When it comes to Mississauga SEO, one of the most important things you can do is optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP). And when it comes to search engines, Google is by far the most important player.
Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business or GMB) is Google’s business directory – but it offers a lot more than a traditional directory. The most important businesses for you to outcompete are other businesses in Mississauga. To do that, you’ll need to optimize your GBP listing.
When you do, you might land in the coveted Local Map Pack (often called the 3-Pack).
The 3-Pack is a thing of beauty. It displays before all other organic search results and contains vital information about the businesses customers are looking for, including:
Their name, address, and location on Google Maps
Reviews and ratings
Services they offer
Price points
Photos
This is the kind of listing you want on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It’s much more eye-catching and informative than traditional text results.
We’re going to teach you how to improve your Business Profile, not only to boost your chances of getting into the 3-Pack but to bolster your overall Mississauga SEO efforts – not to mention improving customer experience.
This article assumes you’ve already set up your profile. If you haven’t, check out our guide to setting up GBP for Canadian businesses. That guide is generic – the article you’re reading right now is about optimizing your profile for Mississauga specifically.
Mississauga is Your Home
A common mistake for Mississauga businesses is to list their address as “Toronto” in their business profile. It makes a certain amount of sense – your location is in the GTA, and you likely want to attract customers from throughout the region.
Don’t do this. List your City as Mississauga. It makes it less confusing both for search engines and for your clients. An accurate address is one of the most important parts of a Business Profile.
Categorically Improved
Google offers both Primary and Secondary categories when you’re setting up your Business Profile. As a rule of thumb, you should:
Choose the primary category that best represents your primary line of business.
Be as specific as possible with your primary category.
Choose as few secondary categories as possible to represent other business activities.
For example, imagine I’m the owner of a spa with a wonderfully punny name: MissisSPAuga. Depending on what my spa offers, I could choose as my primary category:
Day spa
Spa
Facial spa
Spa resort
We’re going to say MissisSPAuga is a Day spa – we’re not at a resort, and “spa” is too generic. We would not include the secondary categories “Facial spa” and “Massage spa”, because our “Day spa” category covers those. If, however, we offer food and drink at our spa, we might include “Health food restaurant” – we’re keeping things healthy at MissisSPAuga.
Not sure what categories to choose? Look at your competitors!
For example, CedarHouse was one of the first results when searching for “spa in Mississauga”. They are highly reviewed, and they chose “Day spa” as their primary business category, so it certainly seems like we’re on the right track.
Rolling Up Attributes
You can (and should) add multiple attributes to your Business Profile. Unlike categories, more is better here. Use as many attributes that accurately describe your business as you can.
Some attributes (like dine-in and take-out) are only available when your Profile falls under a certain category (like restaurant). Other attributes can only be added by Google users, not by the business owner.
General attributes range from the functional (wheelchair accessible) to the descriptive (women-led business). Add any and every attribute that accurately describes a feature of your business. It will help your clients understand your business better, and it can help you rank better when customers are looking for businesses with particular needs.
Describe Your Business
Your business description gives you the opportunity to tell customers a bit more about who you are and what you do. Admittedly, they have to scroll down in your Business Profile to see it, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect it. It’s an opportunity to tell Mississaugans your story, and a great way of signalling what your business is all about to Google.
Business descriptions must be under 750 characters – you should frontload the first 250 characters with relevant keywords. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should stuff keywords (never keyword-stuff) – only use keywords that make sense contextually.
For local businesses, “Mississauga” is an essential keyword – you should also describe important products and services that you offer. The business description is a good place to include lines of business that you might have chosen for your categories. In our MissisSPAuga example, “facials” and “massages” are good services to bring up in the first 250 characters.
Follow Google’s business description guidelines: Don’t be overly promotional (don’t talk about sales), don’t use links, and keep things relevant to your business.
Weekly Publication
You should be posting updates to your Business Profile every week. There are two types of weekly posts you should be making: photos and updates.
Photos
We’re not going to ask you to do a photo shoot every week – that would be a waste of money. Instead, get professional, quality photos of the exterior and interior of your business – those will be the most important photos in your Business Profile. Upload them right away.
From there, you can take photos of your products – take a lot of photos at once, then post one every week. You can do the same with staff photos or photos of the area surrounding your business.
Updates (Posts)
You can make text posts in GBP – think of it as a form of microblogging. You should make a post every week. Unlike your business description, you can (and should) include promotional events. Sales, contests, you name it: put it in your updates.
If you have a promotion that’s going on for more than one week, make new posts about it every week anyway – just change your copy. Don’t have any promotions on? Talk about what’s happening around your business. Talk about what’s happening in Mississauga (like the Bread and Honey Festival or events at Celebration Square) if you can relate it back to your business.
Questions and Reviews
There’s an element of interactivity to GBP that you should take full advantage of. You can connect with Mississaugans, answer their questions, and respond to their reviews.
The basics of questions and reviews are simple: answer every question, respond to every review. That means you’ll have to check your profile regularly – fortunately, you’ll already be posting every week, so you can do quite a bit of upkeep in one sitting.
You want to, when possible, encourage questions and reviews. Encouraging questions can be done by simply answering the questions that have already been posted – an active Q&A section will prompt more questions. As for reviews, use review management software, or simply ask your clients!
Products and Services
Google is pulling out all the stops to make the SERPs a one-stop shop for everything their users need. They’d probably like it if no one ever had to click on any website but theirs. Fortunately, that’s not likely to happen, and we can take advantage of their substantial efforts to increase our sales.
In brief, Google will allow you to display – and in some cases, sell – products and services directly from your GBP. Getting it set up goes beyond the scope of this article, but Google has provided extensive guides on their “Product Editor” and “Services Editor” to help you get started.
Keep Your Profile Up to Date
One final tip for you – you want to keep your Business Profile up to date. Ignorant (or malicious) users can actually suggest edits to your most vital information, including your address and hours of operation.
We recommend checking your Business Profile daily. If that’s a bit too often for you, consider staggering your photo and text posts. That way, you’ll be checking your profile for any incorrect information twice a week – in this time, you can also respond to questions and reviews.
We Can Manage Your Mississauga SEO
As you’ve no doubt gathered, optimizing your GBP isn’t a one-time thing. It takes consistent effort, and if you let your profile slide, there are consequences; the information on your profile might become inaccurate. You may also be giving an opportunity to competitors who are looking to outrank you.
When you work with First Rank for your Mississauga SEO, we can manage your Google Business Profile for you. That means we’ll check it regularly for inaccuracies, optimize your business description, and even create weekly posts for you.
Jacob Kettner is the owner and CEO of First Rank Inc., a digital marketing agency based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He currently sits on Manitoba Chamber of Commerce Small Business Advisor Council which assists people grow their small businesses in Manitoba.
