As a web marketing company, we’ll give it to you straight: your Google Business Profile (GBP) needs work. We know that because every law firm’s GBP listing needs work. These listings are an important part of your marketing plan and should be an important part of your business strategy. A clean, accurate, and optimized GBP listing:
- Increases your chance of appearing in the Local Pack
- Is more likely to appear in Google Maps
- Can increase your organic search traffic
All of this is good stuff. So the question remains: are you doing enough to make your listing stand out in a crowd? Are your listings clean, accurate, and optimized – and what does that even mean?
Don’t worry, folks – we’ve got you covered.
What Do You Mean by “Optimize” Your Google Business Profile?
In this case, when we say “optimize your GBP” or “optimize your listing,” we mean making certain adjustments that will improve your Google Business Profile. Improvements made to your GBP can increase your organic rankings and conversions, and that makes everybody happy! How we optimize a GBP listing is different from how we optimize a website – after all, they’re two different products – but the overall goal is the same: to create a smooth, effective user experience that leads to more folks calling you for help.
Understanding Local Ranking Factors
Your firm’s GBP is a critical component of your local SEO strategy. According to Google, there are three local ranking factors: Relevance, Distance, and Prominence:
Relevance refers to how well a local Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. Add complete and detailed business information to help Google better understand your business and match your profile to relevant searches.
Distance considers how far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search. If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, we’ll calculate distance based on what we do know about their location.
Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands are also likely to be prominent in local search results.
Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories. Google review count and review score factor into local search ranking. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’s local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so search engine optimization (SEO) best practices apply.
These ranking factors apply to your GBP but also to your website. If you want to rank well, you’ll need a website that’s factually accurate, with consistent branding, and that targets local areas. A strong website improves your search visibility, which in turn improves the chances of your listing showing up in the Map Pack. Your GBP and your website are chocolate and peanut butter: fine on their own, but definitely better together.
When the Last “P” Stands for “Property”
Before we get into the weeds about your listings, we want to talk about location, specifically, about how your choice of office location can affect your rankings.
Let’s say you’re a personal injury law firm based in Gulfport, Mississippi and you’re trying to expand into Biloxi. The cities are about 23 miles away from each other, which is not that far when it comes to traveling to court, but is pretty far when it comes to seeing a lawyer. You decide you’re going to open a second office location in the area.
First, you need to figure out exactly where Biloxi is – and specifically, where GOOGLE thinks Biloxi is. Otherwise, you may end up with two offices in Gulfport, and that won’t help you rank in Biloxi. If you open Maps and type “Biloxi, Mississippi” into the search bar, you’ll get a pop-up box on the left, and clearly-marked boundaries in the map to the right.
Now, go BACK to that pop-up and click “nearby,” and start checking out your competition by searching personal injury lawyer (you can add more terms, but you’ll need to put a | between them). This time, Google gives you a breakdown of where your local competitors are in any given area:
You can click the “Search this area” button at the top to see where other competitors are located. All of these law firms have existed in Biloxi before you, which means they’re already established (prominence) and likely already have reviews (relevance), and therefore are all in a better position to rank than your brand-new office listing will be. Our recommendation, then, would be to move back a few blocks to find an address with fewer competitors nearby.
Optimizing 101: The Basics of GBP
This might sound obvious, but the very first thing you need to do is claim your listing. Go to the listing and click “claim,” and then follow the instructions.
We claim listings on behalf of our clients all the time (with their permission, of course), and it’s pretty simple. Just know that if you have multiple listings, then you’ll need to do this more than once.
Check It Twice
The next thing you’ll want to do to optimize your Google business profile is make sure the information in your listing is correct. One lead-gen company found that only about 15% of all listings are fully accurate; the rest either have incorrect or missing information.
So, first things first, look at your public profile and check the following for accuracy:
- Firm name. Make sure this matches your actual firm name – your legal firm name or the one on your DBA. You can use the Moz Local tool to verify the accuracy of your listing.
- Firm address. If you have multiple listings, you’ll need to use each city for each listing – don’t just default to your main office.
- Firm phone number. Use your real number, not a tracking number. Tracking numbers are assigned to specific ad campaigns, so you don’t want to use a tracking number as your main contact number because it messes with the metrics that track your conversions.
- Hours of operation. You can list “24 hours” if you have an after-hours service for intakes, especially one that forwards calls to attorneys. Else, stick to just the hours when people can actually reach you at the office.
- Link to the firm’s website. Listings get about 200 interactions a month, on average, and just under half of those interactions involve clicking the website’s link. It sounds as simple as “turning it off and on again,” but you do need to make sure your site is operational and that the link works.
- Business description. Create a brief statement about what you do and/or the services you offer. Don’t leave potential customers guessing, or they’ll find someone who’s clearer with communication from the start.
If you do nothing else today, check on these items. This is, at a bare minimum, the information you must have in your GBP.
Did You Know?
“Businesses with GMB listings containing accurate and complete information receive seven times more clicks than those without.” – Publer.com
Reviews and Media
There’s so much to say about reviews and their impact on your business, but that’s a different topic for a different day. To sum up, it’s basically just best practice to respond to the reviews you get as soon as you get them.
When adding photos to your GBP, be sure to include pictures of your firm’s signage, members of your team, and rooms in your office. Kitchens are helpful, to be honest, as are photos of your attorneys in their offices. What you want is to prove that you’re a real firm with real employees in a real office – no Regus, virtual, or shared office space here, Google! – and that your name on your listing matches the one on your doors and letterhead.
You can also add videos to your GBP (such as office tours, FAQs with your attorneys, and client testimonials), which is pretty cool too. Per Google, “The photo should be in focus and well lit, and have no significant alterations or excessive use of filters. In other words, the image should represent reality.” Google’s guidelines for photos and videos include:
- Format: JPG or PNG
- Size: Between 10 KB and 5 MB
- Recommended resolution: 720 px tall, 720 px wide
- Minimum resolution: 250 px tall, 250 px wide.
- Types of photos: logos, cover photos, and business photos
As for video, Google asks for:
Resolution: 720p or higher
Duration: Up to 30 seconds long
File size: Up to 75 MB
Social Links
If you have a Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, make sure they’re all connected to your GBP – and that they’re connected to the right accounts. You also want to keep your personal social media accounts separate from your work accounts. (Trust us on this one.)
Services
Listing too many services can get spammy, but you want to delve in where you can. For example, a family law firm may want to list child support, child custody, spousal support, and order modifications instead of listing just “family law” or “divorce” as their services to help set themselves apart. Here’s an example of how a law firm can list multiple practice areas on their GBP:
Note: If you’re looking at your site on a desktop, you likely won’t see Services pop up. It’s a tool for mobile users, so you probably won’t see them unless you’re searching directly in Google Maps.
You can also write descriptions of those services, and we recommend that you do. Note: if you’re looking at your GBP on a desktop, you likely won’t see Services pop up. It’s a toll for mobile users, so you probably won’t see them unless you’re searching directly in Google Maps.
Products
You’ll need to get a little creative here, since this category wasn’t really designed for service-based companies like law firms. But we love Products as a way to highlight your practice areas – especially when you can’t see services on desktops. Here’s an example of one of our clients’ GBPs that we designed with a focus on their products:
This is helpful as part of your GBP because it ensures that users who only use a PC to access your GBP can see your practice areas right in your listing.
Attributes
Attributes tell users about you, your brand, and your physical location. They can also play a role in whether potential clients choose you over the competition. For example, if you work with catastrophic injury survivors, then adding attributes like “wheelchair-accessible parking” or “wheelchair-accessible elevator” is important.
If your office staff and attorneys are bilingual, you can (and should) add that to your listing. It can be time-consuming to update multiple listings with all the attributes of your firm, but it is absolutely worth it because:
- It can make people feel more comfortable to know something “extra” about you (like the divorce attorney who also drafts pre-nuptial agreements, unlike his competitor firm down the street).
- People sometimes specifically search for those attributes that make a firm different (like “veteran-owned” or the like), so you may be more likely to pop up in that person’s search – and get their business.
Posts
Did you know you can share your blog on your GBP? Or that you can update it as frequently as you would update your social media account? You can share blogs, photos, event posts – all those things that can attract users to your site and help improve your rankings.
Typically, it’s a good idea to post 1-2 times a week when you’re just starting out and if your blog is small. This helps build brand awareness. Larger blogs benefit from 3-4 posts per week.
If your firm practices in a fast-paced industry, like technology, or if you want to have an up-to-the-minute news blog on your site, then you may want to post every day, or even multiple times a day. Ultimately, how often you post on your blog depends on the goals of your firm, your audience, and the resources you have available to you to maintain consistency.
Frequently Asked Questions
We recommend adding some of the questions you answer most often on phone calls and in free consultations to your GBP to hopefully save you some time when you meet with a potential client (or reduce the amount of time you spend on the phone with your current ones). You can also enable a form for potential clients to ask you questions through your GBP. If you do decide to add an FAQ to your page, you’ll want to have someone monitoring that listing so that any new questions that come in don’t go unanswered.
Optimizing 201: Know Who You’re Optimizing For
The obvious answer here is that you’re optimizing for your potential clients. Strong, helpful GBP listings help clients make decisions about whom to hire. We know that reviews are THE factor when it comes to conversion rates, and that people absolutely read them when deciding who to hire, which means they’re going to be on your listing at some point – you always want to optimize with them in mind.
Second, you’re optimizing for Google. Google cares about E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which means it also cares about the accuracy of your GBP. And compared to Bing, they command about 92% of the share of referral traffic (Bing has a little over 4%), so they’re still the Big Guy around these parts.
However, that still leaves about 2%, and that search volume is going to sites like ChatGPT (with their new SearchGPT in beta testing), TikTok, and even Amazon. Americans in particular use ChatGPT for all sorts of tasks, including finding information, and the data shows that most ChatGPT users are on the younger side, which is important info as to who to target as your demographic – and how to target them. And so third, you’re optimizing for AI, specifically for those companies that use AI to create search capabilities.
Why Optimizing for AI Is Different
AI tools changed the entire way we view and craft content. Twenty years ago, web marketing companies relied almost exclusively on keywords to help drive traffic to their sites. Now, we look at users’ intent and search context – what are they looking for and why are they looking for it? – and adapting to conversational queries and voice search. Even 10 years ago, the most effective strategy was to answer questions as robustly as possible. Now, we want shorter answers to a greater number of questions on a page, because AI tools tend to favor short contingent with specific headers.
All of this, of course, is changing all the time: that’s the nature of adaptive tools. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that accuracy is a critical component of any good marketing plan.
Think about it: if your GBP says your office is in Brooklyn, but your Facebook says you’re in Queens, and your FindLaw directory listing says you serve New York and New Jersey, Gemini or ChatGPT or any AI program could return inconsistent (or incorrect) information. So you want to make sure that your brand, contact information, and offerings are consistent in every single online space.
Here are some other things Yext recommends when optimizing your GBP listing for AI search:
- Fill in every field and make sure they’re all correct.
- Only use high-quality photos and videos.
- Write your FAQ in natural language – the way your clients would ask these questions, and how you would answer them during a free consult.
- Post new and updated content regularly to your listing to keep it fresh.
If you asked us five years ago what we thought AI would do to the legal marketing landscape, not a single person at MeanPug would have responded “Make paid directories relevant again.” But it has, so along with your GBP, we recommend that you check all of your listings, claim anything you don’t currently own, and then make sure your information is correct in all of them.
The Last “P” Stands for “Property”
Let’s talk location.
Whether you’re opening your first law firm or looking to grow an existing business, your GBP listing will play an important role in your ranking and your marketing strategy. In order to understand why, we think you should understand what it takes ot get your listing into the top 3 – AKA, the “map pack.”
According to Google, there are three local ranking factors:
- Relevance refers to how well a local Business Profile matches what someone is searching for.
- Distance considers how far each potential search result is from the location term used in a search. If a user doesn’t specify a location in their search, [Google will ]calculate distance based on what we do know about their location.
- Prominence refers to how well known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands are also likely to be prominent in local search results.
Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories. Google review count and review score factor into local search ranking. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’ local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so search engine optimization (SEO) best practices apply.
Why This Matters
When you open a new office location, you can “open” a new GBP listing. That means it pays to be strategic about where you open shop. For example, because searches are based on proximity (distance), you’ll likely fare better if you hang your shingle in the center of town or the city, because that’s where the most people are most of the time.
HOWEVER, just opening up in the center of town doesn’t mean you’ll automatically rank well; every other law firm in town might also be in the center, and that increases your competition. If some of those firms have been around for decades (prominence) or have a fuller list of services they provide (relevance), then it’s more challenging to rank. Not impossible – just challenging.
When you choose an office location, then, you’re looking for a place with the highest population density AS WELL AS the lowest possible competition. That rules out shared workspaces, PO Boxes, Regus or virtual offices, and (possibly) buildings with multiple law firms in them (or at least, multiple law firms practicing in your space). To help our clients with this, we use tools like Local Falcon to analyze your competition’s rankings and identify areas of weakness and strength in your own strategy, so we can improve.
Be Mindful of Your Practice Area and Your Competition
Depending on your practice area, you may also need to consider demographics, education level, industry sectors, and median income. A firm pursuing car accident cases likely needs a different office location than a firm focused on securities or immigration.
Our point is this: creating a great listing for a client isn’t just about that client; it’s also about the competition. We look at everything on your competitors’ websites and Google Business Profiles, including:
- Reviews
- Ratings
- Quality of photos and videos
- Quality of the website
- Brand reputation
- Domain authority
- Experience
- Office location(s)
- Number of listings
- Traditional marketing strategies (TV, radio, billboards, etc)
Our goal is to understand exactly what kind of competitive landscape you’re facing so we can put you in the best possible position for success.
Accuracy Is Everything
ChatGPT is throwing its hat into the ring as a viable search engine; according to Search Engine Land, the program “saw an estimated 37.5 million search-like prompts per day.” When folks type in a question, and ChatGPT interprets the data to answer it, that data comes from the websites it scours to find an answer.
This means that the most important aspect of optimizing for AI is accuracy. And of course, we’d argue that accuracy is of the utmost importance on any website OR listing, but it is especially important for AI.
Think about it: if your GBP says your office is in Brooklyn, but your Facebook says you’re in Queens, and your FindLaw directory listing says you serve New York and New Jersey, then an AI program wouldn’t be able to tell what’s correct. It may return an answer that implies they’re all correct, even if they’re not. It might also make something up entirely. So you want to make sure that your brand, contact information, and offerings are consistent in every single online space.
Here are some other things Yext recommends when optimizing your GBP listing for AI search:
- Fill in every field and make sure they’re all correct.
- Only use high-quality photos and videos.
- Write your FAQ in natural language – the way your clients would ask these questions, and how you would answer them during a free consult.
- Post new and updated content regularly to your listing to keep it fresh.
MeanPug Will Optimize and Maintain Your GBP
There’s a lot you can do with a Google Business Profile to help your business grow. Lucky for you, we’ve got the special sauce to make your brand stand out. MeanPug Digital is a full-service legal marketing firm focused exclusively on helping lawyers and law firms be the best they can be.
Howl at us when you’re ready to get started.
