4 Significant Google My Business Fields That Impact Your SERP Ranking

When you create your Google My Business (GMB) profile, you have so many incredible features to customize your GMB profile. Of course, sometimes it may be hard to decide what to focus on. But when it comes to GMB SEO ( aka Local SEO ), there are mainly four Google My Business factors that influence where your business will land on SERP results.

Today, in this post I will walk you through the four GMB fields that impact your SERP rankings.

1)?? Business Name

First, I'm going to talk about the GMB field that has a significant impact on your SERP ranking which is the Business Name. In my experience, the business name has the most weight. Certainly, you think like, as a business owner, you can't really change your business name that easily. But, if your competitors are taking advantage of putting up a keyword-rich business name, then you can able to submit corrections to Google because it's against Google guidelines. However, I'm not saying to add a whole bunch of keywords to your business name on Google. Never do that. 

At the same time, you should keep an eye on your competitors and watch whether they're doing like that, and if they're doing so you can report it to Google by using the Google business complaint redressal form. On the other hand, Bing allowed to have descriptors in your business name, so, on bing, you can take the advantage of that.

2)?? Categories

Categories are the second GMB field that influences your SERP ranking. You may think categories are simple as you choose your categories. But remember you're choosing 10 categories out of 4,000 categories, also Google keep adding and removing their categories. On average, every month there are about 2 to 10 changes that happen to the categories.

Sometimes they add new ones. For example, last year there have been a lot of categories added for the restaurant as well as categories for the auto dealer and a couple of months ago a new category was added for dental implants. So it's important to keep a track of changes happening in the Categories.

3) ?? Website

The website field would be number three. So this is something important that you need to determine, identify what webpage on your business website you want to link to your Google My Business listing. Most people link to the homepage, that's fine. But if you're running a multi-location business, it's better to link to a location page.

If you're a business that has various listings like departments or practitioner listings and you want to link those to different web pages on your website to maximize your exposure and reach, just ensure that you're not trying to rank all the listings for the exact same thing because that never happens. Simply they'll get filtered. So, I would suggest you experiment with your options and get to know what works best for you and your industry.

4)?? Reviews

The fourth GMB field reviews. The quantity of the reviews has an impact on your business's SERP ranking. For example, If your business goes from having no reviews to 20 or 30 reviews, you might start to see improvement in your ranking, but at the same time, if you go from 30 reviews to 70, you may not see the same rank lift. That's something you need to keep in your mind.

However, as a business, there are lots of reasons to focus on reviews, and they have a significant direct impact on your SERP ranking. One of the Search Engine Land article explained how business suffered from rank drops after lost their reviews. So, reviews are still relevant and important for business ranking and growth. So, when you are planning your business strategy, also create a strategy to gain review for your business.

??Bonus

?3 Google My Business Fields That Don't Impact Ranking?

1)?? Q&A Section

Now, I'm going to share the GMB fields that don't impact your SERP ranking. So, in this list, first I'm going to talk about the Q&A Section. Actually, there isn't a Q&A section, but it's on the Google Knowledge Panel and you should get an email alert whenever somebody posts a question to your listing. 

Putting random keywords and very specific things in your Q&A section questions or in the answers has no impact on your SERP ranking. So, this is not the field where you can manipulate ranking.

2)?? Services

Yes, the services section also has no impact on your ranking. Possibly, many of you thought like, you can put all kinds of descriptive words in your services field to boost your SEO performance.

Unfortunately, whatever you put on your services has no actual bearing on where you rank. besides, currently, the services field is not really visible on the desktop at all and on the mobile device, it's hidden off to a tab. So, don't spend so much time putting out your services just spend a few minutes to share the necessary details.

3)?? Products

The third one is the products field. This feature is available in most Google listings. It's a very visual and kind of a cool feature. In the Products field, you can list your business products or services with photos. One of the best things about the products field is they are very much visible on the Google knowledge panel as well as both on desktop and mobile device.

So, certainly, every one of us wants to fill this field, but it doesn't have any impact on your ranking. However, for some industries, it does have an impact on their conversion rates. So, if you want to boost your conversions you can use this GMB field.

??Conclusion

In nutshell, business name, categories, website field and reviews section are the four field that you can actually use in Google My Business to boost your SERP ranking. Make use of these four GMB fields to rank your business higher on Google.

??If you have any questions, please reach out via comments.