SEO is an important part of brand awareness and it’s free. There is a lot of advice and really good education around how to SEO a website but did you know that your Google My Business Listing is one of the best ways to improve your overall SEO on Google?
Google My Business is a tool that Google offers to increase local SEO. By filling out the Google Business Panel completely you are telling them who you are and what you do and where you service customers. This is how Google Connects the dots to all of your other marketing initiatives. Best of all, it’s free and it’s on this rare occasion where free is actually the perfect tool for the job. Let’s talk about how setting up your Google My Business Listing is the first thing you should do to improve your SEO.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Marketing Masterminds Article Ranking Articles in A Google Answer Box
Marketing Masterminds Article Data Analytics Is Necessary In Marketing Led Business Growth
Episode 56- Social Pilot Review
Episode 40 – Tool Evaluation: Rank Math For Easy SEO
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Products We Recommend
What we discussed:
What is Google My Business?
What to fill out
Tips and Tricks to benefiting with this FREE tool
Google My Business Review: Increase Local SEO
*Not ready to give this episode a listen just yet? Below is a rough transcript of today’s episode.*
Everyone wants better search engine optimization and Google has provided you some great tools to help you tell them who you are and how and where they should rank you. And best of all, it’s. It’s Google my business listing. this is one of those times where free is the perfect tool for the job. So let’s talk about how setting up your Google.
My business listing is the very first thing you should do to ignite or improve your search engine optimization. Okay, so a little housekeeping stuff. before we get into Google my business, as always, we’ve got some great links for you in the show notes, got a couple of product links, a link to Google my business, and some.
previous episodes. so I’ll kind of reference it as we go, but definitely go and take a look at those show notes when you’re done. we also put a rough translation in there. So if you’re looking for , something very specific, when you want to come back to the episode, it’s easy to find. And then of course, all of our episodes are on YouTube, whether they are video interviews or just me talking.
so if you want to go listen there, where there. Okay. So this particular topic was actually a listener request. if you’ve listened to any of the past episodes, I talk about Google, my business and Google products a lot. I’m a big fan So the request was, tell us more about Google my business.
Like, why are you such a big fan? Why is this so important? and why do you keep talking about it? So that’s what we’re going to go through today. all the things that are good about Google my business. So first let’s start off. What is Google my business or G M B. You’ll see that. If you ever look up, videos or articles, a lot of people in the industry, we call it GMB for short.
And what Google my business listing is for business is if you do a search for a business, And the search results come up, but you see that panel, right? It’s a visual panel on the right hand side that shows you their name. Usually if they have it uploaded their logo. The map link and then a bunch of things underneath of it, like,their website, their telephone number, all kinds of factual information.
That’s what a business’s Google my business listing is. And it shows all of their reviews too. And we all utilize this a lot. Probably most prevalent that people are used to seeing it is if they’re doing a restaurant or a store search. cause there’s a lot of information that can get packed into that one little panel.
So who should have a Google? My business listing, the short answer is everybody right? all businesses. See clients in a physical location. That’s, Google’s destination are eligible for a free Google, my business listing. even if a lot of what you do is virtual, but if you at least have a designation where either you’re going to the clients, like if you’re a trades guy, or if they’re coming to you like a restaurant, that’s everything, truly a hundred percent virtual businesses don’t really count, but I’ve seen e-commerce companies be able to get away with it.
So while everybody benefits from this, and I’ll explain more why as we go,who really benefits the most, our destinations, where you’re asking people to come to your location, clothing, stores, restaurants, retail locations, service-based businesses, where they need to bring things to you like repair shops, auto mechanics, that kind of thing.
because it helps set. Who you are and where you are and how people can find you. So now let’s talk a little bit more about why this is so important, and what is really important. And the main thing it does is it takes all of your information. About your business and gives it into a format to Google that they can understand very quickly and easily.
It’s like filling out a form. Name goes here. We know where the name box is. address telephone number goes here. Versus them having in the past, before the Google, my business listing panel, they would have to scrape your website and figure out well, which one’s the name field? Where’s the address field.
What’s the telephone number. So this gives them a super fast way. For them to connect the dots about your business? so where website indexing because of them having to figure stuff out through their algorithm, and they’re really good at it. It sometimes takes months to kind of get up in the rankings with that. Google, my business is pretty instantaneous. I’ve seen it take a week for them to just get everything pulled up for reading through their systems, which is a lot, so months versus weeks, it’s still good to make sure that your site gets indexed, of course, but to get that jump ahead of things.
And if people are searching for your business to show up in that panel, so connecting the dots with Google, getting indexed faster. Both are great things. The other reason is the humans involved in how we use that listing. the way I see people using that listing now, and this is based off of data that we collect from our clients, Google my business listing.
Cause as part of managing their website and doing their SEO, we manage and watch this panel very carefully. people are using that listing as like a little mini website for the. Right there, equating it to the same thing. So maybe they don’t want to click through and look at the entire website.
Maybe they just need to get a snapshot of what the business is and what it’s about before. Well,that’s what they’re using it like, especially for like restaurants or take out places or that kind of thing. they’ll look at the menu there before they’ll click through to the site. we see. then almost if you list all your products up there or your services, they’ll scan through that first, before they’ll click through the site.
So they’re really using that panel as the first point of entry to decide whether or not you’re a good fit for them. So that’s why this piece is so important regardless of the type of business you are, because it gets your information out in front of these consumers and clients faster. So there’s a lot that you can fill out in Google my business.
and so let’s talk a little bit about what you should fill out and the short answer is everything you possibly can, but, We’re very busy. Sometimes we don’t have two hours to do a complete listing layout all in one shot. So what are the top five things that you need to fill out? As soon as you get the listing up, you send the postcard off to get verified and you’re waiting for it to launch, right?
What are those first five things? So the most important fields in the Google, my business listing are your company name. That’s really, really important. Cause when you say to Google, this is mine. And, I have verified this, any place else on the internet, they see your name. They’re going to associate it back to you.
They’re going to connect those dots, your website link. It links that name to that website to make it easier for them to index, reviews, get reviews in your Google, my business listing as quickly as possible because it affects your ranking. So let’s say you’re a restaurant and you have. 25, 5 star reviews, and you’ve got a competitor.
That’s two doors down and maybe they only have, 10, five star reviews and they’re three months or older. You’re going to get ranked higher than that other restaurant, because you have more and yours are more current and more relevant, even though they’re both five. And then obviously if you have lower rankings and lower stars, that’s going to affect it as well, but it affects your rankings in the search.
Make sure you include a complete list of your services. So there’s a section in there for you to put all your services and it’s unlimited. So not only put in all of your services, but make sure you put in the service description as well. I’m going to talk more about that in a moment. And then the other thing is.
Category and you get multiple categories, how you can categorize your business. So you put in your primary category, which is usually drop down of what they give you. And sometimes it’s not accurate, but then you can type in your own categories and then you can put as many of those in as you want to. And what this does is it helps Google to understand.
What industry you’re in, right? Because they have all this data behind the scenes based off of industry so that they can, put you in search cues and search results. Based off of the information that’s sitting in your Google, my business listing, as well as what’s on your website. So the two work together, and we always want that Google my business listing to come up as much as possible because of what I said earlier is people are using it as little mini website.
Okay. So those are the five things you need to fill out first and foremost, and then go back when you have more time, don’t forget it. Don’t skip it, fill out everything else as much as possible. The more information that you give Google, the better off your search rankings for Google, my business and for your website are going to be.
So now I have a couple of tips and tricks for you that are outside of just what you’re filling out in the panels. things you can do to kind of boost things a little bit more, maybe a lot more. to again, increase the more times that you come up, the more, what they call impressions of your Google, my business listing.
So the first trick I want to talk to you about is keywords, right? Keywords work on your website, keywords, work in Google, my business. so if you have gone through and done a keyword research and created your keyword list and your keyword phrases for your website, you can then pull that into your Google, my business listing as well.
So the places you would put those keywords is your business description. So there’s a little field there where you can talk about what your business does and is, and then make sure your keywords get in there. And then your services names, which are probably big keywords for you anyway, That describe your services and then in the service description as well.
So you want to make sure those keywords get put in there. Don’t just arbitrarily write something, be a little more thoughtful about it, make sure you know what your keywords are. Make sure you have all the services listed. If your service is explained in multiple ways. So for me, we have web development, web design, web hosting.
We put all three up there, right? Because in some circles, web development is very different than web design. and those are two different search terms. So think about your services and how people describe them. When they’re talking to you or talking to other people about you and then the other place for keywords is those categories.
Like I mentioned, the first one is like a canned category. It may not represent you correctly, but then when you get to add additional categories where you actually type it in, that’s where you can inject those industry keywords that are used. so if you’re a general contractor that builds homes, you have custom home build, you have.
Home building, you have home renovations, home remodeling, remodeling renovations, make sure all of those different keywords get listed in there.
So the next one, I’m going to talk to you about our images. So images on Google, my business listing are really important, right? There’s a little section in there where you can add your logo. You can add images, you can add video. there’s places for interior images, exterior images.
And then you can put product images in there too. according to Google, their data says that, a Google my business listing gets 35% more click throughs to the website when they have images in the Google, my business listing panel for people to look at 35%. That is a lot, Versus someone who doesn’t have that, fill that at all.
And maybe they just have their logo in there. So take the time to put them in there. we have a client and they do a pet grooming. And so we’ve got a lot of pet grooming images in that Google my business listing that people actually scroll through and look at, and we see a huge jump in his. website, click-throughs when we add new images and then also they do doggy daycare.
And so the doggy daycare, images, people love that too. They like scroll through it. Like it’s social media. It’s very funny. and again, it’s just lifestyle type of images. So think about images that would relate well to your brand. If it’s showcasing. What you’ve done, behind the scenes images, it just gives them a better picture of who you are.
And then as I said, you can upload video as well. So if you’ve done a virtual 360 of the inside of your restaurant, absolutely put that up there because when people are looking to figure out where they want to go have dinner, sometimes they have in mind the type of place. Ultra casual, cool, casual, fun, that kind of thing.
And if they can see what the inside of your place looks like, that’s going to help them decide to make a reservation or to pop in. If you don’t take reservations. And then the last thing about images I’m going to share with you is. before you put the image up geo tag, the image, And what you tagging is you’re putting in your GPS, coordinates your longitude, your latitude, into the image.
There is a link in the show notes to a tool that we’ve used and that others have used it. That says it’s pretty good.
Where you could just go upload the image, put in the GPS coordinates and it puts it in the right spot, inside the image. And what this does is if someone finds the image and clicks on it, it re associates them back to you and to where you are. So again, for those businesses where you’re the destination, and you want people to come to you another way to boost all of this is to geo tag your images.
Okay. So now I want to talk to you about the product and service listings. I told you that those are really, really important. so make sure you take the time to fill it out. Use the keywords. Like I mentioned, this is really helpful because it tells Google, what you have, right? Because you’re using all those tags.
And then again, all of these get geotagged as well, so that, if you sell a certain pair of shoes, the geotag is there and then they can come and find you, even though they found the image of the shoes first. So it’s not just general traffic, it’s highly specific traffic based off of what they’re looking at.
So an example of how effective this is, is probably easier. So we have a client, and they have four locations in their state because it’s regional and they, go to the client’s house to do work. And so in their Google, my business listing. And I say listings, as in multiple, we created four separate listings for them.
They have offices in four regions. And so each region has its own Google, my business listing, and it has been verified. And then we have all the products and the services listed in every single. And so when we pull up the SEO data, what we see is they are ranking not only for the product or service and name, when people are doing searches.
They’re also, coming up for those really hyper-local searches where it’s the product in the specific category. So we’ll see the same product listed four times in the four different regions, and then seeing traffic associated to each of those things. We see all the impressions come up for when the Google, my business listing panel comes up.
So let’s say, in this type of an example, you’re a general contractor for different regions and you do commercial and residential. So you’ll see residential home building in a specific city, like where I live in Colorado Springs and then in Denver. and then maybe in Trinidad or something like that.
and you see it come up for all of those, and then that accumulates over time because all of that traffic is still assigned to that one website. So it’s pretty powerful. when you really, refine the hyper local search techniques that I’m talking about here. So if you have multiple locations, Uh, Google my business listing for each one and then make sure you have the products and services listed in every single one in detail.
It’s okay. If it’s a copy and paste, if all your keywords and stuff are the same, but make sure they’re all listed everywhere. The other cool feature for my service based guys, that book appointments out there is that you can actually add a link to your appointment. Booking service inside the Google, my business listing.
They have a field for it, and then it comes in there and it ox. You say, book an appointment and they can click on. from the Google, my business listing platform, which I think is great. GMB also integrates with certain platforms in looking at the list of platforms. Those,systems are not ones I’m familiar with, so I haven’t implemented them.
So I don’t know how it looks if you’re using one of those, it could be that the icon comes up instead of the link, I’d have to do a little more investigating, but I have a couple of platforms that my clients use that I really like to use. and which is Calendly. And it’s not listed. So Google, you probably need to partner with Calendly.
cause yeah, they listen to my podcast. so that’s it for appointment bookings. And now I want to go on to another section that I think is neglected by a lot. Of owners of the Google, my business listing. And that is the events post an offer section. So this is not social media, but it acts like social media because you can share updates here.
If you have a special offer or a special announcement or an event that you’re hosting, You’re doing a ribbon cutting for your business. You can post it in the event, section on your Google, my business listing, or you’re having an open house, or maybe you’re doing a,a guys, shopping night for mother’s day at your store.
You can put that in there and it’s going to get ranked and put out there and then sit outside of your website as well. One of the things that we do for all of our clients that we’re doing content marketing for. So we write their blog posts, we send out their emails. we do social media for them is that, we use social pilot, which I did a whole episode on that’s,scheduling and proliferating of content software.
Go take a listen to that one. it’s it’s I love the tour social pilot, but what social pilot allows you to do is schedule posts to go out, to Google my business. so you can write a blog post, you can write social media posts and have it go to Facebook and have it go to Google my business, where it gets indexed.
The great thing about the blog post is it doesn’t put the entire post out there. What it does is it puts an expert out there, right? The beginning of the post with a learn more button. So that you can actually drive some traffic back to your site and it has an image associated to it. So even if they don’t click through, even if they look at it, they see the image, they read a little bit, you’re getting that awareness and impression.
So really take advantage of that space. We do see when we look at the data for a client that they are getting views impressions of these posts and the images associated with them as well as some click-throughs. So that’s one of those things where every little bucket of interaction builds up to a lot of interaction.
So the last part that I’m gonna, share with you on my tips and tricks here is reviewing your data. So Google also makes Google analytics. So why wouldn’t the data that they provide for Google my business be great. and it is, so they give you a lot of information about the people that are shown your panel, that interact with your panel.
w do all the great things with it. So you can look at it independently, alone. Of course, like you do all your others, but if you are. Aggregating your data into a single report. if you’re pulling in your Google analytics and your digital ad data, you can also pull in your Google, my business data so that you can see it with all the rest of your data.
we use a tool called Supermetrics to do this. It’s a data aggregator that. Beautifully with Google data studio. so we highly recommend that. we did a whole article on what this tool Supermetrics is on the marketing masterminds blog. So there’s a link in the show notes for that too. If you want to learn more about Supermetrics.
So with what they call the insight section of the Google, my business listing, you can see the impressions, meaning how many times it was shown, what they clicked on, what they looked on, how many people clicked through to the website. Who requested directions to your location and where they requested them from.
So if you’re looking to figure out where you want to expand to next, and you’re seeing like a nice little hotspot in the map section of Google, my business listing, that may help you make that decision, Getting closer to those folks makes it more likely that more folks are going to come to. And then also, if you’re an in-person store or you’re getting a lot of telephone calls, you’ll actually see what your peak times are for all of this, so that, you, it can help you with staffing, figuring out how many people you need, how busy your telephone calls are going to be.
So not just for marketing, but also for the operating of your business. So I did mention data aggregation and I wanted to kind of share with you an example of how we do this. so for our clients that we’re doing all this reporting for and all of their marketing, we do create a aggregated dashboard report using Google data studio, which is also a free product by Google using the Supermetrics,aggregators and pull all the data in.
And so what we do is we will take the website. That we grab and the Google, my business data, we grab and look at them side by side, because again, in our minds, the Google, my business listing is kind of like another website. And so one of the things that we have correlated back is when we track the click to calls of the telephone numbers, because you can track when someone clicks on the telephone number to call, we actually see that the Google, my business listings get double the click, the calls than the website.
And that’s how we’re correlating. Like yeah, people are really using that. They like it. And then we also check to see how links are being, clicked as well. If they’re looking at images, and we put those numbers side by side, so they’re sitting on the same page together so we can see how the website is doing compared to Google my business.
And then we pull in the Google search console data so we can see what the search keywords and research is telling us as well. So just an example of why aggregating your data and doing that kind of stuff is, really, really important. All of this awareness, this advertising, cause it’s kind of like you’re getting some free advertising from Google here a little bit and it’s free.
it’s one of the things that I just love about Google in general, right? They understand that by providing businesses, these free tools to help them grow be better. It helps their search platform, It helps them help their users. So it’s really a win-win situation. they’re giving you the things you need to thrive on the search so that those that are searching are getting what they need.
to be fair, Google makes money off of that because the more people that search and click through the more ad money that they’re making. So it is a symbiotic relationship, but I think Google is one of those businesses that understand that and they do it well. They’re not charging you.
They’re not giving you subpar products. they work really hard to make sure that all of their products are useful, to the business community. So hopefully if I’ve inspired you to go in and take a look at your Google, my business listing again. So let’s talk about your next action steps that you can take.
To make your search engine optimization for your business better. So if you don’t have a Google, my business listing, get one in the show notes. There’s the link to click on for Google my business. Or you can just do a search in Google, say open a Google. My business listing and it’ll come up at the top of the search.
I promise. but if you have one now is the time to go in and make sure you have filled everything out. If you have pictures and more pictures, if you’ve had some videos made, even if it’s just a promotional video that you used an ads, throw it in that organic section, let people see stuff there, add your events, add your offers, create a connection between what you’re doing in social and adding it to your.
Google my business listing panel. and again, like I said, you can do that with social pilot, not all of the,social media publishing platforms, support, Google my business, but, it’s one of the reasons why we standardized on, social pilot because of that feature. The other thing you want to check is make sure your hours of operation are correct.
that’s one of the worst things to get wrong. It breaks trust really fast. If people are expecting you to be open because of what they saw on Google my business. But in fact, you’re actually closed and this is really worth doing because once it’s right. You don’t have to touch it again until you make changes.
If you add new services, if you change your business hours and then Google actually reaches out to you and says, Hey, there’s a holiday coming up or you close. And the Luxor indicate for you that you’re closed on that specific day. make sure you’re responding to those emails. So here’s my final thought for you on this top.
Search engine optimization in general is probably one of your most important marketing tactics because when people find you organically like that, they immediately have a bigger sense of trust. and so you need to embrace. Google. My business is just one piece of your overall search engine optimization,strategy.
You need a strategy there. so if you haven’t listened to it yet, go take a listen to episode 40, where, I talk about a really easy way to do SEO for your WordPress website, with a product called rank math. So combining things like Google, my business rank math, or if you’re an e-commerce site and your.
posting products on Etsy or Amazon, you got to search engine optimize those two. so go take a listen to episode 40, get a little more education on search engine optimization. And another thing that we just posted on the marketing masterminds blog is we wrote an article about how to rank your, blog articles for search better.
So go take a read on that. So here at, in coma, we love to give back to the business community, not just with all this great content that we’re creating for you, but we also provide a 45 minute free consultation to talk to you specifically about questions that you have about your business. You may want to talk about search.
You may want to talk about. How do I rank my products on Amazon search? We can have that conversation that forty-five minutes is for you to talk about what you want. If you have a quick question, or like with this episode, if you’ve got a suggestion for a show, we’d love to hear it. Just go to the website in case my.com I N K Y N a.com.
Fill out the contact for. And we will respond back to you if you found this episode, helpful, consider sharing it with other business owners that you know, the better we do as an entire business community, the better we do as individuals. Thanks for listening and have an amazing day.
