Google Business Profile SEO: Fast Google Maps Ranking in 2024

1. Welcome! Your Path to Google Business Success Starts Here...: Did you know that your Google business profile can be your marketing machine, getting in leads even while you're sleeping? That's why I'm so glad to welcome you here. Get ready to discover the power of using Google Business and ranking high on Google Maps. I'm Tricia, your guide and go to partner on your journey. With over 25 years of marketing expertise, I've seen a lot of what strategies work the best to help bring traffic into businesses, and Google business is one of those shining gems. I'm going to show you some powerful steps to rocket your rankings on Google Maps, which means more visibility, more local customers, and more success for your business. Now, I know this is an introductory course, but here's the secret sauce. We're diving into some areas that only the savviest marketers use. So I'm taking you behind the scenes beyond the basics to help your business truly stand out. All I ask of you is to show up, embrace these lessons and take immediate action. You're here to supercharge your results, and I'm here to cheer you on every step of the way. And once you put these strategies into action, don't forget to share your wins with me. I want to help cheer you on. So are you ready to dive in? Let's embark on this thrilling adventure together. Welcome to Google Business and Google Maps. So let's go ahead and let's get started. 2. Cracking the Code of the Google 3-Pack: In this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to learn about something called the Google Three Pack. The wonderful thing about the one Google Three Pack is that even if you're in a super competitive industry, but you do some of the other steps that we're going to learn about through the scores, then you have a fighting chance possibility of appearing on the first page of Google through this Google three pack. Let's look at what a Google three pack is. Let's start there. So let's come to Google. Let's pretend I'm looking for this is just hop ahead because I just had someone outside my condo wiping the windows for me, which is so nice. Let's just pretend I'm looking for somebody to clean my window. Let's just say window cleaning service. Let's type that in and see what comes up. The first thing we see is ads. We know that people have to pay to be in these spots, but of course we don't want to pay. We want to appear on Google first page without be need to pay anything really. Then what you have appear is this thing called the Google Three Pack. And the reason I was called the Google Three Pack is because it lists three businesses. Google will let appear organically, which means they haven't paid to be in the spots. And then as you tell, the first spot is taken up by an ad as well. So you've got the three ads up here, then you've got one more in your Google My Business search, and then you've got Google three Pack. Our goal is to get on the Google three pack. Even if we're in a competitive industry, in a competitive area, we still have a possibility of showing up on the first page. The one thing I want to tell you about that is sometimes it doesn't take any time at all. You definitely want to get on this as quickly as possible. So what happens is Google uses all kinds of algorithms like always, to decide who should appear under three pack. Part of the things it considers mostly is something called relevant. How relevant is the business to the search? If I typed in window cleaning service, very likely these businesses have the phrase window cleaning service or something similar to that in their title, in their description or somewhere, because Google wants to make that match. Okay, next thing Google looks at is the distance. How far are these businesses to where I'm doing my search? Now the fabulous thing about that is study after study shows that like a huge percentage of people will visit brick and mortar business within a day of searching for it on their mobile devices and think about it, that kind of makes sense. So let's say you're, you know, touring a new city and you're hungry, so what are you going to do? You're going to go on Google Maps. And just put down, I always just write in food and see what it pulls up. And then I go and I'm hungry and I go and I eat there within a few minutes. Right? So Google knows that it's very important for Google to find businesses that are local to you. Because most people prefer to use businesses close to them or close to where they're searching from. Distance. Distance is the second one. The first one, again, is how relevant the search is, and that again, is using keywords. And we'll come back to how to make your business relevant. And the third thing Google looks at is this thing called prominence. And prominence is basically almost like online, how popular your business is. The way you show Google prominence is, let's say you have a lot of social media activity and a lot of social media followers. And they're not just followers, just sit there and do nothing. They're active, engaged followers. Google is going to be like, wow, this business must be very popular. Or if you have a lot of links coming back into your site, Google might be like, oh, this business is very popular. So it's going to think that it's most important to show that business first. And there's a whole bunch of other factors as well. Such as how many reviews a business has, how active they are on Google boy business, how they're doing other CO strategies like all of these all work hand in hand. So it's very important just to keep in mind that you always want to do what Google wants you to do, as much as you possibly can. So it's not like you just do it once and leave it type of situation. It's pretty much keeping active on all of these things that we're going to go through and keeping on top of your SEO. And also very important to keep on top of your website. So make sure that your website is practicing all the stuff that Google like it downloads the information fast, pretty much. Just think of it as a good user experience when they go to your site. Is it easy to navigate all the pages download or all the links leading to the right places? Like all of those things that we have full control over, fixing should be looked at and fixed. Okay. So that is, in a nutshell, how you would get into this Google three pack. All right. So let's go ahead and just click on one of them and have a look, and I'm sure you're all familiar with how to use Google Maps, But let's just go through a couple of things here. Okay. So again, what Google wants to do is show you proximity wise, how far away these businesses are. Because more than likely, if it's a good business that's appearing, that sounds legit. We're going to try to pick something closest to our house. Okay. Then we could see the reviews, and I'm sure we've all done that as well. We would click on the reviews and read what people are saying about the business, and then we want to click on the businesses website to find out more about them. These businesses that don't have website, they're really doing a disservice to themselves because you know, it's amazing they are appearing even with only one really lousy review. Like these guys here are sort of pick on you if you're out there, but really you're doing yourself a massive disservice by not having your website there or not going out and getting some good reviews like Google has already done the hard work for you and you're appearing at the top of cert. So I don't know why this business wouldn't want to take those extra efforts that we're going to learn how to do through this course, okay? So do not be this business, be this business, okay? Okay, We're going to have a closer look at this business. We want to see what else they did on their listing, okay? So they put their business hours, they put their address, they put their phone number, they put easy click to their website. They listed some of the products they offer and they, they don't have questions and answers. This here is the question and answer section. So we're going to come to this as well and we're going to cover all of these in more detail. And then of course, you could read their reviews, right? And trust me, people look at the stuff like they will read all of this stuff and look at it before they decide to use a business. Glad you're taking this course because we're going to learn how to optimize your Google business profile as much as it possibly can be optimized. And get you guys all ranking really well on Google. My Business Sound Good. All right, so let's move on and go to the next lesson. 3. How To Access Google Keyword Planner If You Don't Have A Google Ads Account: Hey buddy, Welcome to this video where I'm going to go over how to access Google Keyword Planner without needing to create a Google ad and without needing to put in your credit card. The very first thing you want to do is access your Google account. If you're not already in your Google account, simply go to accounts, stock, Google.com and just select the account you want to work with. The next step is going to the URL, Adstock, Google.com You'll see a page that looks like this. Essentially all you want to do is go to the upper right and click on the Start Now, button on the next page is going to ask you for your business name. Just go ahead, put your business name in, and then click the button on the bottom right which says, next on this page, you want to put your website URL. And I just want you to know that you could put in the URL of your home page, any page on your website or even any of your landing pages. Go ahead, enter that and then click the next button on this page. Here, essentially Google is just showing you a preview of the page that you entered the URL for. Go ahead, just look that over. You could view it in mobile or desktop, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and click the next button. This is where the magic happens because I really want you to get this part right. Just I want you to ignore everything and all the options you see on this page, except where I point at the arrows. That's the only part I want you to look at. Where it says Switch to Expert Mode. Go ahead and click where it says Switch to Expert Mode. This page could also be a little bit tempting because there's lots of things to look at and lots of things you might want to click on. But please do, we do not want to start that Google ad. All you're going to do is ignore everything. You're going to go to the bottom left and you're going to click where it says, Create an account without a campaign. There we have it. You've successfully created your Google as account without needing to start a Google ad. Yeah, don't go away yet. I still need to show you how to access your Google keyword planner. What you want to do now is click, it says, Explore your account. Go ahead and click that. Now on this page, you are going to have to enter some information, but that's okay. Don't worry, this will not start up your Google ad. This is just something that Google will keep Jose. In future, you decide to give Google as a go, go ahead, fill out your billing country, your currency, your time zone. That's it. When you're done, go ahead and click that blue button that says Submit. Now on this page, you're actually on the back end of your brand new Google Ads account, which is great. You've got a few options. But we want more options because in this view you will not be able to access Google Keyword Planner. We're going to take one more step or almost there. What you're going to do is click on that wrench that Settings is going to give you a drop down menu. You're going to click on the very last choice which says Switch to Expert mode. Now you can see that your view changes and you've got a lot more options. What you're going to do is head over to that wrench symbol again. Now instead of saying settings, it says what does it say? It says tools and settings. And then it's going to give you a whole bunch of different things to look at. You can go back in there and check out all those other tools at some other point. Right now, we just want to access that keyword planner. Go ahead and click on keyword planner. 4. Let's Discover Your Keywords!: All right, so this lesson is pretty exciting because this is where we're going to start getting to know and discover what our keywords are. This is just one tool that we're going to be using. There are different tools you can use to get in deeper with your keywords. But we just want to know right now generic, just overall, what our main keyword focuses are going to be. In order to do that, we're going to go into something called Google Keyword Planner. In order to use Google Keyword Planner, you will need a Google ads account. So you would just go to Ads.google.com and set up your ads account from there. Okay? But once you can access it, you're going to go in the thing here called Keyword Planner and just go to Keyword Planner. Then all you need to do is click on Discover You Keywords. From here, you pretty much can enter your keyword or you can enter a URL. I just want to make that note that you can enter a URL because it doesn't need to be your own URL. Which is fantastic because, yes, you can put your competitor's URL in there. So if you have competitor that's doing really, really well online, go ahead, pop in your URL and see what comes up, which is always a fun thing to do. But for now we're going to just put in a very general, broad idea of what our industry is. So this is not the place to get too specific, keep it generalized and broad. And let Google start telling you and making suggestions of where you should be going with your keyword. Okay, let's say my business. How about we do spa, right? Spas are very, very popular and very competitive too, I should say. So let's say I have a spa that specializes in like facials or something, and my spa is located in Toronto. So again, I'm keeping it broad, so I'm going to put it, actually, I'm just going to keep it at Spa. Let's just keep it Spa. And I'm going to say get results, then Google. What it's going to do is within seconds it's going to bring me up and different types of ways people are searching for a spa. And then it's going to split it up into average monthly searches like this, from highest to lowest. If you want, you could click on this and make it lowest to highest. But I don't know why you would want to do that. You definitely always want to see it from the highest to lowest. Then it tells you what the competition is like in general. Is it low competition, medium competition, or high competition? You would only worry about this if you were going to pay for ads. Because obviously, if it's high competition, you were going to pay higher for ads. But if you're not going to use it for ad purposes, for our purposes, we're using it to find the general key words we want to start using within our profile on Google, my business. In that case, it's nice to go after you find anything that's highly competitive. Because it tells you that when people see the word, that they're actually converting on the word. So not only are they searching by the word, but they're actually taking action and buying stuff off of that word so we could find a word that has got lots of monthly searches and a cup petition. That's pretty bonus. But if not, even if it just has a huge number of monthly searches, that is definitely a safe keyword to you. And then basically up here, it's giving you some suggestions of other categories you can start searching under as well. The one thing I want to mention is that Google does well at finding related keywords to whatever you pop in, but it doesn't do so well thinking outside the box for you, when you want to start getting more specific, like let's say my Spa offers services for people with Acne, right? Google probably won't be searching specifically for that. So then I would want to go in and change this and go in a little bit more specific and then see what Google comes up for me. But basically all we're looking for is the hottest trending words. The very first thing you should do, those come up here to where it says location. And you want to click on that and you want to change your location, You don't want to keep it. So I'm not going to keep it as Canada unless I offer my service to all of Canada. But even then, that's just too broad. But you don't want to also be too too specific. So think of the geographic area you're in. If I'm in Toronto, I'm just going to keep it at Toronto because I want to know how people are searching for spas in Toronto. And see how Google goes ahead and captures all those little underlying areas around Toronto Formy, which is super, super great. But if it was a spa in Mississauga or a spa like way up North or something, then I would enter different types of location because people will probably be using different types of key words in order to find that service. Okay, so Pheno, I'm just going to keep it in Toronto and let just Google change all of this Fori. There we go. Okay, so let's come back over here. So one of the things that Google do is tell you if the competition is low, medium, or high. Essentially, if it's high competition, what that usually indicates is that people are converting off that keyword. So if you find a word with a lot of traffic and high competition, it means there's a lot of people going and a lot of people purchasing whatever they see. And that's why there's high competition because your competitors will only spend money on words that are bringing them in traffic. That's always really nice, unless you're going to be doing paid ads, then high competition also means that you'll be paying more for that specific keyword. But for our purposes, we're using the keyword in our Google my business profile. Which means we should use the strong keywords. But we are first going to look at the average monthly searches. If something has a ton of traffic, I'm going to use that even though it has low competition. But if I had lots of options of things with high monthly traffic, but also one of them had high competition, then I would use that keyword first, if and only if it's a good keyword for you. Because as you go through, you might see what Google is bringing up is not exactly a keyword that fits what you do, and in that case, like trikish bath. So if my spa doesn't offer a tkish bath, then obviously even if it was a good keyword, I wouldn't go ahead and use it then basically just start making notes. So I'll be like, okay, the spas a good word to use. Obviously, people look for massage near me. So if I was a spa that specialized in massage services, then my keyword would be massage near me, which is totally in line with Google my business. So that's perfect, because that's how people do searches on Google, my business oftentimes. Okay. And then you can see a lot of times it'll start bringing up competitors because this is what Google is just looking for, what's trending under the general keyword category of Spa. So we just start making notes and just kind of go through it. Can get a little tedious, especially when you start doing this for a few keywords, but it's essential and very, very important exercise. Okay, so I would start off by picking the hottest keywords, and then of course, the 1,000 10,000 category. And then start looking at the 100 to 1,000 per month searches in all of Toronto. I would use these guys more for like if I was running a blog post and nothing up here would fit my category, then I would go into this category. But to use as your main key words, you definitely want to stick 1000-10 thousand searches per month, or 10,100 1,000 is excellent, and anything above that is super. So the more, the better is all I'm trying to say, especially if you're in a very populated city. If you're in a smaller town and you start doing, I mean, if you're in a small town and there's 100 to 1,000 searches per month on a keyword, it's still probably a good keyword to go after. So then one of the other things you want to do is look at how to broaden your search. So let's look at these categories that Google gave me. And if any of them apply, I go ahead and click on that as well. Okay, So then what I would do is I would go back up here. Then I would put in something that's even a little bit more specific. So let's say My Spot just sells skincare products. I would just type in skincare and I would take get results. And then I would go through the all exercise again and see what Google is pulling up as the most popular search terms that relate to skincare. And look a lot of these high competition, which means people when they see these words, they're actually making conversions. So they're probably actively purchasing from these keywords. So again, I'd be like, well, hot, diggity, look at all of these, you know, highly converting words which is super, super awesome. Right. And then I would start making some more notes on that and then deciding what best fits my business and go from there. So pretty much in a nutshell, this is how you use Google Keyword Planner in order to discover your keywords. 5. Keywords: Extra Tip That Will Help!: All right, so hold on. Before you go, I want to show you just one other really cool feature that you can find in Google Keyword Planner. Okay. As you know, when you come here at default to showing you the keyword and then you could sort it by the average monthly searches. And then it also shows you the competition, whether it's low, medium, or high. That's all well and dandy. However, there's a couple other columns that I would like to look at what those columns are. It basically will show you people's bids, what people are bidding on the low side and what people are bidding on the high side per the key word, the way you would use that. Again, as I mentioned, if something has high competition, the competition has already discovered that that key word is associated with people actually making a purchase decision. Because otherwise, why would there be a lot of competition on it? Let's think about it. It's like a whole bunch of your competitors have already done the research. And they said, okay, we are putting money on this. If it's high, competition means skincare, we're putting money on it. Because when we use skincare as a key word, we're not only getting high traffic, but we're getting people who are actually making monetary decisions based on that key word. Same with moisturizer, same ethics. Foliate with best eye cream and so on. Right? So again, ideally it would be so cool to find. I keep repainting this, I just really want you to get it because it's important for any marketing you do if you find a key word that has got lots of traffic and high competition as score. But let's say look, these have all got high traffic and they all got high competition. If you're deciding if you only choose one, well actually you can only choose one main keyword per page on your website or per article you're writing. Let's say you're not sure which one to go with. Well, I'm going to show you a way you can discover that. What you're going to do is come up here is something called columns. You're going to click on it and click on Modify columns. The two columns that I want to add are something called top of bid high range or low range, and Top of bid high range. And then I'm going to hit Apply. And it's going to pull that up on my columns again. If I'm deciding between the first three now, I can look over here and say, well, how high are people willing to put money down on it? How much money? If we look over here on the far right, high range people go up to $4.41 on this. $105.70 on this, $105.13 on this one. So it's not a drastic difference. So of course, I would go with whatever makes more business sense with you. But if you don't really care and you want to promote them all, then start off with the one with the highest bid. Because if people are willing to put a lot of money on something, it means again that more people are converting on it because why else would they be willing to put that much money on it? Right? So the you could use this in any of your marketing and you should use this in any of your marketing. The only time where it's gonna hurt you is if you're actually paying for ads. Because it needs to go after that keyword, you're going to have to pay a lot more money for it as well, because your competition is driving the cost of it up. So I hope that makes sense. But let me think of it in terms of I don't know. Let's make it easy, let's pretend. Do you remember those good oldfashioned auctions? And people would be up there and they hold something up, and if you wanted it, you would just people just keep yelling on $2 $3 $4 And people would just keep going up and up and up and up. It's like how high are people willing to go on something that they think is that valuable? And Google is kind of giving you a generalized overview of everyone out there who's in that geographic area, who's looking at these keywords, how high are they willing to go. So if that's a good number, you can be assured that that's a good converting keyword. And again, Conversions means people are willing to put money on it. Okay. So again, if I, if I wanted to push something with skin care and moisturizer, Enix foliators, if I was a spa, then I would start off with this one, it's $5.70 for moisturizer. I would do that keyword first, and then I would do something promoting exfoliators. And then I would do something promoting skin care. Or I would put that in that order if I was listing my services on my description for Google, my business. All right. So that's a super valuable tip. I know it might not sound like it, but trust me, it's a super, super valuable tip that you can use in any of your marketing. So you guys, go ahead, try it, testo, let me know what kind of results you're going to get and I will see you on the next lesson. 6. Selecting Your Best Google Business Categories: This lesson is very important because it's all about Google, my business categories, and I know the steps in. It will really help you not only to understand categories better, but help you in selecting the best categories for your business to help you rank. When you pick a business category, you will pick one main category and then up to nine related categories. And I say related because you want your other categories to support that main category you chose. This part is really important to get right because the main category you choose will have the biggest impact on how you rank on local searches. My first tip for you is to regularly test your categories. What I mean by that is basically what you want to do is go with what you think your best main category is going to be, Then maybe test it for a month. And then in the second month, what you want to do is pick another main category and see how that one does. What you're going to compare is the type of traffic you're getting in, the types of services people are asking you for. Absolutely. What you want to test is the numbers. How many numbers came off of category number one? How many category number two. In a later lesson, what I'll do is I'll actually show you how you could view your analytics and you could view the number of search views that you're getting based on your category. My second tip for you is to make sure that you choose categories that have a lot of search volume and preferably that have lower competition. Remember we did that keyword research where we looked at exactly those things. This is where you're definitely going to want to reference your keyword research when you're selecting your main category and when you're selecting your other categories. Tip three is choosing the magic number of categories because you're allowed to choose up to ten categories, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you should, Most important is choosing your main category. Then what you're going to do is use your other category selections to support what you said your main category was. Don't worry, we'll go over some examples so this is clear. But what I want you to understand is if you choose more than a few extra categories, it might not only confuse Google as to what your primary businesses or what your types of services actually are, but it could confuse the viewer. And you definitely don't want to confuse them because they could be potential customers. What I'm trying to say is, I'm sorry, there's actually no magic number, but what the magic formula is, is choosing the right main category and just enough of the extra supporting categories that are going to help you get the best results. Tip number four is basically don't select your main category or your subcategories until you know what all your options are. Because the last thing you want to do is pick something. Thinking is your best option and then you find something that could have been a better option and you might have missed out on all that business otherwise. So let me go ahead and show you how to pull up a list of all your available categories and how I would suggest using it. It's really important for you to know what the categories actually are because the last thing you want to do is miss a category that could be very fitting for the profit of your business. So you want to think about your main category, but you also want to think about the other things that you sell that are money makers for you that fit under your main category. So we're going to just use a very general search to figure out what the categories are. And then I'll show you how to use that to start getting ideas of what could work for your business. So all you're going to do is come up to Google and under Google, you're going to type something like Google, my business categories for 2022. And basically just pick something that shows the categories here, Complete list 2022. Sounds good. And then all you're going to do is just scroll down until you see the categories. So here are all the categories, Look at them, that's crazy, right? There are many, many, many categories, and Google's changing this and adding to it all the time. So that's why it's a very good idea to always be on top of what your main category is. Always do testing. Switch out your main category every once in a while with something else and see what happens. And then go ahead and keep checking Google's list to see what the new options are. Because Google wants this to be as user friendly as possible. And really Google really wants to understand what your business is, and Google really wants viewers to understand what your business is and what your business does and what it specializes in. So let's use this list and let's let's pretend for an Asian grocery store. It just comes to mind because I just did some work for some Asian grocery stores which was a lot of fun and different for me. So. Um, I'll just show you how that would work. The best way to use this, instead of scrolling through all, I think there's over 3,000 or 4,000 options categories and you definitely don't want to go through that one by one. So the best way to use it is if you're on a Mac, do command F, and if you're in Windows, I think it's control F. Okay? And that brings up your search bar, or search tool here. Grocery, if I was again, Asian grocery store. So I'm going to start with grocery store and see what comes up. So there's ten options for grocery store. Asian grocery store is number one, okay? Gourmet grocery store, grocery store in general. Indian grocery store, Italian grocery store, Japanese grocery store, Korean grocery store, Kosher grocery store, and Mexican grocery store. So let's say, okay, so the client I dealt with was primarily an Asian grocery store. And almost everything in their shop, well, everything in their shop was pretty much Asian cuisine. And Asian catered to the Asian community for groceries. So what I would do in this case is choose Asian grocery store as a main category and then general grocery store as other category. But it wouldn't be my main category. Now, for example, if the Asian grocery store also sold other types of groceries and maybe the Asian section was just a smaller section within the grocery store. Well then grocery store would be the main category and then Asian grocery store would be a category under that. And I shouldn't really see under that. It's just, you know, your second category, it wouldn't be your main category, it would just be your next choice for category. And maybe that grocery store was very ethnic and also also catered to some of these other cuisines we saw. Like, I think there was the Indian grocery store. So they could list that as a subcategory or an Italian grocery store. Because if they have those subsections within their main grocery store, and depending on the area that they're trying to sell to, these might be really good subcategories. So what you would want to do is make a list of the main category that best describes in general what your businesses. Then choose all your other categories that will help cater to all the other services you offer. Within that, just make your list. And again, before you finalize your list, our next step, we'll be looking at your top competitors to see what they're doing and to get some ideas from them. So right now you're just making a list. Let's say you do accounting, I tape on the word accounting, and here there's three things that come up. So accounting, firm, accounting, school, and accounting, software company, and then there's accountant. So if I'm an accountant and I work on my own, I want to choose that as a category. And just really, you know, in my description, everything really talk about the one on one service that people are going to get. If I'm an accounting firm though, I would list that as the main category and then list all the other services within that. Because maybe you do accounting as a service, but you also do bookkeeping as a service or anything related underneath that. Okay, So this is when your keyword research comes in really, really handy because this is where you're going to start trying to find other things that describe your business. Because like, I just typed in accounting, but I'm like, oh yeah, accountant fits under that. But I wouldn't know that if I had my keyword list. So you definitely just want to spend some time at this and make sure you're not missing out on anything. I'm going to do one more. So if I'm in marketing, which I am, so I can type in marketing. And there's Internet marketing services. There's a marketing agency services, marketing consultant services. And I'm not sure which one which fit best with what I do, because I offer a wide range of marketing services. So in this case, I would write them all down as options. And then I would go into my competition and see specifically in the area I'm targeting and see what they're doing and see what my top competitors are doing especially, and model what they're doing. Okay, so we'll get into how to do that next. 7. Google Business Categories Tool: I really want you to check out the top categories of your top competitors. And if you're not quite sure where your top competitors are, you're just going to simply type in what your niches and your city or area and see who comes up. And basically what you're going to do is model the best people that are out there. And you want to check what their main categories are. And what I'm going to do is show you a tool right now that is going to make this job so much easier. It's always a good idea to model what's working best in your industry. So what we're going to do is find a tool that's going to help us do that. Because what happens is, right now, let's have a look, let's go to maps. And let's say you are in the dental industry. So we're going to go into, let's just do dentists near me. Something like that. And what you'll notice is always the top sponsor for the ads. So you can see it says ads. So just what you want to do is always look at who's ranking organically. Forget about the ads for now, and look at what else comes up for things in your area, your neighborhood. The other thing you do is put like dentists, if you're in the dental category of course. And put in dentist and then put in the city or whatever area you're trying to get customers from. Okay, so from here what you can see is here that's the category. So this person is ranking is coming up first on organic search and coming up in the broad category of dentists. This one's coming up in dentist. Dentist, as you can see, most of them are coming up. This one actually chose the category dental clinic. Let's see what else we've got dentist and then we've got something called an orthodontist. And basically you can tell that, you know, they don't have that many reviews compared to some of the other ones. Here, again, this is a really great example. If you are in the dental industry and you specialize in being an orthodontist and that's all you do, then it's absolutely a great idea that orthodontist is your primary and main category. Or maybe that's the only type of new business you want, so you would only put that out as your main category. If however, you're a dental office or a dental clinic and you also offer orthodontist services, it makes more sense to put a broader category of dental and then choose orthodontist as one of your subcategories under that. So the other reason I wanted to show this to you is because I want to just point out that doing a regular search, you're going to get the main categories. Okay? And that's great, because we want to know what the main categories are and that'll help us in our selection of our main category. But you also want to have a peek at what other categories these businesses that are competing with you are trying to rank for. And that's not only give you a hint on what other categories you want to choose, but that's going to give you a hint on how many other categories you should be aiming for. It's a good idea to see what the top people are doing and then just see the people that are ranking not so well what they're doing. And start to get a feel for what exactly is going to work in your industry. So now I'm going to show you this really cool tool that's going to let you see those other categories very easily. But in order to do that, I just want to point out that you should be using Google Chrome in order to get extensions. I'm not so sure if you're using other browsers what a similar extension would be. But right now I'm just going to show you, because most people will be using Google Chrome, and I'm just going to show you how to do this with Google Chrome. Okay, so you're going to grab an extension. So if you don't know how to grab extensions, what you want to do, make sure you're signed into your Google account. Then you're going to click on Update, and you're going to scroll down to more tools. Then you're going to come across to Extensions. So what you're going to want to do once you get to extensions to get a new extension, you're going to click here under the main menu. And you're going to go to Open Chrome store. Okay, from here we're going to find a tool called GMB everywhere. You're just going to type GMB and then you're going to type in the word everywhere like that. Okay, there it is, GMB everywhere. And you can see it says it's view GMB categories, which is exactly what we're looking for now. It also does some other things like GMB audits, review and audit, whatever. You can have a look at what else this tool can do for you. But right now we just want to use it for categories. In order to get it, you're just going to click on it and you're going to say Add to Chrome. Then add extension. Give it a second. Okay. And now look what happens. Okay? So under dentists near me, under the same search, what happens is this shows me the main category, but it also shows me all of these other categories that this particular dentist is listed under. And remember I said just kind of ignore the first couple because that's usually where the ads are. We want to see what people that are ranking high without doing an ad and doing it organically because that's what this is all about. We want to see what they're doing. Okay, so person that comes up first in my area basically is under the category of dentists, but also chose to go into the categories of cosmetic dentists, dental hygiene, emergency dental services. Okay, so they've got one main category and three subcategories. Then I'm going to look at how many reviews they have, and then I'm going to look at the profile, see what else they're doing well, and just, again, model what's working well. But I'm going to make notes of these categories. So if I'm in the dental industry and I want to sell cosmetic dentistry, and I offer that and I want people to come to me for emergency dental services or whatever. I'll make sure. Now I know that those are categories available and now I know that those are categories that I also want to add to my listing. Okay, so let's see what other people are doing. So this one here has got a lot more reviews, main category of dental, and then they've got other categories. And then again I'm like, okay, they got five other categories. This is what they choose, which ones best represent my business and what do I want to do? And again, you don't want to list like all ten categories. You don't want to do that because you'll be too diluted. But if you really want to focus, if you're getting ideas from here, you're like, you know, cosmetic dentistry actually can make a dentist quite a lot of extra income. So if you're in the dental industry and you offer cosmetic dentistry, you absolutely want to list that as a category, okay? But you don't want to miss the other business. So dentist a very good heading category to go after. And most dentists, as you can see, if you scroll down, most dentists are doing that. Now look at this dentist, okay? This dentist has only got the category of dentists and not using any subcategories and they've only got two reviews. Okay. Yeah. They're still ranking pretty high because again, this is just my local area, it's not really huge, but it's still ranking. So there's a reason they're still ranking high. Even though they're doing this poorly and this poorly, they could be doing a lot better. So for those of you who want to offer Google, my business as a service to other businesses, this would be a really good area for you to look at. Because then you could just call these guys, you know, and just say, hey, I know how you could probably get a lot more traffic to your website through Google Local Search or Google Maps and all you would do for them is just those little things, add more categories for them, help them get a little bit more reviews. And those two things alone would totally bump them up the rank. So let's see what else so you just keep scrolling, just start getting ideas. And you could do this for anything like I just pick dentists because everyone's familiar with dentists, but I don't know if you're like a pet shop. And this time I'll put in Burlington, because that's currently where I live. So I'll just put in Burlington pet shop and see what comes up. Or I guess it pet store would be more specific, but let's see what comes under a pet shop. So remember, ad ad, we don't want to look at the ads. We want to look at people ranking without an ad. Okay? So we look at what's coming up. We look at the number of reviews, and we look again their main category. And there are other categories. So they're ranking under a pet store. Their main category here is pet store, pet store, pet groomer, pet supply. So again, if you're a pet store, if you offer pet grooming, if you offer pet supplies or whatever, then you know these are the sorts of things you want to absolutely be using as categories. Now look at this, most places see their main category here, a pet supply store. Pet store. Look at the ones that are doing the best. The ones that are doing the best, their main categories. Pet store, right? So they need to come to somebody like this and look, they've got no reviews and their main category is pet groomer, But yet they're a pet supply store. So I don't know why they would do that unless their main service and their main money maker is pet grooming. Otherwise, you know, definitely if they had checked out their competition, they would see that pet store is probably the best main category to be under. And then they could put pet grooming and pet supply store as different categories underneath their main category. So I hope this is making sense. I know it takes a little bit of work, but it's not, as you can tell, it's not like oodles of work. You could do this in just a few minutes. And just taking even a little bit of time on this, you're going to get a really good feel for what your main category absolutely should be. And some of these subcategories that you might not have thought of and some of those could be really big money makers for you. Because just think, you know, if you're a pet store and you get extra people in for pet grooming, then that's extra money for you. And I mean like look at this Pet Smart Pet. Smart's huge, right? And they're just listed under Pet store. They're missing out. Anybody looking for pet grooming. They're missing out on those people on their Google my business because they're not listing it. And I can tell you right now from going into pet smart, pet grooming is a really, really big component of their business. So if anybody here knows pet, smart people get on it, get pets, aren't you could be doing a lot better. You guys are way ahead of the game by knowing how to do this and by using this fabulous tool, G and B everywhere. So have some fun with that. So there you have it. It was a little bit detailed, but I mean, it's so important to get the category right for your ranking. And I want you guys all to rank well. So this lesson is probably the most important lesson in all of this course. So thank you for joining me in this lesson and I will see you in the next lesson where we're going to learn how to bring it all together and write an amazing description that's going to pull people in. All right, I'll see you then. 8. Putting Together A Top-Quality Google Maps Description: This lesson is very exciting because in it, I'm not only going to show you how to create a Google Maps description, but I'm going to show you how to create one that will capture your customer's attention and have them drooling over wanting to work with you first, let's recap. By now, you should have your main category and your other categories. You should know the local keywords that you want to rank for. You should have ideas from looking at your competition for things that you also want to promote and also an idea of the areas you want to serve. Now that you have all of that, it's time we piece it all together to create a description that will not only let Google know what you do, what you want to offer, and who you want to offer it to in what areas. But it will also help potential customers to take action when they see your description. Before we get to my special formula I created just for you for creating a powerful top quality Google, my business description, I really want to urge you to please take time to do this well as well as you possibly can, because this could actually get you sales and make you money. Another tip that I'm going to give you is that this area, even though you get it as close to perfect as you think you possibly can, I want you to, every few weeks, come on in, change things up a bit, and then see if it improves the conversion rate to people who want to work with your business. Let's go ahead and look at the formula and then we'll look at how to make it all come together. I've even created this convenient handle it for you. So be sure to go ahead and print that and then follow along. Here are the nine steps. Step one, you're going to list two main category. Step two, lists two or three other categories. Step three, you're going to highlight some sample services under those categories, or you're going to list things that fit under those categories that you want to sell more of. Step four is you're going to outline the city or cities that service as much as possible. You're going to try to target specific neighborhoods. Step five, you're going to add in highlights from any testimonials you've received. Step six, you're going to add in items of importance to your customers. Step seven is adding in what makes you unique, what makes you stand out. Step eight is you're going to use power words you know will resonate with your customers. Think about the words that they use often. Step nine, you're going to add an offer. Let's go ahead and see how to put this list into action. What I want you guys to do now is have a little fun with brainstorming because this is very important to helping you build an amazing description. What you're going to do is take a word document or whatever you're using or a notepad. Just start with the thought, what things do my customers mention as most important to them? Think about when you talk to your customers, you know what do they say is important in your type of business. So for example, I'm in marketing and my customers always tell me it's super important in marketing to have somebody they could trust. Because I cannot believe how many customers I've talked to who have had problems in the past with marketing agencies or marketing teams who have taken their information and passwords and done horrible things or not giving them access to their own material. It's just it's awful. And I'm sure it happens in every industry. So trust is a super important thing in my industry. What is it for your industry? What do you hear your customers ask for? What do you hear their pain points as? What kind of questions do they ask you before they make the decision to work with you? These are all of the things that you're going to start listing. So I'm going to give you a few examples just to get you started, but this is very brief. This is a very small list and I want you guys to do your due diligence and do a lot better job than this. Okay? So this is just to get you going and we're going to use an example of a pizza shop. So what would be the most important things to customers who are looking for a pizza shop? So let's go ahead and let's get started. The first thing I thought of that would be the most important for customers looking for a pizza shop is of course, fast delivery. Next, I know personally when I'm shopping for a pizza shop, which I don't eat very often, but when I do I really enjoy it. But what's really important to me is quality and fresh ingredients because, well, I'm sure we've all had experiences with pizza shop do not use fresh ingredients and that's just not a pleasant experience. Right. Something else I thought would be important to people looking for pizza is maybe depending on the neighborhood premium or exclusive exclusive ingredients that other pizza shops don't offer premium type services. Just something like that. Um, if that's important to your neighborhood. Friendly service is, of course, a very important for, you know, almost any business you deal with. And again, based on the neighborhood, you know, these sorts of things can be important if you offer vegan options or vegetarian off options or organic options. Another example is locally sourced ingredients. People love supporting their local farmers and their local communities. So, you know, if you only use locally sourced ingredients, you know, it's definitely something to highlight. Another thing that is important, as I mentioned, was businesses that people can trust. So you know, if you get our pizza shop, you know, people want to make sure they can go there and not get sick. People want to make sure that they can trust your food and your quality and your cleanliness and what you're offering them. And finally, this is something that's really big to me, what I'm looking for local businesses, I like to use local businesses that give back to their local communities if you do that, definitely something you want to highlight. As I mentioned, this is just a few options and you're going to go ahead and you're going to just keep going with this list. All right? So hope that gives you some ideas, at least to get you started for your next exercise. I want you to take on it other blank sheet and I want you to write on it what makes my business stand out. And you can see examples in that handout I gave you as well. But let's just go through them together here. What are the things that make your business stand out? What are the things that make unique? Why are you different from your competitors that offer the same thing? So the first thing I'm going to go with is number of years in business because, I mean, if somebody was in business for one year doing something and somebody who was in business 50 years doing something, who do you think might have a little bit more experience about that thing, right? So a number of years, if you've got an impressive number of years that you've been in business, absolutely you want to list that Another thing that could be very impressive or very helpful, or very important to potential customers is what your credentials are. So for myself, I offer marketing services. So it could not to all customers, but it could be very important to some customers to know that I have a marketing background and a journalism background, and a public relations background. Because these things on credentials are things that other marketers don't have in their background. And that could set me apart. So if I say to a customer, you know, this press release will really raise your search engine optimization and you're ranking with Google. If you do a press release and I know how to do press releases because I have a PR background, you know, customers is going to be like, oh, that's a fabulous added bonus. So that's really going to help me to highlight my credential in that example. The other thing that could help your company stand out is by mentioning the credentials of your other staff. So you can mention their credentials, the experience, their background, examples of files, the examples of files you've worked on, case studies, all of that, all of that. It's all wonderful stuff, okay? So you want to definitely, I mean, this is your time to start basically shining for yourself and just looking at all those things that really make you powerful in what you do. So don't be shy here, guys. So you're also going to think about any awards you've received, especially if it's part of the community. Some type of community, a type of industry award. You know, if you're in the food industry and you've got some type of prestigious food industry award, absolutely, you definitely want to list those things in there if your company has ever received any media mentions, either from local media or global wide media or whatever, if you're so fortunate, those are the types of things again, that make you stand up. So people trust the media. You know, if they say that you're great, well, hey, you know, that's enough for a lot of people. If you've served a lot of customers, that's definitely something you want to highlight. Especially again, if it's going to make you stand up for your competitors. Because if you've served hundreds or thousands customers in your industry and someone else is just starting off and knows only serve a few. Again, when people are comparing who to use, this is really, really going to make a difference for a lot of people. Because obviously if someone served a lot of customers, it means that customers really like them and keep going to them for some reason. So they don't want to miss out, they want to be part of that. Another thing that you want to highlight is if you make it easy for customers to order either on your website or your mobile app, or your mobile application, or messenger, or whatever you're using. But if you make the ordering process easy for customers, customers like that, people love to buy. If they want to buy your thing, oh my goodness. Do everything you can to make it like a one stop, they got it type of thing. Because people love that. And if you offer that, highlight it, this one's a no brainer. You absolutely. Chris, always want to offer stellar, excellent service. And finally, if you offer any type of personalized customer experiences type of thing, absolutely. You want to highlight it as well. People love feeling special. They love feeling that they're getting all the attention. They love feeling like they're your number one customer, right? So for example, on my profile I offer a VIP day. I definitely put that in my profile because people love the VIP days because that gives people that personalized touch experience. So people really like that. And there you have it. So again, just a few examples, but I just want to get you going. I just want to be kickstart for you and you guys. I want you to fill out this entire page for yourself. I just want you to keep going with this. What makes you stand out? What is great about your business? Who has mentioned you? Where have they mentioned you? You know, this is again, a place not to be shy. This is the place where you absolutely want to stand out, where you want to shine. And you're going to take all of this brainstorming you did from this sheet. You're going to take all the brainstorming you did from your other sheet. And let's go ahead and see how we're going to put it all together. 9. GBP Description: Putting It All Together: Okay, your first step in the nine step formula is to list your main category. I went ahead and did some research and this is the best category for a pizza place. Step two is you're going to list the other categories that you want your business listed under. In this case, we're going to go with pizza delivery, fast food restaurant, and pizza takeaway. In step three, you want to list some services that you offer under those categories or you want to highlight something that's popular that you want to sell more of. In this case I went with, I want to sell family value packs or catering services because that would make my pizzeria if I had one more money. In step four, you want to list the city or cities that you service or specific neighborhoods that you offer services to for my pretend pizza restaurant. I'm going to set up shop in this trending neighborhood in Toronto called Rossville. Let me just show you what that would look like. Toronto Rosensville Village. People in that area actually call it on C because I guess it's easier to pronounce. It just shows that you're in with that neighborhood, if you use that word, so I put that there. It's also near High Park, It's got a high Polish community. It's got little Portugal. People in it love coffee and baked goods, but it's also filled with health conscious people. There's also fresh food stands around farmer's markets. Everybody is very community oriented and majority of people are really big on fitness. I discovered all this by literally doing a super quick Google search. So it's really important to really understand the neighborhoods where you want to offer business. In step five, all you're going to do is just write in anything to do with any reviews or testimonies you've got or any highlights from that. In this case, what I did is I pretended that this pizza shop has been around for a while. It has over 2005 star reviews. So I'm like, wow, that would be amazing to have. Definitely they would, they would want to highlight that. One of the comments they typically get is it feels like a pizza shop with a heart. I thought that would be really important to put in as well. In step six, you want to write in items of importance to your customers and we're going to get into a little exercise on how to do this a bit better. But I put in for this pizza shop, they discovered that for their customers, fast delivery is very important. Quality and fresh ingredients is really important, friendly staff and a business that supports the local community. In step seven, what you want to do is put in what makes you unique, what makes your business stand out from the other businesses that offer the exact same thing. In my pretended pizza shop I put down, we've been in business for over 40 years. We're local media award winner for pizza three years in a row, and we've served over 10,000 customers. In step eight, what you want to do is add in power words that will resonate with your customers. For this pretend pizza shop, I put in words like fun, trending, value, cozy, historic, affordable family leading, organic, and things like that. Step nine, all you're going to do is give them an offer. You've already welcomed them. You've already given them lots of reasons to try you out. Now just give them one more little push to make sure that they give you a try, give them a little. People love little promotions and incentives. That takes down some of the risk factor. It's also people don't like missing out on good deals. In this case, for the pizza shop, I am going to do something like this, 10% off to people who came in off of Google Maps. In that way, people who say they came in off Google Maps, it also kind of verifies to me that Google Maps is working, even though I could read my Stat off of my Google Maps. I'll show you how to do that later. But it's also just really nice to know because if everyone's coming in and everybody wants their 10% off, you know it's working right. And then you can get really creative and have a lot of fun with some extra places that you could do these free promotions through Google. So it's totally insane how fabulous this is, so have some fun with that, and there you have it. That's basically how you would use the nine step formula if you were a pretend pizza shop or if you are a pizza shop. But this is how you would use the nine step formula. You go through it one at a time. You fill it in with your absolute best answers. And like I said, don't worry, you could always go in and change things at a later date. But if you follow this formula, you are definitely hitting some very powerful marketing points that are going to make your target audience fall in love with you and want to check you out and want to work with you, and that's always a fabulous thing. So very powerful. Don't just use it for this, try this formula with other places that you're doing, marketing as well. All right, now it's time to see how it all comes together. This is what we've got for our pretend pizza shop known as the Community Pizza Restaurant with heart Pizza. Pero Diesel has been family owned and locally operated since 1984. With over 2005 star reviews, we have become one of bronze neighborhood's top choices for quality, fresh, and locally stored ingredient premium pizzerias. Try out one of our ethnic theme, Greek or Polish creations, organic vegetarian or vegan choices. Or call ahead so we can prepare a first class family bundle meal. Your family's taste buds won't soon forget you saw it on Google Maps for an instant 10% off. There you go. That's how easy it could be to put something so powerful together. Once you follow all of those preparation steps, this is great at this point. You guys should know exactly what categories you're going to be under. You should have a kill or Google, my business description. And now we're going to go ahead and we're going to learn where to actually put these things inside of Google, my business. All right, so I will see you on the next lesson. 10. Creating Your Google Business Account: Okay, so we're not going to waste any time. We want you up and running as quickly as possible, so we're going to just dive in, The very first step is to go to business.google.com Okay? Depending on whether you've ever set up your Google My business account before or somebody has set it up for you or whatever, you might see something different. If you're all logged into Google already, then of course it'll prompt you, but otherwise most of you should probably see something like this. Then all you want to do is manage your business. So the first screen you're going to see is this one here and is going to ask you for your business name. So you're going to start taping your name in, let's pretend my business is called ABC's of social media. As I'm typing it in, see the options that come out below. And basically what Google is doing is just verifying that your business isn't already on Google business or isn't already on Google Maps. Because what happens is sometimes people can create accounts for business names. You might already be on there. If you are, All you need to do is claim your business if you aren't already managing it. But chances are if you've got a brand new business, chances are it won't be on here. Okay. It says, create a business with this name because it's not already existing in Google Maps. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to click this. Your business category is one of, if not the most important thing that is going to help you rank. You definitely want to get this right. So what you're going to do is add in the business category that you discovered on the lesson on business categories. So I'm going to go ahead and just pretend that my category is Internet marketing. You add that in, and then go ahead and click next on this screen, if you have a location that customers can come in and visit you at or you could service them at, go ahead and click Yes. Otherwise, if you're a service based business that goes out to your client or customer sites, then go ahead and choose No. And it says where do you serve customers? So as we went over earlier, this is called your surface area. For now, enter the city you're in. So let me just put in Toronto, Ontario. Now what you want to remember about surface area is this is all about local SEO. So what you're going to do is only go out about a two hour drive from your location. So I live near Toronto, so what I'm going to do is put down Toronto. And then I'm going to list some cities that are around Toronto, like Tobaco and Miss Saga, and Woodbridge, and you know, off to the East, like even Whitby and Pickering and all of those areas. Because those are all within a two hour. If I was like right in Toronto, those are about a two hour drive within Toronto. So that way I could say I service all of those areas. Now, this isn't necessarily a ranking factor, but this is good for customers to know as to what areas you are willing to travel to in order to offer service. And again, yes, you can do things remotely, but this again, is all for local SEO, and Google just wants to know where, realistically you can assist customers. I'm just going to go ahead and just keep Toronto there for now. And then I'm going to come back later and add a few more cities that are around Toronto. The rest of the information is pretty basic. What you're going to do is choose your country, choose your phone number, enter that in here, and then you're going to enter your website, then you're going to click next. Okay. Would you like alerts and notifications? Yes, definitely, because one of the notification types that Google will send out is notifying you and asking you, for example, if there's a holiday it'll ask you what your holiday hours are and remind you to go and update that on your profile. Okay? And here is where you're going to enter the address that you want Google to mail you postcard at. And see it says right here that your address will be hidden from the public. And this is just for Google's use. Okay? So enter your country. Enter your street address. Okay? And then when you're done, you're just going to click next. Okay? So I haven't seen this before. This is new because basically what usually happens, as I mentioned earlier, is Google will gather your information, then send you a postcard with a verification code. Which you will then come back to your Google business profile and enter that number. But it didn't do so in this case and it might not on yours. So essentially, as I mentioned, sometimes these things change based on location, based on your information. So you're just going to have to go with it if at this point and ask you for verification code to be entered in. It might give you the option of entering it by phone or by taking images to prove that you're the business owner. That's what you might get. Or you might see something like this where you could go ahead and be verified right away. And essentially, if you're verified right away, it means that it will show your listing right away. Which means you can go ahead and immediately complete your profile. So what we're going to do is stop here because some people might be waiting for that verification code. Okay? If you actually get to a screen like I did where it says next. So go ahead, click that next button and fill out your basic information. But we're going to fill things out in more detail in upcoming lessons. 11. Backend Setup & Configuration: Your Options; Start Adding Your Information: Welcome back. Are you excited? I'm excited for you because now you have all the pieces to actually putting together an outrageously awesome Google, my business profile. All right, So what you want to do is type in Business.google.com just like that. And you're can be brought to a page that looks like this, where Google is asking you to select the business you want to work with. Now if you're still entering your verification code, you're actually going to get prompted to add your verification code. So you can go ahead and do that. And then it will take you to another page, which is the back end of Google my business, which is going to look like this. However, if you've already entered your verification code, you're going to see this screen and you're going to follow along from here. All right, so basically what we're going to do is from here you could either click on your Edit Tool. When you click on your Edit Tool, it takes you to the business information portion of your listing, okay? You could also click on your business name like that, or you could click on See your Profile. So either one of those is going to get you in an editing. And this here just gets you into the business information part of your listing. So we want to see all the options. So I'm going to go ahead and click on my business name, or I'm going to click on See your Profile. From here, you are going to see all of your options on the left hand side that you can select from. On the right hand side, you're going to see what your business listing looks like on local searches. Somebody types in your business name or comes across your business while doing a search. This is the profile part that they're going to see. This is great, so you get like a little snapshot of what's going on and what people are looking at. Now, before we go into all the little things that you should be filling out on your profile and diving into that thing, I want to start with the most important parts of your profile. We're going to hit the most important hardest parts first. And then we're going to go into things that are a little bit more straightforward and a little bit easier as you know. The most important part on your profile is going to be the categories you choose in order to see your current category or to change your categories. You're going to click on Edit Profile in under Reddit profile, you see how you have these other options. We're going to start with the About section. Let's see, what I put my business name like is communications which I had changed. But if you ever want to change your business name, you just click on here, highlighted and change it. I still need to do that with my new business name. Then I picked the business category of internet marketing service. I want to go ahead and add some more categories under description. This was description that we came up with when we did the description part of the program. And then you've got some other things that we're going to look at filling out. But for now what I want to do is just focus on this business category. Now the other thing I want to really stress at this point is depending on the business category or categories you select, you may see different options available to you as you complete your business profile. So one thing, for example, business category is related to services. Now there are two very important things I want you to remember regarding your services and regarding your business category. One is you can go ahead and change your main category or other categories at any time. So don't panic and just know that you're not stuck with what you choose, okay? The second thing to note is that if you don't see the service that you want offered, you could always request that Google, add it under the category that you selected. So just keep that in mind. That'll make more sense than just a second. Let's have a look under business category, main business category. Based on all that research I did, it would be internet marketing servers. I'm going to go ahead and add my other category to add other categories. At this stage, you would just click on this. The other marketing category I want to do is like a marketing agency. My other category is marketing consultant. So I offer all these different services. So I'm going to go ahead click all those categories and I'm going to click on Safe. Now the great thing is, is that Google works pretty fast. So what it'll do is it shows you your edit is pending. It only takes up to 10 minutes. And then it's going to go ahead and show me the changes I made, which is really candy to have in case I, you know, made a mistake or forgot what I entered or whatever. This is all very handy. So I'm going to give this 10 minutes and I'm going to be right back. Okay, so we're back. And now, under my business category, I could see the main category I chose and the two other categories that I wanted. So that's fantastic. So now we've got the categories. 12. Backend Setup & Configuration: Using Keywords, Adding Services & More: Now what we want to do is look at the services section. This is very different than what it used to be. And to be honest, I'm not sure why they changed it so much, but and I don't know if they'll change it again, but let's bear with it and let's see what happens if we click on your Edit services. So what you're going to see is your primary category that you chose. And then what Google's going to do is recommend services. And the services are going to be based on category that you chose. What I'm a little uncomfortable with, and I'm not sure why, is it within a day it actually changed the options that I saw anyway. It depends on what people in your industry who are also choosing that same main category, What they're recommending and suggesting as well, for the services that should be offered under that main category. So I think Google's just trying to streamline everything, but it makes our job a little bit trickier to work with. So what it allows you to do is add a custom service. Unfortunately, when you add a custom service, it could take up to a day or longer to get approved. Let me show you how to add a custom service. So if my main category is Internet marketing services, and I offer a lot of things under Internet Marketing Services as a customer service, I'm going to add the first service that's most important for me and that based on my keyword research, is going to be online course creation. So I'm going to add a custom service like that. And then I'm going to click on Saved. And here it says, your edit is pending reviewed. It could take up to one day to get published. So basically what you'll see is your main category, then the suggested service under that category that Google picked, then what you ask Google for. And then you're going to see your next category that you chose, and then the next category that you chose. And you can add services under each of these categories. So let's go ahead and let's just start adding some things in. So the first thing I'm going to show you how to do is if you don't like the service category that Google chose for you, which here in this case is telemarketing. I do not offer telemarketing. I don't even know why Google thinks telemarketing is under an Internet marketing service. I guess it still is in some areas, but I don't offer it, so what you're going to do is click on that, but you don't want, and we're going to delete this as a service right here. Delete service. Okay. Telemarketing will be removed from all categories. Yes, please. And then I'm going to hit Delete. And there we go. Okay. So here is my main category and the first service under that category. Now I'm going to add more services. So one of the other things I offer that I really enjoy doing that, I really want people to know that I do. I'm going to go ahead and click on added service. And I'm going to do a custom service again. And I'm going to type in Facebook advertising, because that's a cool thing to do and get some really good results. So I'm going to add on Facebook advertising and I'm going to click Safe. Okay. And now I can see it. So my main category, online course creation, Facebook advertising. So one of the other services I offer, that again, I enjoy and I want people to know, I offer content creation service. So what I'm going to do is add it up here to my first category so I can add my custom service. And I'm going to put down content creation and I'm going to cook on Save. Marketing consultant services are a little bit different under a marketing consultant. I'm going to do a little bit more keyword research to see what's trending under marketing consultant services. Marketing consultant, I personally like to deal with marketing strategy. Actually, let me just pretend that I did my research and that came up as a good keyword for that. With good volume, I'm going to add a custom service and I'm going to say marketing strategy. So that's basically the only thing that I offer under that specific category of marketing consultant, is my marketing strategy. So if you repeat some of these, that's okay under each of your categories because people might find you under different categories. So if you offer the same sort of service, that's okay. You're just basically describing your services, okay? And then I want to point out that if you scroll down a little bit on this options page, you're going to see the option to add another business category. So as you're going through, you've been filling this out. If you decide, oh, you know, I really think that the specific service I want to offer really would fit under another category. Then you would go ahead and just simply scroll down here and add another business category and this will become your work area. Now before we move on, this is a very important tip. Remember how we did all that keyword research? Remember how we looked at the keywords based on the types of things that people are looking for for your type of industry. For services based on volume. Are you going to pick this service or this service? Are you going to word it like this or like this? When we're discovering that with keywords, yes. It's to know the keywords that we want to use for Google Ranking, but it's more important to use those words for customers. I just want to point out that when you're doing this, this is a super important area. Because you're basically, you are letting Google know what you do based on your main categories and the services that you're saying that you offer within those categories. Google can then do the match, but those keywords that you found aren't actually going to help you rank here. If you're putting together, in this area, your service descriptions, for example, don't stuff it with those keywords because it's not going to help. Just do it for that customer that's going to find you. Again, if you're offering like let's say you offer Excel, you help people learn how to do Excel. Are you going to say you teach Excel or are you going to say learn Excel or are you going to say Excel? Microsoft Excel Services. How are you going to award that? That's going to get you the most volume. Well, that's from your keyword research. So if you discovered that Excel services is got thousands and thousands of people looking for that, it means that there's a pain point people, that's what they're looking for when they need help with learning how to do Microsoft Excel. They look and it's not, By the way, I'm just using an example. Then when you're typing out your service description, you're going to use the word Excel services. Let me now show you how to add in more information about your service because adding in more information about the services you offer, attracting more people to those services. These are the things that are sending that algorithm and Google information that people like what you're talking about and that they're clicking And choosing your business, to be honest, not only do most businesses not even know how to access this area, especially with all these changes that Google just made. You guys are right in The advanced thing is that businesses, even if they know where this is and what to do and even some of you might choose not to do it and please don't be that person. Because just think of all your competitors if only 1% or 5% are actually taking time because it does take time as you can tell. But if that few are taking the time to do this, well, if you're the business that decides to take the time to highlight these services that you want to offer under your categories. And not only that, or make it easier for people by describing those services in more detail, adding in your price ranges, giving people those extra details. And therefore, people are clicking on your business to find out more and sending you e mails or sending you text messages or calling your business based on this, those are the triggers that are going to make a difference. So even though your key words within that won't make a Google ranking difference, the result of what you get from people clicking on it, that's what's going to make the ranking difference for your business profile. So you definitely want to take time to do this next step. So let me just show you how, remember how I said online course creation is right now, the main service option that I want to let people know that I do and where I want to get business from. Under online Course Creation, I'm going to go ahead and click on that. Okay, so here's my service name. Online Course Creation. With price, I could put free fixed price or from price. So if I want to offer a price range, because especially with online course creation, the price of my service is really going to range depending on where people are. Well, depend on the services they want. Because I don't know if you've tried to develop an online course, but there's 1 million different steps that go along with that. So I'm going to just say from because there's not much within it that I could do for less than, let's say I'm just going to put 500 for now. And then people know realistically what their minimum put down price should be for the specific service service. And then for service description, you absolutely again, want to fill this out with those trending keywords because then you know that those are the words that people are using and people want to know. Now this is what I've come up with. To start, I'm going to tweak it and add some trending keywords to it based on services that people want help with the most. But put down online course creation services, just a brief description. Everything from course creation and development to marketing funnels and advertising. Whether you are stuck on what your course topic should be or want full course development and sales, we've got you covered. Please contact for customized quotation. Basically, there's my call to action right there. I'm adding in the keywords of the pain points of what they're looking for. I'm adding in the types of services that, you know, I prefer to do within this service. And also just kind of give them an idea of the type of people that I want to work with the most. And I'm still debating whether I want to offer services just to regular public people, or if I want to offer services just to other marketing agencies. And I would definitely reword this based on that. But as you can see, now I've got a starting price point. And the good thing about putting your price point is you're setting up realistic expectations for people who are looking at your profile. And a lot of people just love to price shop. So if your starting price point is 500 and someone else's starting price point is 200 to someone else's price point, $10,000 You know you're going to attract the right category because, I mean, there's no way they can mess this up. It's very clear that, you know, this is where I start. I won't even talk to people unless this is what's on the table type of thing. And the person that's putting that their starting price point at $10,000 it's a very different environment. And of course, their service description is definitely going to talk to those higher end elite people, businesses, corporations or whatever that can afford a starting price point at 10,000 and want a very different type of service based on that. Okay, So just make sure that your starting price point is competitive. It's all based on that research you've done. Look again at what your competitors are doing. Um, and adding those keywords just to attract the right people to it. And when you're done, all you're going to do is click on Save, And then you're going to go through, and you're going to do that for all of the main services that you offer so they're not left blank. And basically that is how you add services, service descriptions, and price points to Google, my business. So again, you guys are way ahead of the game, so you guys jump on it, get those service descriptions done, get your price points done. Get these selections out there before everybody else comes along in your competitive industry and discovers that they should also be doing this. So take your time. Put aside a few hours, make sure that this is done to the best of your ability. And monitor and check what happens, and we'll get into how to actually monitor your profile in an upcoming session. So I hope this was very, very helpful to you and I will see you in the next lesson where we're going to actually go ahead and start filling out all those other things within your profile. 13. Backend Setup & Configuration: Your Bus Info + Tips To Set You Apart: All right, welcome to part two of the back end of your business profile listing. What we're going to do now is flush everything out and fill it all in. Let's do a quick recap. You've learned about your fabulous keywords. You've learned what your absolute best categories are. You have filled out an amazing stellar description. You have also filled out your services and service descriptions as well. What's left? Well, we're going to add in some details. Let's go ahead and let's get started Before we get into that, as always, I'm going to give you some very important tips to keep in mind that are going to help you rank better. The first tip I'm going to give you is I want you to be active on your account. Just because you're doing this work once doesn't mean that you're going to do the work and then set it and forget it. You're going to come back and you're going to constantly update your information, update your hours, your service hours, update your products, update your services, whatever it takes. Because if you're keeping your profile updated, these are little signals to Google that you are an active business that cares about your customers and what they see. It's going to help you with your overall ranking. The other type I'm going to give you is I want you to fill out everything that is offered to you. If Google gives you an opportunity to fill out a spot, you're going to try your best to put something in that spot. Because again, the more detailed and full your profile is. Not only is it great for Google signals, but it's also fabulous for your customers. All you're going to do is come back to your profile again. You can get there by going to business.google.com Here are all your options. Basically, we're just going to go through all of your options and fill out anything that you haven't filled out yet. Start editing your profile. We've already went through the about section. The only parts of it that you need to fill out is opening date, your phone number, your website. The only thing I'll bring your attention to is this short name right here. I chose the short name. Fun with marketing recently. What's happened? This is the tail end of 2022, going on 2023. And the fabulous thing that's happened right now is Youtube has allowed people to use Youtube handles. My Youtube handle. I changed it to match this. My Youtube handle is fun with marketing. My Google, my business short name is fun with marketing. People could find me both ways. I'm really happy that I got those because I like to think I make marketing fun. Hopefully you agree. Okay, Just go ahead, pick your short name and fill out the rest of your details. What you're going to do is just keep scrolling down. And then you come to location and area, it says no location, deliveries and home services only. That's basically just based because I said that I only offer services outside of my location. If you're a store front. This area is going to be different from you because you're going to Google know that you offer services at your place of business. These are the service areas that I chose, which are around Toronto. Just areas that I wouldn't mind driving to. Google tries to be really helpful. We'll offer suggestions, so have a look at this. If you click on Edit under the Areas, see how it says suggested service areas. I could go ahead and add any of these areas as well. I don't know where. I'll just click on the ones that I want. Some of these, I'm not quite sure where they are. I'll just leave those alone and then I'm going to click on Safe. Now, the other thing I want to add on about your locations that you, that you want to service is it's a really good idea to mention these locations in other areas on the Internet as well, or on Google. My business for example, if I service, let's say predominantly the Toronto area. Remember how we even broke that up? If I was at pizza business, I would service very specific areas of Toronto. If I was at pizza business and service those areas as you saw in my description, I specifically talked to those specific areas. But then what I would do if I was at pizza owner is on my website. On the leaning page, on my website. A leaning page is the page where you're going to take people. That could be your home page of your website, but it could also be a special promotion. Have for example on those pages. You also want to specify again, where is that promotion, what areas is it going to be open to? Who are you targeting area wise for that specific type of promotion? You're going to mention it there If you've got other online profiles, if you're doing social media whatever, and you target specific neighborhoods and areas, all great places to mention them. All right? But especially in throughout your Google my business descriptions, your service descriptions and on those website landing pages where you're taking people to. And that's mostly going to be your home page. So you're going to go ahead and mention those areas in there. Now we're going to get to business hours. Go ahead, just put in the business hours. Now, remember, people on your profile can contact you by e mail, by phone. We'll get into how they can contact you by messenger as well. Of course, you don't want all these interruptions if you're not going to be on, on your business. You know, I don't mind people contacting me on Saturdays so much, but maybe it'll come to a time where I do so I could go ahead and change these hours to whatever whenever I want to be available for customers. Okay. And you can go ahead and do the same. And again, all you need to do is click the edit tool. And I just wanted to point out that Google is also really helpful at prompting you for hours. So if there's a holiday coming up. So here for example, there's holiday hours, right? And this is when I say my business is closed, or when I said my business was closed. And what Google does is if there's a holiday coming up, what it'll do is send you an e mail and just say, don't forget to let your customers know if you're open doing this special thing that's coming up. So I just want to put it, this is online service hours. And hours up here are your business hours. So just so you know that there's two different areas because now you could, for example, be a storefront and be open on certain hours only. But you might be available 2047 if you have the right staff to be able to offer online customer service or online ordering services or something like that. So that's when those hours would be different. Now Google, let's also come up with this really handy section where you could add more hours based on services you offer as part of your business. So for example, if you're a restaurant and you offer takeout services and you have very specific hours when takeout is available, you would click on that, or let's say you do happy hour if you're a pub and you have happy hours every Thursday from 68 or whatever, then you click on happy hours and add in those hours. Okay, so you can go ahead and have a look at that in a little bit more detail. This section here under More is all about extra attributes is what Google calls attributes of your business. For me, I've identified as a woman owned business because that was one of the selections that came up. Okay. Crowd. I put down that I'm LGBTQ friendly. Anybody from anywhere can come and I will offer my best service to anyone. That one there, you basically just have to say yes or no. Are you are you not planning? I put down in my case, appointment is not required, but you can go ahead and click on planning and you can put down an appointment is required if it is for your business. All right? And then you've got service options. I put down that I offer online appointments. You could go ahead and just click there and you could say, yes, you do offer online appointments or not, and have more of a look at that as well. Basically, Google has nicely moved me through all of these different areas at the top and now I'm completely filled out my business information. I'm going to go ahead and shut that down. 14. Backend Setup & Configuration: Final Tips: There's an option for messages and basically you could turn on messages or not. And that'll show up on your profile if you'll accept messages from customers. Now, please please do not say you accept messages if you're not going to be available to check your messages because that's not a good customer experience. Make sure you've got the staff available or yourself available. That's going to get back to customers by messages. Just go ahead, you can click on that to have a look. Basically all it says is turn on chat and then you just chat if you're open and available for that. Next we come up to the option where you can add photos. You can add a photo from here or add a photo from here. Now the photos that you choose to use is also an area where you could really differentiate your business and really make it stand out. Here's some tips for you, all right? My first tip for you is do not use stock photos. I know sometimes you need to and I have as well, but as a temporary measure, but get creative. We all walk around with devices that take photos nowadays. Just get creative on the types of photos for your business. Just show how you really stand out. Getting creative is really big here, you just want to use your imagination. Just think of things that really represent your business and things that will tell a story about your business. You can use images. You can also use videos. Just make sure they represent what you do. If there are no words, could people look at that and understand what type of business you're in to get some ideas? Look at your competitor photos and see what they're using. And see the order they're putting their photos in. Or see if they're telling a story through their photos. Make sure that your photos are high quality. Also do nice close up images. Nice sharp close up images. Basically what you're doing is giving them a sense of you, you're giving them a sense of your company, You're giving a sense of what it would be like and what it would feel like to actually work with you. If you think along those lines, you're definitely going to be able to get creative. Definitely. You want to add an image of your logo. That's pretty straightforward. Now for business photos, I just want you to know that Google recommends 720 pixels by 720 pixels. That should be your dimensions to aim for. You also want to make sure that you add a cover image that best represents what you offer or do, because this is the image that people are going to see first when they come across your profile. I also really encourage you to add some videos. Your videos can be up to 30 seconds long. Videos are great because they're like showstoppers. It's like when you're scrolling through your Facebook feed and all of a sudden there's a video and it just for a second, just captures your eye because there's movement and it's something different and there's not a still photo. If you could add videos every so often, that's really going to help things to stand out when people are scrolling through your profile. Now, for those of you that are thinking, oh, I'm so in love with my stock photos, I don't want to take my own photos. Well, I'm going to help you get over that. I'm going to give you quite a few ideas to go ahead and get you started on the type of photos that you can take and add to your profile. If you do trade shows, they are amazing places to take pictures of what you do. Because usually when you're a trade show you have a banner. You're dressed up, hopefully in business gear, you are displaying on your table, all the different things that you offer. If you can get someone to take a picture of you standing behind your trade show booth that is Prime. I've actually got one of those images, actually, I use that as a banner image on my own profile. If you're on stage and you're speaking or you're teaching a group of people, get those pictures up on your Google My business profile. Definitely going to help you stand out. Absolutely. You want to take product images, you want to take food images if you're in the food industry. Also take images behind the scenes, sneak peek types, things. Or your staff at work as well, just mix it up. It's not always about you. If you've got contractors or staff, make it about them as well. If you're not onstage, take a picture of yourself teaching something on a whiteboard. Draw out a few points, point to it as if you're teaching. And get someone to take a picture of that for you. Or just go ahead and set the timer on your phone and take a picture of yourself. If you're doing a video shot or a photo shoot, get someone to take a picture of the entire scene of that happening. If you're in the media, take a picture of that. If there's lineups to get into your store or an event you're hosting, absolutely. Take pictures of that. You want to take pictures of the neighborhood that you're representing. Because again, it's all about local search, right? If you're in a neighborhood, people are going to recognize or there's things in your community that really stand out. Like if you're in Toronto, if you're near the Scene Tower, right, people recognize these things, take pictures of that. Take pictures of your store front, or take pictures from the view you have from your office, or your home office view or whatever, stuff like that. Take pictures of yourself volunteering in my profile, I have a picture of me and I was doing a fundraiser to help save Elephants in Africa. I got a picture of myself doing that. Also take a picture of happy customer customers after they received a service, or even customers as they're receiving a service. If you're coaching someone, someone take a picture of that stage it. Pretend you're coaching someone. If you are a dentist and you're giving some teeth across. And take a picture of that, make sure it's a happy looking picture though. This is what you want to do and this is how you get creative. Go ahead, put those creative hats on, and get some great pictures on your profile. This is for your analytics I'm just printing out now and we'll go over it in upcoming lesson in a little bit more detail. But this is where you go to check your analytics. And basically what your analytics is is basically your performance and how is your profile performing. And you can get all kinds of very helpful information through that. If you want to advertise with Google, you just simply go there because they like to make that nice and easy, of course. Okay, next is products. We're going to come back to that in just a second because I really want to spend some time on that. Okay, edit services, we've already covered in the last lesson, so you're already a pro on that booking services, so let's go ahead and click on that. Area is fabulous. Thank you Google for offering it because basically booking means that somebody wants to book in and have a meeting or a conversation with you. All you're going to do is add in page two. Let's say you have a calendar like line, I'm probably saying that wrong, but line or any of those online calendars, If you have one of those or if your contact page shows people how to book in with you, you have a form that people could book in with, then this is exactly where you're going to fill that out since we're here. Again, if you want to edit, you just click on the edit key. And I'm going to go ahead and change that because I've got an online booking calendar now and I want people to book in my book and calendar because it's very specific for when they can book and what the services that they're going to get when they book in with me. So I'm going to go ahead and change that. If you have like two links or three links or something to different book and calendars, you can go ahead and add them in here with this calls. All it is is Google has given you a feature that allows you to help track calls that you got off of your online Google My business profile. And this is an area I got to say, I'm super happy with some of the changes that Google just made and that Q and is now here because it used to be available just on mobile, You Google my business mobile option questions and answers is very effective. You definitely want to use the way I've always used it for my clients is, I would say to my client, what's a service that people don't know, you offer, that you want to offer, or that's a profit maker for you. For example, I was working with a dentist and the dentist said, well, cosmetic dentistry, a lot of people don't know we offer that or don't ask for that service and it does make us a lot of extra profit. And I said, great, I'm going to go ahead and ask the question. What I did is I typed in the question, and I basically said, does your dental fas offer cosmetic dentistry? And what types of cosmetic dentistry can you do? Then I told the dentist to go answer the question, which he did. Now people reading the questions and answers know that it's a service that they offer. And he's promoting it in a non promotional way because all he's doing is simply answering a question that someone in the community had asked. You are absolutely going to use this feature, so you're going to click on Q and A. No questions are currently available. Bad me. So what I'm going to do, there's no rules about you asking your own question, but it looks better if somebody else asked a question. So I'm not perfect. I'm sorry. I want you guys to use this feature even though I am not. But on my client profiles, they all are. So as you guys know, if you're a service based business, sometimes you don't give yourself the best service that you can for yourself. But you always give your best service to your clients right here, if you guys are watching those and you guys want to ask me a question, I'd really appreciate it. Now what's really going to be helpful when you're doing this is if people who ask questions of you are asking questions that have those keywords we talked about or those trending words we talked about, that's going to be helpful. Again, I want to or any services you want to offer. Again, if I like the content services, maybe people don't know wh I offer that. So I would say to somebody I know that's interested. Like, hey, are you interested in knowing if I offer content services? Or if somebody asked me that question anyway, or phoned me and said, you know, do you offer this type of service up? That's a great question. Do you mind asking it On my Google, my business profile, And then I would send them in the link and then they could go ahead and ask the question. And then I would go in. As soon as you see those questions you go in, you answer them immediately. Because that again, is a ranking signal when you get back to people right away. And it shows activity on your account. So you can answer it. I remember this is a really good highlight feature for your business as well, so you're going to definitely use it. Okay. Just want to point out as well, if you click this, you get more options. Oops, If you're looking at those last two options, you see here and you're not wondering how I got it, it's just because I click this little arrow thing Here, there you go. Okay, so now I want to point out that you could also add an update. And we're going to come up to this in a little bit more detail in an upcoming lesson. But updates are where you could add some new information about your company if you want to highlight it. If you want to add a promotion, a new promotion, I'll just quickly show you. Or if you want an offer, or if you have an event coming up. And this is what I love about Google, my business in which always shocked me that more people aren't using it because basically you're advertising for free on Google. I don't know what else to say, Just if you can advertise, especially event if you guys are like coaches or authors or anything like that, you know that there are very few places you could advertise your event for free. Here is one of them. Absolutely. You want to be using this, okay? And basically this is the button on how you can get a link to ask people to give you reviews. And we're going to go over reviews and the importance of reviews and how to get people to leave you review in an upcoming lesson. So we're going to leave that for now. Okay, and then when you come down here, you're going to get a few more options. Some of them are duplicate to what's up here, but things like get a custom e mail that's different. Um, if you want a quick place to create an offer, you could do that through here instead of going through your ad update. Okay, getting reviews, some of them are just duplicates, don't worry about that. But you could just browse through this and make sure that there is nothing on here that you don't want to miss. Now what I want to spend a little bit more time on is on how to actually add a product and what types of products you should add. We're going to cover that in the next lesson. 15. Creating Google Business Products: I love lessons. I can teach you how to make money. And this is one of them because we're gearing up to add products that people can actually buy. In this lesson, you can learn about the types of products or services you can add under Products, Learn where products appear, and watch as I go ahead and create my own product for sale. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing to note is that with products, you can add physical products, virtual items such as online courses or software, or actually offer your services as a product. If you're thinking that this lesson doesn't apply to you, it absolutely does. Please go ahead and watch how you could take advantage in order to edit or add a product. You're going to click over here where it says Edit Products. Or you can scroll down here and you're going to click on the ad key under your product section. No worries. No one else will be able to see this ad option or space. Now perhaps you don't actually see a product option. Don't panic, it could be because of the category you chose. If you chose a different category and don't see a product option, you might have an alternative option available by Google. What you could do if you don't see anything that's suitable or anything that's like the product option, you could try changing your category if it's suitable for you, see if you could add products, then make that call. Do you want to change the category to be able to add the products or not? But like I said, you might have an alternative option, especially if you're like a restaurant or even the retail business. You might have something else that will fulfill the same need. If you're a restaurant, maybe you see something that has to do with the menu options that you can add. Same thing as a product. You can go ahead and use that instead, if that's the best category for you first. Before we move on, I just want to let you know that your products are only available on certain places. These are the three I know of so far, and hopefully this will change as time goes on. Right now, if you do a Google search on your desktop computer for the business name and or business name plus the city that business is in, You're going to be able to see the products option on their profile. If you do a Google map search on your mobile device and search for the business or find the business on maps, you can scroll down the listing and you'll see products option. Or you might see something that says something like see what's in store, but it's all the products option. Also, if you do search on your mobile device for the business name, you'll be able to scroll down and you'll see Products Button option. You might not automatically see the products appear, but you'll definitely be able to see a category button for products. So let's go ahead and see what this looks like on my profile. So if you're a user and typed in my business name and found me on Google from the left, this is what you'll be able to see. So you'll be able to see my information and then you'll be able to see my products right. Now, I'm going to add a third product with you and it'll appear right actually first. That's important to note. Two, when you add a product, the last product you added will appear first on your products list. It's a good thing to note because it means that when you're adding your products, your most important product that you really want people to see first should be the last one you add. All right, that's where your product section goes. I just want to also just scroll down a bit so you can have a look at where your post section goes. As you tell if people find you through Google searching and they see your profile come up like this, this really, really stands out. And the other part of it that really stands out is I'll show you. But when you're creating a product, you could put the product under a category and then your category show up as well. Let me just show you this as an example in another business. So let's do a business we're all probably familiar with. So let's do Walmart. I did type in Walmart and the city I'm currently in. Okay. Let's have a look at what Walmart did. Here's their review section. Here's their ad they're running. And you scroll down and scroll down. Here's their product section to look how beautiful that is, because you could actually just start shopping just straight from their product. I wanted to give you an example of what an active product section looks like for a business so you can go ahead and get inspired, right? So, of course, I would definitely encourage you to look up your competitor and see what they're doing in their product section. So let's just, let's just do one more. So let's just say I do Home Depot in Burlington, and let's see what Home Depot did. So Home Depot, right? Same sort of thing. Here are the products, isn't that beautiful, And here are those categories I was talking about every time they're writing a product, they're creating different categories for the products to go under. So people could also quickly shop for products based by category and look how easy that makes it for me as a customer. So if I'm looking specifically for lawn and garden and I want to get my lawn set up. I would just go ahead and click that category, and the products under that category would appear. For me, it's almost like a free catalog that Google is allowing you to do. And like I said, it doesn't have to just do with products. You could add your services here like I did. And again, I want to point out that this will show up if people type in your business name and the city you're in or sometimes just your business name. If you don't have multiple locations, they just type in your business name. They'll be able to get this listing and they'll be able to look at the products you added. Very, very important to note, as you know, most people are going to be doing that search on mobile. Again, if they're doing a category search for your type of business and they come across your business and they hit that on mobile, you're going to get this beautiful outline. If you have your Google Maps set up and if you have your product section set up, they're going to be able to see your outline, they'll be able to see your description. And they'll be able to have that product button that they can click on and discover exactly what kind of products you have. Definitely worth the time to go ahead and get your product section up. And as I said, as time goes on, Google will hopefully show the products option available on desktop as well. But everyone does map search on their mobile device and searches on their mobile for the most part. So as long as you appear great on mobile with your products, definitely worth the time to go ahead and do it now. Because as you just learn, products is this beautiful dominant area on your Google my business profile. And because of that look, always I have some really important tips for you to get some extra business. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to use this section for your absolute bass top products that you want to sell. Makes sense, right? You want people to have a look and go ahead and click and just make that purchase or inquiry or whatever, just realize that a glance the scope of different types of products that you can offer. Okay, second thing I want you to know, as I already mentioned, but I'm going to mention again, list your most important products that you want people to buy last, because the last ones you add are going to appear first on your profile page. As always, remember when you add something doesn't mean that you're going to stick to it forever. Because you can go a delete, you could add new things, and this is an area you absolutely want to keep updated. The other thing I want you to know is Google, for the most part, don't really have any over promotion rules. And because they don't have too many rules yet, means we'll take advantage. So there's not going to be any harm in adding your product and then also adding a service description for the exact same thing. Because the chances of somebody seeing both are going to be very slim. And even if they do, that's okay. Hopefully it's something they're very interested in. But for the most part, people are going to see one or the other. You may as well just take advantage and just put them in both places. We covered how to do service descriptions in part one of the back end of your profile, so you could go back and review that lesson if needed. But all I'm saying is put them in both places, get that extra promotional boost. The one thing, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but the one thing I want to mention about your service descriptions is that your service descriptions that you did won't appear prominently on your profile. Unless people do a very specific search for that service, then it may or may not appear. But if it does appear, it'll be a highlighted service section in your profile. Because Google is trying to be helpful and match what people are searching for to what you've indicated that you're listing. Definitely still worth doing the time to fill it out. And like I said, fill it out there and fill it out here as well. As you can see what I love about the product section, it's almost like creating a mini ad. You get to put in a visual, you get to put it in a description, you get to put in a call to action button. Definitely take advantage. This is like, this is incredible stuff guys. As free advertising on Google, when you're creating your product, here are some things that you need to know. One, your image size should be 1,200 by 900. Next, like anywhere you're posting anything about your business, you really should use an eye catching title headline. That's going to just show people exactly what they're going to get, exactly what their outcome is going to be when they've got it. You're going to use a high quality image here. Don't get blurry shots in there, because people will just scroll off. Also, don't be shy about what you want to promote. Put together special offers or special pricing promotions, or just something to get people in and get people starting to work with you. Also, as I mentioned before, this is an era you constantly want to keep updated. Especially if your product lines change or the seasons change, or your pricing changes, or you're offering special holiday promotions, anything like that. The final tip is Google gives you an opportunity to add a call to action for every product you list. You can skip that option, but do not go ahead, add that call to action for every single product. 16. Product Creation Demo: Now that you know how to create a product and all these wonderful tips around that, let's go ahead and see this in action. What you're going to do is either hit Edit Product. From there, you would just add a product that takes you to this exact space here. You could just hit this button. Save one step, you just click on Ad. And I'll take you to the section where you can add a product. The first thing you're going to do is give your product a name. I'm going to pretend I'm selling my virtual assistant marketing services. Then I'm going to select a category. Now if I haven't made a category before, then there's going to be nothing here and I'm going to have a chance to create one. These are two of the things that I had done before. I want to actually create a new category for this product category. I'm going to call it marketing services. Again, you can call it whatever you want. Just remember that to make it easy for your customers, you want to make sure that your categories are reflective of the different types of services they can get and that the products you create fit nicely under those categories. This section here is going to ask for a product price. So you could put price in, just don't add $1 sign, just add it indirectly. Or you could say show price range. So I'm going to show a price range and I'm going to put minimum price. Because my marketing VA services, we're starting at $60 an hour. I'm going to change that. I'm actually changing this whole thing. The minimum people could hire me for is one day. Anybody else out there who does any type of service based business, maybe you want to try that as well because there's not a lot you could do in only an hour. What I believe in is that you should only offer services that are going to showcase your best work and your ability and make a difference in that person's life or business, I should say. But I mean, obviously, the more hours you work on something, the better impact you're going to have on that customer. So why would you want to do anything that doesn't have a big impact? I've done hourly services for customers and you're just basically band dating or fixing things and it's not helping the customer lot and that's definitely not reflecting well on you and the services you're able to offer. I hope that piece of advice helps a lot of you guys who are listening to it, but this is definitely the way I'm trending Now, I'm no longer offering these per hour services is just not benefiting me on any level. The final for what I'm showcasing you guys. If I'm offering hourly services, my minimum price is going to be $60 an hour. That's what sort maximum price I'm not going to put because there's no maximum price. Because they could hire me for as many hours as they want. Now for product description, this is what I came up with. Do you need marketing help? Thus, we help through digital and online marketing services in a wide range of categories. It's like having your own marketing team for a day, week or more. Do you need help getting started with an online chorus? Do you need a funnel or lead generation? Do you want help improving your SEO so you can get more organic traffic? Whatever the online marketing mission, we're up for the challenge. That's what I came up with. If you guys want to model some of that wording, oh, by all means, please do anything that will help you guys get some business and Okay, just don't copy it for word of course, because we don't want duplicate copy out there ever on anything. But if there's something in there that you like the way it's worded, please please go ahead and model it for your own business. Now, this is your call to Action button. Absolutely. You're going to pick a Call to Action button and you're going to take it back to that website page that you want to take them to. These are your options. Order online by Learn More, get offer. I know just from all of Facebook ads that I've ever done, that the Learn More option almost always converts higher than anything else. Because I think it's because it's like safe. Because people are like, oh, I want to know more about that. They're not ready to buy. I think some people are just scared that if they hit anything that says buy, it's going to somehow automatically make a purchase for them. Obviously they don't want that. People are going to need a little bit more information usually before they make a buying decision. I think learn more, people are just more comfortable with that. Again, with all my years of advertising experience, that's what I found anyway. It's always the safe option to do. Now in this case, because I'm offering an hourly service, I could also just go with order online. Because I don't, again, I'm not really going to offer marketing per hour anymore. But if even if I do per hour VA marketing services, I can only handle so many clients because it's just me and some of my contractors. I'm not interested in getting a lot of business off this and I'm not going to heavily promote it. I might actually go with order online because it's going to weed out the people who just want more information just for the heck of it, so they can price compare or whatever. And I'm going to go with people that are ready to order online. I'll get less people, but I'll get more serious people if I do that, obviously if I pick by, I'll get even more serious people because they're like, oh, yes, please, just Tell me, give me the thing so I could just buy it, which is really great too. So I'm just going to put an order online for that. So the link for your button, basically what you want to do for the link is take them to the landing page. This is not where you want to take them to your home page and then have them figure out where they need to go to get that product that you just sold them on. Right. You just take them directly to the information they need? Absolutely. If you're creating an actual product, unless you're a retailer and it's just one of the many category products, you could take them to that category page, maybe something like that. But for anybody offering a service based business, if you're taking them to a very specific packaged product, make sure you have a very specific landing page for that. So in this case, I'm going to take them to a landing page that I created that just talks about VA services, lets them know exactly the types of services that they can order. And it actually has a full checko area right on the page. So let me just go get that. Okay. So there's the link for my specific landing page that I want people to go to now. We've only got one thing left to do and that's selecting a photo. So what I did is I created my photo in Canva. If you guys haven't heard of Canva, I'm sure you have Canva. Anyway, from what I've seen, I've tried many tools to develop graphics. Canva by far is the simplest and the best, and everything's right in there. Love, love, love, Canva. And this is what I made in Canva. Okay. There's the image I created. It has my starting price. It has my product description with the key words I found that people are looking for. It has a very specific landing page, a very specific call to action, pretty much. Oh, and I gave it a really good category. People again, who see my categories when they look at my profile can go ahead and just click on the category. And then ideally, what I want to do is offer different types of services that people could purchase as products under my various categories. And that's it. So all that's have to do is publish. Oh, look at that. I actually do have to enter a maximum price. But for something like this, if I were still offering hourly services, you know, I definitely wouldn't want people to hire me for too long for hourly services. Because the reason I did hourly services is so I could get different types of marketing work and just help me keep up to date and having fun with different types of marketing challenges. So I'm just going to put in a price as if they hired me at that rate I was doing, when I did hourly services. If they were hiring me per day, maybe $480 for an hour day. Now, let's see if we could publish there. Your product is being added. It could take up to 30 minutes. I'm like only 30 minutes. That's okay. It's going to be up this same day. I'm very happy about it if I want to see my products or if I'm inspired, I want to keep going. I could add my next product too and just keep going. So if I click on See My Products, there we go. So remember I said the last thing I enter is the first thing that people see. So that's how it looks and there's my price range. Beautiful, right? And as I want to mention to all you online course creators out there, you could definitely add. I got to change that image, so just ignore it. But, you know, add your online courses. Add your online courses, guys, This is a fabulous spot to add your online courses. And not only that, just get creative. It doesn't matter what type of business you have. You can absolutely package up a product to put under this section. So you guys, I definitely want you guys to get creative. I definitely want you guys to put something amazing together. I want you guys to make some sales, and I want you guys to tell me about the sales you make. I want you guys to come back, leave me some comments and brag about any types of sales you got off of doing this, okay? Because I really, really want to know. So that's it. So that's your whole lesson on product. It's a wrap. And now as exciting as this was, and I want to get you all pumped, the next lesson is going to be on how to create posts and how you can also use your posts as mini ads in a prominent location to grab people's attention. All right, so meet me in the next lesson. 17. Mastering the Art of Google Business Posts: In this lesson, we're going to cover posts with Google Post. The good thing about it is you could be a little bit more promotional. Now, on social media posts, as we know, it's bad to be overly promotional. People don't like that. People want you to be more social. But Google business is the place to be promotional. Because remember when people go to Google Maps, that's because they're actively looking for service. This I always like to think of as a free Google ad and who doesn't like that? Because I've done Google ads and they can be super, super expensive. If you can get Google showing and promoting your business for no charge to you, take advantage. Like I am shocked, shocked by the amount of businesses that are using this. And I know a lot of people just don't know how. But this is like, honestly, if I could choose doing this over doing social media, you know, I'd almost link to this because people do look at these things and it's fabulous way to promote either your service, your products, even if you have an upcoming event. Listen guys, if you guys are coaches or speakers or anything like that and you've got events coming up, this is your tool, this is one of the places that you could advertise your event for free, no charge. So absolutely you want to get on that. So let's have some fun with this and find out how to do that. Okay, so for this going back into business.google.com and for this account, I opened up one of my client accounts. So I just want to show you what we've been doing for his post. This client here is an accountant. Well, he's a bookkeeper with some accounting credentials. And basically, so his whole marketing premises, he could offer a lot of accounting services but at a fraction of the cost. So sometimes I try to play on that when I do his post. Now here is a post example. So this one I just did, oh, look at, that was just posted or 15 hours ago. So what I do is I just remind people about what he does, answers, any questions they might have. And then always a call to action. If they press call now from their cell phones, it will actually dial. Like how amazing is that? Right? The other thing I always do, and which is always a very good practice, is within your words, you want to, again, add your location keywords. I always put something that's like I offer services in these proximities or sometimes I just pick wine because I don't want overdo anything, right? Google doesn't like it when you overdo anything, but this is a really good area to put in those services that you want to stand out and dominate business for pretty much. And this is where you have put that, Okay, so what we do is once a week as I'm going in and I'm just changing up the words and the services I'm promoting and then I'm looking at how many people are viewing it. Now, I know you're probably saying, well, the views aren't very high. And it's true because this client literally, I'm only posting stuff for him on Google, my business, which is great and as a start and you guys should be doing it. But remember I said it's also really important to keep up SCO best practices and do other things that Google is going to recognize and pretty much verify that you're a prominent relevant business. And some of the ways you need to do this by your website. And unfortunately this client is not spending any time on his website at all. Is not exceptionally attractive or user friendly website. He's not doing any SEO at all, so there's no links coming into his site. He's not putting out content, he's not doing any social media activities at all. Google is still showing him, just doing polls. He's literally, I'll show you the insights, I'll show you the insight. So he's getting visitors to his website and he's also getting people directly calling him and press and call now for literally, oh, the other thing with this post too, this client here, I'm not doing it weekly, I'm doing it biweekly on every two weeks. So you can imagine, even if he's getting some results off only doing posts every two weeks. Okay. Can you imagine if he did post once a week? And can you imagine if he did all those other things and was working on getting in more reviews and was working on getting in more SEO. Can you imagine how much better this could be, Right? The other thing, remember I said Google isn't really like stock photos. I've been using stock photos on these haven't yet got in trouble. But if you have, I mean, people want to see, you want to see your store. I mean, we're very limited on what we could do with bookkeeping. But at least with the stock photos, try to get them to look to stock photo. Wish I guess would be a good rule to follow. And just make sure they're nice and prominent, and attractive. Okay, that in HL is how to do a post. Let's look at how to create one. Essentially, I already posted this week. Essentially, Google will allow you to do one post every seven days. I can't have two posts going, so I can't do another post. So I don't have an option to create a post right now. But all you would do is click on the create post option and then you would just add. Upload your image, type in your words, and add a call to action button. If you want people to call you directly, go ahead and add call now. Or you could get them to e mail you, or you could get them to visit a URL. If you want like, let's say you were doing it, people would visit an online course, you have, then you would call, the auction would be like, I have this amazing online course, it's on promotion right now. For a special deal, go check it out. And of course you'd make it sound better than that just off the top of my head. And then you would add the URL and people could click and they would be taken right to the URL. So pretty easy stuff now this is where it gets really cool, is you can add an event. You just click Add an Event, and you can put your event title, your event start and end date details about your event. And put in a nice attractive event photo, like, isn't that completely amazing? Let's say you're doing offer, Black Friday is coming up. So let's say that you offer title. I would say something like Black Friday, 50% off sale, or just something to get people's attention. One day only sale, put in the start date, in the end date, which would be one day. And then you would put in a nice attractive photo here that represents what you're selling and what you're offering at this blowout sale. If you want to add in some of your products, then you would go here and again, you would start off with a picture. It's worth investing the time to get really high quality pictures of you in your business, you interacting with customers of your different products or things that represent your products. And of course, if you sell physical products, that's so much easier for you. The other good thing is, let's say you're a speaker or another figure. Another good thing to do is, if you can do it, is when you're on stage, get those pictures. Because pictures of people onstage. No one's going to argue with you being an authority in your industry if they see you up onstage. Just really good to add those pictures and videos in here. Well, actually, pictures, videos in your Google My business. Okay. That basically in a nutshell is how you do a post on Google My business. Everybody get on it. Everybody get your posts out there. Let me just show you just very quickly on maps, I just want to show you where your posts appear. Do this yourself, because this is absolutely insane. Remember I said, posting is almost like a free advertisement you get from Google. Okay. Just play around, Google Maps, enter your competitor, enter your niche, and you'll be super surprised how few people are actually posting. Okay. So here again was a client we were just looking at. Here Ras is from the owner and then this is basically the post we just did and there's the Call now button, so people could click on that and boom they call him. How sweet is that, right? Nice, easy, Z. So people would just click on it, to open it, read the information, and click Call now. Love it. Love it again. You should definitely use this and you will use it, because now I'm sure that you have got some ideas. And you could see hopefully, the possibilities of what you can do to promote your own business on Google. My business definitely have a ton of fun with that. Remember every seven days I literally grab for my clients. Anyway, I grab a calendar and literally I write, do a GMB, Google my business post. And then seven days later I go and I write it again. And I write it so every Friday or every Monday or whatever. It turns out being you're not going to forget to add your brand new post dot. I mean, Google is given the opportunity to leave it live for seven days. Take advantage and go do it. So you guys have some fun with that. And let's move on to the next lesson. 18. Let's Get Some Reviews!: Finally we're going to end with looking at reviews. Because reviews is so, so important. Just think about it like when you are trying somebody out for the first time or business out for the first time, or a product for the first time, Almost everybody will go to reviews. Right. I like to sort my review. I look at how many five server reviews they are and then I'll look at the worst review and see what that person said. But regardless, people love reading reviews before they make that purchase decision. Especially if they'll be spending a little bit of money or quite a bit of money in order to get that product to serve us is very critically important. Now to make it easy to remind you to ask for reviews because I've been at fault at that as well. Where sometimes you just forget, you're so caught up in the moment of doing a great job for a client and you forget to ask them for a review. Now what I do is I make a part of my offboarding process. I don't know if offboarding process is an actual technical term for it, but basically if you don't have an offboarding process, create an offboarding process. Offboarding process could include, obviously, you should be thanking that person for working with you, be you handing your things back to them or their accounts back to them, getting them to do their sign offs. Then as part of the off boarding process, you're just going to e mail them and just ask if you're happy with our services. Could you please consider leaving us a review? That's simple and sometimes that's all it takes. Now what you also definitely want to do is add a link to where they can leave or review for you. The reason you want to add a link is because anytime you ask somebody to take an action for you, it is going to be so much more likely that they'll actually do it. If you make it easy for them, you're going to go ahead and give them a link on how to leave your review. Let me just show you what that looks like. All you're going to do is come over here to your profile options. Click that down arrow to bring up some more options. And see where it says Ask for Reviews. Go ahead and click that. Then you're going to come over here and it gives you your direct review link. You're going to click to copy. Let me just show you what happens when people add that link. You're going to just open a new tab, paste that link in, and see how it automatically pops up with that review box. That literally makes it so super simple for people to leave your reviews, then they can go ahead, click your five star review, and then they're going to share some information about what they liked and feedback. Then as a plus, maybe they'll add some photos as well. If you did something for them that they could showcase, that would be a bonus. All right, and then you're going to just click on Post, or they'll just click on post. There you have it. That's it. That's how easy it can be to share an area where people can leave your reviews. One thing I want you to know that's really, really important is against Google's policies. Offer an incentive in order for somebody to leave you review. That would look like, for example, if you're like, hey, leave me a review and you get 10% off, or promise to leave me a review of your services and I'll give you this free bonus. You're not actually allowed to do anything like that. Once again, it's just that simple request. Just if you love what I did, leave me a review. That way you're not breaking any of Google's policies. And if people love your services, they'll genuinely want to leave your review. The other tip I want to give you is that if you know for sure someone's going to leave your review, it's a really good idea to prompt them on how to leave it for you. By that, I get much reviews. If I say to the person in your review, could you please add the type of service that you received? Could also people know how that's either changed your life or it's changed your business or gotten a result. If they could put an exact number to that, it raised my business profits by 42% or whatever. Things like that look amazing on reviews. Just think about it when you're reading reviews and someone's like, yeah, great person, great product, fantastic, loved it all. And Moji, Moji, whatever you're like, okay, may or may not be spam, trust it, maybe not. But if someone left to review and she was like, I use this person for this, and this is exactly the service, like God is exactly what I got out of it. Just think about how much more powerful that is. If you know what someone's leaving your review, just make sure you give them that prompt ahead of time. Sometimes I've been known because it works again to make things easy for people. Sometimes what I've done in the past is I've taken another review and would say to the person if I knew they were going to leave a reviews like, oh, maybe this will help you with some of the wording you want to use in your own review. Here's just a little bit of information on what you might want to include in your review. The people, they'll get it done fast, easier. You make it. I've gotten reviews back immediately as soon as people have received them, when I've just helped them out with those sorts of props. Okay, you don't want to write it for them, Obviously, that's probably against Google policies too, even though I don't think they officially state that. But you definitely want to make it easy for them. For those of you wondering, the answer is yes. Yes, for sure, positive reviews will absolutely help with your Google rankings. Okay. Here are just a few other ways that you can get reviews. You can send a thank you card or an e mail to your customer with the review request. Or likewise, you could send text messages or a messenger message as long as you include that link and make it easy for them and then click and leave your review. You could also in your follow up meeting or your follow up call, if you're not doing follow ups, follow ups are really, really powerful what you want to do. Here's another little trick. What you want to do when you call somebody to follow up with them is first of all, you sincerely want to know how they're doing. But you want to remind them how fabulous it was to work with you. Remind them of what you did, remind them of something they might have said. And just like I'm just following up, do you need any help? Do you need any extra assistance? Do you need any reminders of what we covered? Can I send you anything else? Here is a free resource for you, by the way. Whatever. Just keep it positive, keep it hyped up. And then when they're happy and they're excited and we're reminded of how fabulous you are, then you're going to be like, oh, by the way, could you please leave me a review? I'll send you the link right now, and then boom, send that link over to them. Okay, same thing as I mentioned. If you're delivering a presentation or training session or anything like that, ask people to leave a review, especially if they loved it. Other things you could do is if you have customers with storefront flower shops or restaurants, or clothing stores or whatever, you can recommend that they create a sign in on the sign, it basically just says, Love Our Service Today. Please consider leaving us Google review or condense that a little bit as a little too wordy for a sign, but you'd be amazed when people see that. They're like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. I should definitely leave a Google review here. And they'll leave a Google review. Okay. Oh, and I want to add that if you do do a sign, a really good thing is to add a QR code that links directly to your Google review. Because as I said, if you make it easier for people more likely they're going to take action. My final tip for you is to absolutely reply to all of your reviews. First of all, it's great customer service. Second of all, it looks really amazing for people looking to see how you treat others as a business. It shows professionalism, all kinds of fabulous stuff. Also, I know some of you might not agree, but I want you to all reply to bad reviews. Very important, especially to reply to bad reviews because first of all, again, it shows your professionalism. And a lot of times with bad reviews it's because of a misunderstanding or something that's an easy fix, especially if it was your fault or there's something you could have done better or whatever. Mention it. Just publicly respond and then publicly let them, that person know what you're going to do to remedy the situation. Because what they can do is then come back and they could change the review to a positive review and they could change it to a five star review. You can go from one star to a five star review if you take the right steps. Now the other thing I will mention in regards to that is because not everyone is nice in this world, sometimes maybe a competitor, maybe someone who's jealous, maybe someone who just likes to cause ruckus will go into your profile and it will leave a bad review for no reason at all. Or just again, because they just don't want you to do as well, whatever. What you want to do with those reviews is if you legitimately don't recognize that person as a client and they've said they worked with you, what you're going to do is flag it. It could take a while. Sometimes it does take a little bit of work because you have to explain yourself and everything, but you can Google will look into it every instance I've ever had of that happening to one of my clients. Every instance of that has always been cleared up. But until it's cleared up, that negative review, that's a false review or a bad review, illegitimate review or whatever, is going to be a profile. While it's there, you're still going to address it. And again, just be professional about it and just say thank you for taking time to leave this comment. However, we don't seem to have you as a customer in our records. Perhaps you got the wrong business or perhaps you want to. I don't just let them know that you caught them, but do it professionally nicely. The last thing you want to do is whatever, Don't do anything like that, okay? Keep it professional. Address it. Anybody reading your response and reading the negative review will be like, that's just probably somebody just causing a mess. It happens and that's okay. And most people will just blow it off. And just look at your five star reviews, which is the good news. And it is good that there is a way to flag it as well. Now on that, I know you guys are going to go out to get fabulous reviews. I know you're going to offer fabulous services. I know people are going to love you and make it known in the world that you're just a fabulous business to work with. 19. Google Business Boosters: Increase Your Local Visibility: In this lesson, what I'm going to do is give you, I'm actually going to cover three things in this lesson, because each of them are really quick. And these are just some additional tips that are really, really going to help you. Okay, for the first one, let's pretend we're doing a Google search here. Restaurants. Let's pretend we're looking for a restaurant in our area here again. Top three, right? And then you have this option to click for more places. Let's just go ahead and do that. What we're going to learn about is how to ask and answer questions on Google, my business. Remember I said if Google offers something, take advantage of it because it's going to help you overall. Well, this question and answer thing is not only just good for Google, but it's really good for you and it's really good for your customers. When I'm setting this up for my customers, what I usually do is find out what they want to promote and then we create a question on it. Yes, you can ask your own question and answer it yourself. I don't know if you should, but why not? I guess it would be better if you had a friend or family member, just somebody else with a different Google account to ask a question. If you can, but make it sound like a legit question. Do a question that people usually wonder about your space, again, about something you want to promote. For example, with my dentist. I asked him what he wanted to promote and he said, not a lot of people knew he did cosmetic dentistry. But of course, it's a service that makes him a lot of money. He wants to get it out there more. What I did is I just simply wanted to Google. And I asked that question, do you offer cosmetic surgery? And then I made him answer it. Basically when people are looking at that or they're looking for cosmetics, whatever, he's going to get bumped up in the search results for that service. People will also see it in his profile. Let's have a look. Rest are a lot of time all over Google, my business, so let's have a look at some restaurants to see how they took advantage of that. Let's start near the top. Let's look at this thing called Chugs this restaurant. And here, see the section here, so it's right near the top. And it's questions and answers. What is the Thursday special? And they answered it. That goes ahead and gives you another opportunity, like I said, to promote something. So what is a Thursday special? And they're like, well, Friday, Thursday is this Friday is fish and chips, whatever. They took the time to really give that a thorough response. So not only are they answered the question, but they're promoting their other specials, which is a smart thing to do. Because again, you can get a little bit more promotional on Google, my business, and Google allows you to, so why not? Right. Okay. So if you want to ask a question, you would just click on Ask a Question. And then I come over here and literally I would just type the question. And once it's typed, I click on Post. And then the question is publicly posted. Now this is another reason you should really stay on top of your Google my business account because anybody can ask a question. And the last thing you want is somebody who asked a question that is just kind of left hanging, or worse, one of your competitors ask a question because anybody can post a question and it's a question that won't be helpful to you. You know what I mean? So we just kind of want to be on top of it all the time and see what's coming in. All right. And that essentially in a nutshell is how to ask question. Now you may be living in an area where this feature is not yet available on desktop, If that's the case, that's okay. You probably still have it. Just go log into your Google my business on your mobile device. And then you should be able to have that option from your mobile device as well. Okay. So there's one thing I wanted to show you. Okay, so the other thing I wanted to show you this thing called Insight. So back on the left here, Insight is basically an overview of how well your Google My business is doing. Again, with this client account, we're only posting twice a month and not really doing too much else on his file. Like these are still the queries that are bringing people to his Google My business page. What you would use this for, obviously, is to make sure you're coming up for the right things. If you're not, then I would go back in and double check the categories you're listed under on your description and all of that wonderful stuff and the services you chose to promote. But it's also good to know just how people in general always search for you. Okay, That's pretty much what you would do with that. So this section here, how customers search for your business is always interesting. So the blue is discovery. And this is people who find your searching for a category of product or service. So you know, like with this client just from him being on Google my business and people searching for bookkeeper accountant, most the majority people are discovering him doing that. Which again, is very sweet and very telling. Okay, this one here where customers view your business on Google, listing is on map. People who go into maps because member of your in maps, you have a search tool. So that's one way people could find you. They could just type in accountant and Google will do its map thing, right, and find the local accountants. And this is listing on search. So I want to show you how powerful this is. This is within the last month. Again, we're not doing anything else with the client, he's not doing any other marketing activities. He literally, just once every two weeks I do a post and pop it up and Google my business. And that is pretty much the extent of it. And look at this, 67 people have found his listing on search pretty cool, right? And that's all he did. Search is Google Search. Just to make this more impactful, this is pretty much him appearing on the first page of Google without him doing any SEO or paying any money or doing anything else. 67 people within a month, his name appeared in the Google search, Google Organic. I'm just saying really blows my mind where people are doing this. Can you imagine his results again? If he was doing SEO on social media and all those wonderful things and posting once a week instead of once every two weeks. This is the actions people took. Two people this month visited the site. He got no calls this month. And that's okay. People are still going to his site, but like I said, there's no weather activity going on. You'll find that once you start reading your insights, with very little effort, oftentimes you can start getting people to contact you. If you want business, you definitely need to be all over this. Okay, Now there's one more thing I want to show you. Let's go back into maps. Okay, Let me again, let me just say, this time I want to find a local coffee place, type in Caffe. Always a good thing to put in, All my local coffee places come up and then what I'm going to do is do this, okay? Basically what happens is, let's say you guys have probably done this again if you've used maps, but let's say you're meeting a friend for coffee and you want to share the address, you click on Share This link here is the Maps link. That's one way. What you would do is copy the link and send it to your friend or whatever. When you start sharing links back to you. Google my business, okay? Google again gives you reward points for that. You're not really call reward points, but you get the idea right. So you get little points for doing that. What you would do is copy the link. And then you would go ahead and you would share it with somebody. You would look up your own business and the street address. Copy the link. And let's say you have a client meeting, you just say, here's my address and send them the Google link. Okay? So there's one link you could share. Then there's something called embedded map. Okay. Here with embedded map, you would copy the HTML code. Your Google Map should be on your first page, your home page of your website and any other website you have. And again, any other time you could share it because someone, Google is looking at your website, you again are getting rewards for promoting your location. And you're coming up higher on for local search, local SEO categories simply by sharing your maps address. Now this is one way to embed a map address. There's a more complicated way that we won't get into, but if you're interested in that, let me know. But this is kind of the simple way to do it. So we copy your eye frame and put it on your website. Now, Google has updated the way to do that. It may or may not let you, but this is the simple way. You literally are just copying that frame into the coding in your website. Or hiring a coder to go ahead and do it for you. And then you should have a beautiful map appear on your website, which is always helpful to the customer and again, helpful for you. Okay. And then the third way is just you want to share it again, and this time you could choose to share it on social media. And it just, it's the same link, but you're sharing in another type of way. So Google is getting other signals for things coming back to your Google Maps listing. And that is always a bonus. Okay, just some things to keep in mind altogether. Again, there were just some extra tips of things you want to do that's really going to help with your Google ranking and help you out beat your competitors on Google, my business. So go ahead, have some fun with that, and I will see you in the next lesson. 20. You Did It! Let's Celebrate Your Google Business Success!: Here, business owners. Thank you so much for having made it to the end of this course. Are you ready to start promoting your business on Google by now? You should have a pretty darn solid Google, my business page, that should start ranking Well, if it hasn't started ranking already, I know that these strategies really, really work and I'd love to hear how far you've moved up those Google listings. Please be sure to send me any questions you have and also definitely send me any comments about how this course has specifically helped your business. Thanks again for having joined me here and I wish you all a ton of success. 21. Your Next Steps For Local SEO Success: As a business owner, I know that you're working really hard to bring in local customers and to get your business at the top of local search results. So now you're probably wondering, besides my Google business profile, what else can I do to rank even higher and bringing even more local customers to my business. That step, my friend is by building local listings, otherwise known as building local citations. Local citation building is just one more key on your road to unlocking top ranking local SEO success. What exactly are citations? Think of citations like digital breadcrumbs, leading customers direct to your business. Every time your business name, address, and phone number appear online, that's a citation. When you get eyeballs from different directories that have your citations online, you could be pulling in multiple customers from various different places online. That's why I'm so excited to introduce you to Google citations and Local Listings Mastery. Supercharge your local search visibility and traffic like a pro. Now, I loaded a full events of secrets of how to build powerful citations the right way. You will learn to list your business online like a pro, including how to Prepare for citation building with expert tips, ways to find your existing listings, how to discover high value and high impact directories. I'm also going to give you some time saving techniques so you can build your citations in record time. But that's not all. I wanted to assure that you had everything you could possibly need to be successful when building your online visibility. That's why I've also included five full resources that will help you build and keep track of your citations, create outstanding and high converting descriptions, and also a full checklist, so you'll be able to order citation building services like a pro. So what are you waiting for? Get your business discovered by local customers. So this course really is your next key to local SEO success. So don't miss out on one of the top things you can do to further lead customers into your local business. So Go ahead, sign up, and I look forward to seeing you on the inside soon.