Case Study: Google My Business 68% Increase of Traffic in 1 Month

It’s been a while since we did a case study, so we thought we would break our dry spell by doing a case study on ourselves! I’ll be honest, this was more of a test than it was a case study. If it failed, I might have tweeted about it, but if it succeeded I was going make a case study out of it, so here we are.

We were also very excited after launching our Google My Business guide last month.

Note: this case study is in fact a study, and not necessarily hard evidence. We hypothesized that our work resulted in a 68% increase in traffic based on insights, analytics, and our experience.

The problem: We wanted more traffic to our Google My Business Page! Doesn’t everyone? We’ve always gotten a lot of great traffic from Google, but not so much from GMB. Our intent was also slightly off. By using GMB insights, we found that our intent was off by a schmidge. We were ranking for some odd terms that I don’t want to repeat here because I don’t want to further confuse Googlebot.

The goal: increase visibility to our Google My Business Page, and fine tune user intent for keywords such as “web designer” and “SEO company.”

The tactic: very simple, “touch” our Google My Business Page roughly 1 time every day for a month.  During this time I kept a journal of what changes were made to our Google My Business listing. From the tone of the Google My Business Twitter account and emails, they really seem like they want their customers to take an active approach to their Google My Business Page. In the past, it’s been something that you “set and forget”  with the exception of adding the occasional images etc.

30 Day Google My Business Journal

Day 1:

• added about 10 photos including several interior, 2 exterior, 3 team, and 5 at work
• added more services
• Created a keyword rich post

Day 2:

• Asked a staff member to post photos from their personal phone
• Asked a customer to ask a question on our Google My Business page
• Added to photos of the waiting area and second floor hallway of our building

Day 3

• Added one photo of the exterior of the building
• Removed old photos from our old office location

Day 4:

• Didn’t have an original image so took one from Instagram and uploaded it
• Added 2 more services items (website maintenance and hosting)

Days 5 – 8:

• Added one photo from the GMB app of office
• Added photo of the building from the street using the Google my business app for Android
• Had staff “follow” elite strategies on Google Maps
• Added a photo of our parking lot from 4th floor window

Days 9 & 10:

• Uploaded 2 “at work” photos
• Sent out a few emails to customers with our “shortname”  asking them to take a look

Days 11-28:

• added a new GMB post on day 14
• made best effort at adding new photos each day
• attempted to change to “women led” being that my wife is the co-founder and leader of our company.

Day 29: 

Updated hours of operation to include the days we were closed for upcoming holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years). Working on a video to upload to Google My Business.

The Results

About a week in, we started to notice an uptick in traffic to our listing. We can only hypothesize that the increase in traffic was a result in our efforts to “beef up” our Google My Business listing.

On a good day, we will get 3-4 incoming phone calls for services from a variety of sources including Google Search, Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Emails and Advertising. Also note that the “calls to you” aren’t always accurate. Some people copy the number down and call on another phone or punch it in manually.

We also received 2 direct leads via the GMB “message” feature that goes directly to a cell phone. The website visits were also very productive, several of them resulted in either a phone call or an email, and several of these visitors returned to our website at a later date for more information. In our line of work, sometimes people will visit your website and not call for more information for days, weeks and in some cases even months.

Total actions increased from 20 to 28 this month and last month 7 of those actions were people requesting directions and I’m guessing all 7 of those were either current customers, or potential staff members coming in for an interview. There is no doubt in my mind that our efforts resulted in more visibility for our business.

Our business has a lot of competition. There are dozens, if not hundreds of SEO companies and web designers within a 25-50 mile radius. While we have been in business for almost 10 years and working hard on our own search marketing, the competition is fierce. Getting a few extra phone calls per week is a huge deal for us, we don’t onboard every new customer unless they are a good fit for us and we truly believe we can help them. Quite frequently, we turn away customers or refer them to someone better suited to their needs.

Translating to Customer Success

Of course we aren’t keeping this method ourselves. Anything we try on yourself with success we’ll implement for our clients. We rolled out the same tactic for a one of our clients and saw a 80% increase in customer actions over the course of a 2 month period. The same tactic yielded the same results. In this case we started by removing almost all of the old images. Most of them were very blurry and not so great. We then cherry picked the best of the best photos and slowly dripped them into GMB over the course of a few weeks.

Takeaways

It does appear that maintaining an active, and accurate Google My Business page results in more visibility. The worst case scenario is that it actually did nothing, but still resulted in a much more polished look for our brand.

Google puts a lot of effort into marketing GMB, and wants businesses to engage. Also a side note: There is a rumor floating around that Google My Business is going to start charging a monthly fee for listings, a few months ago a survey from Google was floating around the SEO community that mentioned such.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can optimize your Google My Business listing, please send your queries to a web hosting company by dropping your comments, we would be happy to speak to you about your website.