GMB Feature Adoption & Trends: What We Learned From Studying 800,000 Listings

it's my great pleasure to introduce ali margason ali has been in the marketing industry for about seven years and she spent the last two years working with us at white spark she directs and leads the team for our gmb management service that helps businesses and agencies drive more leads and conversions from gmb ali is one of the smartest and hardest working seos that i know and she's here today to present some pretty amazing research that we've recently completed we crawled over 800 000 gmb listings and we parsed the data like which features each business is using how many posts they're using uh how many q and a's they have what what the review counts are so we've crawled all of that data i think you're going to be shocked to see how low the adoption rate is for some of these gmb features but that also means that there's a ton of opportunity for you to be one of the few that's making the most of gmb and ali is also going to drop all of her best expert gmb tips on how you can get the most out of it so make sure you pay attention if you have any questions uh ali is available on twitter you can tweet at her at seoali and use the hashtag wlss should get back to you ally i am so excited to have you with us so excited to see you present uh thanks for joining us yeah thank you so much jared i'm really excited all right let's just share my screen here good to go all right you can see my presentation yeah looks good all right perfect all right yeah so thank you so much for the opportunity to share today i'm really excited get to talk about one of my favorite things at google my business so google my business is a platform for businesses to manage their online presence on google search and on maps and if you verify and edit your business information you can both help customers find your business and tell them your story having your business on gmb plays an important part in how users find your business online so as darren said we did a study of google my business listings we studied 800 000 listings and we studied them across 70 categories in 100 major cities in the us and in canada so 200 cities total and the purpose of this study is to understand google my business future adoption and trends and the reason that we want to do that is to identify ways that you can stand out and find the best opportunities for your business we also launched our gmb management service at whitesburg last year so we really were interested in this information so that we can help our clients strategize for the google my business listing so let's get started so together we'll explore three of the newest gmb features which are posts q a and products as well as a cornerstone feature which is reviews so the first feature we'll look at is google posts google posts are one of the newest features like i said and they're also one of the biggest changes to gmb they were released in beta in the spring of 2016. and you can use google posts to share what's new with your business and here with this feature you can share about your business what sets you apart feature a service share an update you can also post events events you're hosting such as sales open houses classes and special offers that can't be missed and as of march coven 19 updates and these keep your customers safe and informed about changes to your business during the pandemic and while product posts were eliminated earlier this year you can feature products for sale online or in store with a what's new post or an offer post there are several called action buttons as you can see here we're using order online but you can also have buy or learn more and you can just feature your products still in posts even though that feature is no longer available so let's dive into what we found in study only 28 of businesses have ever shared a google post so google post adoption is really low and when we say that they've ever shared a post this means they've shared at least one post since the feature was launched more than four years ago the number of businesses actively posting now is seven times less than that only four percent of businesses are making google posts a part of their ongoing strategy and that means 96 of businesses aren't doing this yet and by posting regularly your business can really stand out from the competition in google post you can feature your products or services you can add multiple images images with text content even short videos and advertise your business google posts are featured in your business listening so they're seen by thousands of searchers just take a look at your branded search volume to see how many people are actually seeing this and that you're advertising too consider it like free ad space on google and only and 96 percent of businesses aren't using this opportunity just four percent are so when it comes to the value of google posts we're talking about user engagement not necessarily ranking boost google posts are valuable to businesses because they um when used effectively they are low cost low commitment and their lead generators and their conversion points posts should be topical and posted consistently so the question to ask is what is one lead worth and is the investment of posting once a week worth it for your business here we have two businesses in the local finder for the search term drain cleaning edmonton so on the left is the top listing the number one ranking listing they only have one review google isn't even sure about the location it isn't claimed it's missing basic business information and it just looks like a flop on the right is the business that's ranking number four uh it has over 600 reviews a high star rating it's owned and optimized it looks like the business cares they post information they post photos they answer questions so the question to ask is even though the other one is ranking number one which business do you trust more uh which business are you more likely to call so now let's take a look at businesses that are the most and least likely to use google posts these are the top categories that we studied that have ever posted so ranging from 41 to 58 adoption um these are locksmiths medical spas criminal defense lawyers cosmetic dentists and car dealers but on average 10 of these businesses are still posting today so even though the the numbers are pretty high for businesses that have ever posted only 10 of these businesses across the board here are still posting today they have active posts so if your business is in one of these top categories you need to know that your top-ranking competitors have been testing out google posts and it's time to get on board those least likely to post are psychologists banks engineering firms financial planners and architects so if your business fits into one of these categories know that less than one percent of your competitors have active posts meaning a post that's on their listing so a post on your listing could really make you stand out sometimes we have clients in medical or legal fields that might shy away from posts um because they don't want to give advice that could you know lead to a lawsuit or they don't want to get into controversial topics but you don't have to do that at all with google posts you can simply use post to share a link to book an appointment or to call your business in fact i would definitely recommend it use google posts as a call to action point uh and remember only four percent of all businesses studied are actively posting so the opportunity isn't just for these businesses listed here google posts are truly a competitive difference maker for every business now i did want to mention that there are some categories that google posts are restricted for they're either not available or not always available so when we took a look at our study we were kind of interested to see that cannabis stores had 13 had ever posted but fewer than one percent had active posts it's interesting because in canada you're not allowed to have google posts for cannabis stores but in the process of our study we did find a small number of cannabis stores in the united states that had google posts available and in some cases it's in states where it's legal like california but then in other cases it was in some states that is not legal so it is interesting to see that sometimes this post feature is available and there are a few other restricted categories um hotels vacation rentals gas stations gun shops and adult entertainment typically don't have google posts available and we find sometimes they're not there for pharmacies drug stores and medical centers so just something to keep in mind so our tips for um using google posts um in our experience um offer posts get a lot of engagement and they're longer lasting while white what's new posts um they expire after one week you can set the duration for offer posts so they have a little bit more stativeness if you don't have time to do weekly posts but we absolutely recommend weekly posts that's the schedule that we're on for all of our clients and it works super well another thing is definitely focus on your top seller we have a dentist client that uses our gmb management service to handle this task because he just doesn't have time to handle the weekly posts but if gmb can get him just one invisalign client each month then it has paid for itself and brought him a healthy return on investment so in this case all of our google posts focus on his top service and he's booking new invisalign appointments and this can be applied for so many businesses personal injury lawyers roofing companies anything and of course i wanted to throw in some covid19 tips this is something that we've just started doing um we always like to repurpose reviews into post content it's great content to have but we are specifically now looking for reviews that mention coven 19 um and to reuse those as posts because what it's doing is just amplifying your customers current experience here this is for a dental clinic and the review says that they were diligent um and they helped her get an appointment even with coven 19 limitations like that is a goal to post um just from the mouth of your customer to share with other people how they felt visiting your um your business right now so now let's dive into our second feature questions and answers released in august 2017 q a allows businesses to engage with customers and offer faq content directly in their business profile the feature oddly isn't accessible from the gnb dashboard as the business you can access q a from your business listing on a branded search so search for your business take a look for your listing and that's where you can access q a so you won't have alerts in your dashboard about new questions that are posted to you in the same way that you would have you know alerts about new reviews and so in the q a feature you can answer questions um as the business you can post your frequently asked questions and answers and kind of seed that information in and you can also upvote your questions and your answers so the question with the most upvotes will be the top question um and the answer with the most upvotes will also be the top answer so if you post a question and you know you get some other answers from users you can upload your own answer to kind of put it above all the noise so let's take a look at our study findings in our study we found that 30 percent of businesses have q a on their business listing and there are two things to consider here not many businesses are taking advantage of this feature but also there are thousands of businesses with questions asked by potential customers that have left them unanswered businesses need to keep in mind that anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer that question so google my business q a is about managing your reputation just as much as google reviews so here you can see in this example a negative review was left in the q a section and that's not allowed by google's guidelines you could flag this and have it removed within like 48 hours um but it's important to know that you can kind of take control of your q a section and to treat it like a place where you manage your reputation online and similarly don't let just anybody be your pr person not managing your q a means you're letting google maps users answer questions on behalf of your business and and from the businesses that i've reviewed user-provided answers often do one of three things they conflict with one another which leads to a lot of confusion um they tell the original poster to call you or to go to your website for information which of course they've bypassed in your gm listing just to get to the point where they can post this question um or as in this example here probably the worst of all they recommend alternatives to your business so this is for a local walmart store to me somebody's asked if something's in stock and a google user a local guide has gone ahead and recommended two alternatives for them um so you guys need to stop losing two customers to your competitors and the way to do that is by going in and managing q a so let's take a look at who is most and least likely to have q a there are some businesses that naturally lend themselves more to this feature and therefore they're more likely to have q a so that's restaurants car rental agencies bakeries veterinarians and furniture stores if your business is in one of these top categories make sure that you check for user generated questions and answers and add your top q a go ahead and ski that information there and check because it's very likely that you have questions that have not been managed if you haven't known about this feature haven't been managing it definitely go and check because there could be unanswered questions and you could be leaving customers annoyed and leaving money on the table those least likely to have q a were pediatricians engineering firms accountants financial planners and architects so some tips for you for managing q a does your business have questions that come up more often at certain times of the year if so update your top q a whether that's seasonally with seasonal or holiday or sales events related questions and a pro tip from greg gifford three or more upvotes on a question so remember i said you could you know upload those questions three or more will bump it to the business profile um so they'll be able to see the top question right on your business listing as you can see in this screenshot here on both sides that's the top question that's uploaded so to take that to the next level why not get your seasonal promotions special hours holiday policies in front of your customers by swapping out the most uploaded question for the best question for right now another thing that we often talk about with q a is adding your frequently asked questions you might already have this information on your website or in training manuals so definitely if you haven't already repurpose that material as q a you can go ahead as the business post the question post the answer and give both an upvote but also consider answering your top objections you can use this space to answer top objections from customers um and you know things that they might have a problem with with completing a transaction with your business let them know why that's not a problem so here we've used this example with a dentist um you know the objection that we've we've asked this as the business but we phrased it as a customer i can't get time off during the day to go to the dentist do you have late appointments and then we've gone ahead and answered that yes they have two days where they have late appointments and then they have full days on some saturdays so it's definitely not a problem that objection that's in the customer's head we have an answer for it and we've gone ahead and added that information there and our coven 19 tip is to answer your customers new questions about hours restrictions and masks as seen in this example we've added questions about whether masks are required to enter the clinic and similarly we've added questions about curbside pickup remote appointments those sorts of things so now let's dive into products products rolled out in october 2018 and they enable businesses to post their inventory directly on gmv creating a sort of online catalog for customers to browse complete with descriptions pricing and link options products have very high visibility in the business profile on the branded search result page so you can see here in this screenshot of white sparks listing our products they show up above q a above posts and above reviews and generally above the fold so if you're on desktop you don't have to scroll um they also do have high prominence on mobile so products allow you to showcase your products and services like you have in the past maybe by posting you know photos of different things that you offer but now you can categorize them you can add titles descriptions you can add utm tag links with call-to-action options there's a ton of options there the business phone number is also displayed in the top right hand on desktop and mobile as well as you can see with this arrow here much like posts you can think of products as free ad listing space in your business profile and above the fold to boot so let's take a look at our study findings for products in our study we found that on average only four percent of businesses have products listed on their gmb listing the feature is not available to all businesses even sometimes to all businesses within the same category um which google is aware of and there doesn't really seem to be a solution in sight for that so i did want to mention that sometimes this feature won't be available um so if you don't see products listed in your dashboard it's not available to you but for most businesses this has rolled out so the businesses most likely to have products are florists car dealers furniture stores jewelry stores and medical spas and i can kind of see why for some of these it's very natural if you're you know a florist and you have products in your store to see that this new feature is available and you can list your products and so the connection is really clear and you'll go ahead and add those it might be less clear for a business that offers services like a dentist that they could actually leverage products for their business and those least likely to have products yeah it's pretty much everybody else um we found several categories that netted out to zero percent adoption of google products but none of the categories we studied that had this feature available actually had zero businesses that had tried it so adoption is low but you know some businesses are trying it across all categories that we've looked at so our tips for products if the products feature is available to you use it just go ahead right now go and use it this section is very visual it's in a high position in the business profile and if your business has products then it's really simple list them with either a link to purchase them online or information about what that product is or a page that gives instructions on how to pick up any store if your business offers services whether you're a dentist a lawyer contractor or realtor list your services as products and link to the corresponding service page on your site so you can see we've done that here this is a cleaning business and we've listed all the different types of services that they have another tip is to track conversions you always want to include a link and use utm tagging so that you can have proper attribution for where these clicks to these service pages or product landing pages are coming from and again you want to let your top seller shine you want to order your products so that the best sellers show at the top don't forget to use product categories as well these show up just below your top products as you can see here they've got categories of windows and doors and then they've got their top sellers listed first so our coded 19 tip is to use the products feature to share your new or your virtual services that you might have in this example we've replaced their usual top products which are like implants and teeth whitening with kogan 19 services um because general dentistry wasn't available at the time so we've gone ahead and we've added in emergency care phone screening and some of the more you know emergency procedures that wouldn't necessarily be their top sellers but might be the only reason you were going to visit a dentist back in april um similarly we've added services like curbside pickup remote appointments for other businesses like retail stores law firms and so on all right so finally we'll look at the cornerstone feature of google my business reviews google reviews like i said their cornerstone feature they're probably i guess apart from directions and maps it's most well-known feature why people use this service reviews are a local search ranking factor for businesses in google maps the local finder and the coveted map pack on search result pages as well so most people are generally pretty familiar with google reviews um but there are some new features that have ruled out over the past year and that would be review attributes which was earlier this year and place topics which was summer of 2019 so you can see those both highlighted in this review screenshot here now some businesses even have new questions for their reviewer when they go to leave a review so this one here is asking what service was performed and that will be highlighted in the review so this is something kind of new and really interesting that's coming to gmb so let's take a look at our study findings as i was going through there seemed to be a bit of a correlation between listing ownerships and reviews and um i really wanted to kind of explore that so the basis of that was we found only 49 of businesses in google maps are claimed so that's kind of our baseline of understanding how many visitors are claimed about half unclaimed listings are on average three times more likely to have no reviews or low ratings so if for no other reason than this it is vital that businesses claim their business profile on google my business and we did see some trends and outliers when we were studying this connection that we saw between listing ownership and reviews and ratings so one of the outliers here google defines an individual practitioner as a public facing professional typically with their own customer base and we found that many professionals that fit into this classification were much more at risk of having no to low reviews associated with not claiming their gmb listing so we looked at accountants chiropractors dentists financial planners lawyers optometrists they were all about six times more likely to have no to loan reviews if the listing was unclaimed for these professionals a simple and effective review strategy is absolutely paramount if you're a professional in one of these categories or something similar search to see if you already have a practitioner listing floating out there and claim it um if you do look what can happen remember that a practitioner listing comes with you so you should claim your listing and start collecting your own reviews as a practitioner one major exception to this rule of connection here was that was for restaurants and for coffee shops these two categories are very unlikely to have zero to three star ratings less than four percent of all the listings we studied um and there's only one percentage point difference between claimed and unclaimed listings for these two categories this is likely because i mean we studied in america and canada it's very common in our culture to review your experience when you're you know at a restaurant so it's kind of ingrained in our dynode experience so not too surprised to see um yeah whether the listing is claimed or not whether it's being managed or not they're still getting reviews we know that in general consumers write reviews when they're very satisfied or very unsatisfied so we found 43 of businesses had ratings over 4.5 stars and 33 of businesses had ratings under 3 stars but the majority of businesses have less than 10 reviews 62 percent of the businesses that we studied had 0 to 10 reviews and you can see the kind of fall off there only 11 had more than 100 reviews there are some businesses that are excelling at accumulating reviews though coffee shops bakeries car dealers electronic stores and restaurants in fact restaurants run completely opposite to the trend of businesses for average review account as we've already explored they have very few low reviews 77 had over 100 reviews so let's take a look at who's winning with reviews the fewest bad reviews were for our bakeries coffee shops and restaurants and those least likely to have no reviews businesses that are the best at collecting reviews will be least likely to have no reviews so we found very few locksmiths day spas bakeries coffee shops that had no reviews only two percent of restaurants we studied did not have a single review so let's take a look at who is losing with reviews those most likely to have no reviews are financial planners psychologists accountants architects and construction companies it's interesting that the businesses most likely to have no reviews are mostly professionals where a google review is really a review of that professional in their industry or trade so the stakes might even be higher for personal reputation and i also wanted to mention that some of these businesses have industry governance that can limit their ability to engage in review acquisitions such as hipaa compliance or maybe they work in areas where consumers might not be comfortable leaving a review like a psychologist or they're b2b centric like an architect so let's take a look at some best practices um first of all claim your listing as we've looked here that's absolutely first step respond to every review both positive and negative and ask every customer for a review more reviews means more content on your listing so i'll share with you our winning review strategy the first step is a personal ask so ask in person whether um you know you're in person with a client or a patient ask them if it would be okay to give them a review request you can accompany that with giving them a little review request card which has a simple link to leaving a review directly on google i've been in businesses where there's like a 10 step process outlined on how to leave a review log on to your google account search for our business like no just make it easy for your customers um so what we do is we um produce for our gmb clients here these little review cards you can see in the screenshot we use um the short link provided in gmb in your dashboards info tab you can go ahead and create a short link and then if you just add slash review to the end it's the simplest shortest link to getting a review on google we also use that link to create a qr code i've heard qr codes kill kittens that was like a marketing book a long time ago and i think that's probably true if you have a giant qr code up on a billboard um but in this case you're just eliminating barriers for your clients to leave you reviews just make it as simple as possible so it's the personal ask a company with this review request card and you could always follow up with an email with those simple links as well so here's um the review growth over the past 12 months for one of our clients who has implemented this strategy so he implemented our review strategy in january 2020 and a full year earlier january 2019 they had 64 reviews and a 4.4 star rating so a year from then when they started this review strategy they had 77 reviews and a 4.7 star rating so they'd managed to get their their star rating up a bit but you know they barely gotten like 15 new reviews over a whole year we helped them implement the review strategy at the end of january 2020 and the next month the review count jumped to 104. um you can see there's a bit of month-over-month growth and then like you can see like it's clicking and they're really like realizing okay this is a winning strategy this is working for us and then we start to see them take off even more um so the review count is now over 200 they've maintained a 4.7 star rating i know a lot of businesses are scared about asking every customer for a review because what if they get a negative review but as you can see here they've maintained that rating and they've got a ton of new positive reviews and this is an hvac company that has trained their technicians on our three-step process so again that three-step process is the personal ask the review request card and the follow-up email easy-peasy so it's important to remember that reviews are a conversion tool um they're a local search ranking factor sure but they're also why people choose to your business this is a recent review of one of our clients um and it says right in the review i chose them for their great reviews the reviews were right on so keep in mind that the content of your reviews is being read by potential customers um and so it's really important to to get those reviews and to manage them as well so the really exciting thing is that this data that we've explored is now publicly available to you the tools being actively developed right now and it'll be ready when this presentation is available to you so we're really excited to put all this information in your hands um as we reviewed the data we realized there were many applications for this data um it could be if it could be searched and segmented so i have gone through 72 spreadsheets to be able to pull this information together for you and now we've made it into a really nice neat tool for you to be able to explore so a couple of things that we think you could do with this data would be competitive analysis prospecting for new clients and spam fighting so a couple of things that we you know kind of spitballed ideas on how this information could be used so for competitive analysis you know you can sort the data to see which of your competitors is totally killing it you can sort by businesses showing ads businesses that need a certain review threshold and you can really take a look at your competitors what about online marketing companies looking to prospect for new clients if you have maybe a reputation management program search for businesses that have a intersection of high volume of reviews and really low reviews so it's kind of a big problem for them they've got tons of reviews but not a great rating they definitely need reputation management help um or you could search for unclaimed listings that have a high volume of reviews or q a so these are businesses that are already having high user engagement but they're not managing it and so they definitely need your services and it'd be really easy to to show how your service could be valuable and then definitely for spam fighting as well this one came up because we noticed a ton of spammy names when we reviewed the data um so here i am using the tool um looking for cannabis stores with names over 30 characters for spam fighting so that's like kind of a way that you could use this you can also search for certain keywords um in in the names as well and that'll help you kind of find spam um but yeah so we've kind of set this threshold because we know name spam is just so bad so you can try some of our preset rules or you can create your own but we're really excited to be able to make all of the data from our study available to you and we plan to update this free tool with new listing crawl every quarter so you can sign up for updates the tool landing page is going to have a place where you can sign up to get on a mailing list and you'll be notified when we update that so thank you so much for your valuable time today i truly appreciate it as darren said you can follow me or send me a question on twitter i'm at seoali and i'm very excited to be able to extend to you the offer for 20 off our tools and services here at whitespark just use the code wlss that was amazing oh my god mind blown so many so many good things in there gmb this is the place everyone it's like there's so much opportunity in gmb and i love that wow the data shows that the opportunity is even bigger than you can imagine because nobody else is really taking advantage of these features so absolutely yeah thanks for uh pulling that together the one of the biggest stats that really kind of blows my mind is that only four percent this is across all like even in some categories is less across all those businesses are actively using google posts like free advertising on google people free get your stuff up there like you might as well be promoting all of your things i bet you uh 50 of the businesses that are not posting on google post are pushing it to facebook which has a 0.02 uh visibility rate you push it you're pumping stuff into facebook that no one will ever see man that stuff over on google um i also i mean if you're already posting on time let me purpose it yeah exactly so you take what you have on facebook you're already putting the facebook and you put it up over on google posts you know and there's lots of good software you can use uh we use publr at whitespark it's one of them that we use sendable is another one but you know you can create your post and say i want to send it to multiple platforms i would also suggest that you look at traject social traject social is one of our sponsors they have a great system we're exploring it right now we're thinking we might switch but uh yeah check that one out too um i love the screenshot you shared about drain cleaning edmonton and that one really stands out because there's what was it called it was called uh all about dream cleaning was one of the businesses versus mr rooter so all about drain cleaning is basically getting that number one spot because they've got drain cleaning in their business name it's a massive uh ranking factor and so it's giving him the number one spot but i can tell you because i actually called mr ruder recently because we had this problem that i never called all about drink their number one ranking is not helping them and the reason it's not helping them is because mr reuters listing is killing it i went to the number five listing mr rooter is getting all the phone calls because they've got awesome reviews they've got their google posts they've got all of their gmb totally awesome so everything in their gmb spoke to me and that's who i called i think that example is really yeah i think that's important to remember yeah i think it's important to remember because you know we focus so much on what's a ranking factor and what's ranking but also we need to you know equally consider what is a conversion factor because yeah this business was ranking number one because yeah they've got that great you know keyword in their business name but they're not taking care of it like google doesn't even know where they are like that is like alert right there like i don't know i want these people coming in my house whereas the other one they've fully optimized everything and they get the conversion because of it totally and that's actually why i added a whole new section to the local search ranking factors if you saw my presentation earlier all about you know conversion rate optimization factors like what are the things that will help you convert from gmb's because it's not just about rankings and that mr reuter example is really great yeah um is it possible like you talked about how like random people are answering your questions on your q a is it possible to prevent them from doing that like can you turn it off uh and what should you do if you don't like some of the answers that they've provided yeah unfortunately you can't turn it off um it is a feature that google wants you know users to engage with and be able to post their own questions and answer each other's questions um it's definitely like heavily linked with the local guides program that rolled out providing answers but what you can do is monitor it you definitely want to make sure that you're checking in on this you can monitor in some software tools like our reputation builder allows you to monitor or you could just go in and take a look if you saw anything that you know doesn't really make sense which happens a lot actually um or it's like a really outdated question that you might not have got to before you can go ahead and flag it so there's going to be that three dot menu at the top you want to click there and flag it there's going to be a bunch of different reasons available you can flag it for like inappropriate content or does not apply updated those sorts of you know topics you definitely want to go ahead that's like first step for q a go ahead see what's there clean up anything that doesn't make sense answer anything that's existing and then the next step is to go ahead and seed your own q a so repurpose that faq information really take advantage of the q a section in gmb so if you're posting your own q a and then uploading you can kind of push that one down exactly yeah yeah you could always flag something that doesn't make sense or if it's you know if it makes sense but it's not how you would phrase it or something just go ahead and push your own questions up to the top so that the top seen ones yeah smart um can you explain how that qr code thing works on the review card like you know i see a qr code i i know they answer this question but i just want to pose it so that everyone else can get the value here but don't you have to have some kind of app installed on your phone in order to use a qr code yeah um so we love these qr codes i feel like in the marketing world qr codes are like frowned upon and just like shame like i said there's that book literally called qr code skill kittens um but for the average user like this is it's something kind of interesting and cool and so you don't have to have an app installed on your phone uh we verify all of our links them and qr codes that we give to our clients all you have to do is point your smartphone at it with the camera app open so any smartphone um any camera app if you open it up there will be kind of like this like pop-up at the top that says do you want to open this link they click open and it boom takes you right to where you can leave a review for that business so like i said we've used these um short links um specifically for the the business page so it literally opens up to a page where you choose how many stars and you write your review we're not even taking them to the business listing so you don't have to have anything special um just have to use your smartphone and point it right there i've recommended this for businesses that you know do home services because you're right at their house you know you finish your service whether it's like roofing tree removal whatever it is um you hand them the card and show them hey you know just open up your phone take a picture here first of all you're like dazzling these people that like their phones could do this and you made it so easy like you're about to leave they're leaving you review the whole process is complete amazing it's 20 20 and qr codes have finally become useful yeah um i'm i just finally you know i'm just really excited about the tool the gmb explorer i feel like it's going to be super valuable people just kind of dig in there it's just a really it's a shortcut to like all of the listings crawled in your industry you can go in there you can see who's got the most reviews who's got who's using google post you're looking for inspiration for google posts you can use the tool dive in there see who's using the most who's using google posts the most and then look at their listings and be like oh yeah cool so it's really helpful for that sort of competitive analysis i love it that way and i think you know people like jason brown and everyone at sterling sky they'll be excited to use it for spam fighting i actually found when i was testing that you kind of need to go a little higher because there's a lot of businesses with 30 characters i've been testing around 70 80 characters and it's really fun actually to see how how bad people are spamming their business name i really hope google fixed that one yeah cannabis was like a wealth of fun spam stuff there's like one listing where the business name had like the business name dash text me at the number below and i thought that's as funny as they can see text me they're sticking with their old technology though even though they have a storefront or they have a storefront that they've created on google all right allie that was amazing it was so fun to uh i see a presentation you did such an awesome job i loved it thanks a lot all right thanks darren bye see ya [Music] you

Channel: Whitespark

Views: 546

Keywords: Google My Business, GMB, local search marketing, small business education, local SEO, WLSS, local search sumit, Whitespark

Id: qIykomVWb3w

Length: 42min 5sec (2525 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020