One of the most powerful features of Google My Business (GMB) is its built-in analytics tool, Google My Business Insights. These insights provide valuable data that help business owners track their performance, understand customer behavior, and refine their local SEO strategies. By leveraging the insights available through GMB, you can make informed decisions to boost your visibility, engagement, and ultimately, your business’s success.
Understanding how customers interact with your GMB profile is essential for optimizing your local SEO and enhancing your marketing strategies. GMB Insights provide a clear picture of customer engagement, helping you to identify what’s working and where there’s room for improvement.
Optimize Local SEO
GMB Insights offer key data points that help you understand how often your business appears in local searches, how customers find you, and what actions they take after finding your profile. This data is invaluable for optimizing your local SEO strategy. For instance, if most of your customers are finding you through discovery searches (e.g., searching for a product or service, not your business name), it indicates that your profile is optimized for broader local search terms.
Improve Customer Engagement
By tracking engagement metrics like clicks, calls, and requests for directions, you can gain a better understanding of how potential customers are interacting with your GMB profile. This data can help you tailor your content, posts, and overall profile to better meet customer needs and increase engagement.
Measure Marketing Success
If you’re running promotions or seasonal campaigns through Google Posts or other marketing efforts, Insights can help measure their effectiveness. You can track how many people viewed or clicked on your posts and use that information to adjust your future marketing strategies.
Key Metrics to Monitor in GMB Insights
Search Queries
This metric shows the keywords and phrases customers use to find your business. GMB Insights categorize these into three types: direct searches (people who search for your business by name), discovery searches (people who search for a product or service and find your business), and branded searches (people searching for a brand related to your business). Understanding which type of search leads customers to your business can help you tailor your SEO strategy.
Views
GMB Insights break down how often your profile was viewed across Google Search and Google Maps. You can see if customers are finding your business via Google’s local pack, through organic search, or directly on Google Maps. High visibility in Google Maps, for instance, indicates strong local SEO performance.
Customer Actions
This section shows what customers do after finding your profile, such as visiting your website, requesting directions, calling your business, or sending messages. Tracking these actions helps you understand how well your GMB profile converts visitors into actual customers. If few people take action after viewing your profile, it may indicate that you need to improve your call-to-actions or offer more appealing content.
Photo and Video Views
GMB Insights also track how often your photos and videos are viewed. Visual content plays a significant role in attracting and engaging potential customers, so monitoring the performance of your media can guide you in adding more appealing visuals that enhance your profile.
Direction Requests
This metric shows where customers are when they request directions to your business. Understanding where your customers are coming from can help you target specific areas with localized marketing campaigns and even identify new locations for expansion.
How to Use Insights to Refine Your Strategy
Update Based on Search Queries
If you notice certain keywords or queries leading customers to your profile, consider optimizing your GMB listing, website, and content for those terms. This will help you rank better for those searches and attract more relevant traffic.
Analyze Customer Behavior
If a significant number of users are requesting directions or visiting your website but not calling, it might indicate that your call-to-action or contact information isn’t easily accessible. Adjusting your profile to make it easier for customers to take action can boost engagement.
Test and Improve Content
By monitoring how well your photos, videos, and posts perform, you can test different types of content to see what resonates best with your audience. Consistently update your profile with fresh, relevant content to keep engagement high.
Conclusion
Google My Business Insights provide a treasure trove of data that helps businesses track performance, understand customer behavior, and refine their local SEO strategies. By analyzing key metrics such as search queries, views, and customer actions, you can make data-driven decisions that improve engagement and drive more traffic to your business. Regularly monitoring these insights will ensure your GMB profile remains optimized for maximum local SEO impact.
