What is Google Business Profile?
BEFORE FIGURING OUT HOW TO FIND WHICH GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE CATEGORY IS RIGHT FOR YOUR BUSINESS, LET’S MAKE SURE YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M RAMBLING ON ABOUT.
One of the necessary evils of doing business in the modern world is getting your business profile up and optimized on Google Business Profile formerly called Google My Business. This is Google’s own business directory product and in many cases it is the most important thing you can do to get your business at the top of search results for your keywords and categories. Statistics show that if you aren’t at the top of page 1, your chances of being seen are pretty slim, so assuming your business or industry has a decent number of people searching for it, it’s worth getting this right.
One of the more challenging pieces of setting up your Google My Business profile is category selection, particularly the primary category and figuring out just how many secondary categories to choose from. While in some industries this can be self-explanatory, in many there are just too many options. Take this business for example, we could be Marketing Agency, Advertising Agency, Internet Marketing Service, Business to Business Service, Marketing Consultant, Design Agency and even Web Designer as our primary category without any problem. Then all of those, plus about 4 more could be our secondary category. So how do you decide?
The same way you decide almost everything else in business, of course, you see what everyone else is doing and you steal the best ideas.
HOW TO GO ABOUT FINDING THE RIGHT GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE CATEGORY FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Don’t have time for an entire blog post right now? Get the idea of Google Business Categories here in less than one minute.
Our first step is going to be to find the primary categories of our main competitors and also their secondary categories and then figure out the common denominators among the top performers.
Finding out primary categories is pretty simple. Pick the keyword you want to rank for and type it into google, see who the top results are and look at what their category is. Pretty straightforward. Now make a list of these categories on a notepad or in a spreadsheet to reference later. Below is an example of how I would figure that out if we wanted to start ranking for graphic design in Charleston, WV.
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Not surprisingly, the top results have the category of Graphic Designer, so let’s go look at their secondary categories, and this is where it gets a little more complicated.
HOW TO GET SECONDARY CATEGORIES FOR YOUR GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE LISTING:
Click on business listing in Google maps result. Copy the name and address into google maps. Right click the blue border area on listing and select view source. Use Control F to search for the primary category to find category listings, and look at all other secondary categories listed in the code alongside the primary category. If you aren’t used to looking at source code it might be a little confusing at first, but you’ll know when you find it, and the good news is that usually the categories for the other top results will also be listed in the source code. Using our same example, here’s what we are looking for:
After right clicking in the blue area you will get a menu, and you want to choose this option:
From there you will see the page source code, that if you aren’t a coder will look like a giant mess of characters, use your computer’s find function, for most of you that will be CTRL+F and find the main category you saw in the initial listing, once you do that, you will see something like this, and will notice that surrounding the primary category are a bunch of other categories:
As we can see, “Graphic Designer” is followed by “Architecture and Design Companies”, “Business Service”, “Craft”, “Design”, “Design Services”, “Digital Media”, etc. What you are looking for is commonalities between the top performers in the searches you are trying to rank for. Conveniently, they are usually also listed in the same page code as seen below:
You can see there, that in the same page code, we have the results for a company called Dream Catcher, one called Mesh, and one called Petry studio, two of which were the other top three results in the “map pack”
List out all the subcategories and find the ones that all the top performers have in common, now you know which categories your business MUST have in order to rank in the top of search results. You’ll need to do this for each of the terms you are trying to rank for, so if you are an Italian Restaurant for example, you’ll need to do this for Italian Restaurants+your city, Restaurants+your city, etc. to figure out which categories you need to focus on.
Now Google is constantly updating its platform so these categories will change over time and some older categories may be hanging around in these page codes that you can’t actually use, but this research will show you the categories that Google prioritizes for your keyword results, and will frequently give you ideas for categories you might not have thought of, or help you narrow down categories when there are just too many that could apply.
ONE NOTE OF CAUTION WITH GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE CATEGORIES:
Selecting too many categories can muddle Google’s image of your business and lead to decreased ranking in the search engine results. If you find your business affected by using all available categories try limiting your categories to 3-4 to remove this issue, and then add subcategories back in one at a time over time. Remember that Google likes to be sure that it’s sending people to the right place, so if you tell it that you are a restaurant, and a bar, and trampoline park, and a gym, and a car dealer and a doctor’s office, even if it’s all true, somehow, it could very well hurt your rankings.
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