Optimizing Your Mississauga Google My Business Profile

When it comes to improving how your Mississauga business performs online, one of the most important things you can do is improve your rank on search engines. And when it comes to search engines, Google is by far and away the most important player.

Google My Business (GMB) is Google’s business directory – but it offers a lot more than a traditional business directory does. The most important businesses for you to outcompete are other businesses in Mississauga. To do that, you’ll need to optimize your GMB profile.

When you do, you might land in the coveted 3-Pack.

The 3-Pack is a thing of beauty. Here, you see that it’s displayed before all other search results, and contains vital information about the businesses I’m looking for, including:

• Their name, address, and location on Google Maps

• Reviews

• Services they offer

• Price points

• Pictures

This is the kind of listing you want on SERPs. It’s much more eye-catching and informative than traditional search 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 SEO efforts – not to mention improving customer experience.

This article has been written with the assumption that you’ve already set up your GMB Profile. If you haven’t, check out our guide to setting up GMB for Toronto-based businesses. That guide is generic to the whole of the GTA – the article you’re reading right now is about optimizing your profile for Mississauga, in particular.

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 it’s likely you want to attract customers from throughout the GTA.

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 in one of the most important parts of a Business Profile on GMB.

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 the first spa I found when searching for “spa in mississauga”. They’re highly reviewed, at that. 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, and not by the business owner.

General attributes range from the functional (wheelchair accessible) to the descriptive (black-owned 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 for when customers are looking for businesses with particular attributes.

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 Mississauga 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 using your Business Profile every week. There are two types of weekly posts you should be making: photos and text posts.

Photos

We’re not going to ask you to take a photo shoot every week – that would be exhausting, and 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, photos of the area surrounding your business – anything you’d like that’s relevant to your business.

Posts

You can make text posts in GMB – think of it as a form of microblogging. You should make a text post every week – unlike your business description, you can (and should) include promotional events. Sales, contests, you name it: put it in your GMB posts.

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 if you can relate it back to your business. It’s a microblog – the opportunities are endless.

Questions and reviews

There’s an element of interactivity to GMB 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 GMB 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 GMB. Getting it set up goes beyond the scope of this article – fortunately, Google has provided all the information for you.

Here are a few links to GMB product and service guides created by Google:

• Product Editor
• Services Editor
• Menu Editor (for restaurants)
• Popular Dishes (for restaurants)

Keep your GMB up to date

One final tip for you – you want to keep your Business Profile up to date. Ignorant (and malicious) users can actually change even 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 GMB

As you’ve no doubt gathered, optimizing your GMB 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 GMB for you. That means we’ll check it regularly for inaccuracies and optimize your business description. We can even create weekly posts for you! Whatever you need.

Interested? Give us a call.