Why is your Google My Business profile so undervalued?

Local SEO is a shockingly undervalued resource in today’s SEO battlefield, and none more so than your Google My Business listing. Your local listings (or local SEO) on Google have been with us now for over 3 years and yet they are still criminally overlooked by both end clients and SEO agencies alike. It’s 2016 and yet most SEO’s still talking about organic listings as being the peak of SEO when there’s something above them. I mean if I told you there was a free listing that cost nothing to advertise on Google’s front page that was actually above organic listings and yet had more credibility than the Adwords just above it you’d bite my hand off wouldn’t you? Well, that’s exactly what Google offers all companies every single day and yet the opportunity is seldom exploited.

In fact, local listings are the great leveler. Whether you’re big or small you have the opportunity to fight whether you’re a single site concern against a multi-site mega-corporation, well at least in your own locality, which is at least probably where your audience is sited anyway! ‘So show me where to sign up?’ I hear you say.

The first thing to do is to go to Google My Business and check whether your company is already listed. Chances are if you’re an established company you will be. The problem can be if it’s already been claimed by somebody else. This may have been an employee or agency working for you previously. In that case, you are looking at a somewhat protracted process of requesting it from the previous claimant if you can’t work out the partial e-mail that Google will provide you as the only information for you to determine who it might be. If you have difficulty then feel free to contact us to help you reclaim what is rightfully yours.