What is the Google Guaranteed program, how do I get my badge, and is it worth it?
Read on to learn more and see if it is right for you.
Google’s guaranteed program and badge is a program for qualifying businesses that will help position them as more authoritative in the SERPs and with their Google My Business Listing.
GOOGLE GUARANTEED
Upgraded Google GMB Profile
Google is offering an upgraded Google My Business (GMB) Profile [1] for $50 USD per month which gets you a Google Guarantee badge.
The question is, is it worth it?
Well, we think yes!
SEJ wrote a nice post on this subject [2] which covers a lot of the important points. We need to bear in mind that this isn’t yet open to all business categories. It is still very much a trial and they may cancel it. Now with that out of the way, lets dig in.
Google My Business [3] is a vital tool for any business, but especially businesses with a local focus. Your GMB profile is like your showroom and in some cases, it is more important than your actual website. Small businesses live and die by the strength of their GMB profiles so anything you can do to get a leg up is surely worth it.
You could have maybe predicted that this would happen, in fact, we did! This was part of our 2020 SEO predictions[4] made way back in early Q4 2019. You can bet that Google will seek to monetize the GMB platform significantly going forward and this is just the start of that. We also expect to see a significant increase in paid search options [5] in the SERPs with things like featured snippets becoming sponsored rel estate.
Summary
We have yet to see if this will be a fad or if this will become part of the search landscape but we are recommending this to most small businesses.
