Optimizing Google My Business To Help Organic & Paid Search

Over the last 10 years, there is no doubt that organic efforts and paid advertising have evolved. If you’re a business owner then you have probably asked yourself several times how much SEO and paid search truly affect one another. At Levelwing, we have several clients who have started services with us in one of these categories. Through data and testing, we have been able to prove time and time again that SEO and paid advertising will perform better if they support one another, especially during this time of COVID-19.

Throughout this case study, we will be exploring how one of our clients, a national gas station chain, has been able to increase their organic efforts through a mix of paid advertising and vice versa. The joint effort of paid and organic is critical, as one without the other will only allow partial growth online — and if efforts are dropped, most exposure decreases as well.

The Challenge

This client in particular has an organic strategy that is supported through multiple sources. They have a fully built website, Google My Business listings, and lots of positive press to help generate backlinks. Prior to working with Levelwing, the gas station chain did have a paid and organic strategy; however, the website was not optimized to its fullest capability, over half of their listings in Google My Business were outdated and inaccurate, and no internal linking strategy was present on their website. This provided a great opportunity to see where improvements could be made.

Our Solution

When integrating paid search, we took all of these areas of substructure into consideration. While the national gas station chain is supported by general search advertising, we also found it best to support paid advertising efforts through Google My Business. Our rationale for utilizing Google My Business:

• Organic traffic for travel related inquiries have decreased with COVID-19.
• Where are users more than likely coming into contact with Gas station information? While driving, or while planning their route.
• Where do Gas stations rank highest in search results? On Google maps, which are supported through google my business listings.

Optimizing Google My Business

In order for paid ads and organic search to truly be effective in this scenario, the Google My Business account had to be organized and optimized for maximum potential. This process included the following:

• Ensuring all locations were accurate and up to date within Google My Business
• Assigning appropriate store names within each listing
• Including any amenities that each location offered
• Developing an optimized description for each listing
• Adding URLs into each listing that pointed back to their main website
• Uploading any relevant images into each listing
• Utilizing a local listing management platform to ensure data was updated across the web

The Result

Once the listing profiles were optimized, we were able to benchmark the data to see fluctuations in performance and traffic. Prior to starting any ads with Levelwing, the client saw major dips in paid and organic traffic starting in March and extending through the end of June. Since then, we have been able to increase paid traffic by 3.51% and organic by 6.7%, but more importantly, conversions for both paid traffic and organic users is up by 100%.

We attribute this uptick in both traffic and conversions to our Levelwing teams being highly knowledgeable in their areas of expertise, and by working together to digest data and develop actionable insights for our client. The key to success is to understand the data and make tweaks as needed to get optimal performance for both paid and organic results.

Are you ready to optimize your organic and paid strategy to see results? Get in touch with the Levelwing team today.