The Ultimate Google My Business Competitors’ Spying Kit (Free)

in today's video i'm going to show you how you can spy on your competitors google my business listings using two free google chrome extensions this spy kit as i call it only takes two minutes to install but will reveal a ton of information about your competitors listings which you can use to your advantage to beat them at their own game and the best part of it all it's free hey my name is luke durand the founder of ranking academy if it's your first time here today why don't you subscribe and click on the bell button so you don't miss any of my future videos before i started making this video i quickly wanted to check the definition of spying in google and this is what i found spying is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without permission of the holder of the information so just to be clear everything i will be doing today is completely legitimate all of the information that i will be mentioning throughout the video about the various businesses is not confidential having said that let's get on with it and jump on the computer so the very first thing you're gonna need to do is head over to the google chrome web store and search for the very first extension we're gonna need to add to our browser and it is called gmb everywhere so just type that in a search box it should come up and then click on the first results then click on add to chrome and then add extension right it will default to google maps let's go back to google chrome and search for the second extension which is called plepper okay here we go again it should come up as the first results just click on it click on add to chrome and then add extension and that's it as i said in the introduction of this video this should take two minutes to install clearly i was lying as it only takes less than a minute once you've installed both extensions head over to google maps okay so we're now in google maps in the search bar type a keyword for which you're trying to rank your google my business listing for i'm gonna take the example of a dentist and i'm gonna search for dentist near me then click on search give it a couple of seconds after which you should see the magic happen and some information will be overlaid directly on your screen so on the right hand side there will be a box with some blue tabs from which you can toggle through this information comes from the plepper extension on the left hand side you can see some orange boxes with all sorts of information and that information comes from gmb everywhere and the two combined give me tons of information that i can utilize to spy on anybody's listing so let's have a look at the table on the right hand side first which by default should display the category analysis in this section you'll find all the business categories that have been used by the business listing on the left hand side so why is this useful remember when you created your google my business listing you had to choose a category for your business also known as the primary category what you probably didn't know at the time is you could also select secondary categories this table shows you the categories that have been chosen by all the businesses listed on the left hand side and are ordered in the number of occurrences and the percentage so in this example the category dental clinic is the most popular one as it comes up 16 times which is 20 of all the listing the second most popular category is cosmetic dentist with 10 counts and 12 percent overall and a third one is dentist which is quite an interesting one as i would have thought for a dentist choosing dentist as a primary category would be the right choice clearly it isn't so if i was a dentist listed on the results for dentists near me in this example i would consider changing my primary category from dentist to dental clinic that's the very first point and the second point is if i go back to google maps and look at the listings on the left hand side in the search results you have a nice breakdown of all the categories that have been chosen for each and every listing the primary category chosen is highlighted by a star while the secondary categories follow straight after that and you can see for example this business has only picked one primary category which is a missed opportunity as there is the option to add many more such as cosmetic dentist dental implants as long as they provide those services which i'm sure they do so if you haven't added any secondary categories to your listing go and check out what your competitors are doing and if you are offering similar services to them just go and add those categories in your listing i could talk about categories a lot longer but i'm conscious of time so let's move on to the next item i want to cover which is equally important reviews google reviews also play a very important part in the visibility of your listing on google maps and it is no surprise to see that the top two results in this example have respectively got 204 and 300 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 and 5 which is quite phenomenal it doesn't mean that you have to have 200 or 300 reviews to rank but what should you aim for well look at the table on the right hand side and click on the review option and look at the review analysis section for all the businesses on the left hand side it seems like the average rating is 4.68 and the average number of reviews is 118. so you may want to use this as a benchmark and at least try to collect as many as 180 reviews and make sure that the average rating is above the 4.63 this will help your listing rank but what about if you wanted to drill down into one of your competitors listing to investigate the google review strategy all you need to do is go to their listing and click on the button review audit this will bring up the google my business listing in question and the tool will crawl through all the reviews from which you will get a nice report giving you further information about this business specifically so from this graph i can quickly see that these guys have had a steady flow of reviews uh throughout 17 18 19 but at the beginning of this year they clearly put something in place as they literally double the number of reviews between january and now so they've clearly adopted a different strategy which means if i was one of their competitors i would be worried and i would want to do very much the same below the graph you'll find some more granular information such as the total number of reviews the average rating and one specific piece of data which i thought was very interesting which is the number of reviews which include photos i don't know if you've seen my video about google my business photos but it is important to encourage your customers to include photos as part of their google reviews as it will help create more content and for you to be more visible on google maps and in this instance this particular dentist only has two photos out of 204 reviews which means if i'm one of the competitors i will probably try to outdo them and encourage my own customers to post more photos that's it for reviews i could talk about it a bit longer but let's leave it at that for now and go back to our google maps results to do a little bit more spying so the next thing we're going to spy on is posts being published by businesses on their google my business listing and just like with the review audit we can now conduct a post audit directly on a listing at a click of a button just to let you know this feature is brand new and was only published a couple of weeks ago and i haven't seen this anywhere else before i click on the post audit button let me remind you why it's important you publish post on your listing for those of you who don't do it here is the example of a fitted furniture supplier located in wembley who clearly posts regularly on his listing why would he do that because a it will provide further content for google to understand what this business is about b the content of post can be used to suggest answers for questions people ask about your business through the faq section of your gmb listing see some of the content can appear directly on your google my business listing when it appears in a google snack pack so there are many reasons why you should consider adding posts to your listing let's go back to google maps just like we did a review audit for one of the businesses listed here we're gonna do a post audit by clicking on the button that says post audit and here we go this is the very first one just like for the reviews it will fetch the results directly from google and as you can see there are no posts available to audit for this particular business and that's because they're not using the google my business post feature which i think is a shame and a missed opportunity let's have a look at another example but this time we're gonna go for the second one on the list so once again the tool is gonna go and fetch all the posts from google directly as you can see it's scrolling through the various posts that have been published and here we go you can see this business as being very aggressive with a sports strategy based on the actual graph itself and they just started on the 19th of july which was just last month and they've published a post literally every day since so they clearly understand the value of posting and just like for the review audit report you can find more granular data right underneath the graph telling you the pause frequency which is about one a day the number of posts that have been analyzed the average number of words per post and so on we can also go on google pull out their profile and check out each and every one of their posts to see what they're publishing and if you want to you can probably replicate or do something even better or even use some of the content they've produced on their post as an inspiration to create additional content on your website for example you can see there's a lot of value in doing this and i thoroughly recommend you just go and check it out let's continue with our spying and go back to google maps let's have a look at the table on the right hand side and cover the last two sections starting with attributes so this will list all the attributes that are being used by all the listings across the results and are ordered via categories such as health and safety and accessibility i won't linger too long on this one because it doesn't have a huge impact it just tells you what other businesses have added if you feel like adding the same attributes then feel free to do so the last one is business hours what's interesting about that is it tells you on average what the opening and closing times are for the businesses again this doesn't have any influence as such where you rank on google maps however you might want to use this information to extend your hours so you're the only one open when nobody else is or simply just change your timetable altogether probably a bit drastic but you never know depending on your business vertical there is one final item i want to cover which is called basic audit which is an option you can run and is available under each and every listing next to the review and post audit button if you click on that option it will give you access to the detailed information for the google my business listing of that business but will also give you external information in relation with that business such as how much content they published over the past six months a month which i think is very useful i won't cover this today because otherwise we will be here for the next 45 minutes or even longer as you can see there is plenty you can do with this tool and i've covered quite a lot already but i've barely scratched the surface please bear in mind that although these tools are free they have certain limitations and you may need to purchase a subscription if you want to use it regularly but the free versions give you access to plenty of information which could give you a real edge against your competitors that's it for today guys i hope you enjoyed this video go ahead install the plugins start playing around and make sure you get the most of it so you rank high on google and until next time happy marketing [Music] it

Channel: Ranking Academy

Views: 22,065

Keywords: google my business, google my business tips, google my business tips and tricks, google my business seo tips, google my business 2021, google my business optimization tips, google my business secrets, google maps seo, google my business tips 2021, google my business tips & tricks, google my business hacks, google my business tricks, google my business tips and tricks 2021, google my business optimization, google my business seo, rank higher on google maps

Id: UQxyjMDvrFQ

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021