Peter Moriarty: If you're a business owner who wants to rank
higher in Google, or you want to make sure that you close more
sales by using third party authority and validation, well,
this video is going to be useful for you. Using the tool of
Google My Business, you can ensure that your business is
presented well to the public. And in this video, I'm going to
show you how you can make sure you get the onboarding done
correctly optimize all of the best and most important
features. And by the end of the video, you're going to be a whiz
with Google My Business, and you're going to be able to
easily get it set up for you and your team.
So let's talk about the first step, which is actually getting
your profile set up and started. And to do that you had long to
business.google.com and you register for an account. Now
before you do that, you may want to check that someone hasn't
already registered your business on your behalf. If you're a
local business, like a chiropractor, or some other kind
of bricks and mortar business, it's possible you already have a
profile there. And you'll need to then go and claim that
profile, wait for a postcard to arrive, and then access and edit
your profile. If it's a standard one without much information on
there right now, then you may decide to just create a fresh
one. And that's totally cool. But claiming your business is
probably the easiest way to ensure that people don't get
confused with multiple profiles. Once your business has been
claimed and remembered this type might take a couple of days or
weeks for the postcard to come through, you'll need to then
fill out the complete profile. Remember that Google values
completeness. So I would recommend filling out every
field that you can that's relevant to your business, then
the next step is to add your photos. And so you can add
photos inside and outside your business. And if you're a
professional services business, or someone working from home,
this is the kind of time that you may want to add stock photos
or professional photos that someone's taken of you in a
business setting. Remember to try and fill out each one of the
categories because Google likes completeness. And the
completeness score of your profile is important for the
usability of end users. We'll talk a little bit more about
that later in the video. Next up, Google has some great
features to post news and post updates or even special offers
to your customers. And we recommend that you use these as
these will actually be highlighted in Google search
results. Now, particularly if you're the kind of business
where a customer might be googling your business name
because they've been referred by someone else to your business.
Or perhaps they're googling your personal name. And that's going
to show up your business in its ranking. But of course, if
you're the kind of business that's a bricks and mortar, and
maybe you're in a chiropractor in Sydney, then you want your
business to show up and having more updates and posts on that
profile is going to have a more likely chance of Google
surfacing. But you also want to highlight those to customers as
well so that if the customer sees that you have a particular
offer or service on offer, then it's going to show up right
inside their search results nice and easy for them. Next up,
let's go through some of the special features. And there are
some special features for Google business accounts depending on
which category you've chosen. For example, if you're a
restaurant, you'll be able to add a menu. If you're a product
business, you can literally list some of your products. If you're
a business that takes bookings, you can add a booking button and
you can connect that to a booking service of sorts. Now,
some of these options are different depending on which
country you're based in. But when you choose the business
specialization option inside of Google My Business, you will get
options to add different services. Finally, and this is
the most important point is to encourage your customers to
leave reviews, you want to build trust by responding to reviews
as well, anytime reviewers left good or bad, say thank you, and
appreciate that that person has taken the time to leave the
review. Now if it's a negative review, you might reach out with
your personal details and ask them, Hey, why don't you reach
out and let's see if we can resolve this. And you know, do
what you can to show that you are actually taking a genuine
interest in that customers review. Now, of course, it helps
if you actually do take a genuine interest. But you want
to also show that publicly that you have a genuine interest in
resolving that customers review. Remember that if you are
searching for a burger place, and you want to look up the
reviews, what do we do we look at the best ones. But we're
probably also going to flick through to the worst ones, and
not just look at what the reviews were, but see how the
business responded to them. That's going to be a good metric
for us when we are making a choice as a consumer. So I want
you to think about your customers making that choice
when they're considering working with you. Now there is a magic
number, which I'm not allowed to tell you. But it's in the
hundreds, when you get a certain number of five star reviews,
your rankings will actually begin to be boosted in Google's
search algorithm. Now we know that because this is a signal
for Google's quality score for businesses and Google are
looking to service businesses that are good quality to their
customers, Google's customers being people searching on the
internet. And so when you have more and more and more reviews
on your profile, you will over time begin to rank higher in
Google search results. Now it doesn't mean it's going to put
you on the first page above everyone else. There's lots of
other factors included in your search optimization score. But
this is an important factor because it factors into the
likely experience that a customer might have with your
business. And Google is in the business of surfacing the best
experiences for their customers, the end users of google.com and
so you want to make sure you put yourself forward So some of the
strategies for actually getting your customers on board with
leaving reviews for you to ask for them. If you're in a
physical place for the customer, you may even have an iPad, on
the desk of your service offering or on the place of your
business and actually ask customers to leave a review, you
might give them instructions and even ask them to do that at the
point of sale or at the most exciting point of delivering
your service, that would be a great time to ask for a review.
If you're a service business, or you're working with customers on
email, or virtually, you might have a script that you send to a
customer, after you've delivered your service and say, Hey,
thanks so much for being a part of our business. If you think
we're worth five stars, we'd love a review. If you don't
think we're worth five stars, please hit reply to this email,
and let us know what we can do to improve. That's a great
script that we've used effectively over many years to
generate hundreds and hundreds of reviews from our customers.
Now remember, and I can't underscore this enough, the
volume of reviews is so important. Think about when
you're searching for a restaurant and you're you know,
perhaps searching for the word Thai noodles, right? And a
number of restaurants come up, would you prefer to go for the
five star restaurant that only has three reviews, or the 4.5
star restaurant that has 100 reviews, we're more likely to go
with the restaurant which has more data in their reviews,
because we're more likely to be trusting a larger crowd rather
than a small sample size. So if you can set a goal to get to 100
reviews for your business, that's a great place to start to
ensure that when your customers are searching for you online,
they're going to see what's great about you with the rating
that you're showing to the public. If you're a business
owner looking to get more from your technology, then it genius
can help. We've helped 1000s of business owners all over the
world. And we support you on your technology journey,
learning how to use Google's tools and other small business
tools to build a more successful business so you can have more
impact with your team and with your community. Now we'll work
with you no matter what time zone you're in. We currently
only support English. But if you're interested in working
with our team, you can jump on one of the links below for a
free consultation. Now if you are already a customer of Google
workspace, you can take advantage of our Transfer In
offer. And that offer is for businesses who are already using
the Google ecosystem for their email and their file storage.
And they want to get more out of the platform. Now our classroom
which is available for free for transferring your billing across
the US gets you access to courses and training as well as
certifications on the Google workspace ecosystem. We're going
to take your team from wherever they are now to genius level
with the Google workspace ecosystem. And that's going to
help you to run a more effective and productive team. If you're
interested in learning more jump at the link below for the
transfer in and check out our offer for free for Google
workspace users to next time. I'll catch you in the next
video. Cheers!