Tinkering with Your Google Business Profile Page Is Dumb: 10 Reasons

[Adam Kaufman]

Ok, I'll start this debate about the 11/30 article posted by Phil on Local Visibility System here.
Tinkering with Your Google Business Profile Page Is Dumb: 10 Reasons | Local Visibility System
I tend to agree. Who agrees? Who disagrees?

 

[JS Girard]

I think it understate the usefulness of videos, which are extremely prominent on mobile. Like almost all local SEO content on the web, it's very centric to the concerns of Americans: except for brand new GBPs, we don't really see those suspensions at the first sign of movement in Quebec.

Overall, I still think he's right and fiddling with the GBP when you could focus on something more impactful, like review collection, is pointless. Unfortunately, my bosses won't ever accept the idea.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

I'm probably 90% in agreement with the article. For us, the main problem is that Google has deprecated some very valuable metrics that provided insight to GBP interactions, for example post views/engagements and photo views. Being able to see how many specific interactions were occuring helped to determine if there was value for your efforts. Now, basically all Google provides: Calls, Website Clicks, Users Who Viewed Your Profile, Direction Requests, Messages, Bookings, Total Interactions, Products, Menus. The Bookings, Products, and Menus metrics are only helpful to a narrow vertical of business types.

I can say that photos are still very important for many business types, as someone (along with my wife) who post a lot of Google reviews and pictures, we've had images that have have been seen 100K+ times and a few that have been seen over 1M times. For dining and tourist experiences, photos are definitely worth the extra investment. It is strange that Google still allows the general public to see photo/video interactions that they've posted for a particular business, but the owner can no longer see this info on their own GBP!

Because there is no direct way for an owner to measure "views" of photos/posts, it is a difficult for most industries to quantify their impact.

In closing, for most of our clients we don't spend a lot of time on GBPs anymore. We check monthly on occasion, mostly quarterly, just to make sure that there isn't anything Google has "fixed" on the GBP. There just doesn't seem to be much direct impact to local pack ranking after the initial optimization. I'm sure most SEOs have seen the totally unoptimized competitor GBP ranking above the fully optimized and regularly updated GBPs. It is one of our biggest frustrations when a client says "Why is my competitor ranking higher than me on the local pack? They don't have any photos, products, services, posts or take the time to reply to reviews!"

However, we highly encourage all of our businesses to get more reviews and reply to all reviews. The majority of prospective customers make their decisions based on the overall rating, the most recent reviews, and if the business takes the time to reply to reviews (especially how they handle negative reviews). But this really seems to be more of an indirect impact, not a direct ranking factor.

 

[keyserholiday]

I am not a fan of this article. It adds unnecessary fear, and we Local SEOs have to combat it when it's taken out of context. There is only so much optimization you can do with a GBP. Name, primary category, and website URL you use. Create one Google post per month, ask for reviews and reply to them.