How to take your GMB Listing from Basic to Brilliant (Local SEO)

funny hello good morning good afternoon um wherever in the world you are um welcome to the semrush webinar we're going to talk to you today uh about google my business and how to take it from just the basic kind of out-of-the-box thing you've set up and we're gonna talk with an expert panel that i've got with me you can see them in the screen uh we've got tim and nikki and amanda we're gonna introduce them all later so you'll find out a bit more about them later um but we're just gonna kind of shoot the breeze for a little bit wait for a few kind of late cameras to roll up so opening question where in the world are you i'm in cambridge in the uk um do you guys want to go through tim whereabouts in the world are you dialing in from today i'm in kobe in northamptonshire middle earth right awesome and uh nikki and amanda you guys are in the states we're about to see you nikki i'm in denver colorado and it's super in there right yeah a little bit amanda whereabouts greenville south carolina not quite so early there right no it's about nine so okay so nine am nikki nikki i think has the worst deal here she's like 7am me and tim it's kind of the middle of the afternoon we've had breakfast and lunch we've been through all this kind of stuff so margo is joining us from toronto and montreal wow you guys are super waking up early as well um thanks for joining us so early i'm sorry it's so hideously early and ramny you've you're joining us from india so it's probably like night time over there 2j from turkey wow we've got lots of people from all over the place so thanks very much for joining us today um i appreciate it there's other southerners i feel less left out check this jared from texas and indiana wow okay so you guys are up super early i hope you've got a strong cup of coffee or something with you to get you through this um so there will be times there will be some more searching questions and whereabouts in the world you are later in lithuania hi um we'll be doing some more searching questions a little bit later rather than just where you are but hopefully we'll give you time to wake up a little bit and i'll be getting the expert paddle to give you some information and stuff so hopefully some things that will trigger some questions for you there'll be plenty of time for you to ask some questions um throughout and we'll try and pick up on some of those from the end we've got people from florida jersey shore i'm trying to think where's the uh where it'd be the earliest so i guess la people over that sort of way anybody's in hawaii that'd be super early simon cox he's another brick that's not somebody else who's joined us today shout out to ann i'm from i grew up in wisconsin and wisconsin okay yeah nice people from spain and italy so we've got some other europeans here too that's good i'm feeling bad for making all these americans wake up so early kalpana from india ah tim tim arnold he lives in my village so some little tiny backwater in cambridge he lives in the little village where i live in cambridge hi tim thanks for joining us it's not so early for you so you don't get too much of a shout out so here's moscow mars i mean i don't know what the time zone is there anybody know that one really super late we've got carl from pennsylvania somebody in greek greg in athens in greece hi greg so okay we're going to gear up so i'll just give you a little uh intro about what's going to happen today so i'm going to do a really super quick presentation about some of the things that i've spotted in gmb about kind of moving things on like from that basic setup i'll try and make that super quick so it'd be about sort of 15-20 minutes of me uh showing you some slides i'll try and make this font all super big so you don't have to zoom in on your screens too much um after we've been through that then we're going to throw over to the panel we'll give them all a chance to introduce themselves properly so you can hear a bit more about who they are where they are why they're here and we're going to then discuss the presentation like some of the things that it throws up some questions and hopefully have lots of time to tackle some of the questions that you folks have got to all right so bro hits from men about in india so evening evening not night in india okay thanks thanks rohit so my my geography is awful so my geography is entirely based on uk soccer so unless the there's a uk football team that's played against an indian team recently then i probably won't know too much about the geography of that area and ken in chicago we got lots of people joining us okay we're about five minutes in so i'm gonna um jump into my presentation and we'll we'll rattle through that and then we'll get over to the expert panel and start giving you some of the real insight and information that these guys have come to share with you today okay we're discussing this in the warm-up earlier but 2020's most used phrase can you see my screen so yes hopefully you can see my screen so here we go i'm going to talk to you about some of the basic stuff about taking your google my business listing or gmb from basic to brilliant so your basic if the caveman that kind of thing that you've set up hopefully we're going to help move you on a little bit off that kind of at least introduce just fire and some interesting things that cave people had to move them on to the next level so um i hate these kind of intro slides about who you are and all those kind of things but there's some stuff about me i spend way too much time on twitter um at optimisey if you have questions and stuff afterwards so twist is probably the best place to find me but the most useful link on this page is that optimizey.com forward slash semrush gmb the color i've just put in just to make that a bit more obvious it jumps out a bit but if you note down that url then you can get the slides from the presentation and stuff so just if there's things on there that you think oh i forgot what that link that was or the bit that he particularly mentioned or that question that came up with this kind of thing so you should download the slides from there it's all live now you can kind of follow along if you want to if that makes things easier for you too okay so google my business some of the basic stuff we're going to start on the assumption that you are at least already have a gmb listing set up you've done some of these kind of basic 101 things if you haven't done all that kind of stuff that's okay too hopefully there'll be some useful information for you here but we're going to assume a little bit of knowledge here so you must have done some of the basic things so you've verified your listing you probably put in some links to your website and you've added things like your phone number excuse me some of your office hours and maybe even a few photos that kind of stuff too you'll notice that little asterisks there on the on the second one that's on purpose this is something i see really often even with people that have done gmb listings fairly recently so have you checked that your g your listing whether you've got your website address mentioned have you changed it to https lots of people set up their gmb listing ages ago they put their website address on as it was then http www.mywebsite whatever it was in the last few years they probably upgraded to https and they forgot to change on their gmb listing it's not the end of the world of course it still redirects if you've done it properly but what it will do is it strips out that referrer info so because when you refer from a non-secure url so an http one to a secure one as part of the security protocol it strips off all the referrer information so you'll be just having less useful information about where that click came from so not a great idea so quickly go and check that not right now maybe but afterwards but i bet a whole bunch you will find you've still got an http link in there and make sure you do it for everything so that website button you've got on there if you've got appointment links if you've got you know menu links all those other kind of good things you might have in your gmb listing make sure you've changed all of those to the latest most up-to-date version of https whichever the one you were using make sure that's on there first tip okay assumptions and those sort of basic stuff in place we're going to try and take you to on to google my business brilliance if you're wondering who these people are this is the lego set for the women of nasa so some super bright women that um did some pretty amazing things and lego trying to uh introduce more gender balance into their lego toys they made this lego lego women of nasa set so we're going to move you to this kind of nasa level kind of astronomer astrology um astronaut brilliance because the first tip we're going to do is make sure that you track everything so if you've been working with gmb for any amount of time you will know that the gmb insights that they offer in there is garbage so there was a great example of um brody clark who's a great um seo based in australia and uh he set up a brand new gmb listing and like with within the day of it being verified and all those kind of things then the insights info was showing that he had like 160 visits historically before the listing even existed so just gmb insights it's probably got some useful information in there but it's pretty pretty rubbish so if you can add utm tracking into all those links and all those things that you put on there that's going to really help you be able to monitor the impact that you're having so that is the first thing to get set up because all these other kind of things we're going to give you an advice today to help you get more traffic and more leads and all that kind of stuff you want to be able to prove that it's working right because you might do something that makes it worse you'll be able to show that too so get utm tracking set up one of the other really good reasons to do this is that it then shows up in your google analytics data as well but it also shows up in search console so if you have those utm tracking urls then in search console it shows as a separate url so in your home page shows number one hopefully if somebody searches for your brand and your gmb listing also appears in the page that will give you some separate information google search console so you can start to see the kind of queries where your gmb listing is appearing or not and start to see which kind of queries it says it's appearing for start to see like you know when does my appointments link also appear so that's give some really useful extra information in search console okay anybody know what one of these is um this is an extra lego tool so if you've got kids you probably know what one of these is when they first showed up in the lego kits my kids get i was like what the hell is this it's like a little lever to separate all the bricks out anyway it's very useful to all of your building stuff so when you see this little symbol this kind of uh lego tool then i'm going to give you a link and some information to some useful tools and stuff you can use some of the tools that um local seos that are working on this kind of stuff use so you see this little orange thing it's going to be a good tool for you to use so the first one is from my friend claire carlisle so she has written a handy handy handy useful guide to utm tracking if you don't know what utms are and you don't know how to do utm tracking claire has done all the hard work for you she's got a spreadsheet and you just put in a few kind of key bits of information and it just spits out all the urls you can just then go and copy and paste and stick into your into your gmb listing and it'll all come out with all the correct utm tracking because if you get the kind of source and the medium mixed up which i always still do to this day it really messes up all the kind of information you're getting at google analytics so go to that link i've popped on there use players tool save your whole bunch of time okay next thing with the gmb listing stuff is make sure you use all the stuff there's loads and loads of different things to use in google my business that comes with it out of the box that lots of people kind of overlook they just get bits they get started they get a bit you know overwhelmed or get a bit bored frankly just filling out all the things there's a whole bunch of stuff in there that you need to use one of the important ones is photos so people you know you probably uploaded your logo you've got a few maybe photos shop fronts all that kind of stuff but you can really go to town of photos there's loads and loads of different sections that gmb splits up in there for you so make sure you've got something in each of those sections so like your interior shots exteriors your logos your team you working doing what you do all those kind of things have lots and lots of photos and try and think about ways that people might be interested in using those photos think about it from a customer point of view so a classic one i always see is people taking photos of their office like you know if they're agencies and the office is empty don't do that it makes your office look like nobody does any work there if you're an agency you don't want to look like nobody does any work there put people in it have people in your photos it's much more engaging and interesting to have that kind of stuff and think about that seasonality if you're a shop that um you know has beautiful awnings out the front and it's all covered in snow it looks really romantic in winter that's going to be great when people are looking for your business in kind of like november december time but if it's really hot and sunny outside and you're showing photos and you're listening with your business covered in snow it looks kind of weird so you can change these kind of things around um claire is actually talking to the other day um came up with a great tip for this kind of stuff think about it at the moment particularly with covid you know if you're changing your business and you've like you know you've got queueing systems in place or your staff are all wearing masks all those kind of things people want to know that about your business right now so make sure your photos reflect the kind of changes you're making to your business because of tovid or those kind of things so start thinking about how you can vary this kind of stuff too and you can put videos on there the videos don't have to be super long i think they can't be super long i think their limit is um like 30 seconds and 75 megabytes you can put like a little video on there so like my wife is a classic one she uh hates she's really intimidated by places where she doesn't know exactly where she's going so show what it looks like outside your shop show like what it looks like walking into through the door show like you know does the door go anyways or out wise or you know the parking lot right next to the front door or is it kind of around the corner of those kind of things so videos can make people feel much more comfortable with coming to visit your business which is a good thing all the things make sure you use categories properly this is another really obvious one i've got a good um case study where i can show you some examples of this kind of stuff but when you're setting your gmb business up you can choose a primary category you can only have one primary cat screen you can have multiple multiple secondary categories don't overdo it but you know you can put secondary categories in there and experiment with this kind of stuff when you have one thing set as a primary category unlock certain features depending on what that primary category is like restaurants and dentists will have different features available to them in gmb because of those category settings so experiment with it see which kind of one fits best for you and if you've got utm tracking in place you'll be able to see which one works so a good example here like you know locally is a carpenter so they're really artisan they make beautiful wooden furniture but they don't sell a bunch of wooden furniture actually what works for them best is kitchen fitting people want carpenters to come and fit their kitchen so when they switch it around from being a carpenter to a kitchen fitter suddenly they start appearing in way more searches because more people are looking for kitchen fitters and they get a whole lot more business so it was a difficult thing for them because like they're really personally attached to i'm a carpenter not a kitchen fitter but like if this thing is supposed to be driving business for you and making you money have an experiment see which ones actually drive business for you and again you can look at changing this kind of stuff seasonally like maybe more people are searching for fitting kitchens in the new year when they're doing new year house improvements and actually maybe later in the years when they're looking for more furniture so you can kind of switch these things around be interesting to discuss that with the panel about how they feel about changing categories through the year so here's the example so this is actually literally a business i work with locally they were a bakery but they did way more stuff than that too they did like patisserie and they particularly made wedding cakes was a really big thing for them they did bakery classes all this kind of stuff but they had their gmb listing set up they've done it out of the box they'd gone through the steps they put a few photos they chose bakery done and we actually looked at it and then we found all these other kind of categories that they could be they were wedding cake shop cake shop cupcake all this kind of stuff culinary school wedding bakery specialist categories for a lot of this kind of stuff and as soon as we started adding those in they start appearing in way more searches started getting a lot more leads a lot more business and make sure that it matches up into your website back yourself up like if you change your category to show that you've mentioned wedding cakes or sell wedding cakes make sure that your site mentioned it because this is was a listing that appeared against one of their competitors and their website mentions wedding gates they still had only listed themselves as bakery they only had one primary category no secondaries but when you search for wedding cakes in cambridge google might is looking into the site saying well their website mentions wedding cakes i mean it says primary category bakery but we're going to go for it in case because it says and there's a picture so make sure that your site backs it up you know don't just throw in hundreds of secondary categories because you think it's going to get you lose more traffic actually you know walk the walk and talk to talk to and how do you find all these categories there's a great tool that again does this work for you called pleaper there's a little orange tool friend up in the corner so clipper is a great tool you can get yourself a list of all the gmb categories because google unfortunately don't make this easy for you there's no kind of drop-down list to just go through in the care of this category this category this category this category i'm going to get all those things thanks very much they make you work for it so you have to kind of guess and like you know whatever they call it you know is it wedding cakes or is it cakes for weddings i mean they don't make it easy so if you go to plipa you can start to put in you put in bakery and it goes hey here's all the things we find related to bakery and it starts to jest them and it should show you all that kind of correlation things like you know or lots of other businesses that call themselves bakeries also call themselves cake shops so you can start to get all that information search through it find through it all that kind of stuff really useful tool another useful tool gmb spy this is a bit of a recent addition to my arsenal because um it's only brought out a few months ago by a chap called george nenny who built it it's a plug-in for chrome and you can go onto gmb and with this chrome plugins setup you can reveal all the categories that your competitors use so you can go and look at anybody's listing yours your competitors whoever it is see what their primary and see what all their secondaries are you used to be able to do this kind of like by digging into the code of pages and stuff but this plugin just makes it a whole lot easier you can just you know you can skip back and forth between all the listings and the search results start to see who's using which categories having a look at your competitors and seeing which categories they're using can be really useful and a great way to help you expand yours okay going back to using all the things so there's attributes now you can put against your business listing in gmb so they've listed some of them there on the page again these will vary depending on which category you use another great reason to experiment with your categories like primaries and secondaries so here's a whole bunch more about you know particularly again like they've added a whole load more around kobe things like masks required dividers at checkout do the staff wear masks are customers required to wear masks do you need to get temperature check when you go in can they do curbside pick up and deliver all those kind of stuff so depending on what kind of business you are you may have some none or all of these or a whole bunch more but have a look at this kind of stuff make sure this is up to date you know if you're not currently doing delivery or you're not currently doing in-store eating all that kind of stuff make sure that your gmb listing reflects that because you know google doesn't make this stuff up this is based on what they know people are looking for people are looking for restaurants where they can still eat in or restaurants where they can get a curbside pickup all that kind of stuff so make sure you're looking for all these kind of things too again these attributes are just available in your gmb listing just turn them on or off um and google's trying to still um crowdsource this kind of information too so if you've got this um the google maps um app on your phone every time you visit a place you'll be getting these kind of questions so this is just like some of the ones from local parks and schools in my kind of area like you know my kids school is is their wheelchair accessible parking here um for their local park is this would you say this is a useful result for hiking area and bear in mind your customers are going to be getting these kind of questions about your business so make sure you're kind of talking to your customers like you know what do you think about this you know would you like us to have you know more romantic tables for two or would you like us to have a closer cut but all those kind of things so make sure they're thinking about the answers that you want them to give i'm not really sure like again we'll talk about this in the panel but how google are quite using all of this information yet but they're certainly gathering it so it's probably going to be something coming in the future and this is the kind of stuff they're using to then populate these results so this is just again just some similar results from local to me but look how they're kind of pulling this stuff in so here's the coffee shops and it's got no delivery and takeaway similar kind of information here for pubs dine in dine and take away the little green check mark very similar again fish and chips but they've now got kind of negative thing as well so this is dining so they they've turned off so they don't have dining available here they don't have dining development but they do have takeaways all this kind of stuff all this information google's trying to show users in the search results because this is kind of stuff they're looking for so these are kind of attributes and things that you can show for your business because that's what customers are looking for okay make sure you use all the extra stuff too so you can get yourself a short name so mine is g dot page forward slash optimizer so it's a bit like getting your twitter handle or your facebook page name or whatever that kind of stuff you can set yourself up a short name for your gmb listing and it's super super useful to then be able to send people to that to then give you a review so if you're asking for reviews which of course i'm sure you all are because your reviews are super handy when you're asking to reviews like you know if you want to say oh go to google and search for our business and then scroll down a little bit on the right and click it's a really painful process so using the short name you can even skip them straight to the reviews process i think it's forward slash your business name or short name whatever it is for slash reviews but you can skip them straight to those kind of parts and just make that a much less painful journey for customers cycle please give us a review here's our short name let's get them straight in gmp messaging if that's appropriate for your business is another really useful way to kind of keep in contact with your customers give them a really easy way for them to reach out to you and ask you stuff speaking of questions q and a's again lots of people get kind of scared of this i have clients go like oh well you know i'd like to post some but you know do i need to kind of like set up a fake account or not you don't need to set up fake accounts google are quite happy for you to ask and answer questions about your business yourself so you know if you get questions all the time like you know where is the car park are you open on sundays can i bring my dog ask those questions yourself on your listing and then answer them yourself on your listing and then start to give those votes you know give those up votes and the most useful answers float up to the top can be really useful gmb posts is another really good one so again bit like social media um i'm going to talk about this tool so this is from two octobers who's um from nikki's company where who's on the call um so they've made it made a really cool tool called post-o-matic because one of the problems i have with gmb post is you get all these social media scheduling tools and they'll deal with twitter and linkedin and pinterest and instagram but none of them really deal very well with gmb there are a few exceptions but post-o-matic is completely free you hook it up to a google sheet you can populate them all mark it with dates about when you want gmb posts to go live it makes it really super simple and it's it's a great tool so another really good one again just make your business and your gmb listing look fresh and interesting and you can talk about the deals and the offers and stuff you've got going on that week and it's another really good way to make your business look like you care and looks like you're interested and here we go how am i doing for time yeah we're wrapping up soon so we're almost there so spam fighting is another one i just want to touch on so it's the dark side it's all these kind of people that are pushing you down in the rankings so you're doing all the right things you should be doing and there's people that are cheating and we've all been there it's annoying right um google my business has a particular problem with spam just to give you some examples of how this works so this is an example from a chap called yan gilbert that i saw on twitter um you can see that the client site that he's looking at that um they rank kind of down here they're about eighth in their rankings but all these ones that are above them all by one i think shouldn't be there so this person is using a fake name they're in the wrong category this is completely made up this has got a duplicate list and there's two for mickey's plumbing this one's keyword stuffing into their business names trying to get themselves ranked up higher so it really yeah for this business that's down here in eighth and there could be kind of second or third that's a really big business there the difference for their business about how much traffic they would work at and here's another classic one from darren shaw at white spark um you know again this is just obvious name spam you know we've seen some cracking examples of this i'm sure tim will have some i know he's a big fan of this kind of stuff but just shoving loads of keywords into their business name to try and help them rank higher the annoying thing is it just kind of work but you know you should be spam fighting if this is pushing your competit or your clients down in the listings you can get rid of this kind of stuff um lead gen sites are another classic one just yeah they're kind of putting fake not even fake numbers up because you can ring them but then they just they're not actually the in this example they're not going to come and repair your plumbing or your water damage they're just going to sell you one of the lead to someone else who will come repair it so if you're the actual business locally that does all those repairs you're then getting some other business creaming off the top taking your percentage of your business because if they're doing lead gen it's kind of a painful process another good one this is um you know toilet higher just we've all seen these kind of things that they really want to rank for lots of things around this kind of tamper area in the states so they've made hundreds and hundreds of listings all for like toilet rentals in tampa toilet rentals in florida toilet rentals in sarasota it's just there's only one business there it's just it's irresponsible and kind of fraudulent but also super annoying if you're one of their competitors and here's a new one i've seen recently is a good one where they're taking over um so joy and hawk has spotted this one but they're taking over old legitimate listings so you can see the reviews here about talking about a barber shop and they spun it back into then taking it over and turning into car accident lawyers so i mean i know they don't have the best of reputations at the best of times but that's another new interesting way that people are kind of you know using this underhand tactics to push legitimate businesses down in the rankings so tools and tips to how to get this done right so um we'll come over to the panel i'm sure they've got lots of tips about this too but i spoke to um ben fisher um and a chap called jason brown who some of you may know on twitter um who spent a lot of their time fighting this kind of stuff so jason runs the reviewfraud.org site um and they have this kind of process go through so suggesting an edit first so you can do that on any gmb listing suggest an edit correct the name you know switch the categories around if they've you know tried to shoehorn themselves into categories where they shouldn't be so the number of how many times you should do that before you then move on to the redressal form is the kind of the next step up so the redressal form is then you know way for you to submit more information to google say you know i suggested an edit on this one two three ten times and it keeps coming back because they just change it straight back again so you can get the redressal form as the next step up and then there's the gmb support forums where you can talk to product experts like ben and tm i know there's one as well um jason there's lots of other experts on those gmb support forums my tip on that is to remember that they're all volunteers so they're not actually paid by google they get these kind of nice titles and they get invited to some events and stuff those kind of things but speak to them nicely and ask them nicely for their help rather than okay you know it's very upsetting and quite emotional when your business is being pushed down in the rankings or your clients being cost business but you know if you want their help speaking to them nicely goes a long way um some of the tips that those folks had um keeping a list in a spreadsheet particularly for doing this a lot like you know when did you edit it what was the thing you changed it to keeping that kind of list of information um jason was a particularly fan of using a separate account because i think once you start getting into this a little bit more then um some of these people that are doing this kind of shady stuff are very keen to find out who it is that's reporting them so keeping that kind of separate from yourself and your business can be a good way to try and stem some of that tide um so there's some good tips in there hopefully that will help you fight all this kind of spam and get rid of it and get your business and your clients back up to where it should be um so some things to look for so i'll let you download the slides rather than read out bullet points because i think it's great gif it says that bullet points kill kittens but just some things to look out for like um good good for you to pick out here like you know virtual offices they're not allowed under gmp's guidelines they're using post box addresses all those kind of things um and fake reviews is another good one as well so um you know compare it to their you know listings on yell or trip advisor or facebook or wherever it is if on gmb they're kind of getting consistently four and five stars and everywhere else thinking like one and two stars then maybe something is a little bit missed there maybe they're just buying reviews so you can look for that kind of stuff too and hopefully that is a helpful load of information to help you fight spam so just a wrap up so obviously go out there build your gmb listing up a little bit bg and brilliant this is um just an example of it what you can do with lego so this is uh something i found just for researching this so they built a bugatti chiron which is a three million dollar car out of lego um you can see the real one there on the left and the uh lego one there on the right and uh apparently they spent seventy thousand dollars just on the lego engines just to make those kind of like uh the spoiler go up and the lights go on and all those kind of things apparently it works you can actually sit in there and drive an insert but anyway i thought that was particularly cool so hopefully you can build yourself you know up some sort of begatty level of gmb listening that's plenty enough from me i think um so i'm going to invite the the panel back in again um let's start with you amanda we went around the anti-clockwise last time so was there anything that particularly sort of uh struck a chord with you about that anything that uh you know some familiar examples from clients that you've struggled with i really actually like the idea of changing out your primary listing uh probably category on your listing based on uh seasonality and things like that i think that would be really beneficial for something like a bakery when it gets to around wedding season and putting wedding bakery as your primary listing a category and then switching back when maybe it's not a very big wedding season and that would likely help you uh rank higher quicker sorry i completely skipped out the examples i promised that the introductions i promised i'd do that so um i should introduce you properly so this is amanda so the people that don't know amanda she's amanda jordan she's the director of local search at locomotive agency so locomotive.agency if you're looking for them um and she is a creative problem solver in seo and we were talking earlier about i love a video game so maybe if we uh have we'll discuss that later but uh that's that's amanda so um anything you want to add to that amanda have i um horribly butchered your introduction um no not really at this time i do have a son he's seven years old he's great um he slid a picture he drew for me under the door in just a few minutes again um great yeah and uh introduced nikki as well then so let's not use she's the head of seo at two octobers uh also based in the us we were discussing earlier that she's the person that's got up earliest for this call or this person on the panel that's caught up earlier i'm sure some of you have too um she's a big lover of local and technical seo and her interesting bit was about her golden retriever polly who smiles when she's excited so i think we're going to need to see photos of that later nikki to see like an actual smiling dog but anything about you you can do that no i don't think so i can definitely definitely be smiling paulie pictures on twitter later the third panelist with us is tim capper who's the owner of online ownership he's in the uk like me um and he is a google my business product expert which um isn't just the title that he gives himself that's actually the thing you do on the forums right tim yeah that's what we do on the forums so google gives us that title because i know i know in twitter a lot of people go who's calling themselves an expert not me it's google and i think that the question we have for you tim was about um winston the squirrel so last time you were on a semrush webinar i think people might have seen you adopted squirrel yeah no winston has been successfully rehomed so yeah i have an empty office well i don't i've got a bored dog but okay so while we're doing it is there anything in that presentation that particularly jumped out you like a good example or thing you've seen clients particularly struggle with uh well for me spam is becoming um a big thing uh the uk has always been very um i don't know if we want to say a little bit more mild-mannered um with with spam and it's been very it's not so in your faces in the us but it's picking up this year especially we've just seen you know growing massively so yeah people need to start really ramping up and understanding we'll come back to the other analysts i guess for some tips so nikki um anything that particularly jumps out of you or some any spam fighting tips you have maybe um not a spam fighting tip but i did want to comment you mentioned you call that q a and how it's definitely okay for businesses to see their q a which i think is super important also for q a making sure that you sum up any questions or answers that you want to actually show up in the knowledge panel so having a couple of friends go through and sum up any questions that you want to make sure um show up in there that are most important based on seasonality or things related to covid anything that you think would be super helpful to potential customers at any given time um google doesn't penalize for those things so taking advantage of of that little good one okay um so tim then you're probably our spam fighter in chief then or certainly dealing with a lot of it on the forums so uh do you have any particular spam fighting tips or um advice for people watching that they can use to go yeah that the thing that jumped out of me and on the tip where you were saying always use a separate account it's not only just to look after yourself it's actually to look after your your your listings um if you use your account let's say you've got i don't know you you're managing a business who you're looking after this or you've got listings yourself and you start suggesting edits now you're typically going to be suggesting edits in the same sort of categories if you suggest too many edits and they get rejected your account can actually end up suspending all of those listings and i would say that is your primary reason for using another account um i i you know i've seen firsthand um a chap who was managing at banks listings firstly he wasn't obviously uh using third-party guidelines he was listed as the owner and not as the manager and uh 200 bank branches of his got suspended because he was spam fighting in the same account so uh yeah just be very careful of that use a separate account how are you amanda have you got any particular tips for uh trying to get rid of all that nasty spam in the listings yeah um one of my tips is something that i did for a client is make sure you check your own reviews for fake reviews or employee reviews just so no one catches you as well i had a client who had someone who applied for a job and they left a review about the experience applying for a job and of course we were to get that removed and it was of course very easy since it was my client and we knew what the situation is so yeah make sure you're covering yourself with your clients and you look and they've only got sort of three reviews and one of them is i love working here okay not an eligible review okay so we've got some great questions coming in from uh folks in the audience so um jared carraway had a good question about core tracking numbers so what do you do with call tracking numbers do you list that as a primary and then the non-track number as a secondary i'm going to throw that over to you nikki are you happy with that one yeah um i think usu my my gut tells me that you should use your your regular phone number first um and then put that with that call tracking number um as the secondary number just for enough consistency um and for making sure that your you have your phone number that matches with everything else um on the the listing versus having that call tracking number anybody else get anything to offer on that one i would probably do it the other way around um your your call tracking is the one you want people to be phoning from but not consistently you certainly need to not forget put your actual main number in um as your secondary because also call tracking depending on what you use that goes down a lot or can do you know i mean uh if you're using a great company probably one but it has been known to go down and you still certainly need to have the other one but i guess yeah mike blumenthal who i'm sure a lot of people in local seo know the kind of godfather of local seo um and one of his tips around call tracking numbers in particular was to make sure that you kind of google them because he's had instances with clients where they've had a call tracking number set up but it wasn't unique to them it had been used for some spammy nefarious porn pills poker thing related years and years ago and you add it to your listing and you kind of get associations you don't really want with your listing so that can be a kind of risky one i'm not sure that particularly affects your gre ranking but it's probably not great for your brand um the next question we had in what i picked up was from mike dickman amanda i'm going to fling this one to you about multiple listings so what's your input on multiple listings for car dealers so you have auto sales you have the service department the collision center the parts department all of these kind of things some of them at the same address some of them are slightly different variations on the address um if you come across that kind of multiple listing issues with the clients you work with yes and i believe car dealerships have their own kind of thing going on with google my business where they're allowed to have separate departments um and if they're allowed to perfectly fine i think they should use definitely the actual address for that department don't try to fudge it use the actual phone number for that department so more than likely the collision department has his own phone number or the service department has its own phone number so that should be the phone number and information used and if of course if you're building citations through those listings make sure that you use the correct information for that specific department yeah one one thing um yeah using the same address is fine because you know you normally have the same building you have the main entrance which is a dealership then you have the service then you have the space that's cool using the same um same address uh what i would definitely suggest doing is having them if they are in the same building you know some are actually little separate buildings on the same lot but if they are in the same building um silo those uh interior departments into the main listing so like like the main thing is just called bob's toyota and then it would be service department bob's toyota make sure that is located in um it also helps the algo to understand exactly what's in where and under especially the same address because uh last month there was a whole wrath of incorrect duplicate mergers based upon things being in the same location um and it just helps the elder to understand that oh actually yeah it is the same address yeah it's got a different number but it is meant to be there and duplicate mergers aren't absolute nightmare to sort out so um take five minutes and and market it in or get hold of business support to market as located in and can save you a lot of heart attack nikki anything to chip in on that no actually i think everybody covered okay that's a really good response but we're gonna we're gonna let that one lie with the expert so i've got a question for you nikki about um service area businesses so um somebody calling themselves seo teams i'm hoping that's gonna be multiple people watching but uh they are asking about how to win uh if you're a service area business so you don't have that kind of bricks and mortar location thing that people can stick a pin in the map you're kind of service area business maybe like me i don't want people showing up to my house so have you got some advice for sabs and how they can start to rank a bit better in gmb yeah definitely um one make sure that you do hide your address and instead use service areas so using um the town names the zip codes for your actual service areas instead of having your address um listed there so if you don't have people showing up to your door and so you have a better chance of showing up um a little further out um back to that the page that you're linking to from your gmb listing making sure so if you're a plumber instead of just linking to your home page link to the plumbing services page on your website that page is more relevant so hopefully that will help provide a better user experience chances are your homepage probably doesn't talk as in depth about your plumbing services as your plumbing services page so linking to that page as well can definitely help and then a lot of the other things that andrew mentioned so making sure that you have photos of your team uh making sure that you're talking about your team um responding to reviews i think is definitely should be definitely at the top of your list and if you're not doing that making sure that you try to have someone dedicated on your team that's doing that consistently because that can definitely go a long way go a long way with google and with users um as responding to those reviews that's a very interesting thing this morning from mark williams cook on twitter he got an email about um a notification for gmb saying hey respond to this review somebody's giving you a review and there was a glitch in the email that said um kind of revealed some of gmb's code and it had a google unanswered reviews count so it's clearly that google are counting the number of reviews you have that are unresponded to wow whether you respond to them positively and say hey thanks for the great review or whether it's a negative review and you say i'm really sorry to hear about this experience please get in touch respond to all your reviews he says that kind of stuff respond to even the ones where it's like you know somebody that says like you know this is amazing thanks very much it's a two-word review respond to all your reviews that kind of stuff so i remember you were not a long while nikki was talking too do you have anything you want to trip in there just that uh review management can be a lot um i have clients that i work with where the main purpose of our service is to help them with reputation management on google my business and we did do a analysis analysis of their most common uh types of reviews and what those negative reviews typically look like like account issues um issues with product or service and things like that and gave them examples and we went through a process of becoming up with canned responses um where we inc or we had a section to add the person's name and things like that too so we can make it more personalized for them but but if you are getting a ton of reviews that's a good way to make the process a bit easier is to kind of create a an analysis of what type of reviews you're getting responses that have been um approved by everyone who needs to see them including your legal team and marketing team and things like that and then you can kind of go in and kind of mass do it or use one of the many great review tools out there to kind of help you um respond to all those reviews because if you have like a ton of locations or your franchise it could be hard um to get to all the reviews that you need to respond to that's a lot to keep up with isn't it uh tim i've got a good uh question about spam again for you nobody's gonna become so if anybody hasn't seen this before with uh tim on twitter he uh adds a lot to the hashtag stopcrap on the map so if you want ever just like so this when i was putting this together and i wanted all those examples of terrible terrible things with spam stop crap on the map was a great um contribution to that but uh jared has a question to him um about what kind of proof you need so when you step up to that next level of spam fights when you go to the redressal form what kind of proof are you are google looking for to kind of prove the case that okay this is fan we're going to knock it out yes so uh when when you're creating a redressel um i'd uh obviously i typically do it in a spreadsheet and then it's going to be the crd or the actual link to it you reference the address telephone number uh if it's an address typically you can you know say this is a virtual office provide a link to search results showing that whichever company is offering as a virtual office the more information you provide to them to quickly ascertain that um this is uh you know there's something untoward the faster that's going to be done uh if you just write there this is spam um literally nothing you know you you it's just gonna sit it really well uh because you're asking call centers basically um staff to you know to look at this if they can't make a decision there and then then it's got to go through to another team which is oh they've got such ridiculous names um off the top of my head can't remember now um and uh and and then they literally have to do the homework if you've got someone that's just literally flipping through this stuff right it's a free product um and of course they're resources as that so the more information you can provide if it's the address provide a link to the company that's providing it if it's um a if it's a lead gen telephone number linked to another legion telephone number and you know you've got a selection of them if you can record the phone call from one and two at the recording into the thing from one and two so that they can hear themselves it's exactly the same boom you know job done the more you can provide the faster it is um that they will action it yeah great great advice and i think when i spoke to jason brown and ben fisher one of their bits of advice about that redressal form was to keep it as unemotional as possible so like you know when you write those emails really angry and then you take five minutes and then you go back and edit it and take all the swearing out similar to that kind of thing like yeah people do and you know like you understand it it's someone's business it's it's being affected people get really emotional but at the other at the end of the day people have got a list they've got to spend nine hours you know sifting through the stuff and if you start going you're destroying my business but it's like yeah whatever where's just give me the evidence yeah just just put it down properly and emotionally you know link to whatever you need to job done okay i'm going to take a look quickly the top cover a couple of quick questions myself just because i can uh deal with these ones um hopefully fairly quickly so simon cox asked about um how do you get the service area to circle the uk so if you're a service area business not bricks and mortar how do you circle the uk rather than including so i've got a great example of this because um i can show you exactly what i mean so yeah just when you get something that looks like this so you get one of those and it's you're trying to service the uk and you've got some you know bits of germany in front so this is to do with google's messed up understanding of what constitutes the uk i think it's something to do with some raf base out there but basically strip it back from the constituent parts of your service area being the uk if you just say england scotland wales the republic of ireland if you want to include that as well then google gets it and it circles the uk really nice and neatly but if you just say united kingdom for some reason google's understanding of what constitutes the united kingdom is a bit left up and then similarly so tim arnold then asked a question about that kind of stuff as well so if you're a uk service-wide business is it still appropriate to list your nearest countries or the areas that you're most likely to work in so with that kind of stuff so um i think even even if you list yourself as a service area business then where you are based does matter so if you're based in cambridge and you'd really like to work with you know clients that are in edinburgh in scotland which you know i'm not expecting you all to have a great understanding of uk geography but somewhere far away from me in the uk so be like mickey being based in denver and saying like i want to set my service area business up and i want to serve companies in california and seattle that's a nice aspiration but it's like where you are based still matters so people are still looking for that service and it can make it a difference but it's not really the kind of crucial deciding factor so try and rank your own backyard first rather than try and dominate the world yeah i mean look the thing of the service area is just go back to when there was a circumference setting anything over 40 miles um oh sorry it was about every anything over 60 miles you literally and you know you're literally not going to be showing up if you pick an entire country yes um so for example if fine it makes sense that you pick in an entire country and because i don't know you you you provide the service online and although there is the kind of interaction it's still online you know and yes it looks right to do it it's you're not going to rank when someone in scotland searches for something 200 miles away on the flip side think about it this way also if in within guidelines now with updated and service area businesses if you are a franchise and you have multiple uh service areas you cannot have one within a two hour driving distance of another right for gmb to consider it the same business now if they putting in these two hour parameters driving distance you're definitely not going to be ranking you know those kind of distances so really think if i want to service something really think about the areas you're going to be doing and also it although you do remove your address if you look in the api with gmb on for multi locations your address is still baked into the system they still know where you are so you know just be realistic you know and and just box clever start working on where you actually service properly and then you know as you grow and you can grow your business then you start expanding just you know work it properly okay so then the next question i was going to bring up then was andrew bulimores so amanda i'm coming to you with this one about um attributes so his uh comment is um there's he's seen no lift um from adding attributes about wheelchair accessible lifts is his example um so why would you highlight the fact that you don't have one i mean i've got some thoughts on this though sorry amanda is going to come here oh sorry um i would actually like to hear what do you have to say about it first just because attributes aren't like a huge thing for my clients um andrea i should say mr bullymore i'm a big fan of your stuff on twitter as well if you haven't seen andrew on twitter he has some interesting stuff on local seo but i guess with um attributes my son thought of it is that if if you don't want to mention that you don't have a wheelchair accessible lift because you think that's going to put people off is that worse than somebody in a wheelchair turning up and not being able to get in that's going to be even like even more of a kind of ding for your business so you know if you want to then you know say that your staff don't wear masks and that's one of the kind of attributes around the kobit stuff that you're gonna then you know there are lots of people out there that are kind of looking for those businesses that don't wear masks because they're those kind of you know conspiracy theorists that believe in all that kind of stuff so there are you know positive sides to all these kind of stuff but um i guess to think about it more than just a ranking but think about it from a kind of human and a customer point of view you know if somebody is out there specifically looking for a woman-led business or you know stuff that um they're temperature checking their stuff all the time and that's not you you probably don't want that that custom anyway right because they ain't looking for you i would yeah i mean look go back to disability i would probably make sure that you're showing it um and also depending on what country on you're in double check where your disability discrimination laws are before you start advertising things that you do or don't have double check ad yeah that's the reason why i hesitated because i know in the uh a lot of businesses are required to have wheelchair accessibility and if you don't that may be something that you want to figure out on your own outside of putting it on google my business first good points i am not a lawyer don't take my legal advice um nikki i was going to come over to you with a question that we had from justin carter um about gmb websites so um touching on gmb websites and whether those are worth having whether you should have them as well as or instead of your own website that's a good question um i think and from i think i feel like sterling sky did a case study about this but i could be wrong i know somebody did one they i think they're better than not having a website but if you have a website i don't think there's any benefit to creating a gmb website i think your your website through wordpress or squarespace or even wix something is is going to be better than than the platform that that google's providing if you just need to get a landing page up quickly and you don't have another website then i would go with that but um i i haven't seen any benefit in using one personally or with clients tim i know you know stranded a little bit in google sites and things as well what do you think of those yeah totally if you know if so this is going to go back to depending on your competition um if we've set up gmb only sites citations to the to the url all your normal bits and bobs that you would generally do with local optimization and upwards of populations up to 80 000 towns cities up to 80 000 competition up to about 20 businesses you can still rank them really well um you know you you can outrank you know if you if you put the work in they still work like normal sites you just don't have analytics or or search console or anything like that but you could they work they rank them um in terms of um having your own site and then gmb you can you can if you wanted to you can use them as a citation it's because it's exactly the same it's on the subdomain business. um it's basically a citation that updates itself every time you chuck a post on it updates itself every time a review comes on your review goes on so in terms of a citation it's probably far better and more accurate uh that you one that you don't have to go back and update every couple of months when you change address or anything like that um so just think of it as a citation you can or can't like it's any other citation it's not going to necessarily drive you uh phone calls or business but people still do find them um so yeah it's not going to harm you put it that way okay um nikki i was going to pop back to you for a quick bit more on uh google posts i know that you know two octobers have been working on the the tools and stuff that i mentioned in the presentation so um i guess kind of open question is is it worth it like what difference did just using gmb post making yeah that's a great question um yeah noah and the team did a great no learner if you people aren't following him on twitter i would definitely follow him for all things automation um they did a great job with post-somatic but post i think definitely do make a difference from an engagement standpoint um they it's just kind of one more touch point that it gives people to get to your website to engage with your business whether that's just giving them updates about your business or providing things like coupon codes or getting them to blog posts so yeah i would definitely take advantage of those no matter what your business types but the business type is but especially for things like service area businesses definitely take advantage of posts to highlight things going on with your business give people discounts on new services that you're offering new customer discounts that sort of thing and put utm codes on those so that you can you can track track the interaction and the engagement with your posts i saw you mentioning in the chat that uh the post-o-matic does use claire carlyle's utm tracking to uh add on to all the things that you spit out there so that was great so yeah some great conversation going on in the chat as well so uh andy simpson and uh amy thank you particularly for tackling the questions we haven't had a chance to get back to you um amanda you were noddling at nodding along when nikki was talking about posts is that something you've used with um any great effects with your clients yes and we've actually seen uh clients being able to convert from google posts and that's just from um doing some testing figuring out um what images work what text work it's almost like any other social media thing where you need to test things out and figure out what's going to work best for your audience and um i see that promos are probably the most successful thing that i've seen clients have and i was thinking that google posts would be a good idea also to share photos of like staff who are wearing masks for covert related things or share photos of like just to remind people like hey guys you're taking this seriously um so if you if you know you that you have a place like maybe your physical therapy office maybe you are a dentist office just showing things that you're doing outside of your business through google posts as if you would do on your social media platforms as well would be beneficial because those things do show up when people search for you great i'm consciously running out of time so i'm going to ask you all and to wrap up with your favorite gmb feature that you think is under used or you know not used enough or that clients often overlook or a mistake that you help lots of people fix so what's your favorite go-to thing for making a gmb listing absolutely fly so tim looks like he's thinking about it so i'm going to pick on mickey i'm going to come to you first uh that's a great question i think we already touched on it before but i think q a is really underutilized i think it's a great way to get people to have the information that you want to have want them to have right away in the listing and you can still direct you can't you can't link in q a necessarily but you can at least guide people to more information on your website and hopefully send them to finding even more in-depth information and it's a great way to capture leads to paying attention to your q a you never know if somebody's going to be asking about a specific service that you offer or if you have um time available for service that you offer for your service area business so pay attention as it could be a a spot to gather leads for your business good one amanda what what do you think what's the your most favorite underused feature um respond to your reviews uh that is it's important um not just from the standpoint of it encourages other people to leave reviews but and it helps with conversions but if someone has a question or concern possibly about um your customer support or customer service knowing that you respond to your reviews and take customer concerns seriously is takes it puts you another step further above your competition he's not doing it thank you mr kappa so i'm going to be difficult i'm going to go with two here so essentially in a hospitality industry that i that i'm mainly living the and and this is gonna um mimic um nikki's is q a that is about the only feature you have available to you in in gmb so it is the only feature you have in gmb that you can actually use there's no posts there's absolutely nothing no description zero so post is a good way of actually getting people to is this near the beach how near the beach is it does this have jacuzzis does that have a hot tub yep so we start we start thinking about that so certainly q a massively for the hotel industry and then under used for gmb posts is using you know just basically long tail keyword research and providing information in your post with that long tail those long tail queries uh which other people aren't answering and they actually do appear you know a little nicely highlighted um for those queries when they searched so yeah they definitely helped good one um so i'm glad that none of you pick mine because i'm gonna put mine in here as well about um getting making sure that your customers mention key things in their reviews so you often get those reviews where they go like oh you know it was great which isn't very helpful so um the way that you can kind of prompt this like you know when you have those kind of email things that go out to you know recent clients or however you know if you've got some pop-up in your store where you're asking people things you can use what is termed the enhanced ask so kind of lead them towards like you know how did you find your hotel bed or what did you think of the jacuzzi or you know how did you find the selection of restaurants so lead people along that kind of garden path you know we'd really like you to mention the bed was super comfy or we'd like for you to mention that like you know it was such a good deal or you know checkout was super speedy or whatever it is and having those things and when those people mention those key things in reviews then when people are looking for you know hotel with superfast checkout etc then those are the kind of those words that will get highlighted and picked out in the reviews and stuff as well so that can be a really good way to you know not just get reviews but get really good useful reviews they're going to help you get more business and stuff so i am conscious that we are now over our hour so um again thank you all again particularly in the us for getting up so early um but thank you again to tim uh who hasn't got up too early but for his time and to nikki and amanda for their time as well and to all of you for joining us um all of us are on twitter me certainly far too much um if i'm sure there's loads of questions we didn't get a chance to get to i'm really sorry about that but um thanks for joining us thanks for your questions and thanks for tuning in do uh come find us on twitter if you want to continue the conversation thanks

Channel: Semrush Live

Views: 3,152

Keywords: GMB listing, Google My Business, Local SEO, Semrush, Niki Mosier, Amanda Jordan, Tim Capper, Andrew 'Optimisey' Cock-Starkey

Id: OX4XSxuy4hQ

Length: 63min 0sec (3780 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020