13 Google My Business Optimization Tips To Rank Higher

Google my business is the best marketing opportunity right now for small business and in this video we're gonna break down these 13 tips that you can use to optimize your listing and get to the top of Google these are the same tips that I use as a marketing consultant and trainer for my clients so if you want to get more customers and make more money this year keep watching look if you've struggled with online marketing it's not your fault online marketing has never been more difficult your Facebook page reach has never been lower online ads have never been more expensive because they're so crowded so if you're struggling it's not your fault but I'm here to say that you can succeed with online marketing and I want to help you do that I believe Google my business is the great new marketing opportunity for small business and that's why I created this video to help you achieve your dreams of creating a successful business and mastering your online marketing so let's go ahead and get started number one is to encourage customers to leave reviews now I know you've heard of this tip but it's never been more important than right now some marketers aren't out there online marketing experts say that some businesses that have a lot of customers coming in and really rely on the Google reviews should be asking every single customer whether it's through email text displays of information in the store encouraging and asking reviews and one thing that I will say that many businesses forget about is telling them exactly where to go and how to do it so you can't just say leave me reviews online you need to direct people exactly where to go and until and here's another tip until you are doubling I say doubling the amount of reviews of your competitors keep hustling and keep pointing people to Google now I know one thing that a lot of small businesses struggle with when I work with my clients is connecting with people and following up there's a lot of software's out there and I'm not going to get that in this video but I recommend text people the link text people the link to your Google reviews this is a Google review link generator by white spark so you can easily send emails and encourage people to leave a review for you or text some of your best customers to leave a review and to do this you can type in your business's name and at the bottom they will leave you a Google review link and I'll have this link in the description below if you are looking for this my second tip is to order your free package from Google that includes all of these cool things like a poster a card you can put up something you can stick to your door to encourage reviews this is a free package from Google they have they said they have about 10,000 of them so it's first-come first-serve so if you haven't gotten one of these I highly recommend getting one and I'm going to show you off a little bit more of this right now so really quickly this is the website and I will again include the link in the description below but it's free posters social posts and more for your business built by Google and you can incur you can show off some testimonials but also encourage people to make reviews of your business here's an example there's I think over a hundred styles now of different posters you can order from Google for free and you can see here it says support us with your reviews and photos on Google and then on the right here to support us with your reviews and photos on Google this is a table tent and stickers you can get which is this is a cool resource so if you haven't taken advantage of this go ahead and do it it's a nice soft easy way to encourage customers to leave your reviews my third and last tip around reviews is replying to all reviews I see a lot of business owners missed this opportunity to thank their customers and make that connection with them for being that great customer leaving that positive review but one thing I wanted to touch on is that a little something that a lot of business owners lose a little sleep over and that is negative reviews you still want to reply to all your negative reviews if you get one it's not the end of the world a couple of negative reviews aren't terrible aren't bad and here's why is because people are getting a lot better at sizing up reviews so if a business has a couple negative reviews a lot of people now are looking to those negative reviews to see what they're all about and then they really are also looking to see how the owner responds so it's a really a character revealing moment for your business and for you if you are your business to show off how you reply to this negative review how do you address it because a lot of negative reviews we know that they come off a little crazy right the people seem a little extreme maybe a little intense because there are some crazy people out there or maybe I'm blaming the person but maybe someone you work for just screwed up or someone who works for you just screwed up so you need to write the wrong so I'm going to go over some quick tips I found online - just how you need to handle negative reviews it's how I share it with clients this is what I usually tell them but it's in a visual form so it's a it's like how this is set up this is an infographic by Blu Corona and just quickly here what you want to do is respond quickly within 24 hours because that's when the person's going to be upset and you do want to try to resolve their issue keep it your response brief I've seen some clients and business owners who you know they're angry when they see that review they may even know that customer in the situation and maybe they misconstrued it so they put on the all-caps locks and just start typing as they're seeing red you might want to do that to get it out of your system if that makes you feel better but definitely have somebody else review it before you post it because you want to keep something you definitely want to keep it as brief as possible and in that brief or brief response own up to whatever the complaint is about even if you think it's not your fault still own up to it apologize even if it wasn't your fault I think that's important offer to fix the problem and follow up with your promises so make make sure that they that you satisfy that customer and one thing I want to mention one other thing on negative reviews is that it's not always about that one person that one customer it's about the thousands tens of thousands if you have a business that searched a lot you may have hundreds of thousands of people over several years reading this review so make sure that you do a quality reply to it and it's something that people will see for many years potentially many years to come my fourth tip is to order a virtual tour I know some of you know about this or some of you may have ordered this but I'm gonna give it a little caveat to it that I see happening a little bit with my clients so a virtual tour an interior virtual tour is the really the only paid feature that I recommend with Google my business everything else is for free and it depends on the size of your business but on average it costs about three to five hundred dollars and what it does is it allows people to see inside of your business have a 360-degree view and walk through it I want to show you what a good interior virtual tour looks like and here I'm on the Google my business listing for a crepe bar in Atlanta and I click on the first photo here and this is what an interior virtual tour will do it'll allow you to move around and look inside the business as a potential customer and really size it the business and determine if you want to go there so I can see here they have TVs they have the beer they have bar seats a very appealing place I mean it looks nice it could be a good date place could be a good place to get some lunch whatever and I'm deciding whether or not I want to go to this business even if you're a service based business it might be worth it to have this now the problem I now the problem I see with business listings is that they don't hire professionals to do their interior virtual tour and they're not able to move around inside it's just a picture that you can look around that's not what you want I've seen that with a couple of listings what you want to do is hire someone who really knows Google Maps well and I recommend using this resource from Google to hire your professionals for an interior virtual tour now this is the website I'm talking about and I'll have a link in the description below but it's basically Google's resource to hire you know the hire a trusted pro to boost your visibility and this is an example of the guy who would be coming in and using this camera to take a picture in your business and if you scroll down here you can put in your city your city in your state and find you know probably a thousand certainly hundreds of people who do this most likely around where you live and these are people who are vetted professionals that you should look to to hire a couple of people that I've seen because you can do a little reverse engineering and seeing if these business owners are hiring quality photographers many times they're not in this database they may know how to take and have the technology to take 360 degree pictures but they aren't piecing it together to make it so you can walk through the business you definitely want that set up if you are paying for the money for this my fifth tip is to make product based Google post now know I'm jumping ahead a little bit you might be thinking Blake what the heck even is a Google post but I'm trying to go a little bit more advanced and intermediate with this video but Google post is just to catch you up if you've never heard of it is a way for you to make a post and provide information about your business on your Google my business listing and a product based post is a post optimized for products but I want to show you on my phone why you'd want to do these and post different types of products or services you have on your Google my business listing this is my Google my business listing and if you scroll down a little bit I mean this is just incredible in general because it really looks like an app but we're still in Google so if you scroll down you see overview then you see posts and then you see products okay I'm a service based business I don't sell any actual products but what you'll notice is that when you make a product based post and what that is is I made that right here so Google optimized a post to make it look like a product and this product for for me as an online presence review when I made that and I have my link to my website where you can buy it it automatically took that post in made and started making a list of other products I have so you see that when I click on this it opens up a list of potential products so why you'd want to do that is once you make a slew of these product based posts maybe it's just 2 or 3 or maybe it's 20 but whatever it is is that Google is going to take those posts put it under the products tab so you have all of these products listed so I can figure out and learn what products or services you provide without ever having to go to your website which is a pretty cool feature this is a little bit more advanced but I wanted you to be aware of it because it's obviously something Google's starting to roll out there in the world my sixth tip is to optimize your business's description under Google my business this is a newish feature Google rolled out your ability to describe you have the ability to describe your business on Google some of you may have done it but I just want to encourage you to use all of the characters to fill it out and use make sure you have some keywords in there that people might search for in Google for your business so that you are using the same keywords to tell Google about what you do that people are searching for let me show you what that looks like on the phone we're back on my Google my business listing and at the top here you can see your menu I have post product services reviews and then on the end here is about and when I click on about here is my business description now it's pretty lengthy here but you want to go ahead and fill it out you want to put out you know I know this and I say this because I say this because I see a lot of business owners who might just put in a sentence or two because it's something that maybe they just quickly did but if you did it go back and make sure that it is optimized with the different thing you do that it's appealing to your customers and speaks to them make sure it's not your mission statement you don't want to have it at this formal description make it a little bit more informal and fun but make sure you fill it all out as much as you can and you're using those keywords because as you can see it's right there at the top and people can scroll over and read about what you do and you want to make sure that you're saying right things to get your customers head so they say oh this is a business I can help this is a business that not only I want to go to but can help me solve my problems my seventh tip is to fill out all the attributes on your Google my business listing again this is a new ish feature but their basic attributes are basically little tidbits of information that Google allows you to provide and the public to provide to get more information about your business to display that information these are just little things but what's important and I'll show you what how you can add those on your back end but what's important about to know about this is that Google's adding new ones all the time so this is something you want to check in at least every few months so that you know they haven't there aren't new attributes that maybe your business applies your business but you don't have them applied yet so let me let me show you some examples of that here I am in the back end of a Google my business listing and I can you know this is the this is the attributes feature this tag and when I click on this I can Eddie there's the attributes at the top I can edit the attributes of a business they're changing and they're going to be different for the type of business you have but this is a food based business that I'm in and you can see it's wheelchair accessible elevator if you had that then you want to display that know some this there so here's the different topics there's accessibility there's amenities if you offer get gift wrapping Wi-Fi free paid different dining options now if you had table service then you could click on this and even get more options are you veteran red LED are you woman LED different offerings is it okay to just order coffee in this establishment do you order you do you provide these kind of credit cards it goes on and on there's even more there's many more than this but the whole idea here is that Google's trying to collect all this information so if someone lands on your Google my business listing they can get all the information they may need about your business to make a smart decision so Google this is a you know some of this stuff is a little it's not set in stone it's kind of shifts it's like as you know saying store we're just moving around because Google's testing things trying it out so it's gonna change so it's something you want to check up on every every so often my eighth tip is to look at your Google my business insights which are the analytics kippur Shinobu in my business and compare how many photos you have uploaded to your competitors and I say this because I really I recommend clients and it might sound a little bit crazy but it's definitely doable to have 10 times the amount of photos uploaded and viewed than their competitors it's a goal it's something to reach towards and you want to do that so that you know that people are looking that at that many photos about your business because if people are interested in the visual component of your business that much then they I believe for my study for persuasion is they are more likely to take an action call you ask for directions visit your website than your competitors you have a great opportunity to upload photos and encourage customers to leave photos on your Google my business listing but before you do that it's good to see where you're at compared to your competitors in your industry here we are in the backend of Google my business and you can see we we scrolled or under insights and we scrolled down to photo views which is the number of times your business photos have been viewed compared to photos it's a compared to photos from other businesses now this is a business and you can see here that's in the last quarter they've had their photos viewed 200,000 times I'm just gonna pause on that and say customer's viewed their photos 200,000 times over a quarter 3 months that's a ton of opportunity to persuade and convince customers to do business with you I mean that's a ton if you have numbers like that then you really need to focus on your photos it won't be like that from the average business but you might see that or even more and if that's true you really need to focus on your phone because there applies to you ee well as we look at this we can see that there's a little bit of an error in analytics and this is you know this is gonna happen from time to time I've seen some some updates from Google where they're not even posting the amount of photos from their competitors but you can see when we look back that there are a lot more views there the blue line red is their competitors they are having way more views than their competitors not 10x but certainly double triple quadruple what the amount of people are looking at their photos than their competitors so you can look at this and determine where you're at and how many you know sometimes it'll sometimes it'll light a fire under your butt to just take more action and get more people customers yourself to upload more photos about your business my number 9 tip to optimize your listing is to download the Google my business app google has been investing a lot of money and time and resources in this app and they just launched a new version and it looks really nice and I mentioned this because following up after our last tip about photos is because on here you can take photos and videos and upload it directly to your Google my business listing through the app the apps available on Apple and Android I'll have links to those below like I highly recommend downloading it because you can do stuff on the fly on the app you can do a ton of things you can make posts which we talked a little bit about earlier you can reply to reviews which we talked about earlier you get notifications for reviews you can edit your hours if you have if you're closing early and you don't want anyone to show up or you have special hours for a holiday you can edit that all from the app on the fly without ever visiting or using a computer because I know some clients I have don't even have computers in their business they have tablets and phones so you can use the Google my business app to edit everything you need I know we're doing a lot of the computer but you can do it almost everything from the phone as well I wanted to show you around this Google my business app just real briefly because it's so cool how they they changed it right there at the top it has my business my address some quick analytics your followers which is a new component that I'm not even going to get into right now because it's so new but basically people can follow your business and get updates through notifications that's a cool new feature here's my posts they make it really easy for you to do things here you know right here on the bottom you can see you can click that button and make a post and add photos which is you know again what I just mentioned really easy for you to add photos you can review your latest posts you can update information on the bottom customers there on the bottom of the screen is where you can look at reviews and reply to reviews you can edit your profile all from the phone so I highly highly recommend downloading this app it will make your life easier my tenth tip for Google my business optimization is to upload videos about your business these are any type of videos you have you can upload them I've been saying photos but you can anytime you can upload a photo you can also upload a video so it's a great opportunity to give it behind the scenes look at your business persuade people and what I love about videos is that it doesn't have to be professional it's great if you have a professionally made video but even if it's a decent video that's authentic showing a behind-the-scenes look of your business your only people around especially if you have an event or it's packed and it looks like a ton of fun or you have some really good things going on you can take a video and upload it directly to your Google my business listing I say it doesn't need to be high quality because I haven't mentioned this yet but you only partly own your Google my business listing anybody any of your customers can take a picture or a video about your business and upload it those aren't all going to be quality photos and videos they're more of an authentic look of what is going on in your business it's kind of like you know Instagram stories or Facebook stories it's a similar quality where it doesn't have to be very very professional but it's more of a fun authentic look I know that might be a new term because this is a new marketing thing that's been going on the last few years and even stories might be a new term for you if it is you've got to do some research and learn about it or I usually recommend clients just devouring Instagram stories from other businesses to see what they're doing but that's another video so upload the videos and I'm going to show you an example of what that looks like really quickly so here we are on a real estate related business you know they have their nice team photo they have some there's some other photos uploaded and as I scroll down I see the video right here so I can click on this and watch a really nice promotional video they made now this is a professional video they they are a real estate business so things are done a little bit more professionally but if it's you know an example example I saw recently was a arcade type business where I guess they could make a commercial quality video or they just had one of their employees walk around and talk about all the different games and upload different videos about what you can do in that arcade that's another kind of authentic example and you can use those videos to upload them to Google my business listing and make Google posts and also use on anything any social media platform for that matter if you want to create them into stories I love video I'm not gonna go down the video rabbit hole but it's such a great opportunity for marketing your business my 11th tip is to add secondary categories describing your Google my business many of you probably uploaded at least one a category and you may have done it many years ago and if that is you you want to also identify and review your primary category because some new business categories have been uploaded there's over 2000 of them now this is a very important part of your business because you're telling Google the type of business you are and Google has all of these and it's really for SEO I believe it's for SEO want to put all businesses in different categories so when someone types something it says oh here's the category of businesses that this is it's not that cut black and white there's a lot of gray area in there but what you can do is in addition to your primary category you can add secondary third fourth many different categories I'll show you what that looks like in the backend of your Google my business where under the info tab and if I click here on this second pencil you can see here categories and then my primary primary category you want to make sure this really applies to your business and it's your exact category you know you're gonna have to experiment and like if I type in Internet there's all kinds of different categories I mean look at all these different categories that match my typing internet internet internet internet and then it goes to interior but you'll have to experiment to figure out what what you have here I'm gonna I'm gonna link to a resource below in the description or you can review the over 2,000 categories if you don't want to do it manually so if I type it if I have my primary category set then I can add additional categories so you can describe your business more and include it to Google I put marketing consultant but if I was a welder I can add I could do welder and here's an example actually why you need to review it because if your your view your cat your primary category if you did it many years ago if you were if you're now a primary primarily an aluminum aluminum welder you wanted to add that detail because you may be the only aluminum welder in your area in your city in your town and when someone types that in it'll be much more likely you'll come to the top if that is your primary category than just welder because you're going to be competing with all the other welders you want to get very specific with your category if you do many things add the different descriptions and just add the I would add the the one if you're having trouble figuring out which one is primary add the one that makes you the most money and the one that makes you the most money if you want to make it that simple or add the one maybe you want to look at the one that makes you the money it is also the least competitive my twelfth tip and this is a little bit more advanced but I'm trying to get you some new information here some different information and challenge you a little bit but my twelfth tip is to go into your Google my business analytics review the search queries now the search queries are what Google basically tells you what people are typing in to Google to find your Google my business listing so Google's giving you great information about basically what it knows about your business and what type of searches it's showing what you can do for this when you see those search queries is look for the ones that maybe not are at the top but maybe are a little bit lower that your pop is showing for in Google but you're not showing that high for maybe your ranking third or second or maybe you're not even ranking in the top three and you can do a little bit more with those terms you can make more posts you can add them to your website and maybe you have a page because we're talking about Google my business but it is associated still with your website it's one big online presence Google looks at your website and your Google my business and all of your online directories as a combination and tries to figure you out and determine how quality of a business you are so you can see what they're showing you for and if there's an opportunity to rank higher you can add more information about that I'm going to show you some I'm gonna show you an example right now in the backend of Google my business you can see here queries used to find your business okay the most popular queries for business for your business by unique users so these are all different people this is a food based business so you can see at the top food near me is the top one 887 people found they're listening through that restaurants it's in st. Augustine so it's st. Augustine restaurants so these are very popular search terms but then we start to get into some interesting ones acai bowl if you you can type a cyi ball into Google around your business maybe in the city or in you type that in or the zip code your businesses in and see where you rank but as you go down here you can see brunch SAE bowls breakfast now maybe what let's say for example you see breakfast is on here and when you type in breakfast your zip code and you look at all the businesses that pop up or breakfast near me see where your business ranks if it's low then maybe you need to make more Google posts about breakfast maybe you need to add something about breakfast in your business description maybe you need to upload more photos about breakfast maybe you need to encourage customers to leave reviews about your breakfast maybe you need to encourage customers to leave photos about your business I'm dropping a lot of information on you right now but here's that's some of the high level strategy that you might think about and you might also one last thing that's important add a a page to your website about breakfast if you don't have one Google's saying hey we know you provide breakfast or ranking you higher maybe you want to rank even higher than that in Google provide more information about breakfast give people more information about that side of your business so now this is a little bit more advanced but again it's go to your search queries in your analytics see where things are ranking and if if you see a term that you don't use a lot maybe you can use that a little bit more to raise your profile in Google our last tip the 13th one we're almost done hang in there I know it's a lot of information but I'm trying to get you the good information to help your business out right now so the last tip is to enable messaging on your Google my business app chats exploding around the internet people are wanting to text and use words more and more instead of calling and Google is recognizing that and tapping into that by providing a free service where I can go to your go I can go to a business's Google my business listing on the phone and click on a button and send text directly to the owner of that business or whoever's phone has it has is associated to that to that message it's pretty cool it's all for free let me show you what that looks like here we are back on my listing and right there you can see we have the menu right here but there's several features the call message save website message is is that right there you don't get that by default you have to turn it on in the backend of Google my business because once it's turned on I can click on it and you can see that phone number at the top is not my phone number it's a random phone number hiding mine so the customer will never know your personal number phone number but I already did this and I typed in hey Blake it's a little confusing because I'm texting myself but imagine I knew the business owner and I said hey Natalie and then I get an automatic message from Google says thanks for sending a message to Stockton Morgan a marketing agency but that'll be your business and then once I see that message as the business owner I replied stockton marketing agency that's all set in stone hi there how can I help you now I know some business owners get a little concerned about this and it's like I don't want to be bombarded with messages I recommend turning it on you can always turn it off it's no big deal and just see how it works and if anything it just fills up your profile more and looks you looks looks like you're more legit business which is really important if you're a new business trying to grow you want to fill out as much information as possible so I highly recommend trying it out and see if it's if it's right for your business that wraps up my 13 tips if you made it this far Wow Congrats I'm serious you made some real progress and learning about Google my business and your online marketing this was definitely not an easy video to take in all this information so so a nice job good work now it's your turn which one of these tips are you going to implement right now which ones are you struggling with or you still need your she'll try to figure out do you have any questions at all let me know in the comments below I'll be checking in I'll be answering it for you thanks for watching this video again i'm blake stockton subscribe to our channel if you want to get more videos like this give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed it thanks for watching go out and crush it [Music]

Channel: Blake Stockton

Views: 108,278

Keywords: google my business, local seo, seo, marketing, small business, small business marketing, google maps

Id: ysryNyQTYc8

Length: 33min 45sec (2025 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018