Transcript:
Coming from someone who builds websites for a living, I can tell you that in my experience, the most important digital asset for businesses that serve customers locally is actually not their website. It’s their Google business profile. Since Google accounts for over 95% of online search traffic, when someone performs a search for your business by name or a search for local intent, Google Business profiles are actually the first thing that they’ll see. Filling out your profile completely and correctly can be the difference between making a good first impression and no impression at all. If you find today’s video helpful, please feel free to drop a like and subscribe to the channel. Stick through to the end, and I’m even going show you a bonus area of Google Business profiles that 99% of businesses missed. Let’s dive right in
Google Business Profiles. The best way to get to the new interface to edit your profile is to actually Google the name of your business. So today we’re gonna be going through our marketing agency’s profile orb solutions. So when you Google your business, you’ll see your knowledge card pop up here with your Google Business profile. To the right, you see this blue check mark saying that you manage this business profile and then you have all these individual icons on the interface here where you can create and edit different areas of your Google Business profile. So we’re gonna go through each of these one by one and talk about them here today. So the primary icon is the edit profile icon, and under here you have all the information about your business that you need to fill out. So you can edit your business name, you can choose your primary category and your secondary categories.
Selecting the right primary category is really essential for being found for services within search. It’s one of the most important ranking factors within the Google Map Pack, so that’s super important that you set your primary category and your additional categories. Here you have the ability to create a description for your business. You can talk to people about what you do, tell them why they should work with you. Focus on creating a very organic sales or marketing message here focused on the why customers should do business with you and why your business is different. There’s no real rhyme or reason or SEO incentive to include certain keywords about things that you do here in this description section. Just use it as an opportunity to make a sales pitch to your customers. Next, there’s a section to include your business’s opening date. If you know the exact date, I highly recommend that you include it here.
Filling out this profile completely is essential for helping you rank as high as possible within the Google Map Pack search results. So set your opening date if you can contact information. This is where you set your phone number. This is super essential that the phone number that you set here is the phone number that you use on your website, and it’s the phone number that you list all across the internet. There’s this concept called nap, uh, within business citations. It’s an acronym for name, address and phone. And one of the primary search signals for whether a local business is legit that Google looks at is whether when they crawl all of these other directories like Apple Maps and Yelp and Foursquare. If your information shows up consistently and is the same across those directories, it’s gonna give you a positive uplift in Google. So make sure that whatever phone number you use here is the same one that you use all across the internet.
And also kind of common sense people are gonna see this number and call you on it. So make sure this is a good number for you where you or your secretary or whoever takes calls for your business can actually get to this number during business hours and receive calls there. Next is your website. Fairly straightforward. Put in your URL here. If you do not have a website, Google offers the opportunity to create a free site, but that’s a topic for a different video that will color cover at another time. If you are interested in learning more about Google business profile sites, there are plenty of free resources on YouTube to help you learn. I’ll link to a couple in the description of this video location and areas. So business location for my business. Currently, I don’t have a physical location that I operate out of because I have a digital marketing company.
However, this is the address part of your citations. So you want to include the address of your business, exactly how it is advertised throughout other areas of the internet. So if you have a suite A or you’d use Suite B or your Suite 100 or apartment 1 0 1 for some reason, if you’re doing business out in an apartment, make sure that you list your business’s address here, exactly how it shows up elsewhere on your website and on the internet. Because again, making sure that your phone number is the same, making sure your address is the same and making sure the name of your business is consistently the same is gonna help you show up in search results. Next is the service areas tab. Now, a lot of times we might be compelled to just add the general line of like Michigan, USA and that covers the entire area where we do business.
However, to maximize your presence in Google, I highly recommend that you add counties, add states, add cities, and maximize your organic reach by including as many cities as you possibly can that you do service in and dense urban areas that are near this business location address, cuz that’s gonna help you maximize again your appearance in the search results. Next is your business is hours. Just put your actual hours of operation here. Don’t try to game it and say you’re open 24 7 if you’re not. If you do have specialty or access hours, you have the ability to add more hours down here such as pickup or when your kitchen is open, or if you do delivery during a certain window. You can also add holiday hours here as well. So if you’re gonna be temporarily closed, make sure you edit them here. Don’t physically come in and change the hours of your business just for a one day closure or a one week closure.
Make sure you utilize this specialty holiday hours and you can add a date down here and include your own business holidays. And you can see Google also provides recommendations for days where you can say, for example, I’m gonna be spending Thanksgiving with my family, I’m gonna mark orb solutions as closed on Thanksgiving. So then you can save that down here and that will kind of update on its own. Usually if you’re making an update, Google will tell you your edit is pending. It usually takes up for to 10 minutes for it to be reviewed. Sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it takes a little bit longer. Sometimes these reviews even get kicked back and rejected. Depending on if you are like used a description that was violating Google’s terms of service, they would kick it back to you in request that you make an edit there. So this yellow means that it’s not necessarily live but pending.
Next, you can do more from the business. You can identify yourself if your business is minority owned or women owned or veteran owned, you can identify that here. You can identify what kind of crowds that you appeal to. Right now Google has the lgbtq plus friendly option that you can set here. You can do planning. So if you require your customers to have an appointment, they can’t just show up on site, then you can enable this option here. You can enable service option for whether or not you offer online appointments and Google will eventually build out these sections and include more toggle boxes as necessary over time. So make sure every so often, periodically when you’re updating your profile or maybe you’re posting to your Google business profile, you come in here and check to see if new options have been added. But they typically do a good job of notifying people when they do get added.
So that’s pretty much it for the edit profile section. The next section we wanna cover is read reviews. So this is where you can actually read reviews that your customers have given to you. If you a customer would like to leave a review and you need to provide them a link, you can get that link by clicking this get more reviews button here and copying this hyperlink url. If you click this button right here, it will say Review link is copied and you can email this or post it on social media, direct message it, text it to people. If you’re using this application on your phone, make sure you’re getting Google reviews because Google reviews are our primary search signal. Again for whether or not your business is gonna show up above or below your competitors through. The three primary categories to always bear in mind are relevancy, proximity, and review score.
And since you can control the review score component of this, you really wanna push as hard as you can to get as many Google reviews as possible and then also respond to each review. So you could see that here we respond to every one of our customers who posts a five star review. One, this helps other customers see that we’re active on Google, we care about our customers. But two, Google also looks at this favorably as you being active on your Google business profile, being a legitimate business owner and engaging with your customers. So they’ll look at reviews even more favorably if you reply to them. And there is also speculation that the number of likes on these reviews themselves can also boost your presence and search. So if you can go in and like your reviews and have others like the reviews or leave contextual reviews with keywords and comments about kind of the things that you do.
So I could definitely use more reviews on my profile about marketing that mention the keywords or that mention web design or print media. And these categories, these filters are generated automatically as people leave reviews based on the keywords that they leave inside of their reviews. So the next section is the messages section. So if you’ve enabled this, you can actually chat customers have the opportunities similar to like a Facebook Messenger to message you directly and talk to you. So this is an opportunity, a different avenue where you can engage with your customers directly and make it easy for them to get into contact with you without having to call you on the phone or even go to your website. They can just send you a message over Google Business profiles if you turn this on. You can also enable web notifications here so that you can get alerted when your customers actually send you those messages.
Again, the speed of which you at which you reply to those messages can be kind of important. We have another video that talk we did recently that talks about speed to lead. And so if you can have a secretary or somebody in your office who is watching these messages, if you get a constant volume of people who are reaching out via your Google business profile, you wanna make sure that you can respond to those messages quickly, cuz that’s gonna be key in taking those leads from warm prospect to actual customers. Next is a section where you can add photos, you can add photos of your business here and upload them. You also have the opportunity to add a logo or a cover photo. Now Google doesn’t always take the cover photo that you choose to recommend here. Sometimes they pull a different photo that you’ve uploaded about your business, but most of the time they will pull your cover photo.
You also have the opportunity to upload your logo that’s used different places inside of the Google Maps mobile app on Android and iPhone. So you wanna make sure that you do upload a cover photo and a logo that are properly sized here, and then periodically uploading photos of the work that you do. Your customers can come into your profile and actually see the photos and browse the things and the kind of work that you’ve done in the past. So make sure you utilize that photo section there. The next tab is performance. Performance is pretty cool because this section will show you exactly how people find your business and what they’ll be searching for. So you could see we show up a lot for our name branded search if people search orb or they search orb solutions. Also internet providers near Troy, Michigan. Interestingly enough, I mean Google doesn’t always get it right, it’s imperfect.
We don’t actually provide internet services, but marketing agency for roofing repair or orb agency. These are some of the primary search terms that we tend to show up for the most. You can see a breakdown of how people find you by device. You can see a graph of your profile interactions over time. So if people are clicking on something, viewing your photos, reading your FAQs, they’ll show up as interactions here. You can track calls that have been made to your business, volume of messages and see information about that. Like I said, this average response time, you want to try to get this as low as you possibly can. Bookings, you can see like if you integrate a third party booking app for your restaurant to take reservations or something like that with Google, you can see how many people book directly through that profile integration.
And then finally, website clicks. So how many people are clicking through your Google Business profile to come to your website. You can sort by time period for any of these different options and see an aggregate volume of people who have found your website. Next is the advertise section. So I highly recommend going through individualized Google ad tutorials. I do not recommend going through the advertise module here, so we’re not gonna dig into that today. Just know that this is another option that may improve in the future and Google is working on. Next is editing products. So one of the cool things that you can do to create these little modules down here where people can see your products, they can click into it and each product has a description and a call to action button. I highly recommend that you add each product or at least each service page on your website directly into this product section here on Google.
This is gonna help people get a general idea of the things that you offer within your business. You can see our product. So we have pages on our website where we offer print media, video production, search engine optimization, and web design. Each of these has a little short description of the product, and then we have links to each of the individual pages on our website with a learn more button. So these are very simple to set up and you could use something like Canva. I’ll drop a link in the bio to create very simple graphic assets where you can include them here on your Google Business profile. So I’m gonna exit outta that without publishing. Next is services. This is also pretty important because depending on the primary category that you list, Google will give you the opportunity to pick the services that you offer.
And you can add more here with this button at the bottom. But a recently introduced feature that they just added is the ability to provide a description of the service that you offer. So this is still unknown territory for marketers. We’re not sure how the text or the copy within here will actually affect seo, but when Google does integrate new features, they do kind of experiment with how those cause businesses to either pop up or not pop up within Map Pak. So I would recommend coming in here and setting up descriptions for the services that you check that you offer. I tend to err on the side of telling people to go to the add more services and use Google’s recommendations. If a lot of times the bubbles will pop up here to say what other recommendations Google has for that category. You can add custom services as well. But I recommend at the very least, sticking with Google’s default categories and adding as many as possible that are applicable to your business’s nature.
Next is the booking module. So you could add a link to your online booking tools through here. You could also create a featured book booking button through Google’s new service here. So if you book appointments for reservations or online calls, this is really cool because you can remove the amount of steps that people require to get an appointment booked with you. So instead of clicking on Google, clicking through Google to go to your website, then looking at your website and then reading about you, and then finding the booking button on your site and then booking the call, if you integrate it directly with Google, people can click straight to your booking page after you’ve convinced them through the content of your profile that you have something interesting to offer to them. So this is a pretty nifty feature. I highly recommend finding a Google product integration to create this kind of prominent button if you find a service that’s applicable to your business. Next is calls. You can turn on call tracking and you can see a call history. You’ll be able to see incoming and missed calls when customers call your business through Google search or Maps. So this is pretty useful in terms of tracking what kind of results you’re getting through your Google Business profile.
Next is a q and a section. I think that it’s really nice that Google has integrated this directly into their new interface. Prior to this, it was kind of buried below on the Google knowledge cards. But what you can do is even as the owner of your business or any customer who’s curious about your business can hit this, ask a question button and generally post a question on your Google Business profile about your service. What is your pricing? Do you have special events? Do you allow your space to be rented out completely for events? Any frequently asked questions your customers give you? Or do you have liability insurance? How high does your coverage go? If you have any of those questions that people get that you get free frequently, chances are that other customers also have the same questions, but they might find it burdening to call you or reach out or text you.
And if your competitor has that information readily available, they might be able to more readily service that customer or get that lead. So you don’t wanna have cracks in your marketing. You wanna make sure you come in here and ask any of the common questions that your customers constantly come back to you with over and over again. And then you can actually answer the questions that you ask as the owner, why is local marketing essential? And then you see that I both posted this question and answer my own question because it helps you get more exposure for your local business.
So definitely utilize that q and a section. People do read the question and answer section of Google when they’re making buying decisions. Next is the added update. So you have three options here. Now you can add an update, which is a general post where you can include photos, a call to action, and a description. Those show up almost like social media posts inside of a feed. You can see we did one on Halloween down here with a video, and we have some previous posts that we’ve made on behalf of our business. You also have a couple of other post types available to you. So you can add an offer if you’re running a temporary promotional discount. Google’s example here is 20% off in store or online. You can create that offer. You can gen generate or create a graphic for that offer. Again, would recommend something like Canva.
If you don’t have an on staff, artist or graphic designer can make this process really easy for you. And you can post about different promotions that you’re hosting. Now Google probably has bigger plans than they currently do for these posts right now. They do have small SEO signals, search engine signals where they help you to rank higher in the search results. But there’s also, if you go onto your phone and you look under the explorer section of Google Maps, you will see posts from local businesses about promotions or specials they’re offering or different content or recent customer experiences. Those are stories that are being shared there. So Google has big long-term plans for this post section and participating by posting here is going to help your business gain more exposure, help you rank higher in the search. And it also is at the very least, another way to show your customers that you’re very active on social media, that you’re a professional business, that you care about talking and having conversations with your end customers.
So would recommend utilizing this post section here as well. The final post type is to add an event. So if you’re hosting an event at a particular start time in a particular location, you can add the event details here and similar to the offers, it just gives you a different template with information that you can kind of include here. So we’ll discard those changes. Finally, we saw this on the read review section, but if you click to ask for reviews button here, this will kind of take you back to the exact same spot where you can copy your review link and send it out. You also have these recommendation tabs down here where Google will try to help you, you know, can look at your performance from October. It’s telling me I can add more photos about my business or get more reviews. So you can look down here for Google’s recommendations periodically from time to time.
They will kind of add additional tiles here to recommend taking action on a new feature that they’ve just integrated with Google Business Profiles. Finally, you can also see, one thing I wanna mention is that only you can see this section on search when you search for your business and you’re logged into a Google account that’s associated with that business’ ownership. So if you need to add somebody else who can manage your business, there’s these three dots up here and you can go and you can browse your other business profiles. You can create a new business profile. You can edit your notification settings, but you can also go into profile settings here. And there’s this advanced tab where you know can add the labels and store codes and other settings that were previously available in the Google My Business interface. And you can also add, edit, or remove new profile managers.
So you see my creative director, Evan helps me do some of the posts here. You may have seen his shorts on TikTok or YouTube shorts. He also has access to the Orb Solutions Google Business profile. So if you need to add somebody else’s Google account so they can also manage this and this will pop up for them in search, you can do it here under that section. That’s it for today’s video. Thank you guys for watching through to the end. If you enjoyed this content, please like or subscribe. If you have questions, drop ’em in the comments below. I know this interface is new and we’re excited to see what Google does with this moving forward. Google Business profiles are super important. They don’t take a ton of time to set up. As you can see, they’re pretty simple. So get in here, set up your Google business profile, make your business look good, and you’re gonna start getting more customers from those local search results. So until next time, I’m Austin. Thanks for watching.
