A business needs to have a strong presence on Google. Why? Because so much of your target audience is there. They look for answers, for help, at your competitors, at your reviews, and so on. Marketing on Google isn’t easy though. There are countless ways to do it and the competition can be tough.
Google My Business (GMB)
We like putting GMB profiles under the social media umbrella. Because just like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram; you have to optimize it with good content, your business information, and high quality images. Your Google My Business helps you show up first when people search your company name and to show up on Google Maps. The more reviews you have and the more information you fill out, the better you will get seen!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the free (but still requires time, effort, and knowledge) way to market your business on Google. This involves your website and other places you link your website/business to. When you search your business, does your website and social media profiles show up? If so, you have good SEO (at least for your business name). Marketing on Google with SEO requires you to optimize all your pages to show up on multiple search results. So, if you are a roofing company…you should have a service page targeting the keyword (term/phrase your customers are searching for) “roofing” or “commercial roofing.” A blog is a great way to hit a lot of keywords that your website pages can’t! Which is why you see so many companies having blogs.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
This is the paid way to market your business on Google. While your Google My Business and website SEO hopefully takes care of all the organic, or free, ways to get seen; SEM is all the ways you pay to get at the top of more search results for new keywords. So this means pushing a search ad out through Google with your homepage that is hitting 10 different keywords instead of the one that you did for SEO. You can also dive into display ads and so on. All this has been focused on Google. Why not Bing or the other search engines? Google pretty much owns the market. This is meant as a quick crash course. It can get even more involved than this and marketing on Google takes some strategy, time, and knowledge.
We do have a strategy guide on SEO you can check out here. Otherwise, please reach out to us for some help! You can also check out how we help some of our clients on this page: Google Marketing.
