If you're a business owner who wants to rank higher in Google, or you want to make sure that you close more sales, well this video is right for you! Today, I'm sharing how you can get the most out of Google My Business.
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Transcription:
If you're a business owner who wants to rank higher in Google, or you want to make sure that you close more sales by using third party authority and validation, well, this video is going to be useful for you. Using the tool of Google My Business, you can ensure that your business is presented well to the public. And in this video, I'm going to show you how you can make sure you get the onboarding done correctly optimize all of the best and most important features. And by the end of the video, you're going to be a whiz with Google My Business, and you're going to be able to easily get it set up for you and your team. So let's talk about the first step, which is actually getting your profile set up and started. And to do that you had long to business.google.com and you register for an account. Now before you do that, you may want to check that someone hasn't already registered your business on your behalf. If you're a local business, like a chiropractor, or some other kind of bricks and mortar business, it's possible you already have a profile there. And you'll need to then go and claim that profile, wait for a postcard to arrive, and then access and edit your profile. If it's a standard one without much information on there right now, then you may decide to just create a fresh one. And that's totally cool. But claiming your business is probably the easiest way to ensure that people don't get confused with multiple profiles. Once your business has been claimed and remembered this type might take a couple of days or weeks for the postcard to come through, you'll need to then fill out the complete profile. Remember that Google values completeness. So I would recommend filling out every field that you can that's relevant to your business, then the next step is to add your photos. And so you can add photos inside and outside your business. And if you're a professional services business, or someone working from home, this is the kind of time that you may want to add stock photos or professional photos that someone's taken of you in a business setting. Remember to try and fill out each one of the categories because Google likes completeness. And the completeness score of your profile is important for the usability of end users. We'll talk a little bit more about that later in the video. Next up, Google has some great features to post news and post updates or even special offers to your customers. And we recommend that you use these as these will actually be highlighted in Google search results. Now, particularly if you're the kind of business where a customer might be googling your business name because they've been referred by someone else to your business. Or perhaps they're googling your personal name. And that's going to show up your business in its ranking. But of course, if you're the kind of business that's a bricks and mortar, and maybe you're in a chiropractor in Sydney, then you want your business to show up and having more updates and posts on that profile is going to have a more likely chance of Google surfacing. But you also want to highlight those to customers as well so that if the customer sees that you have a particular offer or service on offer, then it's going to show up right inside their search results nice and easy for them. Next up, let's go through some of the special features. And there are some special features for Google business accounts depending on which category you've chosen. For example, if you're a restaurant, you'll be able to add a menu. If you're a product business, you can literally list some of your products. If you're a business that takes bookings, you can add a booking button and you can connect that to a booking service of sorts. Now, some of these options are different depending on which country you're based in. But when you choose the business specialization option inside of Google My Business, you will get options to add different services. Finally, and this is the most important point is to encourage your customers to leave reviews, you want to build trust by responding to reviews as well, anytime reviewers left good or bad, say thank you, and appreciate that that person has taken the time to leave the review. Now if it's a negative review, you might reach out with your personal details and ask them, Hey, why don't you reach out and let's see if we can resolve this. And you know, do what you can to show that you are actually taking a genuine interest in that customers review. Now, of course, it helps if you actually do take a genuine interest. But you want to also show that publicly that you have a genuine interest in resolving that customers review. Remember that if you are searching for a burger place, and you want to look up the reviews, what do we do we look at the best ones. But we're probably also going to flick through to the worst ones, and not just look at what the reviews were, but see how the business responded to them. That's going to be a good metric for us when we are making a choice as a consumer. So I want you to think about your customers making that choice when they're considering working with you. Now there is a magic number, which I'm not allowed to tell you. But it's in the hundreds, when you get a certain number of five star reviews, your rankings will actually begin to be boosted in Google's search algorithm. Now we know that because this is a signal for Google's quality score for businesses and Google are looking to service businesses that are good quality to their customers, Google's customers being people searching on the internet. And so when you have more and more and more reviews on your profile, you will over time begin to rank higher in Google search results. Now it doesn't mean it's going to put you on the first page above everyone else. There's lots of other factors included in your search optimization score. But this is an important factor because it factors into the likely experience that a customer might have with your business. And Google is in the business of surfacing the best experiences for their customers, the end users of google.com and so you want to make sure you put yourself forward So some of the strategies for actually getting your customers on board with leaving reviews for you to ask for them. If you're in a physical place for the customer, you may even have an iPad, on the desk of your service offering or on the place of your business and actually ask customers to leave a review, you might give them instructions and even ask them to do that at the point of sale or at the most exciting point of delivering your service, that would be a great time to ask for a review. If you're a service business, or you're working with customers on email, or virtually, you might have a script that you send to a customer, after you've delivered your service and say, Hey, thanks so much for being a part of our business. If you think we're worth five stars, we'd love a review. If you don't think we're worth five stars, please hit reply to this email, and let us know what we can do to improve. That's a great script that we've used effectively over many years to generate hundreds and hundreds of reviews from our customers. Now remember, and I can't underscore this enough, the volume of reviews is so important. Think about when you're searching for a restaurant and you're you know, perhaps searching for the word Thai noodles, right? And a number of restaurants come up, would you prefer to go for the five star restaurant that only has three reviews, or the 4.5 star restaurant that has 100 reviews, we're more likely to go with the restaurant which has more data in their reviews, because we're more likely to be trusting a larger crowd rather than a small sample size. So if you can set a goal to get to 100 reviews for your business, that's a great place to start to ensure that when your customers are searching for you online, they're going to see what's great about you with the rating that you're showing to the public. If you're a business owner looking to get more from your technology, then it genius can help. We've helped 1000s of business owners all over the world. And we support you on your technology journey, learning how to use Google's tools and other small business tools to build a more successful business so you can have more impact with your team and with your community. Now we'll work with you no matter what time zone you're in. We currently only support English. But if you're interested in working with our team, you can jump on one of the links below for a free consultation. Now if you are already a customer of Google workspace, you can take advantage of our Transfer In offer. And that offer is for businesses who are already using the Google ecosystem for their email and their file storage. And they want to get more out of the platform. Now our classroom which is available for free for transferring your billing across the US gets you access to courses and training as well as certifications on the Google workspace ecosystem. We're going to take your team from wherever they are now to genius level with the Google workspace ecosystem. And that's going to help you to run a more effective and productive team. If you're interested in learning more jump at the link below for the transfer in and check out our offer for free for Google workspace users to next time. I'll catch you in the next video. Cheers!
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