Leveraging Google My Business Insights can help you bridge the gap in your local SEO data to more effectively optimize your local listings and improve your overall local strategy.
Google My Business has simple and valuable insights on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. They provide a synopsis of how visitors searched and interacted with your GMB listing. Once you are logged into your Google My Business listing dashboard, the main menu will be to your left the insights tab is where you get all the data.
Google My Business Insights provides data on:
1. How Customers Search for Your Business.
Differentiates between direct and discovery visitors. Direct searches are generic brand related queries, it refers to visitors who found your listing searching specifically for your business name or address. Discovery searches refer to visitors who found your listing while searching for a category, product, service or general search query.
Knowing what people are searching for to find your business can help you identify new opportunities for your content creation strategy. It can also help you identify other reasons people are finding you other than the ones you would have assumed. This insight will help you craft a better message to those visitors.
2. Directions Requests.
This insight shows the specific areas’ visitors were in when requesting directions to your business. Searches with local intent are more likely to lead to store visits and sales within a day, so making sure you’re giving good directions is key. If you discover that there is a high search volume of people looking from directions from a particular area, you can consider updating your website to include those directions. If people are generally lost close to your building, it might be an indication that you could use some new signage.
3.Customer Actions.
What are the most common actions that visitors take; website visits, direction request or calls? When people are conducting local business searches they often don’t land on your website at all and don’t get counted in your analytics. Your customer action insights helps to fill in some of those gaps of local leads facilitated by online searches.
4. Photo Views.
Compares your photo views with other businesses. Multiple views from a single visitor is recorded as new, though these are not unique actions, unique views are not accounted for. For example, if one visitor looks through 10 of pictures, photo views will record 10 photo views.
5. Posts.
GMB allows you to post on your listing, once posted these appear just under your listing. It is a great way of diverting visitors’ attention to specific offers, news, events, or new products and a free advertising opportunity. Posts insights show total number of views and clicks, and this is a great way to measure success of the post.
Google My Business now also provides data on competitor posts which is a good way to track competitors posts and formulate strategies to outrank them.
6. Where Customers View Your Business on Google.
i.e. differentiates search or map views. These can be likened to impressions, they are not clicks but simply views. Again, unique views are not accounted for, every view from each user is recorded.
7. The Search Queries or Terms Visitors Used to Find Your Business.
These will give you, your most popular search queries, thereby providing you an indication of your brand equity. It answers the question, are you known by your brand name or by the service or product you provide.
8. Phone Calls.
Records when and how many times visitors call your business. This metric is important when trying to identify your business’ peak and off-peak times.
For businesses under brick and mortar popular times and average time spend at your location is also recorded. This is great data especially when trying to improve customer service with regards to turnaround time.
9. Photo Quantity.
This metric provides insights with regards to total number of photos compared with your competitors. You can leverage on competitor data and possibly improve your overall performance.
GMB insights provides data that can help you tweak your strategy and improve overall visibility and engagement. When used over longer periods you can identify trends and patterns that can inform and impact your local strategy. Go right ahead and blend these insights data with other offline data metrics for more customer focused and improved strategies.