If you are selling products online – through Woocommerce, Shopify, Bigcommerce, or any other form of e-commerce platform, optimizing your Google My Business profile can grow your e-commerce site.
Many e-commerce business owners understand the importance of optimizing their e-commerce websites. The higher the website is ranked on search engines, the easier it is for customers to find it. Improving your online presence means more traffic and, therefore, more conversions.
Why You Need to Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
While eCommerce allows the business owner to sell their products to a larger market, Google My Business is not just for local SEO; it benefits your e-commerce site in the following three ways:
- It helps increase your website visibility in search engines.
- It brings more traffic to your website.
- It provides an enhanced shopping experience for your online shoppers.
By optimizing your e-commerce website for Google My Business, Google can crawl and understand the type of services and products you offer, where you are located, and your operating hours. If you have a brick-and-mortar business with an e-commerce site – this is especially important. With the information that Google finds, it can rank your site for multiple searches.
When searching for a business, you may see business listings displayed on Google My Business. Some have reviews, while others do not. Some may have more reviews than others. Some may not have their hours or e-mail address posted.
As a consumer, which one would you go for? Statistics show that consumers naturally gravitate towards businesses that display more information and reviews.
That is why it is essential to provide relevant information to potential customers.
Optimizing Google My Business without Address
Can you optimize your e-commerce website on your Google My Business profile without an address? Yes, you can – since 2019, Google allowed businesses to create listings without publishing a public address.
As an e-commerce business owner, you know you want to be found nationwide as well as locally. How would you leverage Google My Business then? Use their Google Map and Google Reviews.
Even without including the specific address of a physical location, you can tell people what city you are in on your website. If you’re not far from a major city, use that city on your Google Map on your website. Also, include in the metadata of your page, such as in your title tag and headings.
For example, if you’re a craft hemp farmer in Bozeman’s outskirts, Montana selling hemp products for chefs through your Shopify site, you would put Bozeman, Montana as your city.
Next, leverage Google Reviews to help improve your rankings. Google reviews help validate your e-commerce business. Make it part of your strategy to collect customer reviews and testimonials for two reasons: help improve your organic rankings and boost your reputation.
Moz has a great article on how to acquire Google reviews. My tried-and-true favorite is through e-mail.
Conclusion:
Nevertheless, complete your Google My Business profile as much as you can. Neil Patel says that is the number one mistake that most small business owners make. They claim their profile and then abandon it. Make sure to add your products and or services, your business hours (if you are strictly e-commerce, put down 24 hours on all days), put down if you are women-led, black-owned, or veteran, your phone number, e-mail address, and of course, your website URL. Don’t forget to upload quality photos, add videos and add your company logo to your Google My Business profile.
Optimizing your Google My Business profile will help improve your e-commerce website online presence. If you are an e-tailer that needs help with search engine optimization for their website, Contact SCS Digital Marketing to help you on your local SEO strategy.