Google My Business Masterclass

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hi everybody and welcome to the webinar google my business master class my name is steve your host
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for today and i’m joined by nick conov-olive a senior digital marketing
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success manager here at surefire local so two quick housekeeping items in case
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you’re unfamiliar with who surefire local is our mission is to help you make online
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marketing easy by providing your business with a next generation platform
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that’s available everywhere you need it across devices and browsers we provide you the software you need to
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attract customers and grow profits efficiently all from one place
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and yes this webinar will be recorded you’ll receive an email later this afternoon with a link to view
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both the replay and a pdf of the presentation so feel free to sit back
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listen and take it all in while you’re here and you can also engage with us at any time using the questions tab
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which you should see in the go to webinar control panel on your screen you can also share any
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feedback by emailing marketing at surefirelocal.com
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nick has a great presentation for you today full of secrets and tips that can help you
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unlock your local reach and improve your chances of getting found on google nick will walk you through it
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understandings why google my business is so critical to your digital footprint and then also share how to actually use
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your group my business listing to improve your visibility so with that i’m going gonna pass things over to you nick
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thank you hi everybody good morning it is a pleasure to meet with everyone
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or at least present to everyone today uh so today’s gonna be a really fun uh
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exercise as we go through talking about google my business i’m sure a majority of you have at least
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interacted with the google my business page whether or not you’ve established yours and claimed yours it’s a whole
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nother story but today i’m going to be presenting to you two main components one just some general statistics about
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some elements of consumer behavior how that behavior is interacting with google and how google itself
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is actually helping position companies to be more successful and then the second is i’m going to walk
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through kind of the the technical the mechanics behind how do you get your google my business
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page configured and why you do certain things in there so the first part that we’re going to go
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over today is just the general trends and one thing that i want to
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emphasize to you immediately right now google is making a serious and
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fundamental shift towards hyper locality even if the
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search result results in a national chain or national brand or something to that effect
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at least google is attempting to serve up the most local result possible when relevant and so something
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that we want to kind of like put out there and emphasize is the fact that the mobile experience
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is dominating um overwhelming majority of browsing on google and on the internet
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is now happening on a mobile device rather than a old school desktop or a
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laptop this changes elements of consumer behavior
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and one of the ways that that is happening is people are spending more time
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browsing around and being willing to find it to discover what they’re searching for
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google’s gotten smart and it understands how to present certain things but sometimes people just don’t know
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what they don’t know when they’re attempting to search for stuff and this is where elements of discovery come into play and having a
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strong online presence helps get your name out there and capture the attention of
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everyone if you think about how distracted we are in our lives being able to capture the attention of
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those whose services you could potentially provide to is imperative
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so talked about a little bit of the the changing landscape of consumer behavior let’s kind of hit on
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these for a minute here we’ve already touched on the fact that mobile is the dominating force um
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i need to introduce you to this concept of zero click searches now this could be a webinar on its own
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but in short back in 2019 50.33
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of all google searches resulted in what’s called a zero click action or zero click search where
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they may have seen the phone number for something or went to a different place but didn’t click on
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your brand or didn’t click on your website when it was served up as google saying hey this is the most relevant results
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this happens to do with the fact that most people are using their mobile devices and would rather browse something visual
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through video or photos so aside from the main search engine results page when you
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search for something on google the second most popular place that people go believe it or not is actually the images
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section within google and google and you’re gonna notice this is a theme as i go through this
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google is attempting to serve up local images and local videos and local results
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even in those other subsections of its digital property when possible the other contributing
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factor to some of this here is voice search this has become really dominant in the last couple years
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and it’s presented a very technical challenge to google and the others so when you say
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hey siri hey alexa hey google et cetera you are utilizing that form of search in
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a very different way than what you’re utilizing it from a mobile device to actually punching in
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with your fingers or even on a keyboard for a computer the big difference here is there’s more
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words included in the search um it is causing it to be more
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conversational so traditional search is manipulated and
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changed now through the fact that we are using our voices to search which consequently has produced a weird
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element where google on average is seeing about 15 percent of all searches on a daily
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basis being unique to them as in they’ve never seen that type of search results before
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or that search in that combination of words before so all that is kind of setting up for
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what we’re doing today to help you ensure that you dominate and so
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one of the key things that i do have to point out with respect to hyper local marketing and this is something that google is
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working on is the idea of having a physical address versus just a general service area
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now for those of you who are small business owners and work out of your home i think the
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most obvious reason why you don’t want to necessarily publish your location is because of potentially
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either solicitors or bad or angry customers or something like that you don’t want people trying to
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you know bug you at your home so there is this level of protection and google understands why that’s a thing
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so one of the things that we need to make sure that you do when you set up your google my business profile and one
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things that you do when you are continuing to manage your online presence is keeping the the idea out there of
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identifying your geolocation where are you at where are you posting these images from where was this picture
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taken things along those lines so there are basically kind of
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three main key factors that go into um your your local ranking search
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factors uh relevance distance and per and and prominence relevance being does this is
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well it’s quite frankly defining itself is it relevant to the search that i’m looking for and the results that are showing up
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distance if i’m in washington dc i don’t necessarily want uh results for somewhere in boston i
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want somewhere closer and then prominence has to do basically with the idea of
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you know how authoritative is your website how long has it been around does it have the information that i’m gonna need and
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so let’s take a quick step back in the history of search and talk about the evolution of what’s
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occurred here so back in the day you used to be able to do something called
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keyword stuffing on your website back of the website you throw up a bunch of keywords and hope that somehow
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people found you this resulted fairly quickly in a bad user experience so think about if you
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were to pull out your phone right now and search pizza google already knows where you’re located
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so it’s going to serve up to you let’s expect maybe three or four different types of results
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restaurants immediately around you that serve pizza recipes for pizza maybe a wikipedia page
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or something like that and then some local news articles if i’m in washington dc
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and i search for pizza and i get a bulk cheese manufacturer from wisconsin that
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sells 50 pound blocks of mozzarella as part of the first page search results when i’m simply searching pizza
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that is a bad user experience and that is an example of old school uh keyword trafficking
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i’m sorry keyword stuffing now in november of 2019
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google made a fundamental shift on how it’s serving up local search results and this has been
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permeated out and has continued on distance or proximity used to be the
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main driving factor for how something in this local result would show up and that makes sense from
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a rudimentary standpoint on why google would do that however that isn’t necessarily
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the greatest way to serve up the search results and so now google has shifted to having relevancy
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be the more domineering reason behind why one company will show up versus
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another think about how there are certain terms that can be applied in very different ways
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if you search for window replacement are you searching for auto window replacement or home or
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business window replacement so depending upon the words that are used in there google is attempting to
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parse down to provide those who are searching with the most relevant content possible
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there’s other elements that go into this um recency being one that i will touch on in a little bit here
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but there’s an element of consumer behavior that ties into recency and i’ll discuss that in a moment um
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so what is google my business great question it basically is your second website
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it is a free piece of software on google that effectively allows you
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to put your name out there um show attributes about who your company
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is how to get in contact with you what you do what you sell photos etc google being google
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want to keep you on their digital property so it behooves them to have some form of
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digital presence for you on their digital property so let’s walk through these um
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this is kind of like the areas that exist for your google my business page you have
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basic information about your company uh reviews the products and services that you offer
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should people can even book an appointment through you which is pretty fantastic um you have encountered google my
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business in probably three different capacities starting on the left is the knowledge panel
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now that’ll happen when we start primarily something specific if i’m searching for
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you know a company called i don’t know anderson roofing i would expect anderson roofing in my service area to
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pop up and have this thing pop up on the right hand side of the screen if you scroll down the page a little bit
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you’re going to get something called the map pack that’s going to be generally served up with something more of a generic search
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like roofer near me or roofer washington dc and then if you toggle over to google
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maps you have a whole list of companies that will show up and you can click on each individual one
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and it populates the google my business profile there it’s all pulling from the same data source it’s just being served up with a
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different user interface depending upon what you’re looking at now
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i did indicate that i would go over this element of recency and one thing that i really want to talk about with you here
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is human behavior is very funny uh we’ll touch on this a little bit
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later but if you have posts on your google my business page or photos that you have not updated since
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2013 there’s a general level of confidence that is lowered based off consumer
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behavior it sounds bizarre if you’re a dentist that’s what you do as dentistry
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not much maybe has changed in the way of the photos that you’re going to take but people are going to want to see more recent photos um
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that’s that so in order for you
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to dominate your local service area one thing that you’re going to
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notice out of this presentation is it’s going to take some work okay um you have to upload photos you have to
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create posts like you would on facebook or twitter you’ve got to constantly make sure that your service area is up to date
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that the products and services that you’re offering are up to date that any specials you’re offering are up
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to date things like that um this is the modern world at this point now with respect to
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how you have to manage your online presence um here at surefire we also have a piece
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of software that helps you do that i’ll drop that in right now and i’ll move on um so that’s part one kind of setting up
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everything so let’s talk about how you can actually step through and
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get this whole thing set up for yourself a while back google was just creating
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google my business pages they’ve now shifted it upon the business owner and it is your responsibility
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to create and or claim your google my business listing um it’s a very straightforward process
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and i’ll walk you through that in a minute the other things that you’re going to have to populate in here for the most part it’s going to
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be a set and forget it unless you start expanding services but you’re going to punch in your business info where you do business
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how people can get a hold of you and the products and services you offer so even though you guys are gonna be
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getting a copy of this let’s walk through this pretty quickly first and foremost you need to have a gmail address if you do not have a gmail
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address go ahead and create one this way you can create your google my business listing um very
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straightforward you punch in all your information and then google goes ahead and sends out a
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verification to you in my experience most of my customers
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receive a verification through uh the mail google will send you a piece
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of paper with like a six digit code on it that you’re gonna punch in and it verifies that you are who you say
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you are now we are aware of the fact that at some point google is going to be offering i guess
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what i’m calling enhanced google my business profiles where you’re going to be able to pay uh to have some levels of enhancement to
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your google my business profile we haven’t gotten much information about that but we know that it’s coming and so i
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figured right now would be a good time to talk about that um so keep your eye your your ears open
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your eyes are open to hearing what is coming out of that for those of you who receive our um
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communications keep a look at out for that once we have more information we will be sharing that with you
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um moving on this part in our research i found to be
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absolutely shocking um the number is quite astounding to me
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that over half of businesses have not taken the time
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to claim their local business listing or if they have it they may have set it
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up once back in 2013 and haven’t done anything with it you’ve got to put yourself in the
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consumer shoes and realize how frustrating that is because for a lot of companies it’s a
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lot easier for me as a consumer to search for something and find the results
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immediately on the google results page rather than having to go into someone’s website
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verify my location punch in a zip code et cetera et cetera to only understand what your hours of operation are that is one specific
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example but it showcases the fact that there’s still a ton of opportunity
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for those of you who have not claimed yours to start dominating your local market because there’s a
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possibility that one of your competitors down the street has not taken the time to claim sorry
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claim their google my business page
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so adding your information here very straightforward as well
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one really cool thing is you can set up a virtual tour of your office you can take pictures um and set them up
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really hugely popular with my eye care center um and in fact just i’d say just in
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general are medical based uh customers people really like to understand the
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building that they’re about to walk into who they’re going to meet etc
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going back to the idea here that people would rather utilize google
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my business over jumping to a website
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is clearly displayed here the yearning for people to get
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information as fast as possible this number is going to continue to go
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up as time goes on um in my personal opinion google could
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be doing a little bit better job advertising that google my business is a thing for the consumers
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that said consumers are naturally learning that most google my business pages the
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information is accurate and they want to be able to interact with that
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okay so i’ve set up a little bit about why you should be doing this let me reinforce it with a little bit
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further here this is extremely important for you to help dominate your local markets
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should you have a well-functioning google my business page that has all the appropriate things
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filled out you will see up to a 56 percent jump in website visits
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and a 24 jump in calls to your business simply by taking i’m gonna say less than
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an hour of your time to make sure that your google my business page is set up
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that other part here asking for directions um that’s really for two reasons one people
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may just physically want to know where you’re at so they can visit your location but also it’s a form of trust
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but verify people want to see that you are actually located where you say you are
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as opposed to being you know concerned they want to click and say where are you okay i see you’re on the map there great
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these are pretty big um the amount of additional business that you can garner from having a well-configured
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google my business page this thing pays off for itself in spades
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now your service area this is a big one back in the day
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google didn’t really care about how many um locations that you set up as your
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service area they wanted you to be granular it got a little too confusing
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and they narrowed it down and now it’s been narrowed down again to 20 areas so the best practices that
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we recommend is starting off on the so you can cast the widest net possible
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and then narrowed down by either city town um or a zip code itself but you’re only
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limited to 20. so so that’s that
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all right um moving on categories this is a very interesting
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one here these are meant to describe who you are as an organization i am a
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dentist i am an hvac installer things like that what you cannot put in here and what
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google will punish you for is if you attempt to embellish under the category section there is an open text
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field where you can describe your company so you can put dentists if you want to what google does not want
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you to put is like the most affordable dentist in town or the coolest the coolest ac
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guy around right they don’t want that um that is not a way that people are
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going to actually search and so google wants to match based off categories because remember google’s gotten smart
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it understands synonyms it understands if i’m searching for roofer roofing shingle repair etc
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i’m looking for something that falls under the umbrella of like roofing contractor for example
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straightforward enough the other element that you can get to add in here is products and
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services this is where you can get a lot more granular with describing what it is that you
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install so i’m going to keep using roofing for a while but if you’re a roofer you can specify that you install gaf
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if you do citing you can specify that you install hardy if you’re a window if you’re a
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window company you can say that we install pro via windows and doors or whatever the point here is to narrow it
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because there’s going to be that population of uh educated consumers that are going to
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search off name brand and local installer before they search for anything else they know what they want
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they know they want this particular brand because the color scheme or whatever and then go from there
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the appointment link this is great but best practices here you need to lead
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this to a web capture form somewhere on your website that also has a phone number
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most websites are configured appropriately enough where the uh contact us section
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or book an appointment with us section or whatever on the website is sufficient so you’re going to go ahead and drop
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that link into the appointment section there if you do not have an appointment section or something that’s very clearly
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labeled as here’s how to get a hold of us go ahead and get that fixed on your website as soon as humanly possible
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this is a big one because you will lose out on people um contacting you because again keep in
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mind people don’t necessarily want to browse a website however if you direct them directly to here’s how to get a hold of
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us that will help with people uh clicking through
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now attributes are a brand new thing to google um they’re going to be constantly adding
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them over time but this allows you to identify
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based off certain things that people find to be important so if you are a veteran-led organization
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some people prefer to do business with vets being able to highlight that might be just one of those extra little things
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that that convinces someone to pick up the phone and call you versus your competition
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now uh here’s where the bulk of the work is going to come into play on an ongoing basis
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reviews posts photos and videos and q a i’m going to walk you through all four of these categories here
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reviews these serve a couple purposes from the
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technical perspective the more reviews that you have that means the more prominent you’re growing
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online that means google has a level of trust factor on you okay in general with the public as well
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the more reviews that you have preferably good ones uh the more likely someone is to do
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business with you what’s really interesting here is responses
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to the reviews themselves bear no weight on your search engine optimization your seo or
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your local ranking factors or anything like that your responses are for the general
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public everyone wants to feel acknowledged if i took the time to go online and respond back to you or
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to write a post on your google my business page about how great something is that you did for me you should be thanking me for
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doing that you should be thanking every customer that leaves a review now what about the negative reviews nick
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great question negative reviews do not carry the same
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death sentence that they used to negative reviews are an opportunity to show who you
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are as a company and show the character of your company people are going to be leaving negative
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reviews no matter what if you haven’t gotten one i promise you you will get one how you respond to it
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is the issue here do not type in all capital letters which is the equivalent of yelling on the internet
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uh don’t threaten a lawsuit etc etc if you or a teammate or a subordinate or
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someone screwed up take ownership of it yes we screwed up we’re sorry we arrived late
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we’re sorry we ordered the wrong color here’s my personal email address let me fix it how can i help you um
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this is extremely important to go through because i will do business with a company that has a three or even two star rating
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as long as i see that the owner has either taken action
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to rectify the situation or to turn the whole thing around or something that effect
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so be conscientious about how you respond back to negative reviews
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because if you’re not kind in how you respond back in a negative review i as a consumer
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look back and go okay what’s the negotiation process going to look like
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if something gets messed up along the way how easy is it for us to find a middle ground to rectify the situation
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and if you’re yelling at people online i’m going to look at that and go huh i’m not going to hire you to do this
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because murphy’s law something’s going to go wrong and you’re going to be a jerk about it and i don’t want to deal with that
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so something to really think about on on how you handle that now that said only a gmail account can leave
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a google my business review the likelihood of someone taking the time to create a gmail account just to leave you
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a review is pretty slim i’m sure it happens but i i don’t
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foresee a lot of people doing that so the next best two places to ask for
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reviews would be a direct review on your website should you have something like that enabled
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or send people to facebook because facebook let’s be honest really is the next word of mouth
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uh or at least the digital version of the common word of mouth so being able to post on there
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most people have a facebook page great direct them that direction
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the other cool thing here is for those of you who have customers that are um
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you know that are capable of leaving a review for you you can create your own little personal link right here
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and then put that in the body of every email so for my home services based companies perhaps you send out a
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final invoice or a two-week check-in or something like that and you say hey listen here’s a copy of our link would you go
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ahead and leave a review now that said if you
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tell someone that you’re going to send them a link within the next two minutes for them to leave a review knowing that
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they’re in front of a computer they are having a lot higher likely chance of leaving a review right there
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and then than in the future so a best practice that i coach my customers on
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is get someone on the phone and tell them that you’re going to send them a review
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thank them for their business and then move on
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all right this is huge again going back to the idea of
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the how you respond to the reviews and the frequency in which you’ve gotten reviews
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make a really big decision for make a really big impact on how someone makes a decision
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on whether or not to call you make a purchasing decision something to that effect and this notion of frequency
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um or or or recency is really important here
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there’s something about us where anything over two to three weeks we start to have
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doubt in our head is this company still around are they still um open for business ooh their last review
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was five weeks ago why has it been so long since a review same thing kind of applies to the content component of posting
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but um it’s something that i want you to be conscientious of so you should have a goal to attempt to
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receive several reviews on a weekly basis now i know this doesn’t necessarily apply to
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everyone i’m sure there’s some folks on the phone here that are like what i would regard as like a boutique
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home builder and only build six homes a year okay you’re likely not going to be able
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to get four reviews a month i get that but generally speaking you should
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be aiming for every positive experience with the customer inquiring with them to at to leave a
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review for you um going back to the idea that i want to
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feel special and loved i have a higher likelihood of doing business with you again
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if you take the very simple time to respond back to my review even if i left you a positive review
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right um you just being like hey nick thanks for your business uh your
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dog running around the yard was a great site foreman hahaha make it personal make it fun and
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that that reinforces that you care about the fact that i spent thousands of dollars with you
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um it’s a really big thing it’s a positive reinforcement for folks just do it now
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going back to the idea of negative reviews we are pretty good about coaching our
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customers on how to deal with negative reviews but
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one thing that i want to emphasize here the numbers don’t lie is you’ve got about a one-third chance
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of getting that negative review either revised or completely deleted
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and when you’re able to remove the emotion step back and go okay did we have a
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screw-up or is the customer being unreasonable if the customer is being unreasonable how do we call them out on that
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without us looking pompous right so there’s that balance you gotta strike there which is why i
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i keep going back to this i’m gonna emphasize it again talk about it with someone talk about it if you’re working with us
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your digital marketing strategist talk with me let’s figure out the proper response
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if there’s a genuine mess you know mess up go for it figure out how to take ownership to what you had to say or
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to the situation that occurred okay um little thing no control really on
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your side here but um people are able to leave attributes uh as part of their review
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to you okay this will help people um understand who you are as a company
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because it’s all good and fine to say this is a positive review and someone write up everything but again
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going back to this idea that we are quick needing to get basic pieces of information if i can look and go okay they’ve got
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good value and they’re punctual and they’re professional cool i’ll give them a call sometimes decisions are made
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just that quickly so how do you get this you can download
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the app or you can work from it from your computer um the app is really easy uh because it
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makes it very easy for you to upload photos and respond to reviews and whatever whatever surefire local also has an app moving on
33:54
all right posting this is so critical so so critical
34:01
yes you already have to post stuff to your website and twitter and facebook and
34:08
i don’t know pinterest and wherever else you’re posting and now you have to post to google my business
34:13
it is daunting i get it that said it’s super easy to do it and there’s
34:18
basically two different types of posts that we’re talking about here photos
34:23
which are standalone photos that go into a gallery built into your google my business page
34:28
and then post themselves now the posts themselves are you can do a couple different things
34:36
here the most common three that are used are add update add events and then add offer
34:43
these are the the last two are pretty self-explanatory you’re going to run a special 500 off
34:48
window installation or buy one pair of prescription glasses get the second pair 50 off use this code
34:55
you could set time parameters around when it runs how long it runs et cetera same thing goes with events if you are
35:02
at a home show and you have a booth take a picture of the crew at the booth post it up
35:07
post pictures from there add updates et cetera treat it like a twitter feed treat it like a facebook feed
35:13
and then add update this is the most common post that pretty much everyone’s going to do which
35:19
you’re going to treat again like social media you are going to post a picture of something and describe
35:26
it now the really cool part about this also is it doesn’t necessarily have to be specific to you
35:32
so for my roofers let’s just say gaf releases a brand new type of roofing
35:38
shingle that lasts through 200 mile an hour winds and you’re going to start selling these you
35:44
may want to put a press release up um on there that links to the article
35:49
that or the press release that the gaf released and then you’ll have another link in there that takes you to the contact us
35:55
section on your website call us and figure out if we can do this for you
36:00
very simple uh this applies to my dentist if there’s some new i don’t know uh bonding material that helps make
36:07
teeth 10 times stronger and you’ve been certified in the state to now do that guess what go for it post about
36:14
it that is the cool stuff this these posts fall off after a couple of weeks so it’s
36:20
best practice to post a couple times a week through here again going back to the idea that we are
36:26
visual creatures we are preferring to browse on our mobile devices
36:32
you will see higher engagement with your brand online and you will see more likelihood of
36:39
people clicking and coming to your website if you have photos up people want to see
36:45
photos now really interesting fact here which i found to be so disappointing oh my gosh
36:53
most businesses only have 11 photos on their um
36:59
google my business page you want way more than that take pictures of the crew having fun
37:04
take pictures of this office staff doing something you know uh take pictures of products and the services
37:11
put these pictures up there because i want to know who you are as a company when i do
37:16
business with you things are purposely getting a lot more personal and i want to understand who are the
37:22
technicians that are going to be coming out to my house what does their truck look like what does your office space look like
37:27
you have a huge selection of eyeglasses let take a picture of that eyeglass wall selection
37:33
oh these are the top 10 selling eyeglass frames of the year shown to me that’s what i want to see so
37:40
make sure that you are constantly putting the content out there knowing that people want to see these
37:46
pictures knowing that people are going to go to the images section
37:51
now a little bit of a kind of a photography 101 i’ll just keep this
37:57
brief be conscientious of the pictures that you post going back to my home improvement
38:03
customers um i don’t know your local county and
38:09
state and whatever safety osha laws be conscientious about posting anything
38:15
that can be construed or outright is a osha violation the last thing we want is a picture of
38:22
someone on a five foot story giant roof would not harness in and like you know god forbid someone get
38:29
hurt and your google my business page suddenly becomes exhibit a in a lawsuit or number two a board competitor or
38:36
county inspector browsing your google my business page or even your website or something like that
38:41
you know delighting in this treasure trove of violations that you have subsequently posted um so be conscious
38:49
of that also just think about the quality of the photo that you want to take if it takes five extra minutes to clean
38:55
up all the crap in the foreground so this way you don’t have a bunch of debris everywhere and it shows that you
39:00
like work clean you’re going to want to take that extra couple of minutes and clean up the pictures
39:06
um on what you’re working on use the photos as an opportunity to be educational whatever
39:12
photos you take here could also be part of a post so you know uh
39:18
rotten roof decking is typically not covered by a um you know an insurance claim
39:25
for when someone’s renewing their roof so using that as an opportunity to take a picture
39:30
of a rotten roof deck and go hey insurance doesn’t cover this stuff always have a budget of a few hundred
39:36
extra dollars in case we have to replace a few pieces of uh roof decking
39:41
that’s an opportunity to educate and it’s relevant all right moving on um
39:50
little things here at this point now but you’re gonna want to uh select a cover photo
39:57
so whether it be of like a banner of your building or the side of your newly stickered up
40:03
truck or uh the photo of the office staff or something like that make it a nice
40:08
looking cover photo and then you’re gonna have to have a logo along with it so make sure these are high quality images
40:16
all right going back again this idea of visual uh stuff you can create videos and post
40:23
these onto your google my business page you can post them on facebook you can post
40:28
them on wherever else but to talk about google my business today that’s what we’re going to talk about but what i’m about to go over with you
40:34
is universal to wherever you decide to post it high production quality videos do not
40:41
get the views that you think they might get that’s great that you spent three thousand
40:47
dollars for someone to come out and take a drone shot of your storage yard and couple of
40:53
cool shots of you metal fabricating gutters and a few other things but you know what
41:00
your average consumer won’t care go to youtube right now and search for
41:07
something search for something that you’re doing is a home project there will be video upon video of it and
41:14
the most popular videos are going to be the um
41:19
ones that are held with a cell phone camera and that are less than five minutes long and they cover a single subject this is
41:27
how to properly aerate and overseed your lawn you can go to home depot and buy this aerator
41:32
here’s how much it costs you could do this this and this and move on the video is three minutes long and it’s got like five million views i’m
41:38
not joking there are videos like that out there for my home improvement folks and this
41:44
does also apply to those who are not necessarily in home improvement but there’s an element of research that comes along
41:50
with today’s modern consumer we all know that google is the number
41:56
one search engine in the world what may come as a surprise to some of you
42:02
is that the number two search engine in the world is actually youtube it’s because people
42:08
want to go to youtube and quickly learn about something that they’re gonna do how to shop for a
42:14
roofer how to shop for a dentist what is this surgery that my dentist is proposing to
42:19
me why what is an astigmatism i need to see a video of why why that matters so you creating
42:25
educational videos for your prospective consumer base will drive traffic towards you
42:31
okay um the more you can create the more
42:37
visibility the more content the more authority that you have online all right um the last
42:45
section i’ve got here has to do with questions and answers every google my business page is now
42:52
enabled with a q a section anyone can ask any question about any subject
42:59
and anyone can respond back in any way they see fit so if you are an optometrist i could go
43:06
to your google my business page and post a ridiculous question i could post how much does it cost to
43:12
install a swimming pool and then someone else can come on and and go they took care of my guinea pigs
43:17
really well as the answer so you have the opportunity to drive the conversation
43:24
about your brand in a local manner so ask questions that are of you
43:30
um you know do you offer an uh insurance or did you do insurance
43:36
jobs uh do you offer financing you know what is the difference between
43:42
uh this or that any question you can think of what i like to tell my customers is any top 10 ish questions that you
43:50
have to answer on a pretty regular basis when people call you go ahead and post
43:56
those online and then go ahead and answer them the reason why i’m bringing this all full circle now at
44:02
this point is see you see these people all also ask section down at the bottom a
44:08
lot of google searches will at some point will also have this people also ask
44:13
the reason why that’s there is because google’s attempting to understand
44:18
how people are searching and finding relevant components that are along with it but one thing that google’s trying to do
44:25
is serve up hyper local results so if you can populate your q a section
44:31
with questions that are relevant to your brand or your business over time google’s intention is to
44:38
populate the people also ask on a local level same thing with images and same thing with videos
44:46
yes popular questions will populate popular images will populate whatever but google’s goal going back to
44:52
beginning this presentation is hyperlocality they want to present the most
44:58
local results that is relevant possible to you all right
45:05
last slide here what i’ve got for you here um
45:11
i presented a lot to you what is the takeaway here try if you can set it as a goal for
45:18
yourself five to ten photos a week or videos six to eight google posts per week
45:25
depending upon your situation at least a review a month preferably three to five
45:31
and then just every couple weeks ask yourself a question and answer it and that’s it the reason why we uh
45:39
um you know we we are successful and why my customer base is successful is not
45:46
only following the guidelines that we’ve got uh but also
45:51
our numbers speak for ourselves so i’m not being a good salesperson at the end of the day here if i uh
45:57
so talk about surefire local as steven indicated at the beginning of our call we have a
46:02
brilliant piece of marketing software that allows our customers to dominate their local
46:09
presence by having a single place to manage their digital footprint uh you can post
46:14
you can review you can write review you can you can respond back to reviews you can create content it’s a single place to manage
46:22
the multitude of uh digital properties that google is requiring you to manage
46:29
today um so i’m going to turn this back over to mr steven
46:37
and thank you everyone for your time all right thank you so much nick um as you said
46:43
there’s definitely a lot here to unpack and just kind of go through um and you share a ton of
46:51
great insights so i just wanted to remind everybody that you will you will be getting this recording
46:56
um later this afternoon within a few hours and you’ll also have the option to click
47:03
through the presentation and then also share that with anybody on your team that you think
47:09
would benefit from this as well who isn’t listening in um so i would like to
47:15
wrap up today by offering everybody here with us the chance just to learn more
47:21
um there’s gonna be a poll that appears on your screen and just learn more about sharepoint
47:28
local the platform that nick has mentioned um and how businesses like yours are using it to
47:35
grow profit from yeah sorry grow profitably and expand their digital footprint across
47:41
all of google so just let us know if you’d like to join us on a call
47:47
or if you’re a current customer already or if you’re just not ready yet you don’t have to answer too there’s no
47:53
pressure either way you answer we’re just glad you came to hang out with us for this hour and if you are interested we will reach
48:00
out with you back with the next steps after the webinar ends
48:06
all right nick we did have one question for you um which is an interesting one so
48:14
johnny is asking one of the clients he works with has amazing reviews but might have to
48:21
change their business name is there a way to carry across the reviews and just change the name of
48:26
their google my business account yes yes it’s actually super easy and it’s extremely
48:31
common it is it is extremely common for customers of mine to either move locations or even change
48:38
names and all you do is make the changes within google my business and depending upon the change google
48:46
will probably require a verification and so what you’ll do
48:51
then is you’ll get something probably in the mail that postcard it’s the most common way google does it um yeah but like within a week it’s
48:59
basically taken care of so when you make the changes in your
49:04
google my business profile it’ll show something like um changes pending it’ll be grayed out or something
49:10
like that until you re-verify
49:17
okay bear with me for one second we got a lot more questions coming in
49:25
here isn’t also an interesting one from uh laura so she asks
49:32
how can we remove reviews we know are not real
49:38
yeah so that’s a challenge the the the the the the answer i’ll give you you’re
49:46
probably not going to like but it’s get more reviews is really what it comes down to
49:53
i’d like to believe at this day and age most consumers are smart enough to spot a bogus review
49:59
um and even if you put something simple in the response like we don’t know who you are
50:04
or we think you’re reviewing the wrong business or something like that that could be helpful enough just say
50:10
you know and then provide your contact information now if someone is like claiming
50:16
something outlandish there is a dispute process built into the help section within google my business there’s like a
50:22
support section but i wouldn’t bank on many reviews being uh
50:28
eliminated the the best thing to do is just stack more reviews on top and move on
50:35
knowing that the general public looks at negative reviews with a grain of salt
50:41
all right that makes sense it’s good good advice um on a similar note christina has a question do you
50:47
recommend reaching out to the customer after a negative review or just responding and inviting them to
50:53
reach out to discuss online i would do both i would
50:59
try and call them first get them on the phone preferably someone of authority within
51:06
the organization owner production manager head doctor i don’t know whatever
51:12
whatever business it is and attempt to get the situation rectified
51:17
how do we screw up what can we do to fix it et cetera et cetera um and then respond to it online as well
51:24
now if you can get this whole situation taken care of simply ask them to remove the negative
51:30
review you know you get nothing in life without asking it and the worst someone can tell
51:36
you is no so i would just simply ask
51:42
all right and two more questions because i know we’re running up on the hour yeah you’re good to ask you nick um
51:48
nathan wants to know where can he find the q a section on his uh google my business dashboard
51:56
i’d have to share my screen with you and i can’t right now um but it’s it’s i believe it is on
52:04
the um it’s definitely in the app that’s the
52:11
best i can give you right now it’s a little hard to describe uh it’s there though it just just poke around
52:17
you’ll find it okay and then last question um
52:24
jim has on the q a area of google my business is the identity of the person
52:29
asking the question listed yes
52:36
all right nice and simple
52:41
um all right and any other questions that do come in or if you’re
52:48
watching this recording you can always reach out to our team at marketing at surefirelocal.com
52:54
which um you should now see on your screen and then
53:01
as we say goodbye for today i wanted to again thank you
53:07
nick for hosting today’s chat and then a huge thank you to all of you as well for taking this
53:12
time out of your day to spend it with us i do hope to see you back on future webinars
53:18
and like i mentioned please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions
53:23
we’re here to help and that’s a wrap so until next time goodbye everybody
53:30
thanks everyone

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