How to Create a Google Business Profile / Tips to Optimize Google Business Profile

Gresham Harkless 0:18
Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from Blue 16 media CB nation. And now I'm going to talk about a SEO hack that you should know about, if you don't know what a SEO hack is, it's an app, a book or a habit that you have. The idea is something that makes you more effective and efficient. In this video, I'm going to talk about this thing that will make you more effective and efficient. And that thing is Google business profiles. And very much, you know, similar to a lot of the other, you know, names that it has has, it's gone through a lot of different name changes. There's this quote by Coco Chanel that says, When a woman is about to change her hair, watch out because she's about to change her life. For Google, pretty much if they're about to change their name, they're pretty much going to continue to do the same thing. So in the last five or so years, it says Google, went through being called Google Local Business Center. And so does a five Google Places 2009, Google Plus Local and 2011. Google My Business 2014. And what the grand finale, it's 2021 Google business profile, which brings us to today. So why is this important? It's not necessarily let the essence of what Google has done has changed a lot. I generally just believe the names have just changed, the essence of what they've tried to do has been very consistent, which is to highlight and showcase local businesses. And I think that more than anything else, there's been more of an increase of people trying to look and search for local businesses more than anything else, which is why this is a SEO hack. Because this is going to be a way for you to reach out and connect with people locally, baby better than you ever have before. So this video is going to focus on how exactly to set that up. But also, it's going to give me some tips and tidbits on things that you should think about things that you should know about your Google business profile, because, as I like to say the best thing about the SEO Hacks is that they will make you more effective and efficient, but often, often is that strategy behind the things that you're doing, that's going to make it more effective and efficient, not just the tips, that just the tactics that you're using. So with that being said, I'm gonna shout out a couple different statistics cheese, so you have an idea of like why local search is important. 40% of all searches on Google, including include local ads hit 40% of all searches will have to do with location and SEO statistic that highlights the relevancy of local social marketing for local searches. That was in July of 22. By safari digital.com. Au on the map.com says in 2020 93% of all consumers use online searches to find local businesses, local and organic searches together make up 69% of overall digital traffic 42% of local searches and fall click on the Google Map Pack, as of 2021 42% of local searches of all clicks on the Google Map Pack. And I'm gonna show you exactly what that looks like. And how that kind of comes to light that's also very relevant in many different ways. But one of the things that I thought was pretty cool in a different way. That brings me to my first point that you should remember is that over the last two years, and this is in 2017, about five years ago, as a recording, searches for local places, without the qualifier near me have grown 150% Faster than comparable searches that do not include near me. All this basically means is that people are searching locally. While you may not necessarily want to put your contact information, why you might not necessarily want to put your address locally, because you don't want people showing up at your doorstep. That is not the intent of Google business profiles. Google business profiles are simply highlighting businesses that are local to your area. So while you might be in the DC area like I am, you still might want to serve clients and California understand more than anything, you might be able to show up locally. First and foremost, that might be where you're able to grow and submit your business. And if you haven't done that, this might be a tremendous opportunity for you. So if you're a startup, make sure you take advantage of this completely free for you to do just in time. But I'm also going to give you some tactics about local and local intent, some of the things that you should try to keep in mind so that when you're optimizing, you're using this SEO hack, you're going to be able to leverage it as accurately as possible. So with that being said, the big thing you want to try to keep in mind when you are searching locally, is that people sometimes don't know your business as well as you do. So you really have to get very granular and dial into exactly what you're doing to help support and provide got a solution for clients. So I just did a quick search, you go to Google, and you type in restaurants near me, like I mentioned, it's showing as a very relevant search, that's increased tremendously. People are not just looking for restaurants, they're looking for restaurants that are potentially very close to them. They want to know, what restaurants do I know about potentially what plumbers, there's so many different verticals that people are looking for locally. So with that being said, I want you to really look at some of these restaurants that are coming up in the map section, as call, you know, the places section as well to budgets, understand these are fairly optimize profiles. And the thing that makes them really optimized is that they have the review. So it's not just having the profile, it's really leveraging the review. So that's point number two, make sure when you set up this profile, you're getting reviews, because the reviews will go a long way. If I was to refresh this over and over again, some of the most consistent searches are going to be the ones that have the most

Gresham Harkless 6:06
reviews. So again, you see none of them have less than maybe 100 or so there's usually one or two that pop up that might be filtered out, that might be less than 100 searches, but less than 100 reviews. But understand most of these are really, really high number of reviews, again, 93, that's close to 100 162. And you go to let's just say the 10th page, you're gonna see that things have kind of changed a lot even have those that are a little bit farther away, which is probably why they're ranking higher. So they're not as local. So when I'm searching for restaurants near me, I'm looking for restaurants that are near me within a certain vicinity. So these are not as relevant because they're further away. If I probably go to, for example, Lorton which is fairly close, has zero views, so it's not showing up. If I go to the sixth page, again, these are farther and farther away. So vortex row, which is fairly close, actually right in the same neighborhood, I would say has zero views. So like me this to say, it's not really ranking higher. So you just really want to keep in mind that once you get this, again, to make sure that you are optimizing it, one of the best ways to optimize your profile is to get reviews. So with that being said, let's drill into how exactly we're getting a review. So you're gonna go to Google, you're gonna type in Google business profile. And this is what

Gresham Harkless 7:32
you're going to click on. So with that being said, you're gonna see this as your Google business profile. If you scroll down a little bit more, if you already have a Google business profile, if you're already signed in, you'll see that you have certain profiles that are already within your profile. So if you need to manage them, you'll be able to click right through Google, fairly recently has allowed a lot more front end editing that it had in the past, I'm still a strong behind the scenes. And I like the backend as far as editing more than anything else. But know that you can just go directly from the map session if you're signed in to manage any profiles that you have once you have it set up. So with that being said, you're going to click on add that you're going to sign into Google your Google account, if you haven't already signed in, you're going to have to sign in. So I'm going to go ahead and take this directly all the way through. And it's going to ask you, if

Gresham Harkless 8:33
you want to use an account, I'm going to sign into the same account that I already have put the username and password in there. I'm gonna pull that right into the and then right

Gresham Harkless 8:44
there, you're set up to do this. So then we're going to add a single business. So and I'm gonna type in a business that I started years and years ago, actually, when I started with blue 16 media, I started a company called Kids sports Drew, and as kids with a Z. And I started this largely because I was laid off. And I had contacts with some local preschools. So I went to those preschools and I ran sports camps for the two to five year old kids, sometimes older, but typically that was the sweet spot because it was at that perfect age where they were young enough to where the parents didn't necessarily want to go and travel on Saturdays and Sundays for those rectly there's no other things that were going on. And they could basically have their kid participate in sports right then and right there at the preschool that they were at. So very niche, very great opportunity. And it was something that I truly love, but I decided to focus more on the digital marketing when I had to make my decision, but I did it for about two or three years. So anyways, with that being said, because I want to optimize kids for stroke, and this is going to be me approaching it from today's terms how I would Look at it, I'm going to type a kid's sports Giroux, just see if Google may have already created that for me. And I could potentially claim it doesn't look like anything's created. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a business with kids a sports drill. Now, here's the big challenge sometimes is you want to be able to explain what it is that you're doing. For people that are potentially searching for it. Google has certain business categories, they don't have all the business categories that are out there. But that's tip number three, make sure that you're really thinking about how people are searching for your business. Don't just think about this describes it, this doesn't describe it, think about what might even be close to what it is that you do, and might provide you more opportunities for people to search for it. And then you'll be able to kind of clarify a little bit more in other the sections that you have. So with that being said, let's see, I have sports.

Gresham Harkless 10:59
The only thing I can think of is sports complex. But again, because we go on site to the different the different schools are ready. We're not necessarily a complex per se, but that might be something that I have to, to stay within it. Because of that that's just try what can we find with kids?

Gresham Harkless 11:21
Strike children. always helps if you spell children, right? And let's see, does it look like there's a lot of opportunity. So this is prior to preschool let's try camp

Gresham Harkless 11:45
might be something like this might say let's just say a summer camp, that might be something that's somewhat accurate, even though you could do it year round, it might be something that would be pretty cool to do as a summer camp. So this might be the winter. And like you met

Gresham Harkless 12:03
you see here, you can change and add more layers, layers. So there'll be more opportunities. But again, you want to type in your business name, you probably want to be somewhat descriptive, if you haven't already created your business name. Another tip is descriptive about what it is that you do. But know that sometimes your profile can get flagged if it's not the actual business name. So you want to make sure that you're setting that up. So and then the big thing is, do you want to add a location, customers can visit like a store or an office, because we're going on site to schools, we're not necessarily going to do that our profiles are going to be really strongly intertwined with the pre schools that already exists, that's not going to be something that we focus on. So I'm gonna say, No, we don't want to add our location. However, if you do have a local business, make sure you definitely put your address and you still might need to put your address and for verification purposes, or your phone number, but understand that if you don't want people to come to your address, they won't necessarily do that. So this is a really big thing. So where do you serve your customers, this is where you want to get an idea of all the areas as many of the areas that you serve. This is because just like I searched for the restaurant, and the restaurant had locations that were further out, you want to optimize your profile so that you rank as many places as you can. Now you're probably going to show up primarily in the places that your locally that you're located, but know that you have that opportunity to do that. So I'm going to say

Gresham Harkless 13:39
we're gonna go Northern Virginia, we're going to say Springfield had no idea or somebody Springfield's we're going to say, laurieton we're gonna say Sterling, Virginia Sterling, Virginia, Reston, Virginia. We're gonna say, Woodbridge, Ford, Bell vor.

Gresham Harkless 14:21
And you could go on and on and on. This is where you probably just want to get on a map and say, Hey, these are the areas we're going to serve. This is how far out we're gonna go. Again, you can always come back and add on more areas. But I still want to show you some of these areas just because when we did the program, we pretty much say fairly local, but when I worked with a company before it went all the way across Northern Virginia. I even taught in Virginia and DC. I think I did classes in Maryland as well too. So in an actual place that location was in Pennsylvania so it was a franchise that actually served Hear some, then you're going to put in your contact information. So I'm going to put in my contact information. And then I don't have a current website, we had a website at the time, of course, I got the services of blue 60 media this shameless plug. But you can always put, you don't have a website, a lot of times, you can set up a free website through Google, I, as a digital marketer would always say, definitely invest a little bit more in your website, especially if you have a virtual business, because it's going to be your way to get your name out there. Even if you don't have that. Understand that, again, like we showed people search locally. So your digital storefront might be the storefront that people see first. And first impressions are typically everything. So with that being said, Google will usually do two different things, they're either going to allow you, which is a lot rarer to use your phone number to verify your location, or they're potentially going to ask you to put in a mailing address. And what they're going to do is they're going to send a postcard to your mailing address. And with that postcard, it's going to verify exactly what your business is and what you're doing. So I'm gonna choose an address. And then we are going to click Next. So what's going to happen is there's going to be a postcard that's going to be sent here. And that postcard is going to verify so actually, for this, it was a little bit quicker. So it's actually asking for us to either get a text message or a phone call to verify. So you see, there's more options here. To make an ad is, it's not going to be

Gresham Harkless 16:51
visible until you verify it. So I'm going to choose a text message. And I'm gonna change this text messages. So I can show you exactly what this code is. And as I pull it up on my phone, I have a verification code that came in. And it's hard to see, but there's a verification code that came right on my phone. And it just has a six digit verification code. So I'm going to type in that verification code. And again, you have to do a fairly quickly. So whenever you do usually have maybe about a minute or so it was in less than 10 minutes, maybe just one minute to actually verify. So verifying this code was accepted. You get verified for Google. Now, understand that, typically, this is a lot rarer. On most occasions, you're going to get a postcard, on that postcard, it's going to have a six digit code as well, what you're going to do is because your Google profile is linked to your business profile, the Google that what you use the login, you're going to sign into Google again. And then you're going to verify your listing. So I'll show you a little bit of one that I'm working on that actually needs to be verified. So this just tells you that it's verified us use your hours of operation. So interesting thing about you know, that business is you only work very selective hours. But just for the sake of this, I'm gonna say we're open 24 hours.

Gresham Harkless 18:31
And then I'm gonna hit next, close Saturday and Sunday. However, one of the cool things that we did was, we also did like birthday parties and things like that. So if parents wanted to do a birthday party, we would also do that for an hour or so and provide quotes related to that. So those are different things that was pretty cool that we did. We're going to add any messaging. So this allows people to reach out to us mean directly to us, when those messages will typically come to us through our phone, and Google has a app that you can download that will allow you to do that. So you're going to turn on your your call history. So let's turn that on to know who calls and we're going to add a business description. What I want you to really pay attention to and this is going to be a another pro tip that you're going to put as much description as you can. Many people will just put a sentence, they'll maybe put two sentences, they won't really go in depth with what it is that they're providing for their, their, their, their clients and customers. You have 750 characters, I would say use as many of those characters as you can. I'm not going to for the sake of this video because I'm just showing you exactly. You know what to do, but really maximize

Gresham Harkless 19:55
that time. nation provides on site sports, fitness, and wellness classes, apps, free schools and other school.

Gresham Harkless 20:20
The reason that we did preschools is because it was they're typically more privately owned, easier to get into. But there also was churches that we worked with, there was other, you know, organizations that, you know, required a little bit more steps, but we were just able to kind of get through through that. So,

Gresham Harkless 20:41
I'm gonna put that in. And click Next.

Gresham Harkless 20:48
And then we're gonna choose some photos. So I don't necessarily have any photos that I'm gonna put up, but you're gonna be able to upload photos. So I'm gonna do something kind of quick, where I'm gonna go to another pro tip using sites like pixel pixels, Pixabay. Or if you have Canva, you can actually create your own profiles. So I'm gonna say, Kids, sports. And this is exactly a little bit of what we did. So

Gresham Harkless 21:20
you want to have actual pictures. So I recommend not actually using any stock profiles, if you have any pictures, pictures of yourself or anything like that, definitely, you know, take advantage of them, and use them. But anything that was kids in sports was pretty much what we did, we did the younger children. So I would say anything that had children having fun was something that we wanted to kind of showcase. Now, another big pro tip that I always talk about when we're working with clients is that you want to showcase the benefit that you're providing for, for your target clients. And because we kind of had to target clients, it was so important that they both understood the value. So for one, there was value for the preschool offering those specific services, often the preschool would get a portion of the number of kids that we brought in, sometimes we would get paid directly from the preschool, sometimes the preschool, which is had it had us come there as a value add. So we didn't necessarily get a kickback. It was just something that said, hey, because you go to this preschool, we're able to provide, you know this service. So definitely sign your kids up here. So again, it was like a value add, you create that win win. So that's one target market, the other target market was going to be the parents, the parents, you want to make sure that their kids are learning, they're growing, they're having a great experience, all those things that behave in there, especially working on certain skills, karate, especially was all around listening skills, it was all around that kicking, you know, their kids, don't keep your dogs all those things I used to say, but I used to stand in front of the children. But I think one of the biggest skills was discipline, and definitely listening skills. So we really want to try to showcase that as much as possible in these pictures, but also in that text. And then finally, once the kids themselves, while sometimes we can jump over them and forget, that's because they're not making payments, because they're not deciding if we're coming in, you also want to make sure that they're having a really great experience. So more than anything else, we want to showcase, you know, really exciting experiences. We want kids smiling kids happy in these pitchers, largely because that's experienced that we're looking for. And we want them to kind of learn each of those things. So I like each of these three pitchers, but you really want to drill down and think about each of these potential options. And you can drop and drag them just like I did.

Gresham Harkless 24:00
Or you can select photos from your computer. So you click this and this will take you directly to your computer where you can choose the different files. So I'm just going to put, you know, two of those here, you see those are here, and then we're going to click Next. And then this provides an opportunity for you to advertise, you don't necessarily have to advertise. But again, this is something that Google this is how Google really you know gets a good amount of money. So Google also offers domains you can check out Google domains and buy this here also we see a webshop so you'll see a link to that in the profile to kind of set up your your your site if you need a site may also we have hosting options as well too that you can check out in the in the comments too and in the in the description. So you're going to skip this because we're not going to actually add that and then your edits will be visible once you are verified. So click Continue. And they will see kids sports trail right here. Here, you see that it's in the Washington DC area doesn't actually have your location, but we're just gonna be waiting for the business to be verified. So here's some really cool pro tips that I really want to break down for you. Really, it really is important to make

Gresham Harkless 25:20
sure that you have a website and that you add your website in here. I already talked about that you already went through that when we explained each of the different aspects through the wizard that Google has. But you also want to keep in mind you can add an update.

Gresham Harkless 25:40
And update can be anything, you can say book, order online, if you're a A, A A ecommerce business, for example, you can click Buy, learn more sign up call now. So it all depends on what you want people to do. So I'm gonna click learn more. And then you'll have and you can link it to any place that you want unlink it, you can also do call now you can have a call this number usually is going to be a mass number that's going to go directly there. So

Gresham Harkless 26:12
call us about our new karate program. And and I'm gonna look for karate kids. And that's exactly she will want. So again, kid having fun.

Gresham Harkless 26:43
So we're going to add that in to add this photo, rapid drag this here. And again, as much as possible, as we can have photos that showcase the people that we're trying to serve, we're definitely going to do that. So I want to just preview how is this gonna look, karate program and another pro tip.

Gresham Harkless 27:08
Make sure you provide some type of call to action, which this is automatically going to enable but what's going to entice people to actually take action, or Hollis about our new karate program, or preschool or Greece schools that sign up, you receive a free class for all students.

Gresham Harkless 27:43
All students and one of the things that we did is we used to do, essentially like a karate day. And we had all the kids that went through the program that were at the preschool to be able to go through the karate and that's where we would try to get a lot of signups we would, you know, promote before but we will also promote after we did that karate day. So it was usually for a certain amount of hours, the kids were there. And they got a chance to go through a very micro size session. But again, this is something very, very important because you understand the target market that you have. Because people that are going to sign up for this are not going to necessarily be the parents, it's probably going to be the educators, the school directors, those decision makers that are going to call looking for some solution like this. So this is why it's so important to kind of highlight that so this has been reviewed, if isn't improve, you'll receive an email that's a little bit more about, you know what that looks like. And we'll see this all here.

Gresham Harkless 28:54
So because we're signing in, we're going to see the profile so I'm gonna go to Edit Profile, and you have an option to put your business information there's a business category, you're gonna be able to add any other categories I might put preschool and preschool, and often maybe karate school, maybe basketball camp,

Gresham Harkless 29:33
I might even add in you know, I think one really big one that I liked was the summer camp. Um, so we're going to save this. What you understand is that even if there is a category that you want to just add in, it will not accept it. They pretty standard about the category so you want to try to create some categories that are somewhat close. And you see some of these are not available because they're based off location. So that's the other thing we'll kind of run into. Because we're not, you know, having a location that's discard these edits, you want to put in the year you were fine. Especially if you're not just getting started, you want to show that, hey, I've been in business, it's, you know, 2011 2010 or anything like that, because it's going to show you're not a new business, you've been in business for a while. Your business location, you're not going to show your location. If you want to show your business address, you can add in that business address. But you want to make sure that especially if you don't want people coming to your location that you don't do that, because especially for something like this, you'll get people that will show up at you know, whatever location and address you put, looking and expecting to go through a karate kid with their kids. So it's probably important to not do that. And then you want to make sure that you add in any holiday hours. This is going to be around anything that might be additional that you have, you know, related to your business. So if you're a restaurant, if you have certain access, that you have breakfast, any type of breakfast hours, anything like that, that you have, you want to add these different things in, you know, related to your hours. And then you can add in any different attributes for your business, are you Asian owned, black owned, Latino owned, I would put black owned, LG, LGBTQ plus veteran owned women owned any of those you want to add in, you also want to add in anything that is applicable or Yoji be TQ friend plus friendly, you want to add that in. So anything that you're doing related to this, this is how you're going to help your business get out there. So you just want to save any of that information, you want to highlight your different products that you have, I would say even you know maybe products and services as well, too, of what it is that you're doing. Definitely take and add any photos. So people can see your profile, your logo, your way, you know, you can go through, that's how you create your business profile. When you go to manage businesses at Google in the backend of Google, that's how I prefer to really look at these, I'm going to type in kids ports drill, and then it

Gresham Harkless 32:28
shows that this is verified. So I prefer to go through here. And then, you know, set up any info and information here, summer camp mucousy, insights, reviews, calls, messages, all these things are here. For you to kind of leverage, like I mentioned, you can even create a website and have that setup. Again, you know, this is not going to be the highest performing website that you're going to have. But it's something that gets you started and we can get the domain if you need to, as well too. And you know, just says Publish when you're ready. So you could set that up, you have testimonials, all these things And

Gresham Harkless 33:16
And you can also add different people create an ad and another business. This will just show you different businesses that you have. But that's basically it. You know, as far as your, your, your Google My Business, the big thing I would say is that you want to make sure that you you know, take a look of how it looks in the maps. So you have an idea this is kids how kids sports show look. You also have the opportunity to see how it looks when people are searching. So take a look at how that people look at it when they're searching.

Gresham Harkless 33:56
And then you want to be able to share your profile your profile, this is going to be there directly to your profile. So this is going to take people directly to your profile. So they can see all the information that you have. And once you complete this out a little bit more you could do that. The other big thing is that you're going to be able to create any type of posts similar to you do for social media sites. So you can put a post you can put anything about COVID Any any any COVID updates, COVID-19 updates, you can put any offer. Like I mentioned, the free offer when you sign up or when you call and book a time for preschools is something that I would do, you could pick a start and end time and then you could publish it. Anything new you could put any post that you have, the more active you are, the more optimized your page is going to be. So I would definitely make sure to do that. If you have an event say you're having an event and It maybe you're doing something at a mall or something like that. And you want to invite people over, you want to put that in. So all these things just to kind of increase your

Gresham Harkless 35:10
likelihood of showing up. But here's

Gresham Harkless 35:14
the big thing that you want to try to keep in mind, I mentioned how important it is to get reviews, this is your review link. You want to save this and share this, you can use a tool like pretty lakes if you have a WordPress site, and you can mask this or if you use Bitly a bunch of different sites and mass issue or out this URL is going to be huge, because I recommend that you share this out to get as many reviews as possible, this is going to help you to rank higher as I showed you in the very beginning. When you open it, you're gonna go directly towards where you're able to review, you're able to add pictures, you know, take images, put a certain amount of stars put comments in, this is something that you're going to want to leverage to help you to rank higher when people are searching for you locally. So that's kind of a little bit you know of everything that you should do this, how you set up your Google business profile. That's also a little bit more on how you optimize your Google business profile. But there'll be loads and loads more but just keep in mind if you need any help or anything we can be of help. Also check out the links quick resources down below. And hopefully I will see you virtually definitely even better if I see you on Google when I'm searching for your organization. Thanks and take care