How To Setup Google My Business Listings Tutorial 2021 - Step By Step For Best Rankings

having a google my business listing is the most effective strategy for getting your business in front of potential customers and in this video you're going to learn how to set up a google my business listing that will rank at the top of the search engines making it easy for people who are looking for what you offer to find you i'm going to go ahead and pass this off to joseph who does this day in and day out for his clients and he's going to show you everything step by step hey adam thanks so much i'm excited about this video google my business is one of the main ways that a local business can generate new leads new revenue can show up in front of their competitors without spending a single dime on facebook ads or google ads it's an incredible opportunity and if you're not already not only using your google my business profile but optimizing your google my business profile you are missing out on such a huge opportunity to get your brand out there to get your brand known and to draw new customers to you so in this video what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you step by step exactly how to set up your google my business profile it's not hard there's a lot of steps to it so you want to follow me from the beginning to the end but if you just stick with this video you're going to get everything you need we're going to start off by looking at a good google my business profile a bad google my business profile we're going to get into all the features and i might even show this special software that lets you see the difference between a well setup profile and a poorly set up profile and how that's going to affect your rankings in the google maps okay so let's get into this right now all right so right here i have a listing pulled up this is for sunrise plumbing i have no affiliation with them never done business with them never talked to them i just thought they had a good google my business profile so i pulled it up now if we look at this it's completely filled out we have pictures here that are clearly of the team and it looks like there's a lot of text on this picture with some good things about the company if i was to expand this i'm sure i would see what all that is we're listed on the map we have our logo here we also have a lot of reviews which means they've done a good job of getting their customers to leave reviews we can see the normal stuff like the address their business hours their phone number a little place where you can click if you need to set up an appointment we're using the question and answer section which is a great place to put some additional information on your company answer some of your customers biggest questions and then they also have all these reviews here they have a description it's a little bit skimpy but it's still there and they're using the google my business posting function a lot of businesses are missing out on this opportunity to share more information with their potential customers and all their social profiles are here so this is a very well set up profile if i saw this with all of these reviews and all of this information and the nice pictures and i was to see that i was looking for a plumber i'm in this area i'm definitely going to click on that listing now let's contrast that with i just pulled up another random one again a business i know nothing about at all except that i found them and i saw they didn't really set up their profile at all and so if we look at this we have the name of the business we have a general address here just for city of edits in there's no logo there's no picture there's no reviews there's no information about the business and there's no description there's no google posts so if i looked at this i wouldn't know anything about the business and i'd have no encouragement to actually click on this listing now that's not saying it's a bad dentist at all they might be the best ones in town but the only way that i would know that is if i got some word of mouth referral or one of my friends told me about it that kind of thing i would not know it by looking at for google my business listing which means that in the online world i bet they're missing out on a ton of leads just because of that so as you can see there's a huge difference between one of these and the other so let's get right into how to set up your google my business profile and then i'm going to show you step by step how to do this whole thing we're going to get set up quickly we're going to get this set up right away i'll even show you how the verification process works and go through the whole google my business dashboard so you know how to use that to optimize your profile let's get into it all right so we're gonna get started by going to business.google.com or you could do google.com backslash business either one's going to get you to this page and here you can sign into your google account first if you want to or you can click on manage now either one's fine you will have to have a google account though to be able to set up these businesses so if you don't have one just set that up really quickly and then let's come back to the screen it's pretty easy to do now once we click on manage now it's going to say well why don't you find and manage your business so we're going to see if our business actually already exists now i'm going to make up a fake name here so let's say that we are a roofing company we're going to do a321 roofing and then if this already existed then we would see right here a suggestion of a three two one roofing where a profile for whatever reason already exists now if it already exists then we want to try to claim that profile we don't want to create duplicate profiles but obviously one doesn't exist and for your business if you've never set it up it probably doesn't exist so we're going to click here and say create a business with this name it'll take us to the next page says what's the name of your business now you do not want to make up a name but i will say something very important here which is the name of your business is a primary ranking factor which means if you want your business to be listed in the google maps one of the things that helps you show up is what is the name of your business that's why a lot of businesses would be like for roofing it could be like knoxville tennessee roofing company or knoxville roofers something like that where the city name and the service are both in the business name because that helps you rank it actually still does help quite a bit what you don't want to do though is make something up so if your business name is actually a321 roofing and then you say you know well no actually my name is a321 roofing knoxville tennessee then even though that could help you rank higher businesses if they are trying to look at you and see if your listing is valid they could report you to google and google could suspend your listing or hit you with a penalty and you do not want that to happen so we suggest you use your actual legitimate business name for this so we're going to stay with a321 roofing now just a quick note on this if you are starting a business and you haven't named it yet then putting a name in it that includes the city or the location that you work in could be a big bonus so just keep that in mind if you don't already have an established business name we're going to click on next and then we're going to say what category best fits our business and this again this i said is one of the primary ranking factors this in your business name so here i want to put in something that really describes what we do and we are a roofing contractor so i'm going to select that as my primary category later on i'll be able to add different subcategories but let's start with this click on next this is asking me can customers actually come visit me do i have a brick and mortar now as a roofing company i'm probably going to be going to them at their residence at their business however if this was say a restaurant maybe a cpa something like that people are mostly coming to me and so i would mostly want to put my actual address unless i was doing going to them or delivering or something like that so this location will show up when customers are looking for your business so yes i definitely want to add that all right so i'm going to put in my address i'm going to totally make something up 4 2 1 oh sure this looks like a great address to be at so let's say that this is my address it's not i don't know any businesses i have no idea what that address is i'm just putting in there as a fake one all right let's click next now do i serve customers outside this location this is talking about service area businesses a roofing company for instance would be a service area business because a roofing company is going to go to different homes and businesses and locations to do their work people aren't going to come to them so i would want to say that yes i do serve people outside of my location you could think this applies to your business now if you don't go to anyone else and you don't go to any other locations people just come to you you click no i don't in my case i'm going to click yes and then it's going to ask me well what areas do you serve well for instance i serve sevierville tennessee and i serve farragut tennessee how about that now that doesn't mean that if someone's in sevierville tennessee and they type in um you know roof or sevierville tennessee but you're gonna pop up it doesn't necessarily mean that but it is just a good indicator to google of where you serve and this can show up in other areas so i'm going to put that in there i'll click next and then i'll put in my phone number of course i'm going to make up a fake phone number here i'm not going to put in a real phone number all right i have no idea whose phone number that is now it's going to ask you if you have a website you could say i don't need one which is almost never true if you don't have a website already there's some amazing tutorials on this channel that can show you how to set up a website very quickly very easily at a low cost so you know we'll have a link to maybe a couple of those in the description to help you out you can also get a google site here where there's actually google has a website building platform it's very very simple there's not a lot you can do with it but if you had nothing else you could do that however we recommend that you set up an actual business website so i'm going to put the url of our business and what was it a321 roofing.com let's say that that's it all right again that's a fake url so let's go to next and then it's going to say finish and manage this listing and once i do it'll show me that i can start to put photos and posts on there i can track analytics for some great insights and analytics tools and i can respond to customer reviews so i'm going to click finish all right and then what google wants me to do is actually verify my business and the primary way they do this is by sending you a postcard in the mail that postcard is going to have a verification code on it that you can input and then it'll tell google well hey this person actually is at that address because they were able to receive mail there so you would put in your contact name here and then you'd click mail and it would come to you now obviously i'm not going to do this because there's no real business there so i don't want to do that right now i'm going to go to verify later click on that we're almost done with the basic setup here almost done it'll say add my services so it's suggesting some services for me and then maybe i do some other stuff as well maybe while i'm up there on the roof i'm also going to be willing to install or repair gutters now if i don't see something listed that i think should be listed maybe i could put in oh yeah but i definitely do this so let me add this one as well and i can put any other customers custom services in there and then bills will all start to show up all right so i'm going to click save it's going to ask me to add my business hours so i'll add some here and then i'll click save now google is going to ask me do i want to add messaging and google my business now has a messaging platform so you can actually receive messages directly through that similar to how you would with facebook or texting so i'm going to say no but you definitely want to consider setting that up because then people could just be on their phone and they could just click if they want to send you a message and it makes it very easy for them but if you do this make sure you have someone that is during all business hours and even some of your off hours monitoring those messages because the worst thing would be for someone to send you a message and you never get back to them that'd be a poor customer's experience let's click save all right so next we're going to add our business description and i'm just going to put some nonsense in here some people will say the business description doesn't matter at all that's not true there's a couple things that's important about the business description one is if the description is appealing to people or if there's something in there that makes them more likely to engage with you then you're going to have a higher percentage of people who will call you who will click that call button or visit your website so what you put in here definitely matters so put something worthwhile in here that really describes your business and helps answer some customer questions some people say that it doesn't matter what keywords are in here because they don't help you rank at all now i have seen some of my fellow people in the seo community run tests on this where they had an established business and the businesses keywords were in the description and then they removed those keywords from description and they watched their rankings actually tank and so it was a very interesting thing because we usually hear that this is not a ranking factor but it may actually be part of the ranking factors even though people have said that it's not because we've seen these tests where if you have already ranked a business and you remove the keywords it can lower your rankings however i don't know that there's been a similar test that showed that if you include the keywords from the beginning it helps your rankings so just an interesting thing to keep in mind put the actual services that you have in here a nice description your business and then you're going to save this okay now that we have a description written we're going to click save and then we're going to get to add some photos now i'm going to skip this part but you definitely should not you want to put in quality photos that are actually of your business don't use stock put in picture you want to put in pictures of your team be outside of your building especially if people are coming to visit you you would want to put it there so it makes it easier for them to know what to be looking for when they're coming to visit you your interior if people actually come into your building and then if you're something like a roofing contractor in this case i would put some great examples of the actual roofs that i've installed repaired just looking beautiful maybe i've done solar roof and you know solar panel installation on roofs i'd put pictures of that and that just shows off the good work that i've done if you also could put your team members on there maybe if you have a really nice company truck in this case you could put that on there and then it just gives people more familiarity with you and gives them a chance to bond with you on more of an emotional level as opposed to just where is this company located how much do they charge so that's a great thing to do and if you're in a very service-oriented business like say dentists or chiropractors where someone's coming in and they're relying on you for their health or other vulnerable circumstances having these pictures of your team members and it's friendly and it's well lit and it's very approachable that can really make people feel more comfortable calling you all right so i'm not going to put anything in here now so i'll put skip it's going to say do i want to claim my free advertising credit i'm going to skip that for now but that is not a bad idea to just try out google ads run 100 of free ads and see what happens all right so it says this is almost ready i can continue making updates and edits but my edits will be visible to customers only after the business has been verified that's fine the postcard would be in the mail let's click continue all right and now this is your actual dashboard and your backend for your google my business listing so the good news is you could stop right here and you would have your business profile actually set up already which is fantastic but i want to show you everything that you can actually do in this dashboard because there's some awesome opportunities in here so i'm going to help you navigate this but you've already done the hardest part of a work so good for you all right so if we look through here just on the main dashboard we can put in things about say for now the covet 19 update we'll see if this is still relevant when you're watching the video but for right now it definitely is you can put in different attributes of your business now these attributes could include things like if it's black owned veteran owned woman-led different health and safety factors which is very important to many people these days so it's worth including and then some service options i'm going to cancel out of that but those are some of the things that i could have done on the home screen and then i can also create posts we're going to talk about posts in a second and i can see if my profile has been completed i can add a logo lots of stuff here that's good so you could kind of go through here but most of what we're going to do is going to be in the actual tabs themselves so let's go to the posts tab the post tab here this is where i can actually create posts for my business it's not going to really let me do this until my business has been verified but i'll always show you where you would do it so here they're saying well how about you create an offer post maybe if you're a store you're having a sale going on maybe as roofing contractors we have some 20 off or free estimate thing happening so i could do that i am not going to specifically do this i'll just x out of it and then here it's giving me different post types that i can use a you know this type of update i could put an offer maybe you know ad update that could be something just like i have a new team member we opened a new building we have a new service that we're offering anything interesting like that i can put my events on google so if i'm holding some event maybe it's an open house maybe it's a workshop i can put that there and i can add new products and have those as posts now when i create a post it's very easy i select what type i want it to be i like what's new that's what i usually use i'd click here to add a photo and then i can write my post i can put links to my website i can put all kinds of stuff here a call to action button we can get into this more in another video but i could put that there and there will be a link to my website i put all that in i can preview it i can publish it and then like we saw on sunrise plumbing where down here they had all these beautiful posts people will start to be able to go through your feed just like they would on facebook and this is a great way to build rapport with customers let them know about special offers and other things like that so i'm going to x out of this because i don't need to actually save this post but this is where you would do it and do not neglect the posting tool even if you put something up once a week because they disappear i think it's still after every seven days even if you put up one one once a week that's fantastic and you can actually schedule these out you can use a tool that i love called local viking where you can schedule out all of your posts and manage your entire google my business profile from their platform there's a lot of amazing features there and rank tracking and stuff like that or you could also use another posting software and there's multiple ones out there so you could do your own research and see what works for you i personally love local vikings so that's what i use might even have a link to them in the description now if i go to my info tab then here again i can see all this information i put in i could change my business name if i'd put in the wrong name here under roofing contractor this was my primary category so i still probably want that as my primary category but i could add additional ones so maybe like i said i might be up there and i might also take care of gutters so i could put in gutter cleaning service and do we have anything else involved roofing no but like i said maybe i do solar panel installation or something like that solar energy contractor sure maybe i do that while i'm up on the roof all right so i'll click apply and now we start to have these sub categories in here but not as important as your primary but you might as well put other things in there that you do and it can help you in some certain ranking opportunities i have my address here my service areas i can always add more i could change my business hours i could add special hours this is for holidays for new year's for whatever might be christmas or valentine's day i might have different hours so i could add these here and schedule them out like for instance they're asking me do i have different hours on easter and i could confirm that i do or i could say no actually we're closed on easter and then click apply all right so anyway i or there i would say closed and then click apply and then if someone's doing a search on my business and they're looking for this date it'll actually show that we're closed my phone number's there our website i can add additional products and there's another tab on that so we'll get to that in a minute there's a lot of ways to access things here but yeah so i could look at that i could look at services again we have another tab for that i could look at attributes like we were talking about veteran owned black owned women owned et cetera health and safety i could put all that in there change my description add an opening date and here i could click to add photos and again there's a photos tab make sure that you do add photos we'll talk about that in just a minute the insights tab is going to become very important once you've actually verified your business and then you'll be able to see how many people called from your listing how many people saw it if they saw it on maps if they saw it on search what keywords they used to find it all kinds of amazing things you want to be looking at this at least once a month now as far as reviews go this will be a place where you'll be able to see all your customer reviews you'll be able to respond to reviews which is fantastic especially if you get negative reviews to put in a response fair that is either trying to make it right or you know clarifying that no we've actually don't have you in our listings anywhere we've never had you as a customer we think you commented on the wrong business whatever it might be to be able to verify to respond to reviews is very important all right then messages we talked about the messaging platform really powerful opportunity just make sure that someone's actually monitoring those messages and you can set this up where the questions can go straight to your phone without revealing your number so that's a great way to do that all right now photos there's different categories of photos and in photos we do want to put our logo because remember we said that if you put your logo on your business you'll see it pop up right here in your listing and it just looks really nice so it's good to have that you have a cover photo the cover photo is the one that's going to go right here and then we also can put videos there so nice video tours or a promo video usually you have to keep them i think within 60 seconds maybe 90 seconds they can't be huge files either but it's nice to add videos and then you can show off the interior there's also other categories like the exterior and some of these will have things like show your team and if you're at work or things like that so the category is going to depend on the type of business that you have but make sure that you put a lot of different photos into here and then you want to add new photos and you could encourage your clients your customers to add photos as well and those are all great things to be doing if you do use that local viking platform you can also put in geo data which is data that indicates the location the photos were taken and some other different things like that and some people say that that could give you a little boost in your rankings okay though some people also say that data gets stripped off so i wouldn't worry about it too much now if we go down to products this is a great place where if you actually do have products you can start to list them there and those can show up in your google my business listing you can see your products show up in there now if you have services again you can change the services that you have listed because you want to make sure that everything you do is actually here website this is where you can look if you had the google my business not my google my business but the google site set up and then this is the actual website creator i'm not going to get into that right now but it is something that you could have and it can be useful i actually create those in addition to our primary websites and then i do a lot of different kind of linking things on them that give us a little boost for seo i can also add different users to this profile and so i could put different people who could manage it also add additional owners things like that this is nice especially if you're doing work for clients where you want to be an owner on there but you also want to make the business owner an owner on there so they can control their own listing and you're not taking all the power away from them there's some other things here getting custom email creating ads adding a new business so you could do all kinds of different things here but for the most part that's not going to be important to you right now what's important is all the tabs that we already covered all right so we did it this is amazing we have a beautiful google my business listing set up good job if you followed all the steps and did the work with me you're good to go as soon as you get your verification postcard you can just verify very easily your listing and then you can start doing you get your getting your reviews and responding to them maybe doing the messaging start posting and is fantastic this is still one of the best ways to generate new leads for your company now if you don't want to do all this work yourself there are services that do this we'll have a link to one in the description where they'll not only set up your google my business for you they can also do things like create a bunch of posts for you they can do these little seo tricks to send additional signals to your google my business profile and just do some things to start pushing you up in the rankings a lot faster now of course you could just do it yourself but i just want you to know if there's an option up there if you don't want to get into the technical nitty-gritty of everything and also if you're an agency owner and maybe you're on boarding you know 10 15 new clients and they all need google my business i may need posts and everything like that well then you might just want to have a service like just take care of it for you so you'll know it'll all be getting done in the right way at a reasonable cost for your clients and you won't have to go crazy trying to set all those up so i'll have a link to that in the description but if you've stuck with me at least for this listing you've done great work and you have everything going and then just keep maintaining this listing put up your posts put up new questions and answers get new reviews from your customers consistently ask for them put up new photos as cool stuff happens with your business and you're going to be good to go and you're going to be able to rank that google my business listing and get new customers all right so i'm going to kick it back to you adam and we'll be talking to you later thanks joseph for walking us through that and if you found that helpful to you and your business please give this video a thumbs up right now and if you're not subscribed go ahead and click on that subscribe button now all the links that joseph mentioned in the video are linked in the video description down below and if you have any questions about the setup feel free to ask in the comments section and joseph will be there answering any questions you have and if there's anything related to local marketing that you want to learn just go ahead and ask that as well in the comments section down below and we'll get joseph to make those videos thanks for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: WPCrafter.com WordPress For Non-Techies

Views: 12,230

Rating: 4.9529409 out of 5

Keywords: google my business tutorial, google my business optimization, google my business 2021, google my business seo, how to setup google my business, create google my business account, gmb optimization

Id: 59edyPz-UQk

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021