All right today, we have a Google My Business tutorial for you.
We're going to show you how to set it up, how to optimize it and give you some great
tips and tricks to help get your Google business listing even higher.
Stay tuned.
Hi, my name is Mike Mancini.
I'm helping you market, simplify and impact your business.
When it comes to your Google My Business listing, some people refer to this as your Google Business
or Google Maps listing.
Sometimes it gets confused with that, but simply what it is, it's a listing of your
business on Google's website, plain and simple.
But what a lot of people don't understand is how to get your Google My Business listing
to rank even higher.
So what we're going to do is we're going to show you how to verify it, how to set it up
and how to optimize it so it does rank even higher.
As you can see right here, this is our Google My Business listing for Mancini Digital, which
is my Google Ads Agency.
If you are a local business, this Google My Business listing is absolutely imperative
because this is truly free leads.
This can get you business for really just taking a little bit of time to set it up correctly
and drive a little bit of review traffic to it.
And you would be shocked.
How do I know this?
95% of the businesses that I work with are local service businesses.
So they serve a specific area and we've actually put tracking phone numbers on their Google
My Business listings and the traffic that we've seen come out of some of those is astonishing.
These clients aren't paying for that traffic.
They have just optimized their business listings and Google is showing it and people are calling
them for that specific reason.
Now you're probably asking, "Well, why would Google want to show this?
They'd probably rather have us pay for ads."
While this is true, Google would rather have that ad revenue, but Google's M.O. is really
to get you onto their website or one of their platforms, and to keep you there as long as
possible.
So Google knows that they're used as a search engine.
They want people to come back consistently and use that more and more and more because
eventually somebody is going to click on those ads.
So let's go to Google and type in a real quick search and I'll show you some examples.
So if you go and you type in plumber here, you can see that there are some sponsored
links.
There are some ads.
And then these are your Google My Business listings.
Some people will also call these Google Map listings.
These are free to have here, 100%.
And a lot of people believe that whoever has the most reviews here is going to be listed
the highest.
And that could not be further from the truth.
I'm going to show you why in just a minute, but for those of you that want to know about
this, how to set this up, all you literally have to do is go to business.google.com.
And what you can do once you get here is you can click on the sign in button.
You do need to have a Gmail email address to set this up.
If you don't have that, it'll walk you through on how to do that.
But once you're there, you can go find your business.
You can claim your listing and you can set it up from there.
It really is a very easy process.
So step number one is you have to verify your Google business listing.
What that means is you have to go in here and it will ask you to verify your business.
It'll ask you to enter the address of your business in there.
Once you do that, Google will send a postcard to your business address.
It usually will arrive very quickly, sometimes a little within the only few days.
But once you get that postcard, follow the instructions on it.
It will take you, ask you to go to a website.
It will ask you to enter the code on the postcard to verify that that is in fact your business
and then you're verified.
That means your listing can go live.
Now, the second tip is Google loves it when your Google My Business profile is complete
and optimized.
Now, how do you do that?
Honestly, this is very simple.
You just fill out every single question that they ask you.
So for example, on ours, if I go to the information area, it asks, what is our business name?
What services do we provide?
I don't have a location on ours because we are obviously nationwide or worldwide.
So I don't put a specific location, but it asks for service areas.
So I did put United States and Canada.
It asks for your hours.
Don't just leave this at 24 hours a day if your business is not open 24 hours a day.
It will ask you certain dates that you're closed.
Make sure you fill those out.
The more information you provide Google, the better.
And I'm going to show you some examples here in a minute of what I'm talking about.
Put your phone number, put your website.
We have a link where people can go schedule appointments with us.
We have that there.
We've got our services highlighted.
We've got our about us information.
In those services, put your top services that you do.
If you have three or four services, put all of them in there, but start with the biggest
one.
So for example, if you do plumbing and heating, maybe plumbing is a bigger part of your business.
Put plumbing as your first one.
In your about us section, you want to use a lot of the terminology that Google is really
looking for.
If you have a plumbing business, you want to talk about the plumbing services that you
offer.
You want to talk about the locations that you serve.
You want to talk about any guarantees or insurance, are you insured and bonded, and all of this
information.
Google does look at this, but if you don't provide HVAC services, don't list those there,
and it should be readable.
Don't just sit here and spam this entire area with keywords.
Talk about the services that you provide and the more complete that your business listing
is, the better you're going to show up on Google.
Next is photos.
Let's go back to our plumber listing and I'm going to show you some examples of what I'm
talking about here.
If we take a look at some of the plumber listings on the Google My Business area, so people
will often ask what kind of pictures do I put on my Google My Business listing?
These can be photos of your logo.
You can take a picture of a business card.
You can take pictures of your vans or of your employees or different services that you're
actually doing.
Have somebody take a picture over your shoulder.
You do not need a high quality camera.
Simply, the camera on your cell phone will work for most of these, as long as it looks
decent.
First tip is when you save a photo, that photo will typically have a number to it.
So that name might be 1057 dash another number dot JPG.
That is the file name.
What you're going to want to do is you're going to want to rename that file name to
exactly what it is.
So if you're ABC company, you can literally take and rename ABC company logo.
You can say ABC company staff, you can say if it shows you doing a plumbing service,
say, replacing a faucet.
Make sure that those are renamed because Google does use that.
Also, take it picture of your location from your outside your location.
Stand out there with your phone and take a picture of your awning, of the front of your
business.
If you're working out of your home, take a picture of your business card and use that
as your first photo, then add some other pictures.
It doesn't have to be a hundred pictures.
You can add three, four or five.
But what Google will want to see is they will want to see that number one, they're pictures
of your business, number two, that they're legitimate.
Meaning these aren't stock photos.
Google knows when you upload a stock photo image that's the same image that's used on
20 other websites.
Now this is a really, really cool trick.
Download the Google My Business app to your phone, and then go there and take a picture
at your location, upload it to your Google My Business listing from the app, from your
location.
That signifies that yes, they do in fact own this business.
It's taken from the location and this is legitimate.
That's a little known tip that will help you rank higher.
Next, let's talk about reviews.
Remember what I said that a lot of people think that those who have the most reviews
are ranked highest?
You can see this one as 102.
That's quite a few.
This one's got 42.
Okay?
Yeah, but this one's got eight.
Then we've got 14 and 15.
And in fact, this one's got 15 five star reviews.
Shouldn't that be ranked higher?
Not necessarily.
Let's scroll down here a little bit more here.
Here, we have a listing with no reviews, but you can also see that this listing is not
complete.
In fact, nobody has actually claimed this business.
So that's not going to rank very well.
We've got another listing here that, once again, they might have their business on here.
They might have some reviews and their phone number, but they haven't uploaded any photos.
They come up lower in the rankings and same thing with this one.
It's got a few reviews.
It's got its address and the phone number, but there are no photos.
The listing has not been optimized.
They have not filled in all of their information.
The more information you give Google, the higher your Google My Business listing is
going to be.
So let's talk about reviews.
Reviews are very, very important to your Google My Business listing.
But what you don't want to do is tell your customers to go to your Google page and leave
a review.
That is not specific, number one.
Number two, they have to look for it.
What if they can't find it?
What if your listing is not optimized and it's not easy to find?
So the easiest way to get reviews to your Google My Business listing is once you're
logged into Google My Business, scroll down, you can say, get your first review or share
review form.
Here's the link right here.
All you do is copy this.
So in your instance, what I would do is at the end of the day, I would send this link
to every single customer that you serve that day.
Not that you've served ever, but that you've served that day.
Now, does this sound like a lot of work?
Possibly.
So what I would do is create an email template.
I'm going to show you one here, feel free to copy it.
Subject line, can you please help us out?
Hi, enter the customer name.
You can really do this one email one time and then copy and paste it and just replace
the customer name.
It was a pleasure doing business with you.
Thanks so much for using ABC company.
We know you have a number of choices.
As you may know, people like you rely on online reviews to help them make decisions on which
company to hire.
With that said, we would love if you could leave us a testimonial on our say Google business
page.
Here is the link.
And you literally will paste that link, just like that.
You can click that link to leave your feedback and help other people like you get the help
they need in finding a plumber, or whatever service that you have.
And this is probably the most important thing.
If you're not sure what to write, please just answer this question.
What did you love about our service or our service technician?
The reason that we ask people something like that is because people want to do the right
thing.
They're happy to leave you a good review if you've done a good job.
The problem with that is sometimes people are unsure what to write and they'll put that
in their email box and it'll sit there and it'll sit there.
And six weeks later, they're like, "Ah, it's too late now," and they'll just delete it.
We have literally seen response rates go from 10% of the people that they sent this out
to, to 40% of the people responding and leaving Google reviews.
So make sure you give them a question that they can answer.
And like I said, feel free to copy this email.
Now, another thing I need to remind you of is, do not send a link to your entire client
database.
Google has a very good system for weeding out what they would call fake reviews.
Now, if your a Google My Business listing has gotten one, two, three reviews, and then
all of a sudden gets bombarded with 50.
They're going to think something is up and chances are, even if somebody does leave a
review, it may never ever be shown.
So you need to be well aware of that.
Spread your reviews out.
At the end of the day, email the clients that you worked with.
At the end of the next day, do the same thing.
This will start to allow those reviews to trickle in over time.
Now, if somebody leaves a review and they don't show up right away, don't worry.
Google may just be checking out, all right, are they doing this a consistent basis?
Is this just a bunch of spam?
They're just making sure that it's a legitimate review.
Our last point, and one of the most important points is don't worry if you get a bad review.
Google actually likes that.
And think about it when you're looking for an online service.
If you go to a service page and you see 500 reviews and there's not one negative review,
chances are that a lot of those could be fake or maybe not a hundred percent above board.
The best thing to do is to respond to the reviews.
This is a big tip, not just the bad reviews, but the good ones as well.
If somebody says, "Hey, ABC company was fantastic.
I'd give them five stars."
I would go in there and say, "Hey, John, whatever their name is, thanks so much for using ABC
company.
We greatly appreciate your service.
We look forward to serving you again soon."
I would not do the same response to each and every one.
But Google sees that you are engaged with your Google business listing, meaning people
are engaging with it, you're engaging with them back, you're all staying on Google services.
This will get you to rank higher.
And somebody might say, "Well, I'm not sure what to say if somebody gives me a negative
review."
Go on there and own it.
So if somebody says ABC company is a horrible company, I wouldn't do business with them.
Again, your response could be something like, "Jean.
I'm so sorry that you did not have a great experience.
We'd love to earn your business back.
You can give us a call at this number and let us know what we need to do differently."
You're not necessarily saying, "Hey, air your dirty laundry out here, but we'd love to make
it right.
We're acknowledging that a mistake was made and we want to make it right."
That shows other people that are looking at Google reviews.
And they do look at them a lot.
That shows them you're a company that cares about what people are saying and that you
want to go that little bit extra to make it right.
So do you have any other tips or tricks to get your Google My business profile ranking
higher?
Do us a favor.
Let us know in the comments below, I'd love to hear about them.
And at this Google My Business tutorial helped you out, do me a favor, hit that like button.
It really does help us out in the eyes of YouTube, hit subscribe and hit that little
bell icon so you'll be notified of when we release new videos each and every week.
And if you want to see some more tips or tricks to help you market, simplify or impact your
business, over to the right hand side, we'll show you some of those.
Thanks so much for watching.
We'll see you next time.