Your Google My Business Website – The Free Google Website You May Not Be Using – 74

Here is the Transcript for Episode 74 – Your Google My Business Website!

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. I’m here again with Bob Brennan.

Bob Brennan: Howdy.

Jesse Dolan: Rocking our new high-def cameras like we talked on last episode. Got some cool things coming up here. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks, you’re going to see some other team members. We’re going to expand our podcast. I don’t know if we’ll get it this quarter for sure, but looking at maybe end of first, beginning of second quarter, launching some digital courses, which are going to be a deeper dive of these particular podcast episodes to everybody, really kind of going through with more tutorials, videos, kind of step-by-step where you can jump in and jump out on any given day. Kind of a self-paced deal on these same kind of topics to get found, to improve your business, convert more clients, and really help you grow.

A byproduct of that is we’re looking pretty damn sharp here on the YouTube version of the podcast episode, so if you guys and gals out there usually just listen to the audio, I encourage you to go on out to our localseotactics.com, click on the episode page, check out this or any of the other episodes. Actually, if you want the high-def, poor visibility type deal, it’d be this episode, and our last episode, actually just for that, but check out the YouTube versions too if you want.

With that, as well-

Bob Brennan: I’ll take any makeup tips anybody has out there, so if you want to put some makeup tips in the comment deals, that’d be helpful. Thanks, man.

Jesse Dolan: That is Bob, that is looking for the makeup tips. Just to be clear, just to be clear on that, but no, I joke, but we really are excited about some of the things that we’re going to be launching here with the show and with the company to help you guys all out, guys and gals out with your marketing and getting found. Thanks for tuning in on this episode here. Again, what we’re going to be talking about here, it’s kind of related to Google My Business, which like we said, it’s one of our favorite topics. If you’re trying to get found online right now for your business locally, and you’re not in Google My Business, start there. It’s definitely a challenge to get found, to get exposure, but if you want to start to tip the scales in your favor, you got to get signed up for Google My Business.

One of the things you’re going to get within that Google My Business listing, which is totally free, is a website, a Google provided website, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about here today. Why you should have it, why you should use it, and what it does for you. Quite frankly, this can take you just a couple of minutes to set up. This isn’t something that’s going to be earth shattering, “Wow, they dropped that SEO tip. I can’t believe I never knew about this.” It’s not going to revolutionize things, but it’s something that you click a few buttons. You take advantage of this and it’s so stinking easy to do. It feeds the Google machine with more information about you. You just got to do it. It’s kind of a hidden thing. Most people don’t know about it, and that’s what we’re going to talk about here today.

Before we get into that, I want to promote our free instant SEO audit, like always. Going onto localseotactics.com, top right corner, yellow button. Click on it. You can run our website, or particularly a page on your website through there, do an audit against a certain keyword. Find out is your page optimized for that keyword? What you got to do if it’s not? It gives you a score, use that as many times as you want, it’s always free, and it’s pretty darn quick too. You can also run your competitors or any other website against that too, if you want to reverse engineer somebody that’s out ranking you, maybe and compare yours against them. It’s totally free to do that as well. Check it out, localseotactics.com.

All right. We’re talking Google My Business. If you’re not familiar with that, just go on out, sign up for Google My Business. If you want some more in-depth tutorials on how to do that checkout, I think like three or four of our first half a dozen episodes were particularly about how to set up Google My Business, how to optimize Google My Business, and some of that stuff. So we’re not going to dive into that. We’re going to assume either you’ve done that, or you can lean on those resources to get ahead and do that.

What we’re going to talk about here is you need to be logged into Google My Business to do this. There is a website feature within Google My Business that you can turn on. It’s off by default, Google doesn’t automatically engage this for you. Why would you want to do this even, right? Well, depending on where you’re at in your business, maybe you don’t have a website, right? Not everybody does. Maybe you’re developing one soon. Maybe you feel like you don’t need one. You just lean on Facebook, things like that, but you want some kind of web presence. This is a way for you to get a… It’s not the flashiest website in the world, but it’s a website and it can showcase a lot of information for your business.

You can put it on a business card if you want. It’s got an actual URL you can navigate to. It’s a legitimate website, just not maybe as customizable as your own original website, but as far as a value for time and money spent, it doesn’t get any better. It’s completely free, and you just click a few buttons here and that’s going to turn it on, so if you don’t have a website currently this is something that you can take advantage of. If you do have a website, you may be thinking, “Well, I do have a website, so I don’t need that.” We’re going to tell you why you should still turn it on as well. It’s not going to replace your website, of course. If you do have a current website, Bob’s not going to put the Google My Business website on his business card if he has an intrex.com website, right? Or a localseotactics.com, but you still want to leverage it.

So how do we do this? Log into your Google My Business, on the left-hand side. Now you’ve got a bunch of different kind of fields, or options, or modules within Google My Business. You’ve got your basic information. You’ve got products, services. You can do Google Posts, things like that, all in the left-hand side. There’s going to be one that says website. Click on that, if all you want to do is this. You just click on that and then you click on the top right corner. I believe it’s the top right corner. It says, publish. That’s it. Now you have this Google website that’s created. You can modify it. You can change color schemes. You can do a bunch of different options to customize it, but if you really don’t care, you just want to utilize this for the reasons we’re going to get into here in a second. That’s all you have to do, and you’re done, right there.

If you do want to modify it, and tweak it, and kind of customize it, again, change colors, change pictures, change font, change what it says, knock yourself out and run with it. If you don’t do any of that, what does it look like as a default? Well, it basically pulls all your information from your Google My Business listing, and creates a simple website out of that. It’s going to list your business name, your address, your phone number, business categories, your business description, which is, I thinks it’s 755 characters of text that you put in for your Google My Business listing. It’s going to put that in there. If you have any events that you’ve utilized through Google Posts, it’s going to list those events. If you have an offer through your Google Offer Posts, that’s going to promote that.

Then also, if you’re using the Google Posts feature, which is something that we talk about, I forget which episode it is offhand, Bob, but we’ll link to it in the show notes for everybody to check that out. If you’re not using Google Posts, that’s definitely a big SEO thing you should be doing right now to communicate more information about what you do. If you have been using Google Posts, it’s going to pull all those in together, and put those on the website as well, and kind of almost act like a blog within that website. You’re going to be able to click on those posts, read more information, and see that kind of stuff.

Now, the cool part about that is… Not only does it, right now, today, if you went and hit publish, it’s going to pull all your current Google My Business information, including, I should say too, I forgot, photos, if you’ve uploaded photos, people that leave you reviews. I mean, all this information, user generated or that you’ve done, that’s going to be on there. The cool part about it is, if you push hit publish right now today, it’s going to pull all that in and put it online, but then if Bob jumps in tomorrow, and creates a new Google Post within his Google My Business listing, it’s going to automatically update that website. It becomes dynamic and it becomes basically an extension of your Google My Business. You can, at that point, set it and forget it. As far as the actual website goes, you never have to get in there and modify or edit anything, and as you upload new photos, change your business description, add new posts, kind of do your things within Google My Business. It’s going to reflect in that website, so that’s pretty cool from an efficiency standpoint.

Bob Brennan: As you describe how you work on this, when you think about it, it’s kind of a natural progression. If you take the time and effort to go through Google My Business, which isn’t hard, I mean, the hardest part of a website is content, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: You’re listing all this stuff anyways, in the Google My Business, like we tell you to do, and if you can do that, then it’s literally, hit this button called Publish, and it whips up a website. My point being is that’s one or two steps away from being able to do WordPress. Don’t you think?

Jesse Dolan: Yep.

Bob Brennan: I mean, it’s not too far off. I’m not saying WordPress is easy, but if you can… This is kind of the crawl stage and then hit publish, you’re walking, and then dig into how to do a WordPress site.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, you’re right. It is kind of a great training wheels or transition on how to not just type a paragraph of texts, but actually, “Hey, this is actually a webpage now, that I can click on and kind of see it and then manipulate that,” so great training ground for that. You mentioned WordPress, there’s other content management systems like Wix or Squarespace, things like that. Those are all definitely more advanced than this Google site builder, if you will, or this Google My Business website that comes with it. That’s a great point, Bob. It is definitely like a kind of an elementary version of that, and you can get your feet wet on how to customize, change font, change colors, add content, and things like that.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. If you’re extremely intimidated by anything web, this is where it begins. Right?

Jesse Dolan: Right.

Bob Brennan: Then you can move on to any of those products, but WordPress is probably the most SEO searchable, optimizable site, right?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. It’s the number one platform out there right now for websites. Very customizable, like we’ve talked before. It’s kind of like if you have an iPhone, you can load apps onto your iPhone. If you’re using WordPress, the apps are called plugins, right? You can add plugins to your website that add functionality. You can add themes that really change the overall look and the feel of it. Yeah, WordPress for sure, is the A-plus standard right now. It wasn’t always the case, but a number of years back, it really took over as being the website platform of choice. Start with your Google My Business, your GMB website. If you have nothing else right now, start with that, then set your sights on, like Bob saying, upgrading to WordPress and launching your own dot com.

You do that, this Google My Business site will still stay there. You don’t have to replace it. Right? You don’t have to get rid of it. That leads me into actually, one of the things I wanted to start talking about here, for why should you do this? Right? Right now, we’ve been talking about what is it? How is it, how do you do it and click that publish button? Like you said, Bob, it’s super easy, but now really, why should you do it? Other than the fact that it’s super easy to do?

Number one, it’s real estate, right? Digital real estate. If somebody is searching for your business or even your products and services. Now, depending on how competitive your market, your niche, and your geographic area is, maybe this Google My Business website ranks high. Maybe it doesn’t, but it’s a piece of real estate that at least is in the game, right?

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: We’ve seen plenty of client areas where this will rank, even if they have a website, maybe their website ranks number one, maybe this Google My Business site is two, three, four or five. Now, is that really impacting your business by getting you a lot more leads? Maybe not, but what it is doing is pushing competitors down, right? I mean, so at the very least, you’re taking up more real estate, pushing other people out.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: If nothing else, if that’s the only benefit you get out of it, sign me up for that 75 seconds that took to make it.

Bob Brennan: Well, I would argue if you’re good enough to get your GMB in a three pack by doing some of the stuff we talk about, and you don’t have a website in there, that’s not a deal killer, but there is a subconscious voice, as a consumer, in the back of my head when I look at that, and I look at reviews and I’m like, “They don’t even have a website. You know what? I’m going to call these guys first.” Again, the younger you are, maybe that’s even higher in your priorities, whatever, but I do think it’s a converting factor that if on your GMB, there’s no website listing, people might shy away from that.

Jesse Dolan: Just to expand on, you bring up a great point, expand on what Bob’s talking about that for everybody, just to visualize it. If you do a search, you get the Google Map Pack, the 3-pack, the map pack, whatever you want to call it, where it’s got the ABC or the three listings, usually, with kind of a map above it. On that you’re usually going to see two… You’re going to see the business name and the reviews, right? The review score, but then there’s usually two other little kind of widgets or icons. One is going to be for driving directions, if they have a physical address listed. The other’s going to be for a website, and to Bob’s point, if there’s three listings that show up for the Google My Business results, and that map pack, if you’re one of those three and the other two have an icon for a website, but you don’t, that’s exactly what Bob’s talking about.

You look less legitimate. Are you going to get any action from that? Definitely has an impact, from people are looking at you. Again, product service, niche, and market dependent on, how egregious or not that is. But if you don’t have a website, WordPress website or whatever, any other website, you take that URL from the free Google My Business website, you just made. Copy that, paste it into the appropriate field on your Google My Business listing, and now you have a website and that icon Bob’s talking about is going to show up, and you look just like everybody else. Of course, they click on it. They go to the website then, and there’s more information about you. I mean, it actually is a website. It’s not just a trigger, the icon.

There, you got two awesome reasons that again are taking you such a little amount of time. Even if these don’t transform your business, if they get you one more customer a month or even one more customer a year for the amount of time it takes you to do this. You’re getting ROI on your time there, bar none. In addition to that, and this is a little bit more of a, like a maybe non-direct area or a little harder to actually quantify, or be tangible, but by turning this thing on, you are just having that much more information in the Google database about your business.

Somewhere in the ether that is Google, before you had your Google My Business website turned on, there was a void. When you turn it on, now there’s some kind of data in your profile for Google, and that’s going to have all this stuff, your business description. I mean, all these other things, it’s just more information. Sometimes we talk about, use the analogy for Google about you… It’s a file cabinet and you have a file within that file cabinet, right? That’s all your information about your business in Google’s record is that file. You’ve just added a little bit more to that file, and the bigger that file is, the more Google knows about you, your products, your services, who you’re serving, your intent and all that, and that can potentially help increase your rankings and your exposure online.

Those three things, right there, are kind of the main nuts and bolts outside of the, again, just being able to have a site, if you didn’t have a site and things like that, but just the fact that you can a trigger that icon and the GMB, if you didn’t have a website. The fact that you’re going to be taking up potentially more real estate on the search engine results page, by now having a website, and that you’re just feeding more information into the Google machine about yourself. Again, in an automated way, that’s going to continue to be updated when you update your Google My Business listing, that website updates too, so it’s fresh new information all the time. There’s really no reason not to use that feature.

With that being said, again, I wouldn’t say Bob, this was like the most deep dive intensive episode we’ve ever done. Dramatically, life-changing for somebody’s business, but it is a hidden feature. People kind of dismiss it. Like, “I already got a website. Don’t need that,” and again, it’s probably the fifth time, for the amount of time it takes you to do this, click the dang button, do some customizations if you want, but if you’re in Google My Business, take advantage and use this free website.

Bob Brennan: If you already have a good ranking website that’s doing well, in the natural deals, do you think this adds any SEO to it? Or would you somehow link to it, or backlinks, or anything like that, you think?

Jesse Dolan: That is a good question, and maybe that is something that we should do a little testing or maybe even a deep dive on. I guess I don’t have a good answer, because I wasn’t preparing for that or even looking at it, but you do bring up a great point, is can you leverage that for backlinking? Can you leverage that for any other purposes, other than just those main three that we just talked about there. Let’s circle back to that in a future episode after we do some testing.

Bob Brennan: Yeah, let’s do some experiments, it’d be cool to see.

Jesse Dolan: That is a great question. Before I get into the five-star review, Bob, are you doing the Austin Powers thing again there?

Bob Brennan: Yeah. I am. Wait until I get the monocle.

Jesse Dolan: This is going to be like the new kitschy thing. Bob slipped it in somewhere.

Bob Brennan: Yeah, exactly.

Jesse Dolan: If you can identify the timestamp, and when he did it, you’re going to win a big prize.

Bob Brennan: Exactly.

Jesse Dolan: Let’s get into our five star review here for the episode. If you haven’t left a review for us yet, and you’re enjoying the show. If we’ve helped you with your business and provided some value to you, we’d love to get a review from you. That’s kind of the trade here, right? If we’re helping you, we’d love for you to help us. Easy way to do that. Just takes a couple of minutes of your time. Go onto localseotactics.com. Go down to the bottom. There’s a link for reviews, click that and we’ve got a shortcut, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Facebook, Google My Business, wherever we have outlets for reviews. Pick your spot of choice. We’d love to hear from you, like the one we’re going to read here. It’s actually some text kind of saying about the review. If you just want to leave five stars, we’d love that too. Helps the show by way of exposure, and it helps feed our ego, and just know that we’re doing the right thing, and that there are actually people listening on the other end of this that are getting some value. If you can just-

Bob Brennan: And My wife actually believes people listen to us.

Jesse Dolan: It’s tangible proof. Like…

Bob Brennan: Huge.

Jesse Dolan: I didn’t write all of these reviews. Somebody else had to do at least one of them, but no, I’m kidding about that part, but for sure, if you guys and gals out there like what we’re doing, we’d love to hear from you on a review, localseotactics.com, go down to the bottom and click the review button.

We’ve got one here, a five-star review from Stu. Stu says, “Must listen podcast to build your business. I’ve learned so much from listening to this awesome podcast. I’m already starting to see a difference in my small business. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and insights.” Thanks for sharing your review Stu.

Bob Brennan: Thanks Stu.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. That’s kind of the common theme we get from everybody, is just thanks for helping my business, right? That’s the point of the show. Should say, it’s probably been a few episodes since we mentioned that the show is free. We try to give you tips and tricks to get found online. Like we say, if you’re stuck anywhere, shameless plug, we are for hire, this is what we do as an agency. We focus on local SEO and getting businesses found. Kind of stealing from Pat Flynn, who is somebody Bob and I really tapped into on podcasts for years. I believe he said this, at least I have always attributed it to him, “This podcast can be free with a headache.” Right? Because you have to do the work. If you’re looking for headache-free, you just want to push that easy button. We’re here to help too.

That being said, probably wrap it up for this episode. Bob, did you have any other closing thoughts?

Bob Brennan: No. No. I’m excited to try that experiment and see if that moves the needle.

Jesse Dolan: Right on.

Bob Brennan: That one.

Jesse Dolan: Right on. Always be testing. All right everybody. Thanks for tuning into this episode and we’ll catch you next time.

Bob Brennan: Have a good one.