As a free way to advertise your business to a local market Google My Business is fantastic, but to get the most from it, you need to follow a few extra steps… Watch this to make sure you’re not missing any.

Transcript:

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

In this episode I wanted to build on something that we spoke about way, way back in Episode 11. And that is, the entirely free, Google My Business.

Google recommends having a Google My Business listing, for any local business. Actually, I’d recommend it for any business, but it’s particularly effective for local businesses, with local markets.

In Episode 11, I outlined how to start setting your listing up, and why you should have your listing so I’m not going to go back over all of that. What I wanted to do was just, give a very, very brief summary, in that it enhances your likelihood of getting to the top of the Google’s rankings. It can dovetail with your current online processes quite nicely, in that you can utilise information that you’re putting on your website, for Google My Business, for your social posts and content. And any content you have generally, you can repurpose and put onto your Google My Business listing. Regular posts, and regular additions of content, whether they’re photos or videos, service updates or offers, all will help your Google My Business listing be promoted.

Today, in particular I wanted to talk to you about the Google Local Pack. When you do a search on Google, you’ll be familiar with the fact that you quite often get a map at the top, with three or more options for your search, and they will have the location pins in, and you’ll see that each of those suggestions that Google lists, get a certain amount of information, within that block at the top there, of the listings.

What you want to do, is actually make sure, that you’re one of those businesses that comes up when someone searches.

So for us ‘Accountants in Dunstable’, we would love to be up there.

What you want to do is actually make sure, that you’re ticking various boxes, that Google likes to see, which will increase your likelihood of getting into those boxes and in the Google Local Pack.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your name, address and postcode listing, is absolutely consistent across all of your online presence. The easiest way to do that, is to go onto the Royal Mail website, and go into their Postcode Finder and see what their listing is, for your office address and then, make sure that you’re updating that, if anything needs changing. For example, they may still have a previous resident of your office address listed. So make sure that they’re showing your details and then make sure that all of your listings online, so in all the different directories, websites, everything else, are actually showing that absolutely accurate address. So all your formats, etc are the same; no abbreviations for Limited or for Company, etc. So, you need to make sure you check your name, address and postcode.

You need to be sure that the category that you’ve put onto Google My Business, is the one that you want to be found for. Which might sound a bit daft, but we have known people that actually have used a different category, and so are not coming up there.

Also, I mentioned before, that it’s really good to have lots of photos going onto your Google My Business page. When you’re putting those photos on, you want to make sure that there’s two things, apart from the fact that they’re relevant and if they’re staff, they’re smiley and happy and things.

You want to make sure that they’re geotagged, with a geolocation, which you can do through Google Photos, really easily. And you want to make sure that the description of those photos includes your keywords. So, again making sure that, that reflects your search terms.

Additionally, the other things that help your rankings, as far as the Google Local Pack is concerned, are your listings elsewhere and the credibility of your listings, that Google will track and will identify. Which will give them reassurance that you’re a reliable company. Google wants to make sure that the people that it recommends, are people that it’s customers and the people who are searching, want to deal with.

So you need to make sure that where possible, you’ve got some good backlinks, back to your site and obviously from there, that’ll reflect on your Google My Business ratings. So, for us, we made sure that we’re listed as Xero Partners, we appear in the Xero Partner directory. We also appear in the ProAdvisor QuickBooks directories. So, those are two very credible businesses, that Google will recognize the fact that we’ve got a link back to our website.

We’ve also made sure that we’ve got free listings with people like, Yelp and Yell and Thomson Local and Scoot and FreeIndex and some of the free accountancy listings as well. We don’t pay for any of those, but they’re all big directories well known directories as far as Google is concerned, and that does enhance our credibility.

Also, you need to make sure that you embed a Google Map onto your website. We’ve always had a link, just to our map, but we’ve made sure that we’ve put an embedded Google Map on there as well, because that evidently makes a massive difference and it’s one that we’d missed! Hence the fact that I’m sharing that today.

Also, make sure that you’re regularly checking what’s gaining momentum and what is bringing people to your site, because then, through the Insights on Google My Business, you can make sure that you’re replicating that and following that theme, with your future content.

So, hopefully that’s given you some other options to consider. Google is only gaining ground. More and more, it is becoming the given and the only place that we tend to look for things. And it’s an entirely free opportunity, to make sure that within your local market, you’re utilising every option that you can.

So I would massively suggest and recommend that you go off have a look at your Google My Business listing, and just make sure that all of those tips are actually in there, and that you’re implementing them as you add extra content.

Do let me know how you get on and I’ll see you very soon.