YES! You read that correctly. One savvy strategy we employ involves preferring Google My Business (GMB) over a traditional landing page in certain instances. Here’s why:
- For local businesses, the physical location is a crucial attraction factor. Customers are interested in visiting you or knowing the travel time required for you to reach them.
- GMB is often trusted more than individual landing pages because it serves as a reputable third party. Consequently, reviews on GMB carry more weight than those hosted on your own site.
- From a psychological standpoint, the behavior of internet users reveals a preference for consistent layout patterns, which are less mentally taxing and consume fewer cognitive resources. This was a competitive edge for Facebook at its 2004 launch, offering a uniform layout for personal profiles, unlike MySpace, which allowed users to customize their spaces, resulting in a more cognitively demanding experience.
Similarly, GMB benefits from user familiarity with its layout. Users accustomed to viewing thousands of profiles can quickly locate essential information such as profile names, phone numbers, addresses, reviews, etc. In contrast, each unique landing page presents visitors with a different layout, demanding more mental resources to navigate.
While new Smart Campaigns can effectively direct traffic to your GMB profile, they already limit the control you’d prefer to have. There are clever ways to integrate GMB into your search ads, but this may compromise your ability to thoroughly track interactions.
So, when should you opt for GMB over a traditional landing page??
The decision is straightforward: when your GMB profile is sufficiently attractive and well-optimized. For example, achieving over 50 reviews with a rating of 4.5 or higher, having a collection of high-quality images, regular updates, offers, published products, FAQs, and Q&As, etc., signals it’s time to confidently use GMB as your primary landing page.
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