029: What Is Google My Business And Why Should I Care?

Title: What Is Google My Business And Why Should I Care?

Guest: Paul Lee

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.

Peter: Today, my guest is Paul Lee. He is our SEO expert. Paul, what are we going to talk about today?

Paul: Peter, we have a classic question today, which is what is Google My Business and why does it matter to SEO? Pete, let me ask you. As a business owner, What is Google My Business?

Peter: Google My Business is a profile that is created for my business that is in Google’s

Paul: Google verse.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. The Google verse,

Peter: their suite of products.

Peter: It’s a profile page. It’s not even a page necessarily. It’s a profile of my business that I can actually control.

Paul: Right. Exactly. Well, you can and you should, but a lot of people don’t. I guess that’s to back up a little bit. Google business was started, I think, four or five years ago, and Google kind of set these profiles up of basically every business in America and then eventually the world.

They glean data from other sources and things, so they think this is the title of the business. This is the phone number. Then they would invite businesses to claim or verify the ownership of that information. Then once they did that, they could add a lot more information. Now, when they launched it a few years ago, people thought it was an interesting tool.

Some people claimed and verified their listings. Other people didn’t. But Google has really, over the last several years, the last few years, doubled down on the importance of Google My Business for SEO and for other things as well. They want you to use this tool. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, go to maps, say Google Maps, search for your business name and your locale.

You’ll see this kind of profile. It’s it’s where they show you the hours of operation, where it’s where they show your address. Hopefully, they show your hours of operation.

Peter: Yeah. You don’t even need to try Google Maps. I mean, you can just do Google, just straight up Google. If you Google the name of your business and the name of your city, which I call that a branded search, your profile should show up. If you’re on a desktop, it’ll be on the right side of the search results page.

Paul: Yes. And that is so important that branded search is so key. Like people assume that they will rank number one for their business name, but a, it’s not always true. B, sometimes your competitors target your business name with advertising, which is a bit dastardly, unless you’re doing it to them, which is fine. And see, you know, it’s like, Google considers Google my business to be like almost your homepage within the search results.

So it’s that chance to make a first impression. On the customer to tell them, are you actually engaged? Are you really in a real business? Obviously when people are looking on the line, they have no information about you ever. They’ve never interacted with your company before.

Those people are a bit like thirsty deer In the forest, you know, they want to put down their head and they want to drink, but at the same time they’re scared. So you’ve to give them everything to build their confidence. And this obviously do this on your website. You do this in your e commerce stores and things, but you’re also doing it in Google my business listing. Starts with all the basics are there.

You can’t really change the title of your business. The name of your business is the name that it is. There’s your address, is there your phone number, but then there’s things like descriptions. There’s a category that you’re supposed to be in. They also include reviews.

They include where you can, people can ask you questions and you can answer them. And by the way, you can ask yourself questions and answer them yourself, which is. Pretty cool. So they do all that stuff. They give you all these tools, but unfortunately.

Very few businesses take advantage of all of them. And when I say, unfortunately, it’s really unfortunate because according to the latest local search ranking factor survey, which is a survey they give out to like the top 40. Local search experts in the world. Like these people are the cream of the crop. Live and breathe search local search.

They are connected to Google. They know the people in there, so they got a good handle on what makes you rank and what doesn’t. They’ve said in this latest survey that the signals that come from Google My Business account for 33% of all the search ranking signals. That’s huge, bigger than anything else, more than your titles of your page, more than your descriptions, more than even reviews, which is big chunk of it as well, more than even location proximity to your search. It’s just more than that one thing.

It’s Google My Business signals. Those are the signals that are the most valuable signals

Peter: Yeah.

Paul: For SEO, and most companies are not fully taking advantage of them.

Peter: Well, there’s this concept that I’ve heard called the zero click search as well, and this is sort of Google’s evil plan, I’ve heard, is that rather than having to rely on serving up search results about your business and then having you click to your website, even though there is a link to your website in the Google My Business profile, it’s not really prominent. Google’s plan is that you would find enough information on that profile to actually contact the business. For example, there’s directions. Like, I use the Google My Business profile a lot. If I’m going to a business, I’ll Google the name of the business.

I’ll see their Google My Business profile. I’ll click on directions, and it’ll pop up on my phone with the directions. Right? So there’s this whole idea of not even it sounds ludicrous or it would have sounded ludicrous years ago, but now it’s just a fact that Google doesn’t even wanna have to rely on providing people with your actual website. They want everything in their ecosphere as well.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. And you can either lament that and buck against the trend and, you know, shout at the wind as far as I’m concerned, or you can go with it. You can understand that that is the way that things are going to happen on Google, and you need to make sure that that Google My Business profile, which is the thing that they’re using to get the zero click, is as full and complete as possible because you’re still making the sale. Whether they went to your website, it’s a little bit harder for SEO optimization people to point at some report and say, Look, look, this is what we did.

It really doesn’t matter because you’re making sales. So that’s that’s what I think, you know, for business owners, you know, it’s not about being proud. Oh, you know, like, they have to come visit my website. No. As long as they’re buying.

Right. I don’t care if they visit.

Peter: As long as the phone is ringing. Yeah. And they’re buying. Yeah. There is one thing I wanna jump back to though.

You did mention reviews. So Google reviews are arguably the most important reviews on the web now. This is where Google reviews live. This is people talk about Google reviews, and, I think there’s a lot of confusion out there. You know, the the standard used to be Yelp.

Right? And then, you know, a Yelp review, those reviews, which we all love and hate, reside on your Yelp profile page. Well, this is sort of the equivalent of the Yelp profile, so your Google reviews appear on this Google profile. We do have a product called Reviews of Us, and it directs people to leave reviews on this profile. One of the things that they’ve done, though, is they’ve made it sort of Google.

They have made it sort of convoluted for folks to find this. So we make it super easy to actually get into the review process on the Google My Business reviews, and then they’ll show up here on the Google My Business profile. So one thing I wanted to mention, though, too, is there’s there’s once you claim this thing, they have a way of claiming it using a phone number or a postcard. And folks like us who do a lot of the work are generally able to claim Google My Business pages for businesses without even requiring that verification process. I’ve noticed that in the last six months that we’re able to actually help a business claim one.

But once you claim it, there’s actually a dashboard that we use, especially because we help businesses manage these, that we log into that has it’s basically the back end of all this information, and then we use that to manage this. So claiming it is not enough. You need to log into the dashboard as well. The cool thing about the dashboard is that there’s different roles that people can play. So you can claim your Google My Business profile and be the owner, and then you can set one of us as the manager of the page as well.

And then we can do our magic in your Google My Business profile for you to make sure that you’ve got everything set up correctly. So what are some things if I’ve got a Google My Business profile, what are two or three things that you would wanna do right away once you’ve claimed it?

Paul: One of the things you wanna make sure that you have the right category. Google only gives you a limited number of choices as You far as the can choose one primary category. You can choose some additional categories, but make sure that the primary one is really the primary business category that most people are going be looking for you for. You don’t want to confuse people. You don’t want to put your sixth most popular thing.

You want to make sure that those categories are correct. That would be number one, and that’s pretty quick. Number two is to interact with people, especially in your reviews. You mentioned reviews, and it’s such an important thing to be able to make it streamlined for people to review you and then for you to respond to the good ones and the bad ones. Now, again, that may be getting into something that doesn’t necessarily cause you to rank higher, but it does cause customers to trust you more.

When they see that you get a good review, you say, thanks for that. We really appreciate it. You know? But when you get the bad one, say, what can we do to make this better? I’m so sorry you had a bad experience.

What can we do? You know, keep the snark and that sort of stuff out of it.

Peter: So reply to reviews, good and bad. Make sure you’re in the right category. I would also add, just make sure the information’s correct. I mean, that’s just a basic Yeah.

Paul: I think also uploading photos is good. If have a restaurant, people want to see what the atmosphere and the ambiance is going If be you obviously have pictures of your food, a lot of people also have businesses that aren’t as photogenic. Say you’re a lawyer or something. You’re not going to have pictures of delicious dishes that you can show, but you can show your staff. You can show something about the people that work there and things along those lines.

Peter: You could show the outside of your building or something.

Paul: You can show the outside. All those things build trust with customers.

Peter: You can also add posts and events.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. And they give you a variety of categories of posts. Posting on Google My Business is a bit like a tiny little blog, a tiny little blog, but you can add photos, you can add a little description and link to those things for, to find out more, but also to things like booking events or even offering sales or coupons and things like that also available all through Google my business. And again, most of your competitors aren’t using this to its full extent. And when you do, you differentiate yourself.

That’s easy, and you move up just because of that.

Peter: Well, and I think in one of our other discussions, we talked about consistency. I know one of the things that as the SEO service that you provide to the businesses we work with, you will if there’s a blog post written, a lot of times, you’ll make sure that at least part of the post is on the Google My Business profile with a link back to the website for the original full extended version of the thing. So there’s a there’s a ton of different ways that you can take advantage of GMB. So I’m a business. I’m listening to this podcast.

I’m like, I don’t even know where to start. What I’d like to do is offer the listeners an opportunity to interact with us. If you’ll go to bizmarketing.com/gmb, we will have a page there that will give you some ideas on what you can do and a form you can fill out if you’d like us to take a look at your GMB. And, we do have some services associated with claiming and maintaining and optimizing Google My Business listings. So I’d like to encourage everybody to take advantage of that.

So Paul, what else do we need to know about GMB profiles? Is there anything else that we should be, mentioning?

Paul: Just make sure that if you’re doing it yourself or if you’re working with somebody, you know, with an SEO company, just don’t let this become the forgotten corner because it isn’t your website or it isn’t your e commerce store. In fact, it’s on par with those. It just doesn’t seem like it because haven’t paid enough attention to it lately. But as far as Google is concerned, understand that Google sees this as a huge thing. Unfortunately, we joke about Google.

It’s kind of the gorilla in the room. It does its own thing. We have to kind of feed the gorilla. We joke about that, but the fact of the matter is it’s true. They own such a huge percentage of the search business that you have to feed the gorilla what it wants, and this is what they want.

So If you don’t know how to optimize it yourself, find somebody who does and get this thing right because it’s important to your business.

Peter: Excellent. All right, Paul. Well, thanks a lot for your time today. Remember, if you’d like to get more information about your Google My Business listing, you need some help, you don’t know where to begin, go to our resource, bizmarketing.com/gmb. That’s bizmktg.com/gmb.

Paul, see you next time.

Paul: Alright. Thanks, Peter. Bye bye.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.