Transcripts
1. Google Business Profile - Class Overview: Hi, Google Business Profile is the new name for
Google, My Business. It's the way in which Google understands who
your business is, what you offer, and
therefore helps it recommend your business when the right person is
searching for you. It's designed really
for local businesses, which means someone with a physical presence
like a cafe or a shop. But it can also be a
service provider like a plumber or a dentist
that includes B to B services like H Vac engineers or IT services Google
Business Profile. It's free to use. It's quick to set up
and easy to optimize. If you want to
attract new customers and grow your business, you'd be crazy not to make the most of this free
tool from Google. Let me show you what
you're going to learn. We're going to learn about
the type of business that can most benefit from being on
Google business profile. We're going to take an in depth look at
how a good profile directly correlates
to a better position in the search results. I'll tell you what you need
to get started and also talk you through every stage
of the set up process. We'll take a look
at how to assess your competitors to see
what they're doing well, but also look for areas where
you can outperform them. We'll look at the
Google Three pack, what this is and why it's so important for
any local business. I'll also talk you through all the different stages of
optimizing your profile, including how to use AI to
do the copywriting for you. My name is Sharon Hayward. I'm a marketing consultant. And I do hope you'll
join me for this course.
2. Why Google Business Profile is important to your business: Hi again. Thanks for joining me. Before we get stuck into
actually updating your profile, I'm just going to
take a moment to show you what happens
with the information that you put in and how this goes on to
help your business. If you're serious
about attracting new customers and
growing your business, it's really vital that
you understand this. So as I mentioned in
the introduction, this tool from Google is
absolutely free always. There's no upfront costs, there's no subscription costs, there's no renewal costs
because it's free. Most of your competitors
are probably already on it, which means it really is essential for you to be on there too if you
want to compete. Now, did you know Google is by far the most dominant
search engine globally? Although, this is now going to take some time to
learn what to do to update your profile and
to update it going forward. I just want to
reassure you that this really is a good
use of your time. Over 80% of searches globally
are done through Google. The second highest
search engine is being, and that's at around
about 10% You can see the difference is huge. Optimizing anything
for your business, for Google, is
really worthwhile. It's actually interesting to
note that on mobile phones, Google is even
more dominant with well over 90% of search traffic. Which means, again, particularly if you're
a local business, then this is really,
really relevant. Because as people are
out and about using their mobile phone
looking for something, then this is really,
really appropriate. Again, as I mentioned
in the introduction, just a reminder that Google Business Profile is
about supporting local search. A local business is one that
has a physical presence. If your business
is purely online, maybe you offer CRM systems, or potentially you only
teach courses online, then Google Business Profile probably isn't
going to help you. But if you have a
physical business in an actual location, then Google Business Profile is essential just to be clear. It's also relevant if you
have multiple branches. If you perhaps have a
little chain of dentists, then this would be relevant
and you can actually bulk upload all the information
about all the dentists. Because they're all dentists, they will have a
lot of similarity. But you can also make it so that it's quite obvious what the
differences are between them. Maybe which branch offers cosmetic dentistry and
which one offers implants. It's really sophisticated
and really powerful. Now come to looking
at your information, Just bear in mind that Google, their entire objective
is about getting the best results for the
person who is searching. If someone actually goes on Google and finds what they want, then they're very likely to come back and use Google again. The more people who use Google, the more advertising
revenue Google are able to generate through
their other ad packages. That's not a topic for today. But just know that Google are, yes, trying to make money, but equally they're
trying to serve up the best results for the potential customers
that could be yours. The way they determine
best results in the context of local
search is about relevancy. And that's about making
sure that the business is the right match to what
they've searched for, If they search for dentist
and it shows yoga teachers, it's not a good match. Proximity, this is about
the right location. This is where the
postcode aspect within your profile helps define
the region where you are. But you can also
set a service area, so it might be that you're an on call plumber, for example. And you cover a region encompassing a
number of postcodes. You can set that up as well. Finally, Google
looks at prominence. This is a little bit like
what your reputation is, how you appear to
the outside world. You can manage that through your business profile,
through your reviews, through interacting
with your reviews, keeping your profile up to date with accurate opening
hours, for example. And also using the
updates feature. Then in terms of where this
information actually appears, it shows up on the Google
search pages itself, but also on Google Maps. And I'll show you what that
looks like in just a moment. Optimizing your
profile determines in which order you appear
compared to your competitors. You don't want to
be at the bottom, you want to be at
the top because that's where you'll get
the most conversions.
3. Live Demo - what does a good profile look like?: Okay, let's take a look now at how the
information that is in a Google business profile actually looks on a screen Here, I'm using an incognito
tab because I don't want my previous
search history to influence the results. I just want it to
be based purely on the information that's in
the Google business profile, which is what would
happen if someone was making a new search
for the first time. I'm going to put
in plumbers farm. I don't know any
plumbers in Fam. Hopefully, this will
all be very impartial. Okay, this screen here is called the Google
Search Results Screen. It may also be called as a
nickname, the top section. This is sponsored results. You can get your business at the top regardless of
what the search query is. You just simply have to
pay for that privilege. You pay for when someone clicks. Same here with these websites that you can
see what it says, Sponsored, they're paid for. This is a new little bit
widget from Google where they're also showing other trusted sources
of information. These are called directories. And it's definitely worth
getting yourself a listing on these directories because it does help with your Google SEO. But we'll come on to
that slightly later. This section here. Now this business, this is all organic. No one has paid to be here. This is just Google taking the information based on the
relevance, the proximity, and the prominence as we
talked about earlier, and then serving back to you what it thinks
are some good ideas. Typically, it shows a map and then this is
called a three pack, where it always shows
three of the best matches. Sometimes there's
a little bit of variety with who is
in that top three, but they all score really highly for prominence,
relevance proximity. You can see here this one from 4.9 rating review
out of 69 reviews. And there a plumber,
an excellent match for my search query. Obviously, if this
said dentists in Manchester or coffee
in Southampton, you would expect
different results. But it looks exactly the same. In fact, you could try it.
Now, type into Google, searching for your business. Type in your area and
see what comes up. All of these look like
very credible options, but let's just have a
look at the full listing. What we see is the top three
are the same here as well. This information
that's presented here, when you click through to
look at more than the three, is exactly the information
that is presented in the Google Maps app.
That's quite hard to say. The Google Maps app where you see this map view
and the markers. I'm sure you're all
familiar with that. I would use this all
the time if I was out somewhere new Coffee near me and then look
to see what comes up with the best
reviews and location. And easy to get to, I'm
imagining competition is fairly stiff for
plumbers, that's 120. Let's see how many, there
actually are 58 plumbers. You're a new plumber
in this area. You're going to
have to work quite hard to compete
against some of these. What you generally find is
the lower down, this ranking, the businesses,
their business page is really not complete. You've got this Lux plumbing, it's got opening hours. Their website just
says Facebook. I'm not going to
click on it for now. The services, someone has
maybe claimed this profile, but they've certainly
not completed it and done a very
good job with it. I would imagine It's a
test and the business is actually not even still running. You've got a company
down here, now. This one looks reasonable. It looks like it's got some
reviews, not very many. Let's have a Why isn't
that loading up? There we go. They
have an overview. They don't have a little
section about who they are. I'll show you that
on another profile. They don't have many
services listed. They've got some reviews, which is great, but there's no interaction with the reviews. They haven't used
the updates feature, and there's photos apart from probably the
guy's home address. It's not a great listing, despite the fact they
have got some reviews, they're not really doing
themselves any favors. Also, Southampton
and I wanted fan, which is probably why it's
further down the table. But you see already this
bottom of the listing. The quality of the profiles
are really, really weak. This one's got a couple of, I've got some
really good photos. This one's populated well
on the photo section, but doesn't have any reviews. They've done a good
job on the services. They have a little
bit of a bio here, but it's a bit weird
that they've got no reviews after 18 years. Like it just makes you feel
like it doesn't add up, that's why they're not
getting at the top. The results at the top, we go and compare that now to a. Let's have a look at the top few to see what good looks like. Let's go back up. We've got
this Pentland Plumbing, because they are
actually in Faumy'll, be very relevant to my
search inquiry here. They've got opening, they've
got good opening hours, They've got a phone number,
they've got a website. They correctly ticked
all of the areas nearby, rather than just
saying Hampshire, which I did see that on one of the other
ones. As I scrolled past. It's quite broad, doesn't
really work so well here. They've got a good Bio. Let's see what
they've written here. They talked a little bit
about the services that they offer and the range
of services as well. Quite limited in the
the will be very much a heating service rather
than like a home engineer. The review, That's really good. He's replied to the customer
reviews, Google loves that. Makes it feel like the
business owner cares. They've taken the time that
they're personally involved. That's a really good
thing. An update. It's a bit like a free
social media platform. You can just put some
information out. This was in 2022. It's a bit out of date, so they could do with
updating that a little bit. Here's another one,
not as many reviews, but again, I expect
they've done okay. So they've got more
services listed. Have they replied to
reviews? Yeah, they have. Which you'd expect from
someone who's listed in the top few updates, even older. But you can see the content
that you can use it for to talk about your
festive period. Opening hours, certification,
updates to services, things like that.
Even special offers. They've got lots of
photos and they're all categorized as well. Again, really strong profile. I'll go into all of them. I'm sure you're
getting the idea. But you can see now how there's a real
correlation between the better completed pages and the better position
results on Google. Some of those plumbers that we looked at at the bottom which had hardly any reviews or they didn't really
have any photos. Maybe he's a really, really great plumber and doesn't need to advertise and gets all the business
through word of mouth. Brilliant. But if you're
looking to grow your business, you really want to be
one of those top few. Optimizing your profile
is the way to get there.
4. Setting up your Google Business Profile: Okay, so now you've seen for
yourself how important it is to have a good Google
business profile. You've seen the
impact that it has on achieving those top
ranking positions on the Google Organic
Search results page as part of that three pack and
also on the map listings. Now let's look at how you
actually get it set up. Before you get started, there's a few things that
you're going to need. The first thing is you're going
to need a Google account. Now, you've probably already got a Google account
for your business where you access some of the other Google tools like
maybe Google Analytics, or maybe you use Google Docs or Google Drive or
something like that. If you already have
a Google account, perfect, you're going to
use that when you log in. If you don't have
a Google account, you don't need to create
a new email address. If you just go to
account.google.com then you can add your existing e mail address and set yourself up with
a Google account there. But you'll need that
before you can continue. And once you have
it, you can use all the Google tools
from that same account, then you should
know all of this. But you're going to need
your business details, you're going to need your name, address, and postcode NAP. Now, it's really important
that these things are consistent across everything that you put on the Internet to continue with
the plumbing theme. If you were called ABC Plumbing
Services on your website, don't call yourself ABC
Plumbing on your profile page, Go with the plumbing services so that the name actually matches. That's true for
social media as well. Wherever possible, you
should try and have as much consistency
between your naming. Because there's so
many businesses, it's really hard for
someone who's new to looking at your
industry to know if ABC Plumbing and ABC
Plumbing Services are the same company or not being as
consistent as you can helps Google to also know that
they're the same business. Tie the information up together, then that just gives Google a more holistic view of
yourself and your whole profile looks more complete and they
are more confident then recommending you to
potential customers. You will also need
a couple of photos we saw before about
uploading a few photos. Maybe your logo as well, or a photo of the shop front or somebody in uniform
wearing your logo, which helps with that visual
recognition of those photos. And also of your website
or social media if anyone goes across those
different platforms. And you should also
prepare a short bio. You can just start
with a few sentences summarizing what
your business does. Anything you're
particularly good at, work out of hours, or available for
emergency call out. Or you have the best
coffee in the area, or you offer a friendly service. No job. Too big, too small. What do you do a little bit
about how you deliver it? If you're not quite
sure, have a look at some of your competitors, See what they say,
and then work out what you need to say that
sets you apart from them. Once you have that ready, and don't worry too
much because you can always go back and
edit any of this. But then let's head to business.google.com
and get started. Okay, so are you ready? Head to business.google.com and type in your Google account. If you don't have a
Google account already, go to accounts.google.com Follow the process as though
you're setting up a new Google account. Making sure you choose business. Then at the point when
it says my the bit in front of Gmail just
underneath that click, Use existing e mail address. It won't take you 2 seconds. And then come back
here and carry on. Once you've signed in using
your new Google account, you then have to put
in your business name. Now, in most cases, if your business is
already existing, but you haven't yet claimed
your Google profile, then it will actually find
your business anyway. But if you're setting
up a new business, then obviously
that's not the case. Let's continue with the
plumbing theme that I seem to have got myself
somewhat stuck onto. Let's say that we
are ABC Plumbing, so we can see there's
quite a few people called ABC Plumbing. If you were just setting your
business up at this point, it would be a good way
of flagging if there was someone else with a
similar name in your area, which might make you wonder whether you've chosen
the right name. But let's say we
want to go create a business with this name, then you start to choose what type of business
is relevant for you. We're not looking at the
online retail for this. We're looking at
either a local store or a service business. The difference here
is a local store is somewhere where you have
an address which you would put in and people
come to us if you're a hairdresser or a coffee
shop or a dentist, something like that,
that's the option for you. Whereas if you go to the customers like the
plumber, or a gardener, or something like that, then that's the right option for me, that's the option to tick. It's very hard to show you all the options simultaneously, because from this point onwards, every time you put in
something about your business, Google chooses options that are only relevant to
that type of business. It's super clever, but if you follow through and put your
own business category in, you'll get the idea and see what options are
relevant to you. We're going to go with plumbing.
You see it starts to go. Are you a plumber? Plumbing supply store.
You get a few ideas. We're plumber,
where do you serve? So we'll start, we'll
go with Farm UK. Then as you saw before, that example with
all the ticks for the different areas that
the other plumber served, we probably would want to put in the names of the
other districts only. I don't particularly
know the area very well, so I'm going to have to
remember what was on that map. But Southampton,
there was Portsmouth. This would make sure then
if someone searches for plumber in Portsmouth or
plumber in Southampton, you stand a much
better chance of actually appearing on
those search results. It's worth being fairly granular put in your main areas
at this point and then if later you're
looking at growing your business and maybe
reaching a new area, a new geography,
then don't forget to come back and update
those areas here to make sure you show
up in response to those sches we'll do this, put your phone number in, It can be a mobile
or a land line, whichever you use
for your business. Obviously, if you
have a website, make sure you put the
address in here, okay? This is just a summary of what we've already talked about, the purpose and the reason behind doing the
business profile, which hopefully you're
already quite convinced on whether you want to select
any of these options. You may want to sign up to get news and tips about how
to improve your profile. If you're new to this, you
can always cancel it later. Okay. So then you can
see here the services, hopefully whatever
you've put in, you're now seeing the services
that are relevant to you. So I'm just going to tick
randomly some of these. I don't know, it doesn't matter. You can come back
and edit this later. You can also add
a custom service. If you do something
like a design service, you can add your own bespoke
options there as well. Then add your business hours we saw before if it
was open or closed. Ideally, you don't
want people to think you're a 24 hour
business unless you are. As soon as you select a time, then you can put in whatever
you open and closed times actually for whatever
suits your business. Let's say that Mondays
are a shorter day. If you have a day
where it's split, you use this function here to say if you are
open in the morning, close, and then open
again in the evening. So you can add blocks of times. If you want people to be able to message you directly,
that's fine. But you have to make sure
that you are going to be able to see those messages
and react to them. It generally comes
through to your phone, it's probably a good thing. Makes it as easy as possible, although I don't think many
people use it at the moment. But no doubt it's
a growing trend. This is where you
add your little bio. Hopefully you've got some ideas about what you can say
about your business. If you're really struggling, you can always use chat GPT
and have a little play there. And get some help from a little AI model in trying
to write a few sentences. Even if you don't
like what it says, it can often help
provoke some thought and it makes it clearer to
you what you do want to say. Then at this point
here, add some photos. You can just either drag
and drop them in or select them from your browser. That's really important.
If you want to, you can claim some
advertising for Google ads, which is probably worth doing If you've already got a website, you
can ignore this. This section here is Google
trying to cross sell some of their services like Google
Workspace for business. It's entirely up to you,
select these options. If it's something that's
a benefit to you. If not, congratulations. You have set up your
business profile. Once you've verified
your account, it will go live and
you'll be able to see the information yourself on Google when you search for
your own company name. And be able to track how
you appear in the rankings. In the next chapter, we're going to talk
about how you come back and find this page,
how you manage it, how you edit it, and some of the more sophisticated
techniques behind optimizing it
for best results.
5. Optimisation and the '3-pack' goal: As we looked at earlier, it's actually really easy to set up your Google
business profile. If you remember, in our example, we found hundreds
of profiles for plumbers just in Faham,
which is a small town. It is not even a big city. But not many of them
were set up very well. Most of them had
information missing, or gaps or inconsistencies. The ones that we did
look at that were set up well were the
ones at the top. And that's where you need to be if you want to
win the business. In this section and
the next few chapters, we're going to look at a bit
more detail about how you optimize your profile to
really get the best results. Before we get into
all the detail about how to optimize it, just want to explain to you for a moment why it is so
important that you do invest the time in the
effort in optimizing your page and why it is such an advantage
to your business. Really, our goal is to
get into the three pack. That's it. The three pack is this list of three businesses which show up alongside the map on the Google search results
in response to somebody searching for a thing in an area which is
called a local search. One of the first
things to note is that actually 46% which is nearly
half of all Google searches, have a local element to them, which is evidence
that people do use Google to search for
businesses near to them or find out more
information and make a choice before purchasing
of those people. 44% actually click on one of the profiles
in that three pack. If we take 100 people, that means 44 of them are going to click on one of
those three profiles. Three pack itself is
actually considered the most trusted information
on that search page. If you remember,
above the three pack, there were some
sponsored listings, sponsored websites which
they paid for to be there. Below it are the
organic websites. There's also links to other
things like trip advisor or checker trade or
listing profiles. But the three pack does
appear quite high up. With the review information, the number reviews
and contact details, and so much information
all in one place, it's considered a really, really trustworthy
source of information. It's worth noting,
you don't even need your own website to appear
in that three pack. When people click through, they see your profile, not necessarily your website. They can then click onto your website if
you want them to. But to have a
sponsored position, or even an organic position, you need to have a website. Yet still more people click on the three pack than on
any of those elements. If you don't have a website, then it's even more
important that you focus on your business profile because
you can actually do really, really well just by having a really well completed profile. It's also worth noting
that only 8% of people go on and click the
Little More Places button at the bottom of our
theoretical 100 people who are looking for whatever
it is you are selling, only eight are going
to click through, 44 are going to click
on one of the three, let's say on average 15 each. Only eight people are even going to see you
if you are listed in position 45 all the way down. So you're fighting for a
much smaller pool of people. You've only got a maximum of eight if you're in
position four or worse. Whereas you've got
fighting for one of 44 in the top
three positions. So you get exponentially
more visibility if you're in that three pack. Then it also follows that you get five times
more conversion if you're on the three
pack than anywhere else on that initial
Google search page. Which means 500% more likelihood that someone's going to call
you or visit your website, or visit you or interact with
your business in some way. Just because you're
in the three pack. Hopefully you're convinced now that it's really
worth the effort, watch on and I'll show you
what you need to do next.
6. Tip 1 - Profile Maintenance: You might have guessed, this isn't a one time job. Once you set your profile up, you don't need to
set it up again, but you do need to maintain it. That means regularly
logging in and updating it. Google does reward
the businesses who regularly update
their profile. First of all, let's just check, you know how to go back and find your business profile and can actually access it to
update it on a computer. Basically, on your
screen at the top, you see next to
your profile icon, there's a grid of nine
little gray buttons. When you click on that, it opens up all the
different Google tools. It's a really great way of finding any of your
Google business tools. Click on the one that looks
like a Google Shopping, a little shop front that
opens up your profile. Your profile has lots of shortcuts to each of
the different sections, whether that's going straight to getting reviews
or adding photos. Or you can simply click
the Edit Profile option and you can work your way through all of the
different sections. Again, on a mobile device
it's a little bit different. You can still manage your
account and it's super easy to manage your
profile on a mobile, but this time there is no app. There was a Google
my business app. So you may have seen the little shop front icon
on the app store, but it's no longer supported. Instead, you now access your
account through Google Maps. Just at the bottom
right hand corner, you'll see there's a little
icon that says Business, and it's got a little
shop front logo there. Click on that and that opens up exactly the same options as you would see if
you're on a computer. The final thing that I want
to say under maintenance is about trying to find a way to help you remember to
actually keep it up to date. A really good thing is just to put a little reminder
in your calendar, maybe every month,
just to log in and have a little look and
check, it's all up to date. It's really important to
check your opening hours. There's nothing more frustrating
than going to Google, having a little look, going
all, they're open till six. Great. I'll just
sit down there now. And then you get there and find the shop or whatever it is was closed at lunchtime because of a half
day store training. I've been in that
position myself as a consumer where I tried
to go to the opticians. Their website said
they were open. Their Google profile
said they were open. I went there and they stuck a post it note on the door
saying they were closed. It's just so frustrating. And what you don't
want to do is give your customers a bad experience. Keeping your Google opening
hours up to date is probably one of the
most important things you can keep up to date. Not necessarily from a search
or technical perspective, but just from keeping your
customers happy perspective. That's a really,
really important one. Think about bank
holidays particularly. Again, you can put
a little note in your diary maybe a week before
each of the bank holidays, and obviously before
Christmas and big festive periods like that. Just to remind
yourself to just log in and update your
opening hours. It's also surprising how
quickly your photos go out of date for a business
and you get new photos, or you don't really realize how your style has changed or
something has evolved, or you've got new equipment. When you see a photo
using the old equipment, it looks a bit dated. That's a good thing
just to check as well, have a little flick through. It might be that you've
had some nice photos from social media of
even people using your products or
that you've taken that you'd like to share on
your Google profile as well. We're going to talk
about updates in a bit more detail in one
of the next sections. That's an area that
not many businesses are using terribly
well at the moment. In my opinion, that's
an area where you can probably get a little
bit of an advantage. But I think what you need to try and do
is make this a habit. You're probably in the habit of checking your E mail every day, checking your social media. You don't need to check your
business profile every day. But try and factor
it somehow into the marketing activity for your business so that you
actually schedule time. Keep it up to date, it will
really make a big difference.
7. Tip 2 - Locations and service areas: Okay, now we're going to talk a little bit about locations. Obviously for a physical, local business, then locations are actually really important. At the point when you
set up your account, you could select
whether you went to visit your customers or
whether they came to you. And you had a
premise like a shop, or a cafe, or a
restaurant, for example. You should only add in a physical address if it's the place where you do business. Don't put it in if
it's your home address because that's where
your home office is. But you travel out, if you're an engineer,
for example, and you go out and
see other people, do not put in your physical
address because actually it's quite a security risk
to yourself because people could see on
street view your home, work out exactly where you live. And think to themselves, oh, there could be a
van of tools left overnight outside this property. Don't do that. Only put in your physical address if you actually want
people to come to you. You might be a seamstress, for example, or a
massage therapist. And you might have a
mixture of people coming to you and you going out elsewhere. In which case you should include your address
because that is how people will come and find you and will help that
side of your business. At the point when you signed up, you could upload
multiple locations if you have a chain of
stores, for example. But don't worry, you can always add them later if you want to. Now, if you travel
to your customers, then the area that
you're prepared to travel to is called
your service area. You should try and
add as many of these service areas
into your profile. Every time you add a location, it's called a citation. That's just a
Google word for it. These citations,
they can be cities, they can be towns, or
they can be as small as like a little parish
council district. Sometimes they will
overlap as well. It can be quite hard to
get them all first time. It's a good idea to put
in your obvious ones, then when you come back to
Google, it will quite often, as you can see in the screenshot
here, make a suggestion. You just click on the
little plus next to it, and that will add it to
your list of citations. It's quite straightforward,
I would just say be careful. There are people who will contact your
business and offer to add thousands of
location citations quite cheaply to your profile. Now, more citations
are better than fewer citations because it means that you cover a
bigger service area. If you only name your little
village as where you cover, then obviously you're not
relevant to many searchers, so you won't appear so often. But there's also a balance
of quality versus quantity. Google always prefers
quality If it sees that the citations are
all mapped out in perfect concentric circles
around your business, spanning a five mile radius, It generally knows that that's not a genuine
reflection of your service area because
it's pretty rare that our service area is
perfectly circular. It's normally this
side of the motorway or that side of the river
or whatever it might be. Quality is always important. Just be a little bit careful if you do get approached and
offered that service, just want to watch out for.
8. Tip 3 - Review: Collecting and Responding: Reviews. This is a big section. If you recall, we talked about
the fact that Google uses three criteria to assess your profile and make
the ranking order, which was proximity,
prominence, and relevance. The location section
we just looked at, clearly that's all
about proximity. Reviews come under the
prominence section. This is about how
visible you are. Obviously one of the first
things is you need reviews. If you've already got some, great, that's a
really good start. But if you don't have many, then you really need to ask
your customers for reviews. A lot of business
find this quite uncomfortable and don't really
know how to go about it. But there's lots of really creative ways that you can ask your customers
for a review. We all use reviews. Nobody minds being asked
you to actually just find a nice way to phrase it within your profile
on Google itself. If you go into the
review section, you can read all the reviews that have been
written about you, but there's also a link
to get more reviews. As you can see a little
screenshot above my head here. With that, you get a link which
you can send to customers which will take them directly
to review your page. That's the easiest
way to get reviews. Now you can share this link
in a social media post. You could send it on an e mail, perhaps alongside a little
thank you to your customers. You could include it on the
foot of an invoice saying, thank you so much
for your business. We'd love to hear what you think of us. Please
leave a review. Another quite nice
approach is to convert that URL of the
link there into a QR code. There's loads of
free QR code makers on the Internet, just Google it, that's the little square with the funny sort of barcode thing, and have that printed onto some business cards
with your logo, then you can give
those out at the till. For example, it's quite
popular in B and B's or cafes where you give somebody the bill
and once they've paid, they can take one of these
little business cards, which is a little reminder
of who you are in the address and says on there something like
leaves a review. If they scan that code, it goes straight through
to your review page. That's a nice way of doing it without actually
having to ask them. You can just give
them something that they complete that's
quite nice in softer situations
like hairdressers or beauty salons where
maybe you've got quite a personal relationship
with the customer and don't feel comfortable
asking them directly. This is a bit more indirect. So it could be quite
a nice approach and a nice way to do it. But whatever way you
find that works for you, you must try and find
something because it's so important to have reviews. The next thing we saw,
when we looked at the different examples
of different accounts, the accounts that were in the top three in that three pack, they all regularly
responded to reviews. Even if it's something really
simple, like just saying, thank you so much for taking
the time to write a review. If they've commented
on something specific, then acknowledge that point. And if you remember
them as a customer, then you can expand even more. It was great to meet you and I'm glad your family enjoyed
whatever it was. But even just a simple
thank you is great. You don't need to respond
to every single review. But I would try and respond to two out of three
as an average, so that you're replying to
the majority of reviews. If you can find time to do that. Now, don't panic when you
get a negative review. I say when not if. Because getting a
negative review is almost guaranteed to happen. And it's not a reflection
upon your business. Well, it might be. But even if you do
everything brilliantly, you will still get
a negative review. Even the most amazing
restaurants get negative reviews because
people don't see the value in what they offer and just think it's expensive. So you're never going
to please everyone. All the time I worked with
a small business is a cafe. He really prided himself on
really good quality coffee. And someone wrote a
really poor review, I think gave him like
two or three stars saying coffee was all right,
but it was a bit cold. He was so cross because
he'd got a negative review, despite all his effort to prepare the coffee
as well as he could. But I would really say try not to get angry with people for
leaving a negative review, and also try not to
reply to those reviews. Along the lines of, well, you didn't say
anything at the time because I think from a
consumer perspective, I think that shows a bit of a lack of empathy
from a business owners. Very often that you're
out with friends or with business clients and you don't really want to make
a scene or complain. Or maybe someone asks
you how the food is, but your mouth is full and you don't get the chance to say, well actually it's not great. Sometimes it's maybe
only afterwards when you realized that the service wasn't actually that great, like. Something went wrong with
your feeling after you left the dentist or your haircut didn't hold its
shape for very long. Try not to feel aggrieved. Try and respond in a nice
constructive way to say, thank you for taking
the time to visit us. I'm really sorry that you didn't like our service or
it wasn't right for you. Some businesses take
it a step further and are very creative
with their replies. I've actually been
to a cafe just because of the way
the business owner responded to replies. Someone slated them that cup
of tea was, I don't know, three pound 50 or something, when it's only 50
P for a tea bag. They very politely
pointed out that if the customer wanted to only
pay 50 P for a cup of tea, they should just go to Tesco's
and then stay at home. Which was quite, they
pointed out that the customer wasn't paying
just for the cup of tea, but the ambiance of
the location and the staff and everything
else that goes with it, which is a really valid response from a small business who's trying their best to justify the costs that
they have to charge. I think you can do that every
now and then, not to every. You don't want to ramp to
every single customer, but I think it helps show the personality of the business. And my thought was, wow,
this business owner really cares about offering a good service so you can
use it to your advantage. Possibly the final
point I'd make on bad reviews is if
I was to look at a page of a business and there weren't any
negative reviews, I would worry that the
reviews weren't genuine. I feel like a couple of bad reviews just makes the whole thing look more authentic. Obviously, if they're
all bad reviews, then clearly that's not a great reflection
on the business, and I probably wouldn't
go and use that business. The other thing on reviews
is actually they're really, really insightful
about your business. Other than just a
box ticking exercise for the Google profile
of replying to reviews, you really should
read what people say. Because this will give you
so much information in your business and what you can use to promote your business, which we'll talk about
in the next section about your business profile
and how you describe it. But let me give an example. A pizza restaurant that
I was working with, they weren't getting as much
business as they wanted. Their idea was to do a price promotion. They
were like, that's it. Obviously, maybe people
just don't want to pay that much because they've
never eaten with us before. Let's do a discount
on our pizzas. But when you read their reviews, they didn't have very many. Every review was five star
and all said great value, little gem of a restaurant.
Really hard to find. I didn't know about it, but wow, the pizzas are amazing. When you actually
read the review, it's quite clear that this restaurant's problem
is awareness. People just don't
know where they are rather than
doing a discount, which would have just
meant that still nobody knew that there were
cheaper pizzas available. I advised them to put their effort into doing
some advertising. They gave some flyers
out in the town. They put a bit more effort
into their social media, put some signage up
around the restaurant, and their business is taken off, and they've maintained
their full margin, they haven't discounted
their product at all. That decision was based
on the information that was available to
us in the reviews. You can use the reviews to work out what people actually do like about your business and therefore what
you shouldn't change. As well as getting feedback
on what people don't like. And therefore, maybe
you do want to consider changing or evolving
in the future.
9. Tip 4 - Keywords, SEO and Using AI to write your bio: In this section, we're going to talk a little bit about SEO. This stands for Search
Engine Optimization. And if you have a website, I'm sure you've already had conversations about
optimizing your website, or at least heard of SEO. Seo is a way of engineering
the language that you use in your digital presence to match the language that people who are searching for your business use, so that Google thinks that
it's relevant or not thinks, but can assess that
it's relevant. This is all about improving
our relevancy score. We've talked about location
services for proximity, including increasing our
prominence through reviews. Now this is about relevance. Key words are the words that people might search for that
could be relevant to you. You need to think
about what these are. You probably want to try and
maybe come up with like, I don't know, maybe up to ten. If you're a cafe,
you might think about words like coffee or cake, or cappuccino or
brunch or breakfast. If you're a pizza restaurant, you might want words
like Italian wood fired, authentic sour dough,
deep pan, New York style. Depending on what your style is, then you want to try and use these same keywords in as
many places as you can. Your website is one of those, but in the context of your
Google business profile, make sure that your services
reflect these keywords. If you offer lunch,
brunch, and dinner, then make sure that that's reflected in your
services that you offer. But if not, then your custom services option within
your business profile. You also can have a 750
character business description which isn't very long. It's like three or
four sentences. And I'll show you how to
write that in just a second. When you do updates on
your business as well, which is the next
section, Again, just try and make
sure these words flow through everything next time you actually do a
search on Google. When the results come up, you'll quite often find that the keywords which
are matched to your search query are highlighted in bold to
draw your eye to them. So that you can see at a
glance how one business or another business really matches your search and
appears more relevant. The business description,
that is like the about Us section and that appears on the front page of your
Google Business profile. If you're feeling creative, then you can simply write that. Otherwise, you can
actually use AI, one of the free artificial
intelligent tools to use that to write it for
you if you want to. You can even give
it the keywords that you want to be included and make sure that
your description includes your keywords. I've got one more thing to explain and then I'll
show you how to do that. Make sure that you don't try and optimize your site or include services for things or parts of your business that
are not in your control. It's really important you only
focus on what you control. By that, I mean, let's say you're a hair salon and you
have a beauty concession, someone who does
nails or massages, don't say that you offer that. They should have
a Google profile themselves and use
that to offer it. Because if they get bad reviews, you don't really want that
reflecting on your business. If they're different
business entities, you shouldn't talk about it. I hope that makes sense.
Okay, now I'm going to show you how to use AI to write your
business description. Okay, now I'm going to show
you something pretty cool. A lot of people don't
feel very comfortable or creative writing
this description. We're going to
task it to Gemini. Gemini is the AI model run by Google because we're creating something that's going
to be used in Google. It seems that using
a Google tool to write something for
Google would be a good fit. But you could also use chat PT, or one of the other
free AI tools, even compare the answers if you wanted to
use multiple ones. Some top tips for using AI. Talk to it like it's a person. Imagine it's quite a
junior member of staff. You really need
to set parameters of what they can
and they can't do. Be positive, be encouraging and let them know it's
okay to ask questions. You can then talk to it in
a very conversational style and it will give you the
information back that you need. I'm just going to paste
into here a prompt. I've said, assume the role
of my marketing manager. It already knows it
needs to be thinking in a marketing context and write me a business description I can use on Google Business profile. Should be 750 characters. And then I've made up some bit about a pizza restaurant which, where we do takeaway. It's very conversational. This is definitely not good
copy for a business profile, but I've also included
the key words that we identified earlier
that we want to use. I've said to it, it can ask any questions it needs
to before starting. Just so it gets it
to think about how it's planning on
giving a response. Okay, let's try submit,
see what happens. Okay, I don't know. We'll make up the name. Perfect pizza and we
offer the Christy peas. So you just asked me to talk a little bit wider about
what's on the menu, not just pizza, so
there's some ideas. Okay, It's conveniently
used, a character count, so I can see exactly that
it is within the limit, the key words that it's
used and wanted to include. Brilliant. Now we
can just copy that and paste that
straight into Google. Or you can paste it into Word or edit it,
or play with it. Or you can ask it to
even make changes. For example, if you
want to say, oh, you must mention that
we have free parking, which may be a real
bonus for where you are. But for example,
that's how we can use AI to do the
hard work for us.
10. Tip 5 - Atrributes, Amenities & Product Features: In this section, I think it's
fairly self explanatory, but I just wanted to really bring your attention to the fact that once you've set your
profile up at that stage, it's only asked you for some
fairly top line information. Google is always evolving
business profile to have new categorizations
or new amenities that you can add
to your profile. It's one of the things that's
worth going back into now, working your way through, but also having a look
at every few months, making it part of
that maintenance. Some of the things that Google will ask you to
provide are things like, do you offer a toilet?
Is there parking? It will, however, only
ask you these questions if they're relevant to
the business category that you chose in
the first place. If you say you're a
cafe, it will ask you if you have gender neutral
toilets or parking. If you've said you're
an electrician, it won't ask you that. Instead, it will ask you
if you do emergency, call out whatever is more relevant to the
electrician industry. Some of the more recent things
that you can now define your business as includes
about accessibility. That's been there
a while to be fair about wheelchair accessibility. Whether you've got
wheelchair friendly seating. If you're a cafe or restaurant, it now asks you if
you're LGBTQ friendly, you can now identify as
a woman owned business. If that is indeed the case, there are so many options, you really just need to dive
in and see what options have been presented to you
based on your business type. As you can see from
the little box below, it's really simple. Like yes, no. Do you have this facility or not?
It's quite simple. Just, yes, no save, as well as amenities or
accessibility information. You can also now attach products to your Google
Business profile. You can add a
product description. You can add a price, a photo, and you can even add a link to your own
e commerce website. So essentially you can use Google Business Profile
to sell your products. In fact, one of the things that Google is trying to do is to become the shopping marketplace itself on the home screen. Instead of seeing
just adverts for retailers where you then go off and have a look at the
products on their site. Google wants to
keep you shopping on its actual landing page. It will start to show
products and then you can literally just buy it straight through clicking
through on that screen. That's something that
Google is working towards. This is an area
that's going to be developed more and
more going forward. Something else you can also
do just for completeness, is you can add your
own social media links to your Google business profile. For a long time,
Google used to find your social media profile
based on a name match, but it didn't always
get it right. Whereas now you can actually
put your own one in. Which just means then that
people can link through and find you on social media from your Google business
profile page as well. Then the final
point really about refining your profile is about pinpoint
location on a map. Again, this only
is relevant if you have a physical location
that people come to. Maybe that's an office or
cafe or whatever it is. Quite often though, when
you put your postcode in, the marker goes to the middle of that place and that may or may not be exactly where you are, particularly if you're on
a really long road or in an industrial estate or
part of a long building. And your entrance is at one end and the marker
is at the other. And that's really confusing
if you actually go into the location section as you can see here on this screenshot. And you see the little marker. If you click adjust, then
the marker stays still. But you can slide the map
around so that the marker appears to be pointing to
exactly where your business is. It's not really going to make any difference in terms of the prominence of your profile, but it's going to make it
easier for people to find you.
11. Tip 6 - Using the Updates Feature: My final tip is in the area of using updates
functionality within your Google business profile. Google loves it when you
use all their features. And it does reward
the businesses who do so with a little bit more
prominence and visibility. I don't think the updates feature is really
used that well. I'm not sure it's going
to be a game changer and grow your business
exponentially, but it's a good
opportunity to get a position boost and if it
gets you into the three pack, it will have been completely
effort well spent. Updates come under
three categories, Offer or a general update. Event is, as you would imagine, something like an open day or a workshop in your
Google business profile. If you say Add Update, it gives you these
three options. If you click on Add Event,
you can pick the date, have a picture, give it a name, a little bit more
information about it. If you choose off, it
will ask you to describe the offer mechanic and specify the start date
and the finish date. Or you can just do a general
update so you can put a picture in and then any information that
you would like to. For example, per
the example here of this sourdough business,
pizza restaurant. Who are offering or promoting
them Mother's Day because it's coming up and
they've just taken a picture of some pizza
and some flowers. And basically
encouraging customers to come and book with
them for Mother's Day. But you can use this
for product updates, a new product, or a new service. Welcome to the team, new member
of staff. Meet the team. Post something else you could
use it for if you've maybe been closed for a
refit to announce a grand opening or show a photo, something that's
newly refurbished or even just an everyday update. A nice picture of your
product or service in action, it might be that
you've just done a really lovely
bathroom installation. You put a picture up
of that going before and after successful project, you can use it in any way. It's very similar to
a social media post. This really comes into its own. On a mobile view,
on a computer view, it gets a bit lost
at the bottom. But in a mobile view, as per the example here, I think it works really well
and it's really strong. If your business type is
particularly searched for on mobile something
while you're out and about cafe being
a great example, then this is even more
important and you'll get a little bit more visibility
and exposure from it. That's quite simple. That's
the last tip from me.
12. Re-cap and finally...: Well, that's it, we
reached the end, so hopefully you
are now a bit of an expert on Google
Business profile. Just a little recap. Make sure you complete
all sections. Keep it up to date. Please don't just
set it up and forget about it on the location front, remember to review your
pinpoint location for accuracy. And if you're a
service business, make sure you set up
all your service areas. Review reviews. If you take nothing
else away from this, collect and respond to reviews, that's the biggest thing I can emphasize, really key words. Make sure you use keywords
in your description and that will really give you a little
bit more of a boost. And finally, use
the update feature. I hope you found this workshop
really, really useful. I hope you're able to apply these learnings to your business and you actually see some
success as a result from it. If you have enjoyed
the workshop, then please leave me a review. Also, you can follow
me as a teacher to see some of the other
courses that I've published. I'm also at the moment, looking at launching a
marketing academy for SM's. Because I think most
marketing courses assume you're working in a big company with
unlimited budget and unlimited resources. Actually, how you tailor that marketing theory to
small businesses so that you can implement it for
free or low cost is something that I'm
really passionate about. If you'd like to be
involved in that, maybe you'd like to know more. Sign up onto the waiting list or even to be one of
my beta testers. Then please drop me a little note at
the e mail address that you can see written
at the bottom there. Sharon. At Sharon,
Hayward.com Hopefully, I'll see you again soon.
Thanks for watching.
Sharon Hayward
