Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most powerful ways for local businesses to promote themselves and get found online. Unfortunately, too many businesses aren't taking advantage of all that Google's free tool has to offer.
Learn more about Google My Business from our owner, Tom Malesic, in the video below. He'll walk you through:
- What is Google My Business?
- Why is it important, and why should you use it?
- What are some key features that you can use to promote your business?
Stay tuned for more in-depth videos on GMB features in the coming weeks.
Video Transcript:
Hi, I'm Tom Malesic, founder and president of EZMarketing, a leading SEO company in Lancaster, PA, and today I want to talk to you about your Google My Business Listing, why you should use it, and why it matters in terms of your search engine marketing.
So if you think about search engine marketing, you think of what Google cares about. Google cares about ~200 different factors. When we look at SEO marketing, one of the factors that we look at is your Google My Business listing optimization.
Let's really define here what your Google My Business listing is.
If you go to Google, and you type in your company name - I'm going to type in one of our company names, which is EZComputer Solutions - Google is going to come up with what it thinks best organically matches what I typed in.
And then it's going to also pull my Google My Business Listing, which is this listing over here on the side, and I'm sure you've seen this appear lots of times.
Now, the reason that it's important is that the more involved you are with Google's own properties, the better off you're going to be.
Think about what Google wants, and what you want, and what your customer wants. You want people to find your website and go there and and become customers of yours. Your customer wants to be able to find you easily and when they get your website, have a great experience,
Google wants to see that you're providing good content - that you're a legitimate business - and one of the ways that you do that is actually through your Google My Business listing.
So let walk through some of the features that you have here in the listing, and then we're going to have future videos that explain exactly: How do you get that content into your Google My Business listing? How do you really leverage this? How do you handle Google My Business optimization?
So in the listing you have: photos that you can upload, and then Google also knows you as far as your map destination. This image here of the outside of our building is actually taken by Google itself with their their car that drove around and took pictures of everything for street views.
In your listing you can link to your website design. You can link over to the driving directions right within Google.
It shows your Google reviews. So here, I'll just click on my Google reviews, and then it'll pop up and you can see what customers have said about you in the past.
It shows your physical address. You also tell Google when you're open. So right now Google thinks I'm open because it's between our eight-to-five hours and then it's saying literally: "Hey, listen, you close at five o'clock."
It has a link to our phone number. Now, remember when you're in your mobile version, if you do the search from your phone, you'll be able to click right on that phone number and then it dials you.
Google always wants to make sure that you're a legitimate business, and anybody can suggest an edit to your profile, which is also pretty fascinating, but which is a reason why you really need to manage this.
Then Google added a new feature, and this is pretty cool. So you are now allowed to put a post...
So typically we think of a post more with social media, and this is kind of like that, but really not. You can put anything you want, really, in here.
It can be a link to a blog article. It can be a link to a coupon. It could say, "Have a great Friday afternoon. We're open until 'these extra hours'." Whatever you want to do there.
And then they can click on this, and you can direct it over to another page in your website. So in this case, we are redirecting over to one of our blogs, but this could easily be to a coupon, or to a special offer, or to a landing page. It could be to dial the phone so that they would call you right away.
And the neat thing about these posts is that you can continuously add them in. Now, Google will only show two in this main area, and we're going to show you in a different video how you actually upload your posts.
One of the things that you want to keep in mind with these posts is that they expire after seven days. So you're really going to want to make sure that you go in on a regular basis and have something in there.So they only show two, and they expire every seven days.
But this is a really nice way for you to be able to show Google that you're actively involved. So if you're adding photos. You're updating your listing to make sure all the stuff is accurate and that you're putting posts in.
That's our suggestion and an overview of what your Google My Business listing is.
I highly encourage you to really actively use this component. So it's free. Google doesn't charge you for it. It's just all part of what you get with Google.
Start using it and report back to us on your success. If you want help with this we offer fully managed solutions for Google My Business listing optimization, everything from your photos, to your posts, to managing everything on your profile.
So give our SEO company a call, we're happy to help out by providing SEO services to drive more organic traffic. Have a good day!