According to research, in the United States, less than 50% of small companies actually invest in search engine optimization. That means over half of all small businesses in the US end up losing out on traffic, revenue, and customers because they are not organically improving their search engine rankings. However, this ranking is incredibly important for smaller businesses because most customers tend to rely on search engines to research the companies a plan to make purchases from, long before they actually make that purchase.
Google Business Profile
The Google Business Profile is a free platform that helps customers find different businesses on Google. The platform functions within regular searches on Google, but it also interacts with Google Maps. That way, potential customers can find any business they’re looking for while they’re already going to a specific destination. When a company verifies and updates its Google Business Profile regularly, it can end up standing out on the search engine results pages and generate a lot more website traffic and even in-store traffic in many cases. Some of the most important updates that companies need to make to their Google business profiles include the name of the business, the website, address, store hours, phone number, any available social media profiles, photos of the physical business location, and images of any new solutions or promotions. Each one of these elements can help potential customers have an easier time making a decision about purchasing from a company. They will be able to know where they need to go to find a company, where they can find more information about it, what the location looks like, what the solutions look like, and even any latest sales or promotions. All of these pieces of information are incredibly important when customers are making purchasing decisions about a business, and even when they’re at the research and consideration stages of the buying journey.
Ranking factors
Google has highlighted four different factors that the search engine algorithm takes into consideration when it’s trying to rank websites. Those four factors include the words that are used in the search query, the usability, and relevance of the pages that contain the results that users are looking for, the expertise of the source, as well as the settings and location of the user. Although a few of these factors can’t be controlled by companies, every company can still create content for their websites with all of them in mind.