Key takeaways
- Google curates photos and reviews on your profile automatically, whether you manage it or not.
- One customer photo can reach tens of thousands of local views in a small market.
- Claim, update and actively manage your profile so it sends prospects toward you, not away.
Transcript
Today we’re going to be talking about Google My Business. Me and my family, we go to Pizza Perfection every Friday. We do carry out. We post Google review. It’s good. I take a picture, send it off. In less than a week, we received over 25,000 views on that one photo. We’re in a market of less than 35,000 people.
I posted a review for another business. It’s a local coffee shop. Wednesday of Thanksgiving. I don’t expect a whole lot. Saturday through Monday morning, over 1200 views, and that’s 1200 opportunities that they had to invite people into their business, and it’s submitted by a user like me, and curated by Google.
But that’s the key. Google is curating that automatically for you, and if you’re not in control of it, you may be actively steering away customers from your business. So here are three ways to optimize that so that you can garner those customers on a regular basis.
Step one is to go ahead and create that Google My Business account. You’ll go to business.google.com, and if you scroll down a little bit, there’s a Manage Now button. It’s blue. Go ahead and click that, and then it’s going to have you type in the name of the business. And if the business exists, you’ll be able to go through and validate it. They’ll send like a postcard, or they’ll do a phone call. Hopefully, it’s a phone call. It’s way faster. And sometimes the postcard does get lost in the mail, so you may have to ask for it a second time. If your business doesn’t already exist, you’ll have to go in and enter in all the information to create your business, and they’ll usually do a verification.
So step number two is if you were able to validate or create that account, go ahead and fill out all the information, whether it’s the business hours, double check the address, double check the email address, the phone number, and your services and your description, your coupons, specials, everything and anything. Go ahead and fill all that out because that’s the difference between you showing up and not. We see it all the time. Very natural. Fill it all out.
Step number three is to go ahead and curate those photos. So partner with a customer or partner with another company who’s good at photos, and from there curate what the indoor looks like, what the outdoor. When I drive up, what should I be expecting? And if you want to do like a 360 tour of your space, you can do that in the platform. It’s really, really powerful, and we see this in a lot of our analytics.
We work with companies all over the nation. People are actively checking out space before they go in. They’ll tour an entire business before ever thinking of driving to it. Once you curate that, you are helping them make a purchasing, a buying decision of yes, I would like to go here. Whether that was a good photo or if it was a bad photo, they’re going to be less likely to visit.
Want help putting this into practice? See SEO for Financial Advisors.
