– Hey I actually own this, this is mine! – This is me! – So if you don’t have a Google My Business profile you’re just not showing up for 90% of the people out there who are searching, – It’s gone, right? – poof! – Welcome to The Journey, I’m Nealey – And I’m Morgan.
– and today we’re going over the beginners guide to Google My Business. So Morgan, what is Google My Business? – So Google My Business or GMB as the experts call it, yeah, throwing some acronyms at you. – Right. – Google My Business allows local consumers to find your business on Google Web Search and Google Maps.
It’s a one stop shop for all of your business information and users love it. It’s visual, it’s tied to the map in the middle of the search results page, it’s great. – So when I do searches I usually see only three businesses pop up, why is that? – That is known as the Google local three pack.
Basically the best of the best businesses for that search result.
The ones that have the most optimized profiles, the best of the best. They show up. They only show three. Sometimes it’s three and an ad, but that’s how you get to be there. You can click more results and then you’ll see all of the Google My Business profiles for that search result, but yeah, that’s the cream of the crop that show up in the local three pack.
– [Nealey] I dig it. Awesome, so is this all something you can show us? – Yeah, absolutely let’s go check it out.
– Cool. – All right so let’s take a look at Google My Business in action.
Let’s go to Google.com to see what this looks like. – [Nealey] You should search, how ’bout dog groomers. – [Morgan] Dog grooming? Okay, so let’s do a dog groomer in Phoenix, Arizona and see what shows up.
Perfect, so the first thing that you can see this is the local three pack that we talked about which is the maps. Google, based on these three Google My Business profiles, these Google has indicated are the most optimized, the best answers for dog groomer, Phoenix, Arizona. – Right on. – We have the Smelly Dog, Dog Town Pet Grooming, and The Hairy Dog. So let’s jump into the first one to see what’s so great about this profile.
– [Nealey] Other than the name. – [Morgan] Other than the name, it’s pretty darn good. So as you can see right here, The Smelly Dog, they have optimized their profile pretty, pretty well. So they have their website link, they have directions because they have their address. Hours of operation, all it says is open now, an area of opportunity here is they could add full hours, so that way you can know, well what if I wanna go tomorrow, or on Saturday?
– [Nealey] Right, when do they close, you don’t wanna go too late – [Morgan] Right, – [Nealey] and have to go all the way back.
– [Morgan] So they’re missing that, which is fine but that’s an area of opportunity to fix. You can also see that there are questions which people have asked and then there’s answers in addition to lots and lots of photos about the business, where it’s located, what it looks like inside, some examples of dog grooming, and hair cuts, and what to expect if you were to take your dog here. – That’s so important, especially just how the outside looks. I don’t know how many places I’ve driven past and it’s just a wild goose chase trying to find it.
That makes it super easy for me. – And the nice thing about Google My Business in with the maps particularly, you can see where this business shows up and maybe The Smelly Dog’s too far away for you, so you can just click on one of the websites.
I like Hot Dogs and Cool Cats All Breeds Grooming. That seems more up my alley where I live and then you can click and you can see if this is the right business for you. So one other thing to point out, we’ve been talking about you need to create your profile or claim your profile.
Here’s an example right here, all it says is dog grooming, and there’s no information. It just has the location, most likely this was a user that just came in and said hey I’ve had my dog groomed here, a grooming place exists but as you can see there’s no information other than the zip code. – Literally nothing. – So there is this button here that says own this business question mark, you can click it and that’s how you can start the process to claim your profile. If I were this dog groomer I would for sure do this right away because there’s so much information about my business that’s not here and people are looking for.
– [Nealey] Right, if anyone goes and see that there, their gonna think it doesn’t exist and their moving on.
– So that’s all I wanted to show you. I just wanted to give you visually what this looks like on the search results page so you can see what customers are seeing for your business when they search for you. – So that was awesome demo, – Thank you. – but what about the audience at home?
Why, why should they set up a Google My Business account? – It gives you so much more visibility to your local business. 90% of the worldwide search traffic goes through Google. So if you don’t have a Google My Business profile, you’re just not showing up for 90, 90% of the people out there who are searching. – 90%, it’s gone, right?
– Poof, and like I said before having a Google My Business profile it really is a one stop shop for your customers to learn everything about your business. – Everything! – They love clicking on the pretty map and they click on your business and they get your name, phone number, address, hours of operation, reviews, star ratings and they can click and go to your website and check out photos of all your amazing products. – Right, it’s just, it’s one link but again they don’t have to go any further cause all that information is there.
– And the last reason you should set it up is because can tap into really cool analytics about people who are visiting your Google My Business profile.
– I love analytics but what, what type of analytics? What can we see? – So it gives you information about the number of people who are calling your business from that link, who are visiting your website, all sorts of stuff. – All right, so you have me sold. How do we start?
– So the first thing you need to do is you need to create your Google My Business profile.
Go to Google.com/business to create your profile or to claim your profile because sometimes you’ll have a profile already created by other users and you need to claim that to say, “Hey, I actually own this! This is mine!” – This is me.
– And then on that you’re going to put in some basic information about your website, the name, phone number, address. So the next step is you need to optimize your profile. A lot of people fill in the basic information and go on their merry way and they don’t do anything else and Google doesn’t like that. They wanna fully – I don’t like that. – optimized profile.
I know you don’t. So optimizing your profile means going in, adding photos of your business, putting your menu if you have it, responding to reviews, all sort of things to really provide so much context and make that have tons of information.
Also, if you have keywords that you’re trying to target on your website, for your businesses, you should probably sprinkle those in. A little bit throughout. – Just a little bit.
– Just a little, little taste of the keyword, – Right. – and that will help as well with SEO. – The more value you can add to that profile to get people to actually stay and look around, the better. – All right guys, I hope you found this beginners guide to Google My Business helpful, so you can get started.
Start getting lots of business.
Checkin’ out all those analytics. All the good stuff. – Right and if you’ve created your Google My Business account or claimed it, let us know in the comments below. Like this video, subscribe to the channel and ring that bell if you wanna see these videos first. This has been The Journey and we’re signing off.
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Read More: How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing – 15 Steps
