It’s not often that businesses get the chance of something for nothing, but Google My Business is pretty close! There’s a small effort involved in the set-up, but it’s simple and the results make it well worth it. What’s even better is that it can make a BIG difference to pretty much any business…

Interested? Watch this to find out more!

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

Now, this episode I wanted to talk to you about Google My Business. It’s a FREE business listing on Google. It’s ideal for people who are searching locally for your business or your services or your product, and it will enhance your rankings on Google. It’s not being used by many businesses, so if you have local competition, it’s a good opportunity to possibly get yourself just slightly above them on the rankings. And it’s really simple to use.

So what do you need to do?

First off, you need to claim your business.

To do that, you just need to go into Google Maps, and there’ll be a link there to ‘add my business’. You need to put in some basic information about the business, so obviously the name, your address, telephone number, website, and opening hours. You can then add photos and videos which will help to give potential customers a feeling of familiarity with the business, what they might expect if they were going to actually contact you, photos of your service. Sorry, photos of your product, photos of situations within your office, within your business, which they may expect to see if they came, if they actually did become a customer.

You can also gather Reviews on your Google My Business page which are very similar to the types of reviews we see all over the place these days on TripAdvisor and Checkatrade and on Amazon for products.

It essentially encourages your customers to leave you a Review. You can respond to those reviews, so you can thank your customers, and you can comment additionally on something that they left. You also have the opportunity obviously to comment if someone’s been slightly less positive about a Review. But you can actually put in a process that will actually automatically encourage people to leave you a review. It’s brilliant in terms of encouraging Google to like your business and to show you higher up the rankings than potentially your competition.

Once you’ve claimed your business, which is what you do at the end of adding all the information in, Google will send you a verification code which will go by post through to the address that you’ve entered on your listing. That verifies that you are actually where you say you are.

Once you’ve done that, you can start to add posts to your listing.

And these can be for a whole wide range of different things:

• You can talk about offers.
• You can talk about deals.
• You can talk about new services or new products.
• You can post links to your website, so it could be links to your latest blog. It could be any particular page that you wanted to highlight on Google.
• You could be showcasing new services, or you can write text up to 300 words, so it’s really flexible, and you can get a good range of different posts over time.

There are also Call to Action buttons that you can use.

• So this could be ‘learn more’.
• It could be ‘reserve’. There’s an option for ‘sign up’.
• There’s an option for ‘get offer’, and there’s lots of others.

So, again, it just gives you the opportunity to use a variety of different approaches. Your posts will expire after seven days, and Google will email you to say your post is going to expire, which prompts you to set up a new one. Your expired posts do remain visible, though, so you don’t need to be repeating a library of them too often. They will still be on there.

There’s even a measurement tool within Google My Business so you can see which of your posts are actually gaining the most views, whether people are looking at particular photos. If they’re looking at a particular type of photo, obviously you can come up with more of that way to hopefully gain their interest a little bit more.

And there’s also the chance to add a 360 degree tour within your business premises to your Google My Business. We can all see Street View, but it’s actually going be really useful for some of you where a customer potentially might feel a little bit wary about stepping over your threshold in terms of whatever service you offer, to actually show them what they’re going to see, where they’re going to go. You can do this in different ways, but they’re really easy to do. You do them from an iPhone and then you just upload them to Google My Business. It’s really simple! And as I say, it might just give potential customers a little bit more confidence in making that first call or paying that first visit.

Did I mention that all this is ENTIRELY FREE?

It’s also very, very easy, so I would strongly recommend that you go off and have a quick look. Very few businesses, as I said before, are actually using this at the moment and certainly are not using it to its full potential. So I really would recommend you go and have a look.

I’d also be really grateful if anyone would like to leave us a review on our Google My Business page. All you need to do is find us is Google ‘Baranov Associates’ and then follow the link that will come up on the right hand side of your page to ‘write a review’. I’m going leave you with that thought. Do go away and have a look, and I’ll see you very soon.

Find out more by going to Google My Business.