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Google Business Profile

How to Leverage Google Business Profile

Google dominates the search engine landscape, controlling a staggering 92% of the market. To better tap into the potential of Google Search and Maps for attracting new clientele, it’s imperative to set up a Google Business Profile (GBP), previously recognized as Google My Business (GMB).

Understanding GBP

Google Business Profile is a complimentary business listing service provided by Google. It’s a platform where businesses can share detailed information and visuals about their offerings, including their location, range of services, and products. By establishing this free profile, businesses can significantly amplify their visibility across various Google platforms. The information from your Google Business Profile can seamlessly integrate and appear in Google Search, Google Maps, and even Google Shopping.

However, it’s essential to understand that Google Business Profile is tailored for businesses that have direct interactions with customers. This encompasses entities with a physical presence, like restaurants or retail stores, and service providers who engage face-to-face with clients, such as consultants or plumbers. If your business operates solely online, you’d benefit more from other Google utilities like Google Ads and Google Analytics.

The Significance of Having a GMB Account

- - Boost Visibility on Google and Google Maps: Google stands unrivaled as the premier search referrer, directing both online and foot traffic. A well-optimized Google Business Profile ensures that when potential customers search for services or products akin to yours, your business emerges prominently. Especially on Google Maps, a local business listing significantly enhances the chances of discovery.
  - Command Your Online Business Narrative: With GMB, you’re in the driver’s seat. Update contact details, operational hours, and other pivotal data as and when required. If there are changes in your service offerings, temporary halts, or resumptions, you can promptly communicate this to your audience. Given the potent local SEO capabilities of Google Business Profiles, the information you provide takes precedence, overshadowing outdated data on other websites.
  - Foster Trust Through Authentic Reviews: Reviews are the bedrock of credibility in today’s digital age. Google’s review system, which amalgamates star ratings with room for detailed feedback, offers customers a platform to share their genuine experiences. This transparency aids potential customers in making informed decisions about which businesses to patronize and which products to invest in.

While the prospect of public reviews might seem daunting, especially given the inability to filter which ones appear, there’s a silver lining. Google asserts that a blend of positive and negative feedback appears more authentic and trustworthy than a barrage of exclusively glowing reviews.

Harness the power of Google My Business and watch your business thrive in the digital landscape.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns. Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.

Understanding SEO

The quest for visibility and relevance is a continuous journey in the digital world. One of the most critical tools in this journey is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, a common question arises: “How long does SEO take to work?”

Based on insights from SEMrush, this article aims to shed light on this question and more. Many use the comparison between the tai-chi movement and a fast-paced world to describe the pace of SEO versus other forms of promotion. It’s not an instant solution but a strategic process that requires patience and persistence. The timeframe for SEO results can vary, but generally, it takes several months up to a year to see measurable outcomes. Both research and industry consensus support this timeframe.

Understanding SEO Results

Before diving into the timeframe, it’s essential to understand what SEO ‘results’ mean. The primary metric for measuring Optimization success is relevant organic traffic. A significant uptick in organic traffic is often the first indicator of a successful Optimization program. If a substantial increase in bounce rate accompanies this, the success is far less credible. The best ways to compare the increase in organic traffic are:

Increase in engaged traffic = (Traffic after SEO campaign x (1-Bounce Rate))- (Traffic before SEO campaign x (1-Bounce Rate))

Increase in goal Completion = Goals completion after SEO Campaign – Goal Completion before SEO Campaign

The ratio of Converted Engagements = Increase in goal Completion / Increase in engaged traffic

A great SEO campaign will give you improved overall traffic, improved increase in engaged traffic, improved increase in goal completion, and improvement in the ratio of converted engagements.

If you only see your traffic increase without a lift in other areas, it may be time to question the quality of key phrases used for your site optimization.

Traffic increases from Search Engine Optimization – Real World Exampales

To provide a clearer picture, let’s look at some real-world examples. An e-commerce toy business that lost significant search rankings and traffic after launching a redesigned website managed to rank 37 priority key phrases back onto Page 1 within five months. Within six months, they saw a return to previous traffic levels. It took an additional year to ensure that the additional 25 keywords aimed at mid funnel were in the first page thus improving all the results.

A niche ad agency’s website that suffered from lost rankings in relevant keywords despite the increase in organic search traffic started to see an increase in relevant traffic results after seven months of implementing recommended improvements. Within nine months, they received record levels of relevant organic traffic, and within two years, they saw a 200% increase in goal completion (phone calls and form completions for purchase of their products and services).

Factors Impacting SEO Timeframes

Several factors can influence the timeframe for SEO results. Three of the most important are your actions, the website’s condition, and the competition. The “SEO results” clock starts ticking once you implement the program, not when you hire someone or when strategies are being formulated.

If your website has a lot of technical issues, received a manual action from Google, or was negatively impacted by a Google core update, it might take longer to see results. On the other hand, quick fixes like resolving a robots.txt file blocking search engines can produce fast SEO results.

Competition also plays a significant role. The competition can be challenging depending on the industry and the resources your competitors have. However, it’s possible to beat the competition with a nimble and creative approach.

Accelerating SEO Results

While you can’t drastically speed up SEO results, there are ways to streamline the process. An in-depth, technical SEO audit can pinpoint how to fix your site and beat the competition. Enlisting the help of an expert SEO consultant or agency can also make a significant difference.

In conclusion, SEO is a long-term investment. The results you see within several months to a year are just the beginning. With a solid SEO strategy, you can expect better results as time goes on. Remember, in the world of SEO, patience and persistence are key.

Sitemaps

News about Sitemaps Ping Endpoint Deprecation

On Monday, June 26th, Google made a significant announcement regarding the Sitemaps Protocol, a tool that has been assisting search engines in discovering new URLs and scheduling crawls of already known URLs since 2005. The announcement revealed that the sitemaps “ping” endpoint, a feature of this widely utilized protocol, will be deprecated within the next six months.

What are Sitemaps

To repeat some of our previous posts, Google defines a sitemap as “a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, as well as the relationships between them.” (Google: Find out more about sitemaps.)

When you submit a sitemap, search engines may crawl your site more efficiently.

A sitemap will offer search engines crucial information such as:

When was a URL last updated?
How frequently are modifications made to a page?
The importance of a page in relation to other pages on your website.

This data assists search engines in finding, crawling, and indexing the web pages on your site. Sitemaps can be generated in an XML file, the most often used method. Some content management systems have capabilities that make it simple to create sitemaps.

Below is an example of a simple sitemap with all possible elements sourced from Dream Warrior Group‘s site.

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>https://dreamwarrior.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-06-28T00:00:00-07:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Understanding the Sitemap Ping

The sitemap protocol provides an unauthenticated REST method for sending sitemaps to search engines. However, subsequent internal Google and other search engine research have revealed that these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are no longer helpful. In the instance of Google Search, most of these submissions have been detected as spam. As a result, Google has chosen to remove sitemaps ping support. The deprecated REST API will stop working in six months, and any pings to it will result in a 404 error, and using the endpoint will no longer be useful.

The end of the sitemap pinging doesn’t mean that your sitemaps are useless; if you are utilizing robots.txt or regularly pushing your sitemap to the Google search console, you should experience no issues.

The Role of the Lastmod Element

The utility of the last mod feature, which indicates the latest modification date of a webpage, has fluctuated throughout time. However, it has recently become more impactful in a variety of situations, and Google now uses it as a signal for scheduling crawls to previously identified URLs.

To serve its purpose, the last mod element must be in a supported date format, as stated on sitemaps.org. Once you upload your sitemap, Google’s Search Console will alert you if it is not. Furthermore, it should accurately reflect the actual modification dates: if a page was last amended seven years ago, but the last mod element indicates that it was modified yesterday, Google will eventually discard the last mod dates provided.

You can apply the last mod element to all or just a subset of the pages in your sitemap. Because these sites frequently aggregate content from other pages on the site, some site software may need help to detect the last modification date of the homepage or a category page. In such circumstances, omitting the last model for these pages is appropriate.

It is critical to understand that “last modification” refers to “last significant modification.” Minor changes, such as changing the text in the sidebar or footer, do not warrant an update to the last mod value. Only if there are significant modifications to the primary text, structured data, or links you should change the last mod value.

Changefreq and Priority Elements

Google does not utilize the change freq or priority elements. The change freq element overlaps conceptually with last mod, while the priority element, a highly subjective field, often fails to accurately represent the actual priority of a page relative to other pages on a site based on Google’s internal studies. For further information on sitemaps, please review SITEMAP.ORG.

Making Sense of Change to GA4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) – Making Sense of Change

Now that we have covered some of the more important points about the Analytics after UA let’s do a quick general summary. If you need to review the subject in detail, please refer back to our series on the subject starting with GA4 Setup.

What’s GA4 All About

As a way to achieve better search results and leverage existing technology, Google is changing over to GA-4, and Universal Analytics will stop receiving data on June 30, 2023. GA-4 can measure users’ interactions within web, mobile, and single-page apps. It also attempts to receive data despite cookie and privacy settings.

This is a structural change in analytics from session and device-based tracking to truly device-agnostic event & activity-based tracking, so it’s essential to make the change sooner rather than later to maintain your analytics.

What You Need to Know

Universal Analytics will stop receiving data on June 30, 2023
GA-4 is free
GA-4 is easy to install, but setup is more intensive (so that key metrics are captured)
Provides better analytic tools
Important to do this as soon as possible. By running both sets of analytics you can verify results, and confirm that everything has been migrated properly.
The deprecated GA account will remain open so you can always access your historical data
GA-4 accounts will not retain historical data past 14 months

How DWG Can Help

Install & setup up the GA-4 Account
Ensure your goal tracking is migrated
Monitor tracking for 3 months to make sure all data is captured properly
Manage your data archiving

Pricing
GA-4 Setup: $350.00 one time charge, includes up to 5 goals
$95/hour for over 5 goals migrated
Data Export and storage. $99/set-up, $14/mos ongoing/hosting

GA4 Reports

Part 6 of many about GA4 and what is coming after UA

We will pick up this installment of the Analytics after UA here at the end of this article GA4 Audiences by focusing on How to customize GA4 reports.

Basics of GA4 Reports

Standard GA4 reports provide us with a wealth of information about our users’ activity and the overall trajectory of our tracking efforts. If you’ve previously used Universal Analytics and are switching to GA4, you’ll note how adaptable the reporting interface is. Aside from the ability to produce new reports, you may also edit existing reports in any way – a feat previously unattainable in UA.

To do so, you must first understand where to look and how to activate some of these reports. It may appear complex, but we’re here to show you how to locate what you’re looking for. We’ll also demonstrate creating a new report based on the landing pages.

This guide shows you how to customize your Google Analytics 4 reports.

Please remember that we are utilizing our test property rather than Google’s demo account because modifying functionality is unavailable there.

If you’re also testing on the demo account, you must switch to a property you own. Even a brand-new, empty one should work, though you will notice how your changes affect the data afterward.

Standard GA4 Reports and How to modify them

Let’s start by looking at what a standard report looks like.

In your Google Analytics account, go to the Traffic acquisition report.

GA4 reports - Traffic Acquisition — GA4 Traffic Acquisition report

Standard reports are available for alteration, reorganization, and interface changes to suit your preferences. Going back to the Library and editing the collection the report is in will allow us to remove an entire report topic quickly.

Let’s use the retention subject as an example, as we don’t utilize it frequently and think it’s optional.

GA4 Reports - User Retention — User Retention Report

Go to Library → Edit collection under the life cycle collection, and follow the example below. Remove the panels you don’t want, add additional panels, and save.

GA4 Reports - Delete Panel — Panel deletion

GA4 Reports - Panel Replacement — Panel Replacement

Customize your GA4 Report Layout

To start customizing your Google Analytics 4 reports, determine what changes you want to make. For this example, let’s try removing the visualization charts.

At the top-right corner, click on the customize report icon.

The panel at the right shows the different aspects of the report you can change.

To hide a chart, click on the eye icon beside the said chart. A backslash symbol will cross through the eye icon to signify that it is hidden.

You should see that the charts are no longer part of the report, and only the table will remain. Next, let’s look at and modify the metrics shown in this report by clicking on Metrics.

New view 1 — New View – after removal of chart

The panel will present the visible list of metrics. If you want to remove a metric from the report, click the ✖ button to the right of the metric name.

In the list of metrics, we have the event count, engagement rate, conversions, etc., but what about the conversion rate? It is available in GA4, so this metric is present, but we must add it manually.

Adding Dimensions & Metrics to GA4 Report

Click Add metric at the bottom if you want to add a metric.

Browsing through the list of metrics, you’ll notice two conversion rates available in GA4: session conversion rate and user conversion rate.

Add both metrics to the report.

You could be unsure of how the two differ from one another. The user conversion rate displays the proportion of people who converted. The session conversion rate, on the other hand, indicates the proportion of sessions that resulted in conversions.

Organizing Your Report

Let’s change the placement of our metrics.

You can decide how you want the metrics displayed, but placing the conversion rates right after the sessions is preferable.

Upon satisfactory placement of the metrics, click on Apply.

To save the changes we’ve made, click Save → Save changes to the current report.

A popup will appear. Click Save one more time.

Besides the sessions column, we should only see the detailed table and the session and user conversion rates.

Creating Your Report in GA4 (GA4 Landing Page Report)

Making your own Google Analytics 4 reports is another method to personalize them.

Consider the scenario where we would like to involve a team of marketers in our project. However, they want to avoid fiddling with the reports’ configuration or going through multiple reports to find the necessary data.

They desire a single report with all the required data, in this case, the landing page report. You search your account but are unable to locate it. Therefore, you conclude that GA4 does not have it.

Go to Library → Create new report → Create detail report.

To make our lives easier, let’s start with a template. Select the Pages and Screens template.

You’ll see that we already have a typical report layout. We only need to modify the information that is displayed here.

Click on Dimensions.

Click on Add Dimension.

Add Landing page + String as a Dimension parameter and click on Apply.

Provide a name for the report and an optional report description. Then, click Save.

Returning to the reports library, you won’t find the landing page report in any report collections yet. It is not enough to create a report; we need to add the new report to a collection.

Adding a Report to a Collection

In our case, let’s add the landing page report to the life cycle collection.

Click on Edit collection under the life cycle card.

Editing will open a window with the life cycle collection structure on the left and a list of reports we may include in the collection on the riEditingght.

Drag the Landing Pages report under the engagement subject after finding it in the detail report bar.

If you want to remove a specific report from the collection, click the ✖ button next to the report name.

When you’ve made all the required changes, click Save → Save changes to the current collection.

Hope this series on how to manage GA4 has proven helpful. We will try to provide more hints in the future.