How To Pick The Right Google Business Profile Categories For Your Listing

How To Pic k The Right Google Business Profile Categories For Your Listing

Google Business Profile is such an excellent tool for businesses out there. It helps you get discovered by customers in your area who may not have even known about your business at all. To ensure you get the right leads off your GBP listing, you need to use the right categories. Here’s how to do it and create lots more new leads, every day.

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HOW TO CHOOSE CATEGORY

Research search terms

What are the most important search terms for your business? You need to nail this down so you can pick out all the right categories. First, create a list.

Include the type of business you are, and all the sub terms that can include. For example, if you’re a supermarket, you may also be listed as a ‘natural foods store’, ‘health store’, ‘grocers’, and so on.

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Use tools to get category 0su4ggestions

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Research your competitors

Now you have your keywords, start using them to search your local market. You’re looking to see who’s your competition in your local area. This area can be larger or smaller, depending on your business. An auto trader, for example, would cover the whole city. A local coffee shop, on the other hand, may only cover the immediate neighbourhood.

It’s not always apparent which categories you should use when it comes to GBP. That’s why you should every tool at your disposal to get recommendations. These will fetch all available categories that are relevant to your business, so you can pick out ones that your competition are missing out on.

THE IMPORTANCE OF GBP CATEGORIES

GBP categories are more important than you’d think. The categories you select will influence which areas of GBP you can use. For example, listing your business as ‘educational’ won’t allow you to use reviews on Google. If you’re Google Business Profile is listed under ‘car dealerships’, you’ll be able to have multiple listings for different dealerships. You want to get this right, so you can use the aspects of GBP that will bring in the most new business.

The categories you choose will have the most impact on your GBP ranking, overall. The higher your ranking, the more likely you are to show up in search results. If you choose wrongly, then Google may exclude you from certain rankings. It’s an easy mistake to make, but you’ll see that it can have a massive impact on your success.

WHAT TO KNOW BEFORE CHOOSING CATEGORIES

Choose as m any categories as are relevant to you

You have the option to choose up to 10 categories for your business. It’s tempting to fill all 10 slots, to try and get more business. In truth though, you should choose only as many as are relevant to you. If you pick categories that aren’t quite right, it may hurt your rankings. For example, if you’re a take away pizza restaurant, it won’t help you to list your store under ‘French cuisine’ or something similar.

Don’t worry if you can’t find the right category

In most cases, you’ll be able to find the category that works best for your business. If you can’t though, you can go to Google with evidence showing why your category should be added. In the mean time, you can use the category that most closely matches your business. You can use images, description, and more to create more accurate info about what your business

Ensuring you have the right categories

You’ve done all the work you can, but you aren’t getting the results you need. If that’s the case, you can do some trouble shooting to see if you’ re using the right business categories. Check to see that your categories match other top ranking businesses, and keep an eye on Analytics.

Create listings for m ulti entity businesses

Normally, Google won’t allow for a business to have more than one listing. There are some examples though, where they will. These can be places with multiple departments, like medical centres, or multi practitioner businesses such as legal firms. It makes sense for them to have different listings as they’ll need different categories, to send customers to the right place.