Why Is Google My Business Important for SEO?

The stock answer comes in three parts. It turns up in the local pack. That pack sits above everything else on the screen. Google reads the profile for relevance, so filling in every field helps.

All of that is true. Every bit of it is covered properly elsewhere on this site. So none of it gets repeated here.

Something else about a Google Business Profile goes unmentioned, though. It has nothing to do with ranking factors. Rather it is a fact about what kind of object the thing is.

What This Page Hands Away

The checklist belongs to the local SEO pages. Categories, hours, photos, posts. Reviews have a page of their own as well.

How Google weighs any of it is a separate question, answered elsewhere. Nothing here is a claim about the ranking machinery.

This page asks something smaller. What does that profile do, exactly, once somebody has found it? A plumbing company asked this same question last month, and SEO for plumbing covers what that profile did for them. None of this happens in isolation either, which is closer to what holistic SEO actually means in practice.

Everything Else You Build Is a Route

Line up the things a business builds in order to get found. Your website. The pages sitting on it. An advertisement. A post somewhere.

Now ask what each one is for. Every single one is a route. It exists to move somebody one step closer to you.

The advertisement routes to a page. Then the page routes to a form, or to a number they have to dial themselves. A link routes to a page as well. Nothing on that list is a destination. Each item hands the customer onward, then hopes they keep walking.

Somebody will point at a checkout here, or a booking form. Those do finish things. Only look at what they needed first. Somebody had to arrive.

So that is the ordinary shape of marketing. You build a path. Somebody walks it, then the finishing happens at your end.

Google My Business Is Where the Trip Ends

Then look at the profile. The phone number dials from it. Directions open from it. The hours answer the question that was about to be asked.

Nobody had to arrive anywhere. So a customer can hire you having never seen one thing you made.

Read that twice, since it is the whole page. Your website was never opened. No page of yours got read. Not one sentence you wrote reached them. They rang the phone. Somebody in your shop answered. By every measure that matters, you won the customer.

Which makes the profile the only thing in your marketing that finishes something without being reached first. Everything else has to be arrived at.

It Works Without Being Read

A website has to be read before it works at all. So does an advertisement. Somebody takes in the words in an order, then gets moved by them.

Nothing about a profile works that way. It gets taken in at a glance. Open. Four stars. Six minutes away. Call.

None of that is reading. Instead it is scanning, and it takes about as long as this sentence took. A decision comes out the far end.

So every instinct you hold about persuasion sits idle here. Argument. Tone. The line you spent an afternoon phrasing. None of it is in the room.

Somebody Will Point at the Description Box

Fair enough. There is free text on a profile. People do read reviews, too, sometimes at length.

Only notice what that concedes. A review is not a sentence you wrote. Somebody else wrote it. Which is rather why anybody believes it, though that argument has its own page here.

Meanwhile the description sits below the point where the decision already happened. Somebody scanning a map listing at eleven at night is not reading paragraphs. They are picking.

So the claim survives. Nothing you composed has to be read for the thing to work.

The Most Important Thing You Own Is the One You Cannot Compose

Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Pull apart whatever settles that glance.

Whether you are open right now. How far away you are. What other people scored you.

Not one of those is a sentence anybody writes. Your hours are your hours. The distance is a fact about a building. Then the rating belongs to your customers rather than to you.

So the thing carrying the most weight at the moment of the decision is the thing you have the least authorship over. Everywhere else in marketing, writing better helps you. Here it barely enters into it.

Nobody Can Out-Write Your Google Business Profile

That reads like bad news. It is not.

Think about what it means for a small business. A national chain can outspend you every month of the year. It can hire writers you could never afford. On your website, that gap shows.

Meanwhile the profile shows nothing of the kind, since there is nothing there to be better at. Their hours are hours. So is their distance. Nothing in the part doing the deciding gets written better by anybody.

So this is one of the few places where a two-van operation stands level with a franchise. That advantage arrived free. Also it cannot be bought away from you.

Read Your Own Profile at Arm’s Length

Try it yourself. Search your own trade on a phone, somewhere near the shop, until you find your business in the results.

Then read nothing. Look for two seconds, the way somebody would at eleven at night. Then notice what you took in. Now put one question to it. Would that have been enough?

Perhaps it would, in which case your profile has been finishing decisions for you already. Or perhaps something was missing and you caught it inside two seconds. Then your customers have been catching it for months.

No statistic about other people’s listings settles which of those you are looking at. Yours is one search away.

Where the Google My Business Argument Stops

None of this holds for a slow purchase. Hardly anybody hires an accountant off a map listing. Where the decision is expensive, somebody reads a great deal before deciding, so there the ordinary work does the deciding after all.

Distance does much of the work here as well, and nothing on a profile changes where your building sits.

The claim is narrower than it sounds. A profile can finish a fast decision. It has never once finished a slow one. A fast decision still needs the basics done right, and what doing business listing in SEO involves covers those basics.

How To-The-TOP! Treats Local Work in Calgary

A request to fix the website first turns up often enough across Calgary. Frequently the website is fine. What is quiet is the thing sitting above it.

SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been doing this work since 2007. So that means search engine optimization on the pages underneath. Then the profile above them. Also keyword research telling you which of the two a search actually wants. No guarantees. Rankings move across three to six months.

Where the phone has to ring sooner than that, a Google Ads campaign does a job SEO cannot rush. The To-The-TOP! portfolio shows the keywords this work has reached. That profile carries customer reviews too, and those get weighed on their own separate from anything ranking-related. Getting that split right is most of what local SEO means for a business waiting on the phone to ring.

Common Questions About Google My Business and SEO

Is Google My Business still called that?

Google renamed it Google Business Profile some years ago. Plenty of people still say the old name, and nothing about the work changed when the label did.

Does a Google Business Profile help my website rank?

They are separate objects. Your profile can turn up while your website sits nowhere, and the reverse happens too. Treating them as one thing is where it usually goes wrong.

Do I need a website if my profile brings in customers?

Yes, though for a reason this page has been circling. A profile finishes fast decisions. Anybody weighing something slowly still goes looking for content to read, so a business with none has nothing to hand them.

What is the most valuable field on the profile?

Whichever one a customer checks before phoning. Often that is the hours, since a wrong entry there costs you somebody who was ready to call.

How long before local work shows anything?

Three to six months is the plain range for ranking work. Fixing something wrong on a profile is quicker than that, though nobody can promise a date.