Optimizing Your Google My Business Listing – 002

Thanks for checking us out!  We’re excited for this episode, it should give some quick and easy ideas you can implement, to rank higher in Google for local searches, specifically as it relates to the Google My Business (GMB) listing area.

If you already have a GMB listing, we’re going to show you how to optimize it.  If you don’t have one yet, check out our first episode How To Setup Google My Business Listings where we walk you through the process of getting it setup.

Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

Episode number two picks right up where episode one ended.  Now that you have a GMB listing, you need to optimize the listing to rank high in Google for the services you provide.

Only the top 3 GMB listings are provided in the Google search engine results page, so it’s critical to focus on where you want to be found, and what you want to be found for, so you can optimize your listing and rank in that top 3.

We’re going to walk you through how to utilize the photos area, with some do’s and don’ts that will help your listing stand out from the crowd.

You’ll also learn the importance of selecting the categories for your business, plus some tips for selecting the best primary category on your listing.

It’s important to keep your listing fresh and updated, so we’ll touch on some easy ways to consistently put new content on your listing, to help rank higher.

Check out the show notes below for resource links, guides, and a link to watch the episode in video format!

Thanks for checking out episode 2!

If you want to dig even deeper, check out the brand-new course Dominate GMB, which will be launching soon!  We’ll be talking more about the course later, but you can signup for the wait list now (and get a special bonus).

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the full transcript for Optimize Your Google My Business Listing!

Jesse: Hey everyone, Jesse Dolan and Bob Brennan here again with local SEO tactics.
This week we’re going to be talking about your Google My Business listing again.
If you remember what we were talking about last week, hopefully you guys have
done your homework and got your listings set up. Maybe even gotten a few
leads or a few new customers from it. Now we’re going to build on that success
and take you to the next level with optimizing your Google My Business listing.

Bob: I’m really excited about this podcast, Jesse. This is going to be something simple.
This is going to take you, what, 20 minutes to do?

Jesse: Yeah. If you’ve got to create some artwork maybe a little longer. But yeah, it
could be as low as five minutes.

Bob: You’re going to see results pretty quickly with this. We’ll get into other episodes
on how to optimize the Google listings and get you further up in what they call
the map pack.

Jesse: Yeah. We’re going to be covering this for at least one more show after this, and
we’ll probably follow up on it down the road too. Let’s just dive right into it.
Those of you watching us on the video, you’ll see that we have a sample listing
here up on the screen. For those of you who are listening on the podcast, check
out the show notes below. We’re going to have plenty of cheat sheets and how
to guides on going through this process step by step to make it easy for you.

Bob: Yep. First thing that we’re going to go through is just all the main information.
You’ve got your website, your address, phone number. You had to enter that in
before.

Jesse: Up in the top right corner of your listing you’re going to see a button that says
edit. You’re going to want to go ahead and click on that. That’s going to take you
to the main information page. You’ll see these little edit icons next to each
editable element. You’ll want to fill all of those out. Bob and I, something we tell
customers all the time, if Google gives you a field to fill out, fill it out.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: That’s going to be one piece of information in their file that’s going to land in
their index, and it’s one more piece of information that’s going to get you found.
Take advantage of it and use it.

Bob: Don’t skip anything.

Jesse: No. Don’t skip anything, and it doesn’t have to be complex. It can be simple too.
For this example we’re using a local store here, Helper Tech. It’s a phone repair
shop. We’re going to be focusing on the iPhone repair for their service. Very
important, you want to make sure you have your hours listed. Some places are
open 24/7. Some places are closed on the weekends. Whatever it is, Google has
a little spot here. You can click on it, put in your hours. Google will prompts you,
if there’s a holiday coming up they’ll ask you to enter in your holiday hours. If
you have special hours that you want to pre set ahead of time you can click this
next link down here and go ahead and set those holidays up. Or if there’s days
that you’re closed, maybe you’re closed on Mondays. Whatever it is. If you want
to add a quirk into that you sure can.

If you have a separate URL for an appointment, let’s say you take consultations
on Tuesdays and you want people to book an appointment ahead of time, or
whatever the case is. You do have a spot to put an appointment URL.

Bob: Again, if you’re following us on the podcast, just go to business.google.com.
Jesse’s just going down from line item for the very top.

Jesse: Correct.

Bob: You can just follow us through the podcast. But again, we encourage you to go
through the video link on the show notes. He’ll break all this down.

Jesse: You have a couple pieces of information on the right hand side of your screen
under the advanced information. Store code. Labels. Ad words. Location.

Extensions, phone. For your store code, if you have multiple stores you’re going
to want to do something unique for each store. If you just have your one store,
like in this case we’ll just put, “iPhone repair”.

Again, under the advanced information you want to click on the button for
labels. We’ll go ahead and add a few labels that help describe your business.
Things that help you organize it. Then on the off chance it does carry a lot of
weight with Google, it’s not a bad idea to do that as well too. Click apply to save
your changes.

When you set up your business, you had to pick a category for your business.
This is a very important part. We touched on that last episode. Now you’re
going to go back in and you’re going to add multiple categories for your business
here. If you didn’t do that before, now’s a great time to do it. Google has pre set
categories for you. You’re going to want to just type in some words that are
relevant to your business or the services you provide and see what they have for
options. Sometimes they get them pretty close. Sometimes not. If I type in,
“iPhone repair”, you can see there is no pre set category for iPhone repair.
However, if I just type in, “Phone”, we can see there are some pre-populated
items that come up. Choose the best one. Phone repair service, that seems to fit
for these guys of course.

Bob: Yep.

Jesse: Now in this case I actually, let me back up on that. Those are primary. If I just
type in, “Mobile phone repair”, you can see Google has a pre-populated option
for mobile phone repair shop. We’re going to go ahead and click on that. Let’s
add one more category for computer repair. I know they fix computers. We can
see that it comes up with computer repair service. You should be able to find
something that’s relevant to your business. It may not be as exact as you’re
hoping. But go ahead and search. Add as many of these as you possibly can.

Bob: Now I would throw that in, I’d throw something in here real quick, Jess. You’ve
got your primary category. That’s the number one thing that you want to get
found for. Think about that. Again, if you’re a coffee shop and you want to get
found for coffee shop, make sure that’s your number one thing.

Jesse: Correct.

Bob: Now, if you’re a coffee grinder and that’s your secondary deal, make sure that’s
your next additional category. I would prioritize and sit down and write them
down on paper, what your categories that you want to be found for, and go
from the most needed to the least, so to speak. Because I believe that Google
more or less organizes those according to the way you put them down.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Again, if you don’t put some thought into that and really categorize that, you
could be coming up for things you don’t really care about.

Jesse: Fill out all your categories. Pick out everything that’s relevant for you. When
you’re done, click apply to save your changes. That will add those categories.
Now if for some reason you come back later and you say, “I picked coffee
grinder instead of coffee shop”, all you’ve got to do to fix that is just go back in,
click the edit button, go up to your primary category, and change it. If we
wanted to be a coffee shop, we would just pick coffee shop as the number one.

Now I hit apply. That’s as easy as that is for your categories.

That is extremely important. We can’t underscore that enough. That’s how they
categorize you. If you think back to the Yellow Pages days, those of you that are
old enough to know what that is. Those of you that are young enough, just
Google it.

Bob: Don’t worry about it.

Jesse: But that’s the heading that you’re in. That’s the section that you’re in. That’s
how Google looks at this when they file it all away.

Okay. After you’ve taken care of your categories, we’re going to go down and
we’re going to optimize for the photographs. This is another really big part of
being found in Google in the map pack listings here. If you do some Google
searches for, whether it be for your business, for your industry right now just to
check and see what we’re talking about. You can use any example that you
want, but do some searches. You’ll notice when these come up, not only do you
see the A, B, and the C, or the one two three ranking of the businesses in the
map pack. You’re also going to see a photograph, or some kind of picture or icon
on the far right hand side for each one. You can control to an extent what’s
going to show in those areas by adding your photos here.

Now you are going to be at the mercy of Google for exactly which one they pull
up. Could be based on the keyword phrase that you’re searching for, what they
show. It could be based on popularity. Really don’t know. The Google machine
kind of decides sometimes what it wants to do. But at least here you’re going to
have the ability to add your own photos to try to represent your business in the
best light possible.

Bob: To that end, select photos that, “If they picked any one of these, this would be a
great representation of my business”. Don’t take pictures of houseplants or
whatever the case is. Try to have 10 good pictures.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Then if they pick any of those 10, you’re in a good position.

Jesse: Right. Users can also add photos to this too, the community at large. People that
leave reviews, and there’s other sources that they’ll pull from other online
areas. You’re not going to be the only one to add photos into this, so it’s also
good to get familiar with this area because if you, maybe there’s an
inappropriate photo that gets posted to your company page. Or a competitor
tries to mess with you. Who knows what the reason is. This is also the spot
you’d go in to try to request removal, or flag it as inappropriate for that photo,
to manage your property and manage your page.

For on the video, you guys can see that we’ve got pulled up on our photo page
here. There’s lots of options Google has pre set. There’s photos by the owner,
by the customer. 360 degree view. You’ve got interior photos. Exterior photos.
You’ve got photos of your team. There’s just lots of different categories. Do as
many as you can. Like Bob just said, if you can throw 10 photos up there, throw
10 photos up there. That would be great.

Now Google is going to have some size and file format requirements for you.
We’re going to go through some of this real quick. We’re also going to have all
of this in a cheat sheet for you in the show notes down at the bottom.

Bob: Yep.

Jesse: If you want that to go along and follow along with yourself, we’re going to make
that real easy for you. The first one we’re going to pick here is the profile photo.
This is usually shown in kind of a square aspect ratio. Whatever you’re going to
choose for this, make sure it looks good as a square. Sometimes it might be
rounded in a circle. It might cut off the corners. Just kind of be aware of that
when you’re putting it in there.

We have here a logo that we’re using. You can use a logo file. It’s not always the
best, because this image will be small sometimes on the screen. If your logo has
a lot of text it might be kind of hard to read. When you’re picking something for
your profile photo, just keep in mind that this might be kind of smaller when
you’re looking at it on the desktop or on your mobile. If there’s anything in there
people really need to see fine detail, it’s probably not going to be a very good
option for you.

Bob: Try not to get too stressed out about this. I’ve got to reiterate, do your best, and
then if it turns out it doesn’t look the way you want it, obviously go back and
refine it. It’s not the end of the world.

Jesse: You can always change it.

Bob: You’re going to be refining it throughout this process anyway.

Jesse: Absolutely. You don’t want to set this and forget it. You’re going to want to be
coming to check this out. While we’re talking about the photos, to Bob’s point,
you’re going to want to try to upload photos if you can every week, maybe
every couple weeks. Or at least once a month add a fresh photo on there. That’s
something Google’s made well known. They want to see relevant fresh photos.
They want to see some kind of activity on here. Get familiar with it.

Bob: They want to see you’re engaged in your business.

Jesse: Correct.

Bob: The less attention you give to this, the less importance Google will give to you,
so to speak, in the listings.

Jesse: When you upload your photo, you’re going to want to make sure they’re at least
600, 800 pixels or wider. 600 to 800 pixels or wider. If you upload a file that’s
too small, or maybe it’s the wrong file type, Google’s going to give you a
message. It’s not going to let you proceed. Once you have your image uploaded
you can kind of crop it. If you want to cut out some stuff or zoom in on an area,
you have the ability to do that. Then you just go ahead and click the button to
set the photo. You’ll instantly see it up online.

We’re also going to add here our cover photo. Now your cover photo is usually
kind of like Facebook or Google Plus, if you can envision that. It’s usually longer,
kind of a landscape type of a deal. More of the backdrop of your page. For that
one, unlike the other one that’s square, maybe cropped down, this one’s going
to be a little bit larger. Maybe a more broad review of you, your team, the
storefront if you have a retail location. We’re going to go ahead and grab one
here, showing the outside of this building.

The last one we’re going to pick is something for the interior. Again, just like the
categories and everything else that Google gives you, use them. If you’re got a
photo of your interior, put it up there. They have a spot for interior photos. Put
an interior photo in there. It’s definitely going to help you out. Gives Google
more options to sort through for when they decide what’s the best photo, and
frankly for customers, if they want to engage and flip through your photos it
gives them more visibility. More exposure to what’s going on in your store.
Bob: Is there seasonality that we can throw in there? In other words, it’s the middle
of the summer and somehow there’s a picture of your building that’s covered
with snow or whatever.

Jesse: Yeah. That’s getting again back to like we were just talking, for being relevant.
Being fresh with your photos. Absolutely something like that is … We’re up in
Minnesota here for anybody who doesn’t know on the show.

Bob: Can’t tell by our accent.

Jesse: Right. Definitely, it’s snowing outside right now as we speak. If we took a photo
today, it’s not going to look very good in July.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Once you have your photos loaded in there, you can go back. On the left hand
side you’re going to see a button that says home. Click on that. You can see
we’ve got our profile photos up there. It’s right next to our logo. There’s
shortcut buttons here on the top or on the left for you to access at any time to
get back to these features.

Now if you go onto the left hand side, click on the button that says info. What
we’re going to do is, we’re going to go out to Google and we’re going to see
what this looks like now in the maps, search, or just on the Google search for
the photos that we uploaded. It usually happens pretty darn quick. Hopefully
this plays well with us and we can see our example here. If not, if this doesn’t
work for you when you’re doing it on your own, check five minutes later. Maybe
10 minutes later. It’s usually pretty quick.

We’re going to start here. I’m going to click on view on maps. It’s going to open
it up in a new tab. It’s going to show us what the actual listing looks like if you
were to pull it up on Google Maps. You can see, here is our cover photo. If we
scroll down we’ve got more photos. You can scroll through those. Some of our
information is listed on here as well. Some reviews. We’ll get into that later.
Now we’re also going to look at the button, if you click right above that. Right
above the view on maps it will say view on search. We’re going to click on that
one. This would be if your business was searched for, or your service was
searched for in just the traditional Google search. This is how it would show up
on the side bar and the knowledge panel, or in the map pack.

With this you can see on the right hand side some of that same information. See
photos. See outside. It’s got a link to the actual map. Our hours are listed. Again,
our reviews and other information of that sort.

Those of you that are watching on the video, you may see right on here, Google
rolled this feature out a couple weeks ago, at the time of this recording at least,
where you can edit your Google My Business information right in the Google
search results page. This is pretty handy. If you’re like us you’re just going to
want to search for your business every so often. It could be a couple days. It
could be every couple weeks. You’re going to want to definitely do that to keep
tabs on it though. Without having to log into your whole Google My Business
account, you can just change some of the basic information right there in front
of you.

In the case for us, we’re recording this right before New Years Eve, so it’s asking
us to confirm whether or not this business is going to be open on New Years Eve
or not. Like we said earlier, you enter in your standard hours. When holidays
come up, if you don’t have special hours entered in for those they’re going to
prompt you to change that to keep that accurate.

That’s pretty much it for taking that first step towards optimizing your Google
My Business listing. Getting your photos listing. Those are kind of the critical
things once you get it up and running to get it established, so when people do
search for your product, your business, or your service, that you look like you
have a completed listing and you stand out from everybody else. If people
wanted to maybe know what sizes to use for their files for the photographs or
things like that, how would they go about finding that?

Bob: You’re going to want to go to Intrycks.com/show. There again you can get the
template for the different files and file sizes. The video of everything we just
went through tonight. Hopefully that helps you get started, or down the road.
Again, this is easy. It took us, I don’t know, 20 minutes to get through this
podcast. How long do you think it’s going to take them to do this? Probably 10,
20 minutes at the max, right?

Jesse: Probably 10 minutes on average.

Bob: Again, this isn’t something you just do and you forget it. You want to review it
probably every two to three weeks. Just kind of brush it up, tweak it each time.
Google loves to see the fact that you’re digging into it. Just again, go to that link.
Intrycks.com/show. Then also we could use your help out there. If you could
give us likes or share out on iTunes. Again, we’re just getting going on this. But
there’s got to be people out there that are in small businesses and service
businesses that could use our help. That’s what our goal is. To help all the small
businesses out there.

Jesse: Absolutely. We’ll have links to where to leave those reviews, and some step by
step to how to do that if you don’t know. Get on the show page,
Intrycks.com/show. We’ll help you do that real easy. As always, we have a free
SEO report on our website. If you click on the button up in the top right corner,
enter in your website, enter in the keyword phrase that you want to optimize
that for. It takes just a few seconds. It will analyze your entire page, give you an
awesome report with where you’re good, where you’re bad. Gives you a grading
on everything, and a checklist with all the things that you need to do to tidy it
up and to really optimize it for that keyword search. Check that out. It’s
completely free. You can use it again and again on as many pages as you want
for as many search terms as you want. It will definitely help you out.

That’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed it, and we’ll see you next week.

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LINKS

DOWNLOAD THE MP3 AUDIO FILE

Listen to the episode however you like with the audio file.

WATCH VIDEO OF THE SHOW

YOU’LL LEARN

• Where to upload and mange photos and videos for your business.
• How to optimize your photos to rank higher in Google.
• How to optimize your photos to attract more new customers.
• How to setup and choose the categorizes for your listing.
• How to properly choose your primary category for your listing.
• How to check your GMB rankings.
• How to see what your GMB listing looks like in search results.
• How to see what your GMB listing looks like on Google Maps.
• Important do’s and don’ts for proper GMB optimization.

RESOURCES

Note: some of the resources below may be affiliate links, meaning we get paid a commission (at no extra cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.

• Cheat Sheet – Editing GMB Info
• Cheat Sheet – Managing GMB Photos
• Cheat Sheet – Photo Size Requirements
• About GMB Photos (Google)
• Our General Resources Page
• Our Free Instant Online SEO Audit