Google My Business Insights Now Includes Queries Used by Searchers to Find Your Local Business

You’ve probably used Google Search to find your business website. Sure, you know the web address and could simply type it in the URL bar. But there’s a level of satisfaction seeing your website show up in search results. This is especially true if your website shows as the top search result! Keywords and key phrases bring up websites that search engines believe to be the most relevant answers to your query. Now, Google My Business Insights will show these queries.

Search Engine Land provided commentary on this new, welcome addition. Barry Schwartz writes “Google My Business is rolling out a new report in the Insights section of the console that is designed to show businesses how people are searching within Google Maps or Google Search to find your local listings. It is called the ‘queries used to find your business’ report, and it shows the most popular queries for your business by unique users within a time frame.”

The Importance of Search Queries

Let’s say you own a business that sells hats. You have all types of hats! You have red hats, blue hats, big hats, and small hats, among others. Your website proudly displays these hats and has great content to go with the photos. Google Analytics shows people are coming to your website. That’s great! But you have to answer this: Why are they coming to your website? The answer is that your website was displayed after a searcher used a query to find your website. Let’s talk about those queries.

First, let’s differentiate keywords versus search queries. Keywords are targeted queries. For example, “red hat’ or “blue hat” are keywords. An example of search queries are “blue hat in Dallas” or “where can I buy big hats”. As you can see, search queries are normally lengthier than keywords. Search queries are more like phrases.

Here’s why knowing your search queries are so important: You can use search queries to optimize the content on your website with the goal of ranking higher in local search engines. For example, if a searcher is finding your website by searching for “small blue hats” you should optimize your web pages for that query. How do you find these search queries? Check out Google My Business Insights!

Google My Business Insights Queries

As you can see from the screenshot, Google lists queries ten at a time. While they are listed ten at a time, you might have numerous “pages” to click through to see all of the queries. There are 413 queries listed in the screenshot. That means that business will have to click through 41 “pages” to see all of the queries used to find their website. Perhaps Google will make it easier to navigate in the future with you not having to click through so many “pages” to see all results. But something is better than nothing, for now at least.

Google My Business Insights starts with the most popular query used to find your business, locally. Google Insights even lists how many unique visits you get for each search query. You have two options with which to view these results: results from the past one week or results from the past one month.

Now you have a better understanding with how people are finding your business. You know which search terms they are using! Are you going to position your website differently going forward based on what you’ll learn? Using keywords and search queries to your advantage can help you rank higher in local search results. When you know what people are searching for, you can weave these keywords and phrases in your content more seamlessly. Start today and see if you notice a different over the next few days, weeks, and months!

Featured photo by PhotoMIX Ltd on Pexels

Google My Business photo is a screenshot of Search Engine Land by Gain Local