Unsolved GMB Local SEO question

[jorda091]

I am trying to diagnose how one particular competitor is smoking us in local rankings. I came across a text field “Service Details' within Google My Business Services.

This allows me to put in a brief description of each service we offer. My thought is that this could be a good place for keywords. That said, the descriptions are not public facing (or to the best of my knowledge) so I am reluctant to do all the work for nothing.

I am wondering if anyone has filled these out and if there were any noticeable results.

Any insight is appreciated

[dhruvbhatia7]

You should fill out the service description with information that would provide value to your customers (not just local SEO keywords stuffed in there).

However, as someone has already pointed out this may not give you a big leg up.

Could you share your business name & website and your competitor's business name & website?

If you'd like to triage it yourself, you can break down what your competitor is doing for various local SEO categories (GMB Optimization, Reviews, Posting of Updates, Photos, and Social Media).

[Sukhera20002]

https://mandptracker.com/

[sarahwalsh]

Hi, so, yes, to improve your company's local SEO, you will need to fully fill out the Google My Business page.

[MiriamEllis]

Good morning! And very good question. Definitely do add a list of your relevant services (not just a list of keywords) to the services section of your Google Business Profile. However, doing so is unlikely to impact your rank much, or that of your competitor. To find out why your competitor is smoking you, I would recommend you do a full competitive audit. Let me give you a link here with instructions of how you can do so:
https://moz.com/local-seo-guide/assessing-demand-analyzing-markets

Go to the section of this page near the bottom, entitled: Finally, assess the strengths of the top competitors in each market

Follow the instructions in that section, using the free spreadsheet it contains, for comparing your business to a competitor. This should help you identify factors which are likely to be giving them higher visibility. Hope this helps!

[HayleyBowyer]

Moving this over to our Local SEO category!