How to optimize your Google My Business account. You will find the most important and most powerful tips to help with your Google Business Profile in this video. Thanks for watching and ask your questions in the comments below!
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Read The Video Transcript
Let’s talk about how to optimize your Google My Business account, now known as the Google Business Profile. Let’s talk about how to optimize that so we can rank high and get more business coming in, starting now. In this video, I’m going to go over the top ranking factors that we need to look at to rank your business quickly on the Google My Business 3-Pack. Let’s look at this report I got over here. This is the top 20 factors, okay? We’re going to look at the top five and we’re going to go through them fairly quickly, but what I want to do is show you how to get this free cheat sheet that has a video so you can dive deep into each one of those if you need to. Otherwise, let’s get going right now, but if you can get the stuff I’m talking about in this video nailed down right away, you’re going to be light years ahead of the competition.
So first, let’s talk about the category that you select in your Google Business account. So let’s jump into the back end of My Account. So I’m going to click on Edit Profile here after I’m logged in. And what I’m going to do is click on Business Information at the top, and then you’ll see down here my Primary Category is Marketing Agency. Your category is going to be based on whatever it is that’s going to get you the greatest revenue for your business. So before you select this or before you change it, make sure you understand what the competition is ranking for. So if I go and search for marketing agency in Missoula, which is where I live, you’re going to scroll down here to the pack and you’re going to see all the top three people ranking here, have marketing agency as the category. Okay? So if I was going to put in web design agency, I probably wouldn’t rank from marketing agency.
Whatever it is that you want to rank the most for, is what you need to put as your primary category. Now, you can select many other additional categories down here, okay? Those are going to have a big impact on ranking, and they can always signal to Google, other things that you provide within your business. Like I said, on my YouTube channel here, I have a much more in-depth video on categories where you can download a list of all of Google’s categories. There’s over 4,000 of them, so check out that video when you download the cheat sheet. Now, if you like what you’ve seen so far, please subscribe below. I’ve got lots of videos coming out all the time of cutting edge information when it comes to Google My Business or the Google Business Profile, and if you have any questions, ask them in the comments below and I will get back to you.
Let’s move on. Now, quick warning, before we talk about keywords, there’s a lot of BS on the internet when it comes to keywords, and when I say BS, there’s just a lot of articles and videos of people trying to sell you their keyword program that you don’t really need. You’re not going to be doing in-depth keyword research. You just want to make sure you understand the number one thing that somebody searches for, to find your business. And then you want to place that in strategic places so that you rank, so that you tell Google exactly what it is you want to rank for. A lot of businesses don’t get this, they just don’t do it right. So how do we do this? So let’s go to one of my websites, bigwestmarketing.com, and you’re going to see where I put the words marketing in there because I want to rank for marketing keywords.
If you look up here and you hover at the top here, you’re going to see Digital Marketing for Service Businesses. So digital marketing, marketing is my keyword right there. And then we scroll down to the main heading. We got marketing right here. The name of my business has marketing in it as well. And one thing you need to understand about Google is they really love it when you have these keywords as your business name. So if I wanted to rank for electrician Missoula or electrician Seattle, if I had electrician Seattle within my business name, somehow within my business name, that would actually help me rank. Is that fair? Not necessarily, but people do it all the time and it does actually give you an advantage. So if you’re looking to start a new business and you haven’t figured out the name yet, consider adding keywords in there.
It’s not crucial, but it does help. Now, let’s move on to completing your listing. A lot of people have a profile, but it is not complete. They haven’t put in everything that Google wants to see. So, what do I mean by that? Let’s jump back over to the screen here and click on Edit Profile. We’ll go back into My Account. Now, you want to make sure that you have everything possible added to this section here. You want to have your hours, and if your hours change, you want to change your hours. Any kind of products you have, you want to put in there as many as you possibly can. You also want to put services. If you offer services like I do, I’ve got lots of different services that I put in here. Look at all these, okay? There is no limit to this and it’s not going to hurt you to put too many, so fill this out completely as possible.
Now for booking, I use a program called Calendly, so I put my Calendly link in for my booking account. You can also just put the Contact Us page on your website as well. Google wants to see something in as many of these as possible. We’re going to talk about photos in a minute. Of course, you want to have your logo and then you want to have a graphic designer create a cover photo or do it in a program like Canva. But the point is guys, fill this out and fill it out completely. Next, let’s talk about reviews. Five star reviews. Reviews are becoming an important factor when it comes to ranking on Google, but beyond that, they’re also the best way to get that online word of mouth advertising for free. So don’t discount reviews. It is a huge part of your business if you want to play the game online.
Now you see my business here has 166 Google reviews. We’ve got these since 2009, and yes, Google has taken some of those away over the years, but we slowly trickle these in week by week, month by month, and we stay consistent with it. We didn’t get these all at once, and you don’t want to either. That looks phony, that looks fake. Google does not want to see that. You want to constantly be requesting reviews from your clients. Now, how do you decide how many reviews you actually need? It depends on how many your competitors have. If your competitor has 50 reviews, you want to have 75 reviews. If your competitor has 500 reviews, you want to have 600 reviews. Always try to be the top review collector in your area, in your space. Now, I have a whole nother video that offers a free template on how I use email and text messaging to get reviews from people that I’ve worked with.
It works like magic. Check out that video. I’ll make sure I put it in the description as well. Now, the last thing I want to talk about are photos. A lot of people just throw some photos in at the beginning and then they let it sit. If you can throw a new photo into your Google account every week or a few every month, that’s going to be amazing. That’s going to help your business rank as well. But don’t just throw any photos in there. Make sure these photos heavily relate to your business. Google can actually see what’s going on in the photos. They can tell if it’s a chair, they can tell if it’s a desk, they can tell if it’s a little animal that looks like a bull. They can tell if it’s tape. That’s how smart Google’s AI is now, and they will actually look at your photos and if your photos are real, authentic, and they show off the service or the products that you provide, that will help you rank.
Now, that’s it in a nutshell, guys. Like I said, subscribe, ask questions, like this video. I’m here for you and I have a lot more. I also want to offer you this free cheat sheet. This cheat sheet has everything we do for our clients when it comes to Google My Business, and we’ve been doing this for 13 years now. It also has links so you can go deep on every topic that I talk about and it’ll directly link you over to the video, and it will help you get to the top of Google, I promise. All you need to do is go to bigwestacademy.com/gmbcheatsheet. I’m putting a link down below as well. Go and grab that. It’s free. It can change your business. Once again, my name is Joe Burnich from bigwestacademy.com, and I will see you in the next video.
