Google My Business (also referred to as GMB) profiles can make a huge difference in digital wellbeing of modern businesses. With optimized GMB listings, businesses show up as search results at top locations for users. For all UAE businesses, GMB optimization can make that much needed difference standing the target business out from all others.

Google reviews play a vital role in GMB optimization and reaching it out to the right audiences. New and advanced GMB Tools provide a competitive advantage on local search competitors. As digital smart devices and the internet is becoming the go-to search destination for everyone around the world and in the UAE, the need for an optimized GMB boost is greater than ever.

Here are few tips from pros at www.seo.ae that will tell you how to boost your GMB profile for 2020:

1: Focus on Reviews

GMB profiles are naturally optimized by reviews. Google thinks of reviews as signals for businesses and places listed on their platform. Encouraging reviews for your profile is one of the best GMB strategies you can have. Also, reviews don’t cost anything but their output for organic searchers is far superior to some of the paid strategies.

Think of any local business website from any industry. When looking for their products or services, you do not have any testimonials or opinions to look upon. Whatever their website says and claims, there is nothing to prove it unless there are some reviews by people who have used their products or services in the past. Cost effectiveness, product or service authenticity and many more will be confirmed by reviews wherever you can find them.

GMB reviews help raise businesses in local searches telling people about product and service quality. Ranging between 4-5 stars and have the maximum number of reviews on the GMB profile can build trust from searchers and users. Yet, these reviews that you get on your profiles don’t just show up overnight.

Reaching out to your happy customers to have them leave positive reviews is what you have to do. There are a few review platforms available that can provide great advantage. BirdEye, Pozative and ReviewPush are some of the best ones available. These advanced review management platforms allow:

• Proper customer reviews organization
• Option to send text messages for review requests
• Direct response to reviews from email alerts

Whichever way you do it, encouraging honest reviews from customers is the best way to go. Ask happy customers for detailed analysis in their reviews to give better outlook for new customers. If you can picture of products in their reviews, you will be in the best-case scenario. Pictures boost your GMB profile’s visibility even better than text-based reviews.

2: Do Not Ignore Negative Reviews – Respond to Them

There are some tactics available that deal with negative reviews in non-ethical ways. However, these tend to cost much or have future implications for your website. It is also common for businesses to ignore negative reviews and just leave them be. Both these are not great options and will bring some sort of problems in the times to come.

The best way to go about negative reviews is to respond to them. These negative reviews are also insights into the running of your business and production of products or delivery of services. Understand the problem and share your response with the reviewers in a way that you try to fix their side of the problem to your best ability.

Making sure to change the perception of your negative reviewers is the best option. Apologize and empathize to people who leave negative reviews. This will show your intent about your business and leave an impression into review reader’s minds that you care about public opinion. And then of course, you get the knowledge about what brings negative reviews. Try not to repeat the same mistake.

3: Spammy Tactics Are Bad – Avoid Them

Google is getting smarter by the hour. Their intelligent algorithms are now able to detect when someone is trying to cheat the system. Automated content, keyword stuffing, creating doorway pages and many more are spammy tactics that now do get caught. Since GMB is Google’s very own platform, this all applies here as well.

Customers as well as Google trust only genuine, honest and real reviews by real users. Everyone seems to judge pretty well when websites have paid dubious review platforms for fake five-star reviews. In all honesty, spammy reviews are now detectable by review sites that also get these websites with fraudulent reviews flagged for being dishonest.

This flag will warn users when they land on your website to not trust the site and will result in a negative press about your business. Similarly, any incentives including future discounts if customers leave positive reviews also get caught on GMB. This one causes your online reputation to take a plunge rather than benefits from it. There would be that someone who will mention this discount causing new readers to think of the whole review to be false.

4: Benefit from New GMB Tools

Google has rolled out some fairly recent tools for their GMB platform. Google Marketing Kit is one of these newly release tools. This one allows to create free posters, stickers and social media posts to advertise your promotions and events for the business efficiently. Of course, this is release by Google and thus there will be great applications for it throughout the system.

Social posts especially can be that huge difference maker for your business’s online presence. The option to create cool posters for positive reviews is available as well. These can feature blurbs from text. You can also then share these on social media platforms for better response and trust from the audience.

With the latest updates, users can now follow your business’s local profile on GMB just as they do on social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook. This feature in particular is beneficial offering more interaction of users with your business. Following your business on GMB, users will get access to the following:

• Offers and promotions
• Blog posts by your business
• New GMB Social Posts
• Business events and occasions
• Product or service updates

These all play a vital role in boosting your brand awareness among your followers and also multiply it with new audiences. Google Posts also let businesses advertise new deals, events and coupons in an innovative way. Use of videos, call-to-action buttons and images engage users towards your businesses even more. Google Posts also has an analytic feature that makes it one of the best GMB advertising methods letting businesses see the way users interact with posts. This data can be used for post improvement.

Another cool future feature is GMB’s Local Favorite addition. It is said to award digital and physical badges to top 5% local businesses in each category. However, not many details have come out regarding this one. Categories of businesses might be separated by region and how these regions will be partitioned is yet to be told.

How www.seo.ae Can Help?

It is pretty evident from Google’s new GMP tools that the search giant has its eyes settled on building business’s local profiles in the right way. www.seo.ae is your most reliable Google My Business optimization service provider in the UAE. We promote your business in GMB making it easier for people to find it in the real world.

Our team of certified Google My Business experts also helps with getting maximum organic reviews for your business profiles. Get in touch now and we will handle your online business in the perfect way for it to become the next big thing on the internet in 2020.