Today, you can employ many SEO promotion strategies and tactics to help your business rank higher in local search results. However, along with the well-known and proven ranking strategies, there are unproven ones that non-specialists pass off as effective local SEO tactics.

In this article, we will look at five of the most popular myths about local SEO promotion that you should not believe if you really want to rank your business effectively on Google.

The first myth is that if you set your service area in the Google Business Profile listing, it will affect your ability to rank in all of those areas.

However, any professional will tell you that this is not the case. This action doesn't have an impact on Google local SEO ranking. The only thing that can be achieved this way is that Google will show your chosen area as the location in which your business operates. But it won't help you rank in those areas in any way.

Another myth is that keywords in Google Business Profile influence rankings. Many people add a bunch of keywords to the description field, and their company description starts to look like "Miami plumbing company, emergency water repair, serving Miami and surrounding areas, water pumps, water heater repair, plumbers, commercial and residential plumbing services."

But the truth is, Google doesn't index this ranking field in any way, no matter how many keys you put in there. The best thing you can do with this field is to use it as a sales copy. Get those who see this field interested in your business, tell them what you do. Use this field for conversion purposes, not for ranking. You can see detailed instructions from Google on how best to use this field and how to use it to improve its ranking here.

Another myth is the idea that adding a call tracking number to your GBP list can negatively affect your rating. The truth is, if you do it right, there will be no negative impact.

If you keep your main number there, it is not a problem. The main number becomes the call tracking number, so anyone who goes to your listing will call the tracking number, and you will get it traced in your software.

A lot of people think that paying for Google ads affects Google local SEO rankings. People reason: if I pay for Google ads, they are likely to help me rank higher. But it doesn't work that way.

Google's official memo says, "There is no way to request or pay for better local rankings on Google. We do everything we can to keep the details of the search algorithm private to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone."

Indeed, you cannot buy your way into the results. However, you can pay for the right ads, and that will work much better. But it doesn't affect your actual local SEO ranking.

Some people think that getting a new listing into local rankings can take a very long time, up to a couple of months. But it actually only takes 20 minutes. You create a Google listing, and as soon as it passes verification, there is an opportunity to rank immediately.

You should also keep in mind you only rank within your own immediate area, not around the whole city. So, you start with a small radius, and then you work with your business listing: add full and correct data into your listings, get citations and more reviews. That's how you can broaden the area you can rank.

Listings ranking is influenced by the text in reviews, so the keywords that customers use, as well as you, when responding to the review, are important. But remember: you should not use keywords in a response to a negative review, otherwise the search engine may show your listing to users in an unfavorable light.

If we go directly to the company listing, we will see brief announcements of publications that are the right place to use keywords.

The keywords in the "products" section can help your listings rank higher, even by low-frequency keyword queries.

So, we've covered all the major false myths about how rankings work at GBP. We hope that our material on local search engine optimization was useful to you and that you won't waste any more time on things that don't help rank and focus on what helps instead.

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