Boost Your Google Business Profile: 5 Advanced Strategies

Having an optimized Google Business Profile is crucial for local businesses to improve their online visibility and attract more customers. 

While claiming your listing, filling out all the details, and collecting reviews are basics that most businesses understand, there are some advanced strategies that can really help your profile stand out from the competition.

Here, we cover powerful strategies for giving your Google Business Profile listing an extra boost so you can outperform your competitors and attract all those patients or customers.

Listen to the podcast episode:

Local SEO for Clinics: 5 Advanced Strategies to Boost Your Google Business Profile Listing & Help You Stand Out from Your Competition

Show Notes & Related Resources for 5 Advanced Strategies to Boost Your Google Listing & Help You Stand Out from Your Competition 

• How to Optimize Photos for Your Google Business Profile

• Google Business Profile: The Ultimate Guide to Optimize Your GBP Listing

• Google Posts: An Overlooked Google Business Profile Listing Feature

• Going Beyond Google Reviews to Improve Your Online Reputation

• How to Repurpose Your Google Reviews

• How to Use Your Google Business Profile Listing to Generate New Leads

• Google Posts: what they are & how they can improve your SEO

• 3 Simple Steps to Increase Your Company’s Local Presence on Google

• Local Online Reviews: Trends, Behaviors, & Platforms

• 4 Online Listings that Will Help Your Clinic Get More Patients

Why Your Google Business Profile Matters

Before we discuss the strategies, let's briefly discuss why your Google Business Profile (GBP) is crucial. For local businesses, especially clinics, your GBP is the first impression many potential patients will have of your practice. 

It's not just about being listed; it's about being found and, more importantly, being chosen.

The Google Business Profile Basics

At the top, we mentioned that some of you understand the GBP basics, but many don’t. So, let’s do a quick overview of those. 

Claim Your Business

Ensure that you have claimed your business on Google. This allows you to easily manage the information displayed and interact with customers.

Accurate Business Information

Provide accurate and up-to-date information such as business name, address, phone number, and business hours. Consistency is key across all platforms.

Business Description

Write a clear and concise description of your business. Highlight what makes your business unique and what services or products you offer.

Reviews and Ratings

Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. Respond promptly to reviews, whether positive or negative, to show that you value customer feedback.

Attributes

Use attributes to share more specific details about your business, such as whether you offer free Wi-Fi, wheelchair accessibility, or cater to specific people, etc. 

Insights

Regularly check Google's insights to understand how customers are finding and interacting with your profile. Use this data to optimize your profile and improve your online presence.

5 Overlooked Steps to Boost Your Google Business Profile

Now that you know the basics, let’s explore the more advanced ways to improve your SEO through your GBP. 

Utilize Real Photos and Videos

Don't settle for stock images. Use real, high-quality photos and videos that showcase your business's interior and exterior, team members, products, services, and community involvement. 

This provides an authentic look into your business for potential customers searching online. Google and prospective patients love this. 

For example, if you’re a chiropractor, include images of adjustments being performed. If you're an acupuncturist, show a session in progress. Highlighting community involvement can also make your profile stand out. 

Clinics should prioritize professional photography to capture the essence of their services and environment, ensuring that these images are reflective of the actual patient experience.

Optimize Your Hours for "Openness"

In December 2023, Google stated that "openness" is now a ranking factor for local listings. So think from the searcher's perspective. If they need a service urgently, Google will prioritize businesses that are open at that time. 

Adjusting business hours to align with peak search times may seem controversial, but it's a strategic move that can improve a clinic's visibility on Google.

With the search engine now considering a business's hours of operation as a ranking factor, reassessing your listed hours can set you apart. 

It's not about being open 24/7 but about being available when potential patients are most likely to search for your services.

There's a delicate balance between actual office hours and optimizing for search engines, but one that can significantly impact visibility.

Consider adjusting your listed hours to match the peak times when locals are searching for your services. This doesn’t mean you need to change your hours completely. Just keep it in mind and ensure your doors are open at peak times. 

Select Multiple Business Categories

The selection of business categories on Google Business Profile is often overlooked, yet it can be a game-changer for clinics. 

Most organizations only choose one primary category, but you can actually select additional relevant categories. This can help your business surface for related searches beyond just your primary category.

While it's crucial to have a primary category that accurately describes the main service offering, adding secondary categories where appropriate can broaden the clinic's reach.

By doing so, clinics can appear in a wider array of search results, potentially capturing the attention of users looking for related services and helping you stand out from the pack.

Leverage the Q&A Section 

Engagement is key in any online platform, and Google Business Profile is no exception.

Actively participating in the Q&A section of the profile is a proactive approach that not only aids in patient education but also contributes to the profile's richness, making it more likely to appear in relevant searches. 

Clinics should anticipate common patient inquiries and provide thoughtful, informative responses. 

Post Updates Regularly

Consistently posting fresh updates and offers through the Google Posts feature signals that your listing is active and keeps your business top-of-mind for anyone viewing your profile.

Utilizing Google Posts as part of the clinic's profile can keep the audience engaged and informed. Regular updates about services, events, or health tips demonstrate an active, thoughtful online presence.

Get Ready for the Influx of Patients

By implementing these five advanced GBP strategies, you can optimize your listing to increase visibility, earn more engagement from potential customers, and ultimately drive more traffic and revenue for your local business.

Let’s get to it! Want to learn more about SEO? Book your free discovery call! 

Podcast Transcript  - 5 Advanced Strategies to Boost Your Google Listing & Help You Stand Out from Your Competition 

Hey there, today we are talking all about your Google Business Profile listing. In fact, I'm sharing with you five strategies that will help give your listing a boost and help you stand out from your competition. 

Welcome to today's episode. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan, from Propel Marketing & Design. 

Now, I think we all know how important your Google Business Profile listing is for all local businesses. The vast majority of people tuning in to this episode are clinic owners, so I'm going to give some specific examples for a lot of clinic owners that we work with on a regular basis. 

If you are interested in getting an SEO review, you can visit our website, propelyourcompany.com. We do tons of reviews for clients and potential clients to take a look at how their websites are ranking online. With clients that we work with, we also do Google Business Profile audits. 

So, having looked at tons and tons and tons of businesses, specifically clinics' Google Business Profile listings, I can tell you that the vast majority of them do not participate in these five strategies that I'm going to share with you today 

And I'm going to be honest, number two is probably the most controversial, but it really truly makes a big difference. 

So we're not talking about the basics. We all know that you have to have a Google Business Profile listing. These days, your Google Business Profile listing is what controls the way that your listing is displayed in the top section of search and in Google Maps search. 

Now, you have to have claimed your listing. Your listing should be completely filled out to the best of your abilities, and obviously, you should be collecting reviews. 

I think that those key elements have been driven into everyone's brain time and time again. So that is not what this episode is about. 

Are reviews incredibly important? Absolutely, but that's not what we're talking about today. Is it important to claim your listing? Absolutely. Again, not what we're talking about today. 

Today, we're talking about five strategies that I see that aren't being implemented by most clinics, so it's a really great time for you to pick a couple of these, try to implement them, and see how it goes.

So the first up is using real photos, and using a lot of them. 

Using real photos, using real videos, and we had a recent episode where we went into exactly which images you should use and why–we'll include that in the Notes section associated with this episode or the page on the website that goes into more detail about this episode. It will also include some more basic tips about setting up and optimizing your listing. 

But for the photos, we want to make sure that we're highlighting what your building looks like from the outside, what it looks like from the inside, that it's showcasing your team members and probably them performing, or appearing to perform, some of the offerings that you have. 

So, if you're a chiropractor, it might be a chiropractic adjustment. If you're an acupuncturist, it might be someone performing acupuncture. It could be that you've got images that are of you talking to a patient or anything like that. It could also include images from your community involvement. 

What we don't want to do is use stock photos, and we want to make sure that the photos are of high quality. 

Again, you can grab the episode where we really went into detail about those photos, and there's also an episode where we went into detail about planning a photo shoot. If that's something you're interested in, check out the Show Notes for those. So that's tip number one.

Strategy number two again, probably the most controversial out of all of these: but back in December of 2023, Google stated that openness is a ranking factor, and I think it's a little difficult when we look at our business globally through the eyes of the business owner and not through the person searching. 

So openness refers to if your company is open or not, and you've got to think about it like this: if I have a flat tire and I'm sitting on the side of the road and I do a Google search for a towing service, of course, it makes most sense for Google to deliver me with the places that are open and readily available near me to perform that service or that task. 

Same thing comes to openness with your business. Does this mean that you should list your business as open 24-7? No, but it does mean if you are a business that, for instance, has a listing and it states that you are closed all day on Wednesday or that you are closed from 11 am to 2 pm, but you know that that is the time when people are online searching, you might want to reconsider your hours. 

Also, keep in mind that people don't necessarily assume that just because you're open a specific hour or time, that that means that you're taking appointments that time. So keep that in mind when you consider the hours that you have listed. 

If you go to update your hours on your Google Business Profile listing, they need to match the hours that you have listed on your website and in other listings. 

So basics when it comes to your Google Business Profile listing is to make sure that it matches all of your other online listings with your name, your address, your phone number, etc. That also includes your hours. But given that openness is now a ranking factor, you might want to go back and revisit what hours your business is actually open.

Third, for advanced strategies, you have the opportunity to select the category or categories your business falls under. 

The vast majority of Google Business Profile listings that we see when we do audits only select one category. While you should absolutely focus on a primary category and make sure that your primary category offers your main business offerings, if you can select a second or third category, we strongly recommend that you do so.

Now, obviously, if it isn't appropriate for your business, don't do it, but if your business falls under multiple categories, I suggest you select multiple categories. Now, within the categories,  you have the services that you offer which you want to make sure you also list and have a description for each of those services. 

But selecting multiple categories gives you a little bit of a standout from your competition, especially if they are searching the secondary or one of your non-primary categories; if your competition only has one primary category selected, make sense? I hope so. 

All right, let's keep moving on.

Strategy number four is to participate in Q&A and to do so as the business, asking questions and answering questions. 

So with the Q&A section of your Google Business Profile listing, you have the ability to ask questions and answer them as the business. Your most frequently asked questions are good. 

Let's say you're a chiropractor; a bad example of Q&A would be to ask what schooling is required to become a chiropractor. That's too basic and doesn't have anything to do with your specific office. 

What would be a better question is, “What should I expect at my first visit?” The answer then could be: “Please arrive five to ten minutes early to your visit to make sure that you are able to fill out the appropriate paperwork ahead of time.”

Or a good question might be: “Where should I park when visiting?” This one is especially good if parking is difficult for the location that you have. 

We want to make sure that we ask and answer, again, some of the most frequently asked questions that you get. 

It could also be, “What services do you offer?” That would be a good question, but we want to, again, make sure that the questions and the answers pertain to your specific business. 

You cannot include a link in the answer; however, you can use the wording, “Please visit our website for more details.” 

The final suggestion that I have for you for using advanced strategies for your Google Business Profile listing is to use the Google Business Profile Posts, and we again have resources specifically about this as well on the website that you can find and will include in the Show Notes.

But I suggest that you regularly post to your Google Business Profile listing. This is not something that you need to do daily, but if you do it a couple times a month or ideally once a week, you will see more traction and it helps you stand out with your Google Business Profile listing. 

Let's do a recap about the strategies we shared today. 

First and foremost, if you haven't completely gone through and filled out all the information that's available for your Google Business Profile listing, you will want to do that ahead of time, and you can find more resources in the Show Notes for this episode.

Once you have included your description and you've been out there collecting your reviews, and you want to give your listing a little bit more of a boost, here are the strategies that we talked about today:

• Incorporating more photos and videos in your listing

• Adjusting the hours of your business to make sure that you're available during the time when people are searching

• Including multiple categories for your business when appropriate

• Starting to ask and answer questions in the Q&A section

• And doing Google Posts 

All right, that's it for this episode.

Sponsors

This episode of the Propel Your Practice Podcast is brought to you by Propel Marketing & Design. Propel Marketing & Design helps Chiropractors, Acupuncturists, Physical Therapists, Wellness Practitioners, and other clinic owners improve their website rankings.

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