Due to the COVID-19 Crisis that we are experiencing in the year 2020, it is noticeable a before and after in Local SEO. If local SEO was already important before the pandemic, now we could say that For a business it is essential. And surely Local SEO will continue to have an impact in 2021, as consumer habits have changed forever.

In recent months, a large number of establishments have had to reinvent themselves by enabling purchase channels by phone and WhatsApp, delivering their products to their homes. Even many businesses that did not have a website or presence on social networks have now had the need to create them.

Currently, businesses with a single location, or businesses with several establishments, have realized the need to create and maintain communication with their local target audience through digital channels, or in other words, to position yourself locally with Local SEO.

What is local SEO?

El Local SEO focuses on improving the visibility of a local business in local (local pack) organic search results. Normally, the results that appear in local search results usually answer questions with the intention of buying close to your location, or that the search engine understands that there are geographical limitations to the search.

Businesses have the opportunity to improve their visibility in local search results through a search engine optimization strategy such as: Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp and Google My Business, the latter being the most used in Spain and part of the world.

Did you know that 88% of consumers who perform a local search on their smartphone come or call the store within the first 24 hours? According to Hubspot, 46% of all Google searches have local intent.

Data that confirms that local SEO is essential in 2021:

• In 2021, smartphones will influence more than 1.4 trillion in local sales (Source: Forrester).
• Searches such as “near me” or “close to” grew by more than 900% in two years. (Source: Chatmeter)
• 4 out of 5 consumers use search engines to find local information. (Source: Think with Google)

Organic vs. Local Results (Snack Pack)

Local Pack

The local pack is a section of Google's search results that shows the local business related to the search being performed. Whenever the query has a local purpose, Google will show three local companies that could respond to our search. In this case, each of the results shows the name of the business and a prominent image.

If we click on any of the results, it redirects us to the local business file (local finder) that we have clicked on. As you can see, you can see the Google My Business listing displayed with all the information (Company name, address, phone number, hours, reviews, etc.).

ABC Pack

For some specific searches, such as locations that have more than one establishment, chains or franchises, a list (A, B, C) of the businesses closest to your location appears.

This type of result shows us the name of the business, the address, the telephone number and in addition, they offer two options to click: “Website” and “How to get there”. Unlike the Snack Pack, it doesn't show the reviews or the business category or the featured image.

As can be seen in the image, the letters A, B and C appear in front of the name of the businesses in one of the results.

Organic results

Organic search results are the listings of web pages that are closest to the user's search query based on their relevance. Also called “natural” search results, they may appear after paid ads or after Snack Packs.

Importance of Google My Business

According to Google, GMB is a free tool that allows us to promote our company profile and website in Google Search and Maps. With the Google My Business account, we can see our customers and get in touch with them, as well as publish news in the company profile and find out how users interact with our company on Google.

Benefits of creating a Google My Business profile

• It allows us to attract customers and make them interact with our company when they search for it on Google.
• Gain presence through Google Search and on Google Maps.
• It allows you to respond to reviews, post photos of products or special offers and add or edit our company information.
• Show the business for free on Google in a professional way, displaying photos and company information in an attractive way.
• Statistics allow us to find out how to optimize customer interaction to improve results.

How to have a presence on Google My Business?

Create and claim the business card in GMB:

To have a presence on Google My Business we need to have a Gmail account. The first thing to do is to check if our business listing exists in GMB. We can verify this by simply searching for the name of our business. If the file does not appear, it means that it does not exist, on the other hand, it may be that the file exists because it was generated automatically by Google and has no owner, or that the file exists and already has an owner.

In both cases, what we should do is claim the company file by clicking on the option “Are you the owner of this company?” and follow the steps to take control of our business at GMB.

Check GMB file

Verification allows us to ensure that our company information on Google is correct.

In addition, verification protects us from people who want to impersonate representatives of our company. We must verify our company to be able to edit your information in Google products.

Most local businesses perform verification by mail, but others, such as local service companies, can also do so by email, phone, SMS, or from Search Console.

Once we have completed the verification, we can edit our company information, respond to reviews and add images. It's important to know that it may take a few days or weeks for our company to appear on Google.

Importance of NAP (Name, Address and Telephone)

The NAP refers to the name, address and telephone number of our business, originating from the acronym in English (Name, Address, Phone Number), it is very important that the data we provide to GMB is exactly the same as the information that appears on our website, otherwise, our ranking in the search results may be affected.

The NAP must be consistent throughout the website, GMB and even in all the local and non-local directories where we have a presence and even in the information and description of our social networks.

For example, if we have an email address on our website Carrer de Pallars 84, ground floor 4. 08018 Barcelona. And the phone is the 932 31 53 03. In Google My Business we should follow the same guidelines. And don't put the city first, and then the address, or put +34 on the phone. Consistency should always follow.

7 Tips for Optimizing Google My Business

If we have a well-optimized profile at GMB, it can help us to appear among the first positions, which will lead to greater visibility and increased sales and potential customers.

1. Add accurate, complete and up-to-date information

One of the most important aspects is have the form filled out completely. It's important not to leave any fields unfilled so that Google “pays” more attention to us. It is very common to see some companies that lack information in their files.

We have to create a very complete description of the company, is one of the most important points, so we must take into account and add within the text the main keywords of the business. If we can fill in the 750 characters that we have available, all the better.

As we have already mentioned, we must be very meticulous with the address and telephone fields following the same structure that we have on our website.

It is also very important to add the URL of our business and the opening hours.

2. Choose categories correctly

Another essential point, we must choose a main category to optimize our Google My Business profile.

According to a study on Google My Business by Bright Local, 84% of visits to a GMB profile come from Google searches, which means that users were looking for a product or service that we have in our profile.

Nor can we forget to add additional categories, for example, if our business were a hairdresser, as the main category we could add “hairdressing” and as a subcategory we could choose “specialized in curls”.

Another example, in the case of a restaurant, apart from the main category, we can add specific categories or even attributes that potential customers are looking for, such as: that the restaurant has Wi-Fi, offers takeaway food, etc.

3. Add products and services

GMB tokens also allow businesses to add a list of the products and services they offer. One of the benefits of this option is that users who are browsing a business listing will be able to know what they can buy in it, what offers exist, the prices of the products or services, etc.

This option is a very important point to consider for retail businesses.

4. Get good reviews and respond to them

Did you know that 82% of consumers read online reviews of local businesses? That's why Reviews are one of the sections within the local file that has the most value for users.

Google knows that Reviews have a lot of influence on the purchase decision for a user, that's why it's a key factor in your algorithm. If we look closely, in most searches, the first 3 local results that appear (Local Pack, mentioned above) are those that have multiple reviews and are best ranked by star ranking.

When our business receives a review, whether positive or negative, it must always be answered, we can never leave a review unanswered. Another aspect that Google takes into account within its algorithm is the interaction with users, who can understand that the company cares about consumers.

One option to receive positive reviews is to encourage our most loyal customers to leave a positive review on our profile. There are different ways to do this, such as, for example, adding a link to our profile on our website, encouraging them when they purchase our product or service, even asking questions on social networks, etc.

5. Make publications

Google My Business cards also allow us to publish offers, events, products and services as well as on social networks. These posts appear at the bottom of our local tab.

It is advisable to add a CTA (Call to action) in each post, in this way we will increase engagement and conversions.

6. Upload photos

The images section is one of the most visited by users. According to a Google study: Tokens that include photos and virtual tours double your chances of attracting attention.

The images in the company profile are one of the aspects that most stand out to users and, in addition, it should be noted that Google loves images, as we have been able to verify in the previous statistics.

In addition to the images uploaded by the business owner, the images can also be updated by users.

7. Review the statistics

As Peter Drucker said: “What is not measured, is not controlled, and what is not controlled, cannot be improved”.

The statistics tab is one of the key points, it provides first-hand information on how users find our business profile on the Web, in addition, they also reflect how those customers use Search and Maps to search for our profile and what they do when they find it.

With all this information, we can optimize our local file.

COVID-19 news on Google My Business

Due to COVID-19, Google My Business limited certain features of local listings, but on the other hand, it provided businesses with new functions to provide the most accurate information possible to customers.

Google's recommendations for customers to know the latest information about our business are:

• Indicate the updated opening hours; it may be that due to the pandemic we have changed our regular hours.
• Add a full schedule that describes other operations, such as: home delivery services, to take or without leaving the vehicle.
• Include the additional services we offer to the community.
• Indicate if our company is temporarily closed.
• Add news posts related to COVID-19 to the profile

All of these changes are shown in the company profile both in Google Maps and in Google searches.

Nor did Google want to penalize any company during the pandemic, for example, companies that marked their listing as “temporarily closed”, did not penalize them in positioning and treated them in a similar way to open companies.

How to manage multiple locations in GMB?

Los businesses with multiple locations they can also be managed from Google My Business.

Chains, franchises, hairdressers, supermarkets, hamburgers and a long list of companies that have several stores, Google My Business makes it easy to manage, now it allows us to see all the locations that our business has from one place.

In the event that our business does not have a local file in GMB, the first step we should do is to create it and add all the locations of the other stores.

If we have less than 10 locations, we must create them manually and fill in the different fields with as much detail as possible for each location.

You can create the “Location Group” as follows:

1. Sign in to Google My Business.
2. Click Manage locations (if you're part of multiple organizations, make sure you choose the right organization).
3. Click Create location group.
4. Type the name of your group.
5. Click Create.
6. Start adding locations.

If we have 10 or more locations, we can create the tabs in bulk in bulk importing the locations to Google My Business. Once we have created the main file of our business and we have created what is called a “group of locations” (previously it was called a company account) to manage all the locations we can start uploading all the information of the different businesses in bulk. To do this, we will go to the “add new location” section and select “import locations” from the drop-down menu.

Then we will download the templates offered by the platform itself, we will fill in the different fields with all the information about each of the businesses. Once we have the spreadsheet filled in with all the data, we will upload it to Google My Business and request a mass verification. La block verification allows us to manage information from 10 or more locations in the same company across all Google products, such as Maps and Search.

One of the Most common problems that usually occur with multi-location tabs This is when a store manager wants to update their local business listing and has no access because it has been created by another user (Director or Marketing Manager). In these cases, it is highly recommended to give permission to other users so that they can manage the local files, because otherwise there can be very complicated situations. Let's imagine that the marketing manager has created all the locations under his personal email and in the future he changes companies, we could lose access to all Google My Business profiles, and we would have no way of accessing it.

How to give management permission to local GMB tokens?

They exist three types of token users: proprietors, administrators and local administrators. When owners add users, they share the management of a listing with several people, but they don't have to share the password.

• Owners: Each token can have multiple owners, but only one primary owner. Both types of owners have the same functions, but primary owners can't abandon tokens until they transfer primary ownership to another user. However, all owners can add users to share the management of a tab without sharing the password.
• Administrators: Administrators have most of the functions of an owner, but they can't add or remove users, nor can they delete company profiles.
• Site administrators: They have most of the functions of an administrator, but they don't have access to edit all of the company's information.

In the event that we have the necessary permissions to give permissions to other users, when we are inside a tab, in the left menu we select the option “users” and “invite the user we want by entering the email of the user we want to add, we choose the permissions we want to grant them (owner, administrator or administrator of the site), and we click on invite.

Examples of Businesses with Multiple Locations

Marco Aldany (Hairdressers)

Below we can see an example of a business with several locations within the same area, in this case the Marco Aldany hairdressers. The results will vary depending on the location of the device where the search is performed. The locations closest to our location will always appear. The key point for the hairdressing industry is to have an updated telephone number, since most of the inquiries will come through that channel, although the first contact with the hairdresser was the Google My Business profile, and we should not forget it when assigning customers.

Bacoa (Hamburger Restaurant)

Here's another example, in this case of restoration. We can see on the map the location of the Bacoa hamburgers closest to my location. In this case, it is worth noting that the new Google My Business functionality launched during the COVID-19 era for bars and restaurants is key for this sector. Information about the possibility of eating inside, buying takeout or ordering at home has a direct impact on sales and helps restaurateurs to communicate the current regulations on visits to the premises. With the constant changes in restrictions, it is very important to communicate well to customers their current possibility of using our service.

Digital Strategy for Local Businesses Beyond Local SEO

As we have been able to observe, A Google My Business listing requires continuous optimization, it's not about creating a file and leaving it forgotten, quite the contrary, it requires a Marketing strategy with continuous actions for good positioning. But once the optimization seems controlled, what else can be done? There are two tactics beyond just SEO.

Boost local SEO with Google ads

Los ads that appear on Google can include the locations of our company and can help us to let users find us and contact us through an action, such as a phone call. When a user performs a search on Google or Google Maps, such as: “hamburgers nearby”, they will be shown local search ads that include our company's locations. For this to happen, it's important to configure location extensions to show up in local search ads.

The main benefits of local search ads are:

• Get more visits to our business
• Receive a larger number of calls
• Helping customers learn more about our company

Be in other local directories

Although Google is the most used search engine in Spain, we cannot ignore other ways to position our business locally.

It is important that our business is registered in several local directories, such as: Bing, Yelp, Yellow Pages, QDQ, Hotfrog, and many others.

Nor do we have to be in all the directories, but rather search and see which are the best depending on the type of business and sector in which we operate. For example, if we have a hamburger restaurant it would be interesting to be in directories such as Tripadvisor, Minube, El Fork, etc.

Local SEO in 2021: Overview

There is no doubt that due to the current situation, businesses cannot ignore local SEO. It's a great opportunity for businesses and stores to get traffic and potential customers, especially if they rely on a physical location to offer their products and services.

In the end, the ranking factors for our business to appear in the first positions in Google My Business are reduced to:

• Relevance: A good optimization of the file to show our business, our products or services to the user who performs the search.
• Proximity: Correctly add the address and telephone number so that the user who performs the search near our business appears in the results.
• Reputation: Take into account the opinions and comments of users in the reviews section of our profile. Remember that it's important to respond to all user reviews, whether positive or negative, in this way we show current and potential customers that we value their opinions. And also the Questions and Answers section.

To have a 5-star rating gives our business 39% more clicks on Google Local you must have a 1-star rating. (Source: Bright Local)

82% of people who shop on their smartphone (92% of them millennials) use their mobile device to do a local search. (Source: Statista)

At Novicell, we want to support local businesses in Barcelona, Catalonia and all of Spain. Have you suffered significant losses in your local business? If you want to boost Local SEO to be prepared when the world returns to normal, contact us now for a FREE consultation, and together we'll look at how to do everything possible to help your local online presence.

How can we help you?

If you need more information do not hesitate to contact us.