Seven ways your business can improve its online presence with Google
Google processes over 60,000 search queries every second. It’s the most widely used search engine on the internet and has become the go-to place for consumers looking to purchase a product or service.
If you want to build and perfect your business’s online presence, you’ll need a firm grasp on how to navigate Google to reach your customers.
At Feefo, our Google Partner status means that we’re expertly placed to help your business harness Google’s features and offerings to build brand awareness, gain trust with consumers and maximise sales. Follow our guide for seven ways to promote your business through Google and enhance your online presence.
In this guide, we’ll go into more detail on the seven ways you can harness the power of Google to improve your online presence.
- Get noticed with listings
- Set up a Google Business Profile
- Collect reviews and star ratings
- Perfect your SEO strategy
- Manage your Google Knowledge Panel
- Enhance your business information
- Measure and monitor to make improvements.
Before we start, let’s consider what online presence means and why it’s important for your business.
What is online presence?
Online presence is the information you can find about a person or business in digital media, which you can find by searching for their name. You can use your website, social media channels, online publications, media mentions and customer reviews to build your business’s online presence.
Why is web presence important?
In today’s digital world, every business needs an online presence. It’s how existing and potential customers find you and communicate with you – and it’s also important in building consumer confidence and trust in your brand.
Your online presence encompasses all the touchpoints a consumer may have with your brand online, from your website to social media and news sites to review platforms. With 81% of consumers conducting online research before making a purchase online, having a positive and trustworthy web presence could help your business stand out from the competition.
How to grow your business online with Google
When looking for a product, service or experience online, the first place consumers are likely to go to is an internet search engine. Google dominates the global search engine market share, handling 92% of all search queries worldwide. That’s more than nine in every ten internet users searching for information online through Google.
With Google controlling such a vast majority of internet searches, understanding how it displays your brand to consumers helps you manage your online presence so you can grow your business online.
Watch the video below to learn how to improve your online presence through Google.5 ways to optimise your brand's online presence - GMB, YELP, Google Reviews
How to improve your online presence with listings
What are listings?
Listings are an online summary of all the essential information about your business. They are a powerful tool that can help your potential and existing customers find you online – and if you have a brick-and-mortar presence, offline too. Most listings contain four key pieces of information:
- Name of your business
- Address of your business
- Your phone number
- Your website URL.
You might also want to include supporting information too, such as hours of operation, questions and answers about your business, as well as any customer reviews.
How to enhance your listings
An up to date and accurate listing can boost the visibility of your brand online. If your business listing is incorrect or missing key information, consumers are likely to feel less confident about your brand, which could lead them to choose a competitor’s product or service.
If you have stores or branches, an accurate listing will also ensure that customers are able to find your business location, which drives footfall and increase sales. Here are some simple ways to perfect your business’s listing online:
- Complete every section of your business listing. The more information you offer to potential customers, the more likely they are to view you as a legitimate brand
- Make sure you use your actual business name. Adding additional keywords could get your listing penalised
- Use a local phone number if you have one. This will show consumers and search engines that you’re a legitimate local business
- Update your hours of operation if they change
- Use the description to offer a genuine summary of what your business can offer customers. Be honest about the services and products you offer
- Add high-resolution images of your business. This could show the inside and outside of your store, for example, as well as product images
- Regularly review and update your business listing online. If information about your company changes, for example opening hours during holiday periods, make sure you update this to give consumers accurate information about your business.
Google Business Profile
What is a Google Business Profile?
With over 90% of online searches made through Google, you’ll want to list your business online through Google’s Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). It’s a free tool for businesses and organisations to help you manage your online presence across Google’s various platforms.
By giving Google relevant information about your business, you can become more discoverable to potential customers in search and begin to take control of the way your brand is represented online. It’s free to set up, easy to manage and you can personalise it to connect with your customers and show them what products and services you offer.
How to set up your Google Business Profile
Setting up your Google Business Profile is simple. During the set-up process Google will ask you to provide as much relevant information as possible, including:
- Business name
- Contact details (e.g. phone number, email address)
- Business location
- Opening times/hours of operation
- Website URL
- Social media links
- Photos and videos
- Links to your reviews.
Google won’t fully recognise your business until you’ve completed their simple verification process. Once you’ve entered your company’s details into your Google Business Profile account, you can choose how you’d like to verify your business – either through phone, text, email or video. You may need to verify with more than one method, but you’ll get a notification from Google when you’re verified. It can then take a few weeks for your updated Business Profile to show on Google, but you can now update and add to your information whenever you like.
Citations
If you want to increase your brand’s visibility in its local area, citations are a key factor in making sure that online users can easily find your business. A citation is an online reference to a business that includes its name, address and phone number. When set up and used correctly, citations can help improve your business’s local rankings.
Most citations are in the form of an online business directory, with some of the most popular free directories including Yelp, Yell, Bing and Facebook. By listing your business in a trusted online directory, you’re sending a signal to Google that your company is a legitimate business that can be trusted.
You can manually submit a business listing to online directories. Search for your business on each site – if it’s already there, make sure the information is accurate and update it if required. If there’s no listing for your business, add one. Make sure you include the three key pieces of information – name, address and phone number. Some sites, for example, Yelp, let you add photos and other details to your listing.
Keep track of your citations to ensure they’re consistent and accurate. 80% of consumers lose trust in a local business if they see incorrect or inconsistent business details online.
Bing
What is Bing?
Bing is an internet search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. It’s the second biggest search engine by volume worldwide, managing around 3% of all search queries. Like Google, Bing has a business listing function for companies who want to increase their online visibility among consumers who use Bing as their search engine: Bing Places for Business.
How to set up your Bing Places for Business listing
Follow three simple steps to set up your company’s Bing Places for Business listing:
- Claim your listing on Bing. There may be an existing listing for your business online, or you may need to add a new one
- Complete your listing profile. Add information about your business to your profile, including contact details, hours of operation, products and services offered, as well as photos of your business
- Verify your Bing listing, by receiving a PIN at your business address, phone or email
Use Bing Places for Business to give your brand more visibility in online searches made through Bing, helping more customers to find your business.
Reviews
Once you’ve sorted your business listings and set up a profile on Google and Bing, the next step in improving your online presence is collecting and sharing customer reviews and product star ratings.
What are product stars?
Product stars are the aggregated reviews for your products displayed to customers shopping online through Google. They’re shown in ads and free product listings, appearing as one to five-star ratings that also show the total number of reviews for each product. Product star ratings are taken from multiple sources, including sellers, review platforms like Feefo, Google users and more.
Why are ratings important?
Ratings are critical for any business. 92% of consumershesitate to make a purchase if there are no customer reviews. Star ratings and reviews help consumers research products and make purchase decisions. They can help drive more customers to your product pages, sending signals to consumers that you’re a trustworthy brand, and they’re a great way to boost click-through rates to your website and increase conversions.
How to get product ratings
To get Google product ratings, you need to have at least 50 reviews across all your products, which can be combined to form an overall star rating. You can source these ratings from various locations, including your website and review platforms like Feefo. As the name suggests, product ratings are specific to each product – customers rate the performance or quality of the individual product, not the business that provides it.
SEO
What is SEO and how can it help? (link to online reputation management guide)
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process of making your website as visible as possible to consumers who search for your business or related topics on Google and other search engines. Search terms could be linked to your product or services, your brand, or other topics related to your industry and company type. With 68% of online experiences starting with a search engine, it’s important that you make your business as visible as possible.
While many factors impact a business’s SEO performance, product reviews are a great way to boost your SEO and enhance your online presence. Reviews can help Google to better understand your business, as customers are likely to include keywords and phrases in their reviews that could tell Google what your business sells, what industry you operate or where you’re based. Once Google has a clearer picture of who you are and what you sell, it can better position you when a consumer searches for something that’s relevant to your business.
Google Knowledge Panel
What is a Google Knowledge Panel?
Knowledge Panels can be a great marketing tool for your business, helping you to boost your online presence and brand in Google’s search results. A Google Knowledge Panel provides online consumers with useful answers about your business. It displays at the top of the page when you search for a place, person or business and displays the information consumers need, such as website links, contact details, opening times and location, in a more visual and immediate way. There are two types of Google Knowledge Panel: Local and Branded.
Local Knowledge Panels
Local Knowledge Panels are linked directly to your location and are most often used by small to medium businesses to display useful information to their customers, such as contact details, website links and consumer reviews. It helps customers find information about your business immediately on the results page.
The panel is tied to your company’s location and contains all the relevant information a consumer needs to inform their purchasing decision. The more localised and specific a search, the greater chance your business has of appearing as a relevant Knowledge Panel on Google.
Branded Knowledge Panels
Branded Knowledge Panels are harder to get, and they’re generally reserved for established, well-known brands. They provide a general overview of key information about the company (usually taken from Wikipedia), including their name, logo and a brief description.
If your company is deemed to have enough online authority, Google may create a Branded Knowledge Panel for you that will appear when consumers search for your business name on search engine results pages, though it’s not guaranteed.
How to get your own Knowledge Panel
There are many benefits to having a Google Knowledge Panel, including increased online visibility for your business, higher brand awareness, and greater engagement with online consumers. If you want to get your own Knowledge Panel, get started with these simple steps:
- Set your business up with a verified Google+ account. Google unsurprisingly favours content published on Google+ and it’s a primary trusted source of information for Google to draw data from
- Submit entries about your business to Wikipedia and Wikidata. Wikipedia is one of the most trusted sources for Google when searching for relevant data to create Branded Knowledge Panels, so you’re unlikely to get one without a Wikipedia entry
- Ask your SEO expert to add structured data (more on this below) to your website. This tells search engines what your data means, rather than just what it says, ensuring that it returns more valuable and informative results to search engine users
- Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. If your business doesn’t warrant its own Wikipedia entry but you still want a Local Knowledge Panel, set up your verified Google Business Profile. This is a quick and easy way to manage the information Google displays about you to potential customers
Rich snippets
What are rich snippets?
Rich snippets are the enhanced search results that appear beside your website in the search engine results page (SERP). They include extra information about your business, such as star ratings, with the additional information pulled from the structured data found in your website code.
Why are rich snippets important?
When an online user views a Google search results page, they’ll notice that most of the results display three pieces of information: title tag, meta description and URL. A rich snippet adds extra information to this normal snippet, which makes the result stand out from others on the SERP. The main benefit of this is increased click-through rate to the URL that features the rich snippet.
How can you get rich snippets for your business?
Google will show rich snippets for your website if you add structured data to your site. Structured data is essentially a piece of code that search engines can read and understand, which they then use to create rich snippets. It’s a way to describe your site to make it easier for search engines like Google to understand. Some of the most popular types of structured data include:
- Article
- Course
- Event
- FAQ
- How to
- Product
- Q&A
- Recipe
- Review
- Video.
Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that Google will create a rich snippet for your site, even if you’ve added structured data to it.
Tools for online presence management
Why measuring and monitoring is important
Your online presence directly affects how existing and potential customers find and interact with your business, both online and offline. It’s important to measure and monitor the state of your online presence to understand how well you’re reaching these customers and how you can improve the visibility of your brand in the future.
Supporting metrics to monitor
As well as building your online profile through Google and other search engines, you should consider monitoring additional metrics to ensure you’re proactively and effectively managing your online presence, including:
- Direct website traffic
- Bounce rate and conversion
- User demographics
- Social media mentions
- Review platforms
Tools to use
There are several tools available online to help you manage your online presence. Some also provide insights into the sentiment of customers based across different locations and your brand perception in different demographics and geographies. Some of our favourites include:
- Mention: A social media and web monitoring tool that provides real-time alerts for your chosen keywords. This can include brand mentions as well as product mentions
- Reputology: A platform that helps you monitor and manage online reviews
- Brand Grader: A tool to help you assess other publications, your competitors’ and influencers’ reputations to see how they compare with your brand.
Reviews and ratings are important when it comes to getting seen in the search results. To find out more about how collecting real feedback can help improve your position, speak to one of our experts today.
