Imagine you had to book a restaurant for your friend’s as a surprise birthday party.

And you practically don’t know much about the place.

What will you do first?

“Take out your smartphone. And start searching for the best restaurants near your area.”

For instance, the “best restaurants near me” or restaurants near sector 18 Noida”.

Nobody would look for a place in Chandigarh when they reside in another place.

That’s how Google listing comes into your savior.

It helps you find the best services, restaurants, or any search query near your location along with its reviews.

Another reason why the importance of Google My Business is increasing exponentially.

You have started a retail outlet, let’s say in Noida. But, somehow are not converting well when it comes to sales.

Why is that?

It’s because your business is not visible to your target customers. So, how will they come to your outlet?

Here’s why Google My Business listing is helpful for creating an online presence for your brand.

Let’s start with a brand story that used demographic targeting as a part of their YouTube campaign.

Brand Story of Minute Maid  

I am sure you know about this brand. It is one of the well-established juice brands in Asia and many Europe countries. 

However, they were unable to get through convenience stores in a large part of Thailand.

They used the strategy to engage their customers, who in reality, are a fan of YouTube videos more than anyone.

They leveraged their passion for buying their brand even more. By creating awareness and making it possible for their users to understand the importance of their brand in their lives.

Hence, helping them to grow their marketing and sales simultaneously.

Although, the said example is nothing near to GMB listings. But, it gives the impression that one needs to understand a local market to rule there.

Now that we have understood the importance of local markets or local listings for the survival of your brand.

Here is How Google My Business is beneficial for your company as a part of your incredible local SEO journey.

1. Improves Visibility On Search Engine

As already mentioned before, Google my Business is like “Yellow pages” which makes you accessible for thousands of customers online. It’s like a free ad that shows every time a related search query is entered.

Not even customers, but various companies also rely on Google listings for finding reliable partners to do business with.

So, an impressive GMB listing will make it possible for you to reach out such an amazing customer base practically at no cost.

2. Offers Consistency Throughout The Online Space

Having a Google My Business listing gives you the much-needed credibility in the eyes of Google.

Plus, you can maintain your business profile across the search engine in terms of address, contact information, and relevant data.

3. Good For Impressing Your Customers Right Away

Google My Business helps to improve the first impression of any brand in the eyes of their customers.

This is possible because Google allows uploading photos and products of your store. You have complete control over the things you wish to share for making an impactful first impression.

4. Analyze Your Position 

GMB gives you the opportunity to analyze whether or not things are going into your favor.

It gives you the desired analytics and data that can help you change your local SEO marketing strategies.

5. Management of Online Reviews

Google My Business listings enable your customers to write reviews about the services or products of your company.

It is a perfect opportunity to fix anything from the customer’s point of view. And make it work for your company in terms of brand’s recognition and conversions.

6. Opportunity To Directly Engage With Your Customers

Using GMB listings, you get a chance to share posts stating about new offers or anything related to your brand.

Plus, you can add extensions to enable your customers to reach out directly without having to look for your business website first.

But, the question still remains is, how Google My Business helps to improve your local SEO rankings.

It is confirmed that GMB uses a range of factors to determine the rankings of any business. However, the most important ones are listed below.

7. Relevance

It determines whether or not your business profile fits into the criteria of the searcher’s.

So, being clear about your business services and products will help Google to identify as the product of desire.

8. Distance

Distance is like the primary ranking factor when it comes to local SEO rankings. As mentioned above, you can’t rank for Chandigarh, if your store is in Noida.

So, ensure to keep your address right or else you might lose your potential customers to any competitor brand.

9. Prominence

It includes a lot of factors such as reviews, events, unique content. If your website has a lot of quality links, then your GMB listing has more chances to be shown in the top 3 locations in SERP rankings.

So, keep your listing updated at all times.

The main part of the article has focused on the benefits and other factors related to ranking higher on local rankings.

But, how to go about it is another challenging task.

However, we have enlisted some of the tips and tricks to help you optimize your Google My Business listing for magnificent local SEO rankings.

Checkout Google My Business of Google Local Listing Optimization Tips

1. Enter Your Data Correctly 

One of the best ways to mark your presence online is to post correct data about your business whenever creating a listing.

This will help to indicate that your business is completely genuine and that your business is the solution of so many searcher’s search queries.

There is a thing called NAP, whenever GMB listing is talked about. It means “Name, Address, Phone Number”. You must be consistent with these required criteria to help Google understand that your business does exist.

2. Keep Your Business Hours Accurate

It is essential to notify your customers about your availability on normal working days and social holidays. It gives your customers a feeling of confidence regarding your brand.

After all, you are saving so much of the time and money of your customers.

3. Include Photos

Photos are a way to tell your customers that you are a real brand. And that you have a physical location from where you conduct your business.

Plus, it is an opportunity for you to lure in the customers by publishing relevant photos that have a higher customer engaging ability.

4. Manage Reviews

Online reviews are extremely important nowadays. It gives other customers other than the existing ones an idea of what’s beneficial for them.

Plus, replying regularly to every type of review gives an idea that you care about your customers a lot.

To wrap it up, claiming your GMB or Google My Business is the primary step towards an incredible SEO journey this and the coming next few years.

So, make sure to get it right in terms of target keywords, and mentioning the right location and name for your business.

And eventually grab more deals, leads, and ultimately conversions.

With good SEO, any user will be directed to your website, but without a good web design, you can’t be so sure of their interest or their satisfaction on your website. Web design has obvious effects on SEO as search engines may not encourage an average or underdeveloped website as much as it would for good and creative web design.

Good Web Design and good SEO make your advertisements worth projecting. 

As Google is trying to make the search engine experience better for its users, it has no time to spare on a bad website. With the new algorithm updates, it steers to provide the users with the best experience with the most desirable website experience.

Good web design is the backbone of SEO; every company must invest adequate resources to create innovative and efficient web designs as it improves search rankings as well. Keywords help to direct a user to your website, but the job to retain the audience is of the company.

As far as web design is concerned, try not to be too trendy and hasty with the designs as they aren’t long-lasting. Branding must leave a long-lasting experience and ideally, your work must ensure that it is done by making a visually appealing website. With superior rankings, your probability of reaching and retaining audiences is also higher. 

How does web design impact SEO and how to improve it?

1. Page Speed

 As an essential factor in the ranking of your website, page speed is an important factor in satisfying search engines and the users that they direct towards your page. With heavy images and flag plugins, your website may become slower and reduce traffic as well. Try not to bombard your website with these just because you can.

2. Navigation Design

Even a well-decorated fast website may fall flat in the eyes of a user if the navigation tools and options aren’t presented clearly. For example, if the user is at an e-commerce site and can’t find options for choosing sizes or to set the budget, they may get frustrated even before they look through your products.

A good navigation design must focus on the ease that any user feels being on the website or page and to deliver the service inconvenience.

3. Parallax Design for Landing Pages

This design indicates developing the entire website on a single page. This is a unique feature as creators can use the same remarkable background and include and innovative menu option that has the relevant categories for the information a user is looking for.

You can use the above features, to make your website engaging, interactive and informative for users to experience maximum satisfaction and convenience.

Gone are the days when customers or visitors were less aware of the technology. 

Buyers today are smart enough to understand the difference between benefits and USPs of a brand and its actual benefits. 

And so are today’s search engines. 

Intelligent!

They understand whether you are providing value to your customers or are just trashing your website with target keywords to ranking higher in the search engines. 

It’s like an “Insta 360” hovering over your head all the time making you anxious about your moves.

Especially, if you are looking to cheat.

In the midst of all these challenges faced by a marketer, there is another dynamite waiting for its turn to explode. 

The existence of content marketing with SEO marketing. 

Well! Isn’t this the primary reason we started this article in the first place. 

Content is still the king or that content matters- A phrase used by many but the importance understood by only a few. 

I am sure you might also be thinking about the connection between the two marketing strategies. Don’t worry. We are here to help you to understand the importance better.

So, you have two options to access the effectiveness of any marketing strategy.

Either, 

 – Include technicalities in the broader yet powerful content marketing.

Or,

 -Understand that the success of content marketing relies on result-oriented SEO strategies.

It’s like in the absence of either of the parties, your strategies are bound to fail. No matter how worthy are your websites.

(That’s also not possible without content as well).

So, content and SEO marketing are like a matchbox where you need a box to flash a matchstick.

To clear the dust around this concept, let’s dive into the world of marketing once again.

SEO is the pool while content is the water that fills it

SEO is a type of marketing strategy that understands competition and other marketing scenarios. 

However, in order to gain the benefits of such strategies, it requires the coordination between the concepts and the content that will complement your strategies. 

It’s like how can you approach any website for a Guest post when you don’t have the right words to produce unique or quality content. 

Not only that, you need creative content even to pitch to your customers.

SEO needs content and content marketing is itself the content

There are no SEO techniques that don’t require any content. A website needs content. 

Off-page SEO needs content, even on-page SEO requires content in the form of the right use of keywords in the entire setup.

Blogs, articles, images, infographics, and other related content is all part of the content that helps your SEO efforts by producing content that resonates with your target audience completely.

SEO is about using the Right Keywords. And content marketing is incorporating such keywords.

Keywords are the foundation of any SEO strategy. So, incorporating them in every space is probably one of the most preferred strategies.

But, what will be the use of such phrases or keywords if they cannot gel in with the content naturally to communicate with your target audience accordingly. 

And keyword stuffing will be of no help if they do not live in harmony with the rest of the content. 

SEO is about creating a quality backlink. Content is the reason they are referred to as quality.

Imagine a high authority website linking to your website. Or that any .edu article linking to one of your blogs. 

It will be like water found in the desert.

Completely magical. 

But, how is that possible.

Content makes it possible by being unique and user-friendly. Just work according to your searcher’s intent, and both SEO and content marketing will work in your favor completely. 

Both SEO and Content require great User Experience

SEO is about ensuring that your website is working in a way that attracts your potential customers easily. Hence, more conversions.

Similarly, content ensures that whenever a user comes to your website, they stay there to get the solutions to their queries that they were looking for in the first place.

SEO and Content Demand Final Output

The purpose of using any type of marketing strategy is always sales.

So, whether you are investing in PPC, social media marketing, SEO, or content marketing, the reason behind any form of marketing strategy is to obtain leads, conversions, and ultimately higher ROI. 

Fresh content not only indexes faster by any search engine. But, it is also helpful in improving the search rankings of any website.

After all, Google is all about content. If you own great content, do its SEO properly and reach the target audience easily without any constraints or hassles.

To summarize, content and SEO are not interchangeable at all. Rather they are Tom and Jerry of Digital Marketing. Both will try to avoid the other’s importance. 

But, cannot produce definite results without being entangled together. 

So, 

Content is definitely the King.

But,

SEO is the queen of digital marketing.

A combination strategy that has the capacity of producing organic results gradually whenever in connection to another subject.