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As consumers go through their buying journey, they prefer to make a decision without having to visit a brand's website for further research.
This is supported by the fact that over 60% of searches are zero-click and 80% of the top five results in Google for industry keywords link to a Google profile or other third-party profile sites.
The first step before you implement steps to improve your digital profile traffic is creating a benchmark of where your brand stands today.
Begin by identifying how accurate your information is for core fields (name, address, website link, phone number and hours) in major profile sites like Google, Bing, Facebook, Yelp & Apple. An additional third-step would be to identify your average rating across profiles and compare this against your competition to identify opportunities.
The end result of this exercise will give you a benchmark of where you stand today, what are areas of concern you should be focusing on and will enable you to track progress as you continue optimizing your profiles.
You can add additional insights on your profiles on major sites including whether you offer online bookings, accept credit cards and if a face-mask is required to enter your establishment. This article gives you a list of all the fields that are available in order of importance.
You can add additional insights on your profiles on major sites including whether you offer online bookings, accept credit cards and if a face-mask is required to enter your establishment. This article gives you a list of all the fields that are available in order of importance.
Bulk add UTM parameters to the web URL for all your Google Business Profiles using the automation recipe in Synup Automation to track via Google Analytics.
Reviews have gradually become a major ranking factor across digital profile sites. According to a BrightLocal Survey in done in 2020, a profile with a well rounded reviews strategy is likely to have a 13% edge when it comes to ranking in the top results.
It is recommended that you utilize a tool like Synup that can aggregate and send you alerts any time a review is posted on the major profile sites. If you do not want to invest in a tool, a best practice would be to have all of your reviews flow into the same email inbox.Most review providers will allow you to set notification preferences to accomplish this.Ensure that you also set up a regular cadence to do a deeper check on consumer insights and feedback from reviews. One way to do this is by exporting all of your reviews to a spreadsheet and utilizing Google Data Studio or Tableau to visualize a tag cloud of common phrases based on sentiment.
It is always recommended that you personalize the reviews and appear human as opposed to posting the same response irrespective of customer sentiment. Keep in mind that your response will need to cater to specifics about that particular reviewer's experience with your brand and also needs to change based on the rating they have provided (anything that is 3-stars or below is a bad review).We’ve put together a few links for responses templates that can help you along the way.
While tracking and monitoring should be critical components of your review strategy, nothing moves the needle as much as getting happy customers to write reviews about your business. Just a one-star average rating improvement on Yelp can result in a 5% - 9% increase in business (Harvard Business School Survey, 2016).
Tools like Synup allow you to connect your CRM or point-of-sale system to automatically generate new reviews. An alternative is to build this workflow internally. Most review providers will allow you to set notification preferences to accomplish this.
A workaround is to schedule time every week to export customer data from your system of record and send out emails and text messages through a provider of your choice. Don't forget to personalize these invites. A quick and easy way to accomplish this is by using mail-merge and templates.
One technique we have seen working is to automatically add any happy customer reviews on your website and share them on social media profiles. Nothing beats social proof when it comes to driving conversions.
Your quality and quantity of what Google considers to be citations is a factor that drives rankings in their algorithm. Outside of this, it's also important to specifically optimize other high value traffic sources.
Look at investing some time to build citations using thirdparty digital profiles. While there are benefits to using an automated solution for this, you can also choose to build them manually. We've built a section on our website that you can use as a reference for this.
You should ideally list yourself in any high traffic site relevant to your industry (example: Healthgrades if you're in healthcare) - additionally, consider listing yourself on any source that comes up frequently for your brand and vertical specific keywords.
You can scan your business listings now:
When it comes to many of the digital profiles that you create and manage one key element that is often ignored is getting them indexed successfully in the primary search engines. If your profiles aren't indexed, they are likely to never be found by consumers or by the search engines to improve your profile rankings.
Indexing your profile can often lead to better results from any optimization effort. So, beyond getting your profiles published and completed, focus on the below tips to impact your digital marketing.
One way to check to see if a profile you published is being found by search engines, is to enter the URL of the link into the appropriate search engine and see if any results are showing.
One way to check to see if a profile you published is being found by search engines, is to enter the URL of the link into the appropriate search engine and see if any results are showing.
While getting indexed profiles is a major component to profiles and their authority in search, another way to make this happen is by building some backlinks to the profiles you've published while you are doing so for your brand website. It is recommended that you build 3 - 5 backlinks to each profile over a two month period. Also, adding your published profiles to each branch page on your website will help.
A lot of the information in your profile will come from users who are contributing their own content. Especially media, including photos and videos. These are a major factor that contribute to profile rankings as well as conversion.
Based on our analysis, we've seen that up to 15% of media for many brands (uploaded by users) aren't brand approved or correct. The first step is to audit your existing media and report anything that may be off.
Once you've completed a preliminary audit and cleanup, setup a regular cadence to have branch managers log in and report media that may be off and encourage staff to post pictures and videos to your profiles. This can be automated if you use a tool like Synup.
If you are actively encouraging customers to post positive reviews, reward them if they also include a photo or video as part of the review. These show up prominently on profiles.
Here's an interesting fact: 50% of all searches today are voice searches. Consumers are using voice search for recommendations, directions, and more important answers.
The key difference between how you are optimized for voice search and how you are optimized for traditional search is the long and short tail keywords. Consumers are conditioned to search with phrases like "Pizza opened near me", unlike when they are using voice search and speaking more naturally, "what restaurants are still open around me?". Below are couple of things that you should do to optimize for voice search.
Adding structured markup data to your website not only helps your brand stand out on search engines, but also helps you control the data that search engines can extract from your website. The Google Assistants and Cortanas of the world then can give exact answers to your customer's questions.
Yelp has an API connection with Amazon Alexa, which means claiming and optimizing your listings on Yelp will automatically help you get found when consumers are searching with an Amazon device.
Since voice search queries require long-tail keywords, a great way to do this is through FAQs. Taking the most commonly asked questions about your brand first and embedding them into your website is a great way to start optimizing for voice search.
Improving rankings and driving more traffic is one thing, but all of this has no impact on your ROI if you are unable to convert these profile views into your desired conversion (website visit, store visit or phone lead).
In this section, we will cover strategies you can employ to improve conversions on your profile.
↓ 1. Implement UTM parameters for all profile links
↓ 2. Ensure that you have a specific landing page for each local profile
↓ 3. Capitalize on posts & offers to drive conversions
↓ 4. Implement remarketing for profile visitors
↓ 5. Implement a call tracking solution
↓ 6. Optimize your posts and offers to focus on events
↓ 7. Personalize profile content for buyer intent
One common mistake we see with brands is that they do not utilize UTM parameters on the website link they publish within profiles. This makes it extremely hard if not impossible to attribute conversions that happened as a result of a profile visitor. In the case of one Fin-Serve customers of ours, we noticed that after implementing UTM tracking, their profiles became their top conversion channel (it was previously fifth highest).
While one conversion path for profile visitors is clicking on the website link, we notice that several other industries are extremely call heavy (example: beauty services). If your brand falls into that category, it is highly recommended that you invest in a call tracking solution. Not only will this give you visibility into conversion challenges, but it will also allow you to remarket back to prospects who didn't convert during the call.
While one conversion path for profile visitors is clicking on the website link, we notice that several other industries are extremely call heavy (example: beauty services). If your brand falls into that category, it is highly recommended that you invest in a call tracking solution. Not only will this give you visibility into conversion challenges, but it will also allow you to remarket back to prospects who didn't convert during the call.
Another avenue for conversions from profiles are posts (especially on Google & Facebook). We see that brands rely on the service they post on for attribution and conversion data, which can be tricky if clicks from these posts aren't tracked well. One way to solve this problem is by using short-links for any post being published on a platform. This allows brands to attribute well without having to rely on unreliable reporting from search engines and social media sites.
Many brands choose to link out to their website homepage from profiles. This often leads to a poor customer experience where the user is forced to take additional steps to reach the information they are looking for.
A way to solve this problem is by creating unique pages for each branch or store on your website and using them to link out from your profiles.
On an average brands see a 20% lift in conversions (Synup internal data, 2020) when they send profile visitors to a location specific page as opposed to the brand's website homepage.
Another benefit from creating location specific pages is that they also rank very highly on organic search leading to more visibility.
One trend we've seen is that brands focus on making regular posts on social media sites, while search and review sites are often ignored. It was very hard to generate posts at scale and schedule in advance in the past outside of social sites like Facebook and Instagram, but this can be solved using a tool like Synup or integrating with the endpoints offered by Google, Yelp and other profile sites.
A good number to stick to is at least five posts weekly to all your profiles. It is recommended that these posts are also personalized based on market dynamics.
With the powerful tooling options available today, marketers should establish a calendar to populate posts into all of their profiles and ensure that it mimics the brand's overall content calendar.
Every major profile site will allow you to add a post about any new information or news which may be organization-wide or specific to a brand.
These post types show up prominently especially in mobile search and can be used to announce any specific deals or events happening at a local branch or store.
These are extremely powerful for brands that may not sell physical products, but have services that they offer. Products & services posts show up prominently above the fold on desktop and mobile searches.
Remarketing can be extremely useful to convert browsers into customers. This can be done specifically for anyone who visits your web property from a profile or calls your business (if call tracking is implemented).
Not only do retargeting ads boost your conversion rates by up to 150% (Dataxu study, 2020), but consumers also like them, with 30% reporting a positive experience, compared to 11% who feel negatively about them (eMarketer study, 2013).
For website visitors or users who browsed, but didn't convert, put them into a custom audience you can utilize to run search, display and video advertising. Provide a strong incentive for them to choose you over the competition - offers and discounts work well in these scenarios.
For any existing customers that have converted, consider expanding your strategy to promote any other products that may be relevant to them using retargeting ads.
Further expand your remarketing audience by targeting look-alikes from your existing segments. Clicks from this channel are between 2 -10x less expensive compared to traditional ads (Wordstream client data, 2019). Additionally, you can reach out to prospective customers who haven't reached out to your brand yet.
Posts can become a lot more powerful for your brand as a conversion channel if you tie them to specific events.
If your brand is dynamic where users look for something specific based on time of year (example: Black Friday), optimize your calendar to focus on offers specific to that - this will lead to higher conversions and a better customer experience.
Several industries are impacted by weather conditions (restaurants, for example) and it may make sense to promote any weather sensitive offerings during this time. Tools like Synup can automatically connect to weather systems to auto-populate posts based on conditions.
Several industries are impacted by weather conditions (restaurants, for example) and it may make sense to promote any weather sensitive offerings during this time. Tools like Synup can automatically connect to weather systems to auto-populate posts based on conditions.
Pulling historical keyword search data for your profiles (Google My Business analytics allows this)
Identify patterns in spikes based on location and date-time
Include posts that contain keywords linked with specific landing pages on your website to drive higher traffic and conversions
Beyond orchestrating posts based on season, weather and location, it is also possible to show a specific message on your profile based on the keywords buyers search for.
By including a specific keyword in your posts, it is possible to show a clickable message (redirecting to your brand’s website) to improve profile conversions.
With one grocery brand we work with we noticed that a majority of their customers were looking for their offers and circulars primarily over the weekend. These customers were looking for something specific, which we could identify based on historical data, and we incorporated that into their profile strategy.
We were able to successfully show anyone searching for a circular or offer a specific page on the brand’s website. This cut down steps in the customer journey and lead to a significant increase in the number of engaged shoppers.
This lead to a significant increase in the number of engaged shoppers.
If your brand offers physical products, it is recommended that you publish these on shopping feeds and link them to your primary local profiles. Google, Bing & Facebook allow this type of integration.The most exciting thing about shopping feeds is that they show up prominently within profiles, and are personalized based on the keyword that the user has been searching for. While traditional posts require two clicks before a prospective customer can navigate to a brand's website, shopping feeds only require a single click that results in the searcher navigating directly to the brand website.This experience is extremely useful for potential customers, and also allows your brand to control a larger portion of the customer experi- ence (as opposed to relying on a search engine), optimizing the experience for conversions.
Linking your primary product inventory system to Google Shopping, Bing Shopping and Facebook Store
Establishing a one-time connection between your shopping feed and your primary profile
Ensuring that local search insights are integrated with product insights and your primary e-commerce website to drive conversions
Customer on average will have eight intractions with a brand before making a purchasing decision. Over 80% of these searches happen while on mobile and through third-party profiles.
70% of searchers get to your profiles, but never to your website.
70% of searchers get to your profiles, but never to your website.
Reviews aren't just there for your customers. They are there for your rankings, reputation, and profile authority. Make sure you are actively managing this.
It doesn't matter how many places your are listed if you are not being indexed. Make sure Google knows to crawl your 3rd party sites.
The world is shifting rapidly to voice as a preferred channel. Don't wait to be behind the curve. Optimize for voice now.
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