out our previous blog post

3. CATEGORIES

This field probably seems like it will be the easiest to perfect because all you have to do is go in and choose the categories that represent your company the best and you get to choose 10. The difficult part about this though is that even though you can choose 10 categories Google provides close to 4000 to choose from. This means that in order to choose the best ones you will most likely need to take the time to go through a bunch of listed categories and narrow it down to 10. The other part that makes this field more complex than it seems is the fact that those 4000 provided categories change a lot. They actually tend to change month to month. This means that new categories are added regularly and some are even taken away. It is going to be best to keep up with these changes as much as you can in order to make sure your chosen 10 are still the most relevant for your business (and make sure none of them are ones that have been removed)

BONUS: WEBSITE

One of the fields that affects ranking is your linked website. Many people assume they need to just link to their homepage and this does work a lot of times. However, this field is something you should test and play around with until you have it down pat. This is because sometimes linking to different pages on your website will improve your ranking more than just linking to your homepage. Another possible page to use is your locations page if your business covers more than one location. Or if you have multiple departments in your company you can link to the page on your website that lists them. There is not a definitive answer for which page does the best for all companies so this is something you will want to test out. Try linking to different pages on your website and see how it affects your ranking. This may also be something that changes if you add on to your website in the future. 

CONCLUSION

When it comes to your Google My Business page it may be overwhelming trying to figure out what to do in order to rank as high as possible. There are many different fields and you may feel as though you need to perfect all of them in order to rank. However, the fields you should focus the most on are your business name (mostly watching competitors), your customer reviews, chosen categories, and your linked website page. This blog post is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ranking on Google. Unfortunately we can not just give a detailed list of everything you need to do because it tends to be custom for each company. If you feel that you need help with your ranking, Spotlight Revenue is here to help. Let us take the guesswork out of your ranking while you focus on doing what you got into business to do.