What is Google Business Profile and does it work in Malaysia?
Google Business Profile (or GBP) is a free tool that allows you to manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps. This includes adding your business name, location and hours of operation; monitoring and responding to customer feedback; more photos; finding out where and how people search for you, and more.
If you’re new to local SEO, the Google Business Profile is a great place to focus your first efforts. After all, when people search for a product or service near them, they are often very close to making a purchase: for every two people searching locally (think “watch repair near me”) there is a person visiting a store that day.
Therefore, it is important that the information about your Google Business Profile listings be as accurate, complete, and optimised as possible.
To learn how to create a Google Business Profile account here.
Everyone is doing social media now, how is Google still relevant?
True, social media is the trend now and Google sounds pretty much like something that people wouldn’t care much about these days.
However, when we talk about numbers from SEMrush. The Top Visited Malaysian Websites on October 2022, Google is still pretty much killing it in terms of numbers, doubling the traffic of YouTube at no. 2.
What’s even better is that whenever people search for something on Google, it pretty much means that they are already “looking for a solution”.
What do I mean by that?
So bring yourself back to a typical weekend morning, you just woke up and looking for some great coffee.
It’s habitual for you to turn on your phone and type in “cafe near me”, “breakfast near me”, “coffee near me” and so on.
As a business owner, if you’re able to appear at the right time, chances are you’ll get noticed by customers like these and eventually grow your foot traffic.
Does GMB work for Malaysian Businesses?
Yes, it does! From all of the retail stores we’ve worked with, hundreds of businesses ranked Top 3. But it’s not an easy task. As there is a lot of technical expertise involved behind like backlinking, optimisation, review management, etc.
As a business owner in Malaysia, most probably you don’t have the time to work on all these. This is why we’re here to help out! With a tool that you can use to manage your reviews easily, your business can be seen by a wider range of audience.
Imagine rather than your cafe ranking no.1 in “Cafe in KL”, you can rank no.1 in “Cafe in Bukit Jalil”! It gives more relevance and in turn, more sales to your cafe in a long run. How cool is that!
Is Google Business Profile Free?
GMB is completely free. The only requirement to use it is that you must interact directly with your customers – in other words, you cannot operate 100% online.
We’ve created a complete guide on how to list your business on GMB here
Is Google Business Profile Worth it?
No doubt – Google Business Profile is definitely worth it. It’s like being publicly available for free without much effort. Using Google Business Profile will also be a big advantage for your competitors.
This is a great tool to use for your local marketing efforts. Not only will this make your business unique, but your business will also be highly visible to a local audience in your area.
With Google Business Profile, you can build trust among your customers because most people consider Google to be very trustworthy. If you’re looking to boost your SEO, Google Business Profile is a must-have and you can trust us for that!
Just as your website needs to be optimized, your business listing also needs to be properly optimized. We can help you audit & optimise your business listing and help you update your listing and make the necessary changes if needed.
Google Maps Ranking (or Local SEO) and Online Reputation is an integral part of business strategy for every brick-and-mortar business. Local SEO will help your audience find you when they search online if you have a storefront or business area. We hope you found this article helpful in your quest to gain recognition and credibility for your brand online.
If your business is serving local and you don’t have the skillset and expertise to optimise for this, we’re more than happy to help you out!