More Changes to Google My Business
Peter Brissette • October 1, 2018
Good morning everybody, or afternoon, or evening, whenever you’re reading this. Peter Brissette here with your Monthly Marketing Message. Today, I wanted to do another quick recap, I’ve done this before it’s probably been about a year, about your Google My Business page. Basically your Google Maps profile, and I want to share my screen with you here, and show you a couple things that are going on with that, that I think are really important for you to know, so you can really take advantage of your Google My Business page.
To get to this you can go to business.google.com or google.com/business. Then, obviously, if you’ve got control of Google Maps, which is your location page you’ll want to be signed into whatever Gmail account that it’s associated with. There’s a few things that I want to show you.
First of all, in the info area something that they’ve recently added is additional services and attributes. You can now add a comment, basically, a business description. They used to have this, and then they took it away. They’ve added it back in again, so that’s something you want to make sure that you update is your description. Then, you can also add services here. For example, we’ve got one called marketing strategy, we could add more items, and more sections. There’s a lot of different things that you can add there, so you can really have a greater description of whatever services that you might offer. I highly recommend filling those out, and adding that.
You can also add other attributes, this is new as well. Some of those that they’re highlighting here are veteran lead, or women lead, and different things like that. There’s different key attributes that you can now add to the page as well. Do you have WiFi? Do you have outdoor seating? Again, if you’re a restaurant, or some other type of business what are key important attributes about your business that would be of interest to people who search for you, and find your Google Maps page? Make sure you get in there and do that.
Always, always, always, just as a reminder, any time you can add new pictures it’s always good to add new pictures to your profile. That’s one of the key things that people look at in particular on mobile devices. We’ll talk a little bit about the mobile as well.
Then, let’s look at another item here, which are the posts. There’s different kind of posts that you can do. You can do a basic post, which a basic post will be there for seven days right now. Any time you post something it’s there for just seven days. You can see here, I posted a link to the blog, and let me show you what this looks like. Basically, what you can do is post an image, you can add some text, so you have up to 1500 characters here, which is a lot, so you really have a detailed post. Then, you can add a button. The button, these are preset what you can do, so it’s whatever call to action you want. You can use one of these call to actions, and then a link back to your website, ideally.
The other type of post you can do is an event, so where a post only lasts seven days what you can do with an event … let’s look at this events here I set up. Now, I didn’t add a picture, but you can definitely add a picture to this. I’ll just show you what that looks like. Added the picture. With an event what you can do is have a start date and an end date. Your end date can be pretty far out, I don’t know what the limit is. I just did this through the end of December but theoretically, as far as I know, you can have this out there for an entire year. I just have, this is our monthly marketing message. Ongoing training, watch the blog for latest videos and guides, and a link to the blog, that’s going to show up all the time.
Where does that show up, that’s the question. I’m posting these, where does this actually show up? Let me show you that. When someone’s searching for either your business directly, or your type of business your Google Maps page will show up here on the right side, if it’s on a desktop. Where those show up is down here, so not only do I have pictures, I’ve got reviews, I’ve got information, so people can book appointments I also have these showing here, these two items. I’ve got the monthly marketing message, which is going to stay there through December 31st, and then the other posts that I added there is going to be there for about seven days.
The way this looks like on a phone … let’s see if we can find these here. This is my profile on a phone, and you can see there’s the overview tab right there. Then, what you’ll see as you scroll down on your phone you’ll see these items to show up. They show up pretty big there, and you’ve got tabs here, and depending on the business these are going to be a little bit different. It could be under the overview, it could be under more information, there’s a couple different ways it shows up. On mobile device they can actually see these things, then click, and select these things, and go to them by just pressing on them. That, again, really gives you a way to really maximize your Google My Business page, which is one of the primary ways people are finding your local business, your brick and mortar business with an address, they’re interacting with this.
Then, the final thing I’ll just show you real quick are the insights. Insights shows you different search terms that you’re coming up in. How many went direct to you, how many were doing discovery because they were searching a category. Did they search specific for your business, or just for a category? How many listings on general search versus Maps? How many visited your website, how many requested directions, how many called you through the Google Maps page, so there’s a lot of good information here that you can look at in the insights.
Now, something that’s coming, and I don’t know what this is going to look like, just a little heads up, is Google Websites. Not going to get into this now, that can be another one, but Google’s trying to get into the website business. Not sure what that’s going to look like, but it’s going to be interesting to find out more about them.
That’s this month’s marketing message, make the most of your Google My Business page. If you have questions about this, you need help managing your Google page, need to get it approved, you want someone to keep their eyes on this, and dig a little deeper please let us know we’d be glad to help you out with that.
Thank you, and have a great month.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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