Transcript
Hi, guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation - for Google's My Business rankings, reviews are your knockout punch. This is really important because Google My Business has become its own sect of SEO. And there are a lot of people who are very concerned about ranking well in Google My Business. But because it's a relatively newer section of SEO and also a subset of local SEO, lots of questions about how do I get that rank to the first spot as quickly as possible. So we want to go over that today.
Well, but before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have the ryokucha green tea, which is a tea gifted to me by a friend, Brad Jashinsky, who is the director of marketing for John's Incredible Pizza. If you live in the West Coast, you probably know John's incredible. I'm not sure how far their reach is, but I believe they're more on the western side of the United States. But anyways, thank you, again, Brad, for the tea. The tea we have today is a green tea, and it has this taste of like a toasted brown rice. That's the way I like to explain it. Every time I tell people that and they drink it, they're like, "Yeah, toasted brown rice all the way."
So, let's go ahead and get brewing, get chatting. So for Google My Business, a lot of the ranking factors are very similar to local SEO, some of them being your citations and local listings need to be on point. You need to have optimizations on your website to correspond with the locality you're trying to rank for. So again, if we're in Orange County and I'm a pizza shop, I want to put "pizza in Orange County" in my titles and my content so that the Google My Business corresponds with that.
In addition, you want to optimize your Google My Business. So again, have the right name, address, phone in your business description. Make sure that it's very rich with keywords that are relevant to your business. And again, fill up those products and services. But after that, Google My Business gets a little difficult in that there's only so many things that you can be doing to get it ranked high. Unlike your website, where you can build more pages, you can put more title tags and badge descriptions, you can add more content, Google My Business is a little bit different in that there's only so much you can do.
And there's a lot of different theories of what help. A lot of people say you should be posting on Google Posts a lot. I've yet to see someone telling me that there's data... I've yet to see data that Google Posts increase your Google My Business rankings. Now, the last time I reviewed data was a year ago. So maybe there has been data since that has shown that it has improved rankings. And if so, in the local SEO community, please share that with me. Please prove me wrong, so that I can kind of look into that data. But until this point, I haven't actually seen any data or studies showing that Google Posts increase ranking.
So, long story short, the number one ranking factor that I've seen for Google My Business that really helps is your reviews. Clients and customers I work with, when they really focus on getting Google My Business reviews, no matter what details they have in the Google My Business, they tend to just rank number one or two. So this is going back for years, when I used to work in the different industries where, in the dental or veterinarian industry, if you have eight to ten rankings... all right. Sorry. Eight to ten reviews on your Google My Business, and your average competitor has the same, all right.
But where I've seen the big players in Google My Business rocket, is when they just go big or go home. So for example, I had a client who had 539 Google reviews, and then their next competitor had 200. They were just double the size of anybody else. Therefore their Google My Business rankings were always near the top. I have another client whose average competitor has about three Google rankings. I keep saying, "Google rankings." Reviews, rankings. They don't even sound similar. I don't know why I'm mixing them up. But I had a client who had competitors of... Average competitor had about three reviews, four reviews, but they have 99. So they always are the number one in the entire area they're trying to rank for.
So what I would say is, yes, focus on your Google My Business optimizations. But what I have found is really go for those Google My Business reviews. And those will really drive home some positive rankings in the Google My Business section. So that's pretty much what it is. There's nothing complex about that. So, if you've done all your optimization for Google My Business, I highly encourage you, make it an emphasis for the business. And don't make it... Where I feel clients fall a little bit is when they relayed like, "Oh yeah, we'll focus on it. We'll get five." You really need to be orders of magnitude higher than your next client. So, for example, the one I just said, the average competitor has three. They have 99. I like to say, "Go for 50. Go for 100." And Google My Business reviews aren't that difficult to get. They don't require long prompts. It's just a star and a quick text. So, if you can do so, you should. And I think those will help you the most in Google My Business.
All right, so I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea, guys. It is a really hot day. I don't know if you can tell. It's like the sun's beating down, but you got to commit to the tea, right? Tea is good. Hot, cold? Doesn't matter. But if you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe. And if you enjoyed what you saw today, I hope to see you guys again, soon.
Thanks, everybody.