Google My Business Setup For Small Business | How To Quick Setup Guide
Google My Business Setup For Small Business. If you want your business to get found with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) this is one of your very first steps.
This video gives the average entrepreneur and small businesses owner an overview and quick steps to get your Google My Business (GMB) profile up and running with some good tips as well.
GMB is very important for retail business locations since it help you get found, get phone calls, add images and posts, and a whole variety of other things that can enhance your businesses profile online and in Google Search.
Today, we’re going to go over our series of small business quick tips to help you make the most of your online presence and digital tools available now. Let’s get right into it.
Today, we’re going to be talking about Google My Business. Now, what is Google My Business? Google My Business is a free tool from Google to help get small businesses found on Google search and maps. Like a business listing, it’ll show your name, address, phone number, URL, business description, hours, any number of things. There’s advanced cool features that will also show things like your social media profiles, questions and answers, google posts, a whole ton of things. But today we’re just going to go over the basics so you can get up and running or do some tweaks and make the most of it in the time that you have right now.
Why is Google My Business important in general?
Well, because most of the search engine traffic going through right now goes through Google. They’re the 800 pound gorilla in the search engine market. And if you are searching online for something, about 60 to 80% of that traffic will be going through Google My Business instead of Yahoo and let’s say Bing. It’s also very important, because if you’re a brick and mortar location, or if you have a retail address, you’re going to want to be found on Google My Business. Here’s some stats to back it up.
About 46% of all, Google searches have a local intent. That means that people are searching for product, services, information in their geographic area, which is their city, suburb or neighborhoods. Now 93% of local searches now feature Google My Business listings. That means your competitors and other small businesses and retail locations in your area are using it. If you’re not, it’s going to stand out and it’s going to make it look like you aren’t a trustworthy source. And lastly, 68% of people contact a business directly from search results. Google My Business has very easy to find call features and direction features so if people are searching on Google and they find your business, they can click the click to call and also find directions. And if you’re not doing this, they’re going to go to your competitors.
Quickly, let’s go through what you’re going to need to get set up and where you need to go. Number one, you’re going to want to go to business.google.com. Once you get there, you’re going to sign up with an email through Google so they’re going to want you to set up a Gmail account or you can set it up with an email that you already have and get verified through there. And once you’re signed in and you get into the Google My Business area, you’re going to want to start entering these things in this order. And it’s the order that’s listed here so it’s not going to be too difficult.
Business name, make sure your business name is how it will be displayed across your social media platforms, on your business cards, on your retail location storefront. This is going to be your business name. Do not add extra things like your area, your neighborhood or other search terms in there, because Google can eventually penalize you that. You’re going to have to pick a business category. Now, this is your primary industry where you are and if you have a hard time figuring this out, check what your top competitors that you’re going to be competing with are setting up. There’s several categories in there and you can do primary and secondary categories. And it’s a number of ways to do that. Pick your primary to get started.
Business address, now there’s a couple of ways to do this. If you have a retail brick and mortar business address, you’re going to want to enter that in. Enter in your suite number on the secondary line and any other particular details of your address on that secondary line. Now, if you are somebody like a carpet cleaner or somebody else who doesn’t use their business address, they might have a home based business, but they deliver their products or services right to their clients’ locations, you’re going to pick a service area. Now, if you’re in a third category and maybe you have a retail location and you also deliver to a service area, you can fill both of those areas in.
Now after business address, you’re going to want to enter your hours. You’re going to have regular hours or special hours. This is a very important area to keep updated because time’s like COVID when people are closed or there might be temporary closures, you’re going to want to update your hours in here so people can get an idea of which businesses are open and closed and keeping up to date on that.
After hours, you’re going to have your main business phone number. This is another area very important if there are times like COVID for closures and such that sometimes your retail address may be closed. You might want to change out your primary phone number to a secondary phone number, like your cellphone number or vice versa. Either way, make sure your primary phone number here is one most listed that most people are going to find online for your business and update it accordingly.
After that, you’re going to want to add your business website address or URL. Now, if you have a hard time figuring out how to enter that, you’re going to want to just copy and paste it from the browser bar that you’re in, because it’ll include the HTTP or HTTPS address that you’ve been set up as. Now there’s also a great new function that allows you to do a shortener in here. And we’ll go into that a little bit more detail later, but you can copy and paste your Google My Business link in a much shorter version than what displays in the address.
You can also add more services and products in there too, but that’s for another time and a little bit more in depth coverage, but products and services can be listed additionally in there. If you are certain types of businesses or providers, you can have inventory that you display in there that for your top selling items. If you’re a restaurant, there’ll be a ton more features such as menu and other things that you can add. And if you’re certain types of service based businesses, you can add a lot of features in here as well. And we’ll go into that in another video.
After that, you’re going to want to add description. You should always have a short description for your business. Kind of like a elevator pitch where you talk about who, what type of customers that you serve the most of, what are your products and services are in a brief description and any other special differentiating items are going to be listed in your description. Do it naturally and don’t try to put too many search terms or any crazy speech, just differentiate yourself in your description so that people understand who you are. You’re going to be limited to 750 characters so use that limitation as a guide.
After that, you’re going to want to enter in some photos. Now this is very important. It’s actually getting more important since Google is actually displaying a lot more search terms for local businesses based on photos. You’re going to want at least an exterior and interior shots, depending on the type of business you are. Your exterior sometimes Google will put a default, which is coming usually from when they do the drive bys in their Google maps search. You’re going to want to replace those a lot of times with a nice exterior photo. Phones are very nice. If you have a decent phone with a nice camera, you can take that. Otherwise you can get professional photos of your exterior, interior. They make a big difference if someone is trying to select between you and a competitor and you have great pictures of your exterior and interior. You can also take pictures of your products or services or on a number of other things to differentiate yourself from your competition.
Now, there are some advanced features too like options like your store code if you have multiple location. Labels and extensions, if you’re using things like call tracking and you have multiple phone numbers too, but those are for a little bit later time, today’s episode is just going over quick tips to get you up and running.
Some of the other great features within Google that are just fundamental to getting a good business online presence for yourself is reviews. Now reviews comes along with your Google My Business, but you’re going to want to be proactive in getting Google reviews. One of the main things that people kind of avoid or maybe it’s just a little bit of more hard work is getting those Google reviews proactively. Now, what I mean is that proactive versus reactively because usually the first reviews or the people who are most strongly inclined to go and leave a review are the people who have had a bad experience or that one in a 100, one in a 1,000 times where it was really poor service or that person had a really grumpy day or the person you fired later on was the one who was interacting with this customer. They get online, they’re very engaged in leaving a bad review. However, for someone to leave a good review, it’s almost has to be outstanding exceptional service, or you’re proactively asking your good customers or the people very happy with you to leave a review.
The other side of that is and why they’re so important is that it takes several really good reviews to take that one star review all the way back up to four point something stars in there. And this is a big factor. When I go look online, I’ll look at their reviews and if there’s three or four or five, I’ll look at how many reviews and I’ll also look at if they have a four point something rating or higher. Now, a lot of customers use that, make sure you’re proactive in getting that done.
There’s some other advanced features like questions and answers so you want to make sure if you’re able to, take some time to put in some commonly asked questions and some of the answers to those as well. And also Google Post is a feature where you can put in posts about products or services and highlight certain aspects of your business or information that is going to be appealing to your customers. There’s also some advanced features that allow you to display your social media profiles in a certain type of a setting, but that’ll be for another time as well. Just know those exist.
We’re here in quick tips. I hope that you’ve got some information that’s going to get you to get online and get your Google My Business either set up or to go and take control of that and update it a little bit. Look at what photos are on there, how your reviews are looking. If you can put some Q and A’s, the commonly asked questions, or some people have already submitted some questions that you need to respond to. Either way, get that set up, get it optimized and we’re going to have another video in the future. One that’ll go a little bit more in depth into how to optimize this even further and take advantage of the really powerful tools that Google is allowing you to have, including things like analytics and search console which is tied to Google. This is how you see your traffic coming to your website and there’s some little neat tricks that you can do to actually see some of the people coming from Google My Business or your other search results.
This was Vince for quick tips for small business from Breakthrough Entrepreneur. Please like and subscribe or leave a comment. Let me know what you thought about this or something that I may have missed or if you have a comment or a question that I can answer a little bit more in depth. Take care and we’ll see you on the next one.
Originally published at breakthrupreneur.com on July 28, 2020.
