Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #41: How to Use Google My Business for Better SEO

Chris Raines: Hey there. Welcome to Episode 41 of the Dodgeball Marketing podcast. How are you doing? My name's Chris and this is Michael.

Michael Utley: Hey.

Chris Raines: Hey.

Michael Utley: Doing great.

Chris Raines: Okay. See. I made that awkward. It wasn't awkward, then I made it awkward.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: Today, we're going to talk about Google My Business (GMB) and how to use Google My Business for better SEO. If we're talking about local businesses, Google My Business is. . . I don't know what the percentage is, what the ranking factor is, but it's big.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Depending on what you're doing.

Michael Utley: It's a big deal. Step number one is claim your Google My Business listing.

Chris Raines: Yeah. We're going to go over five things you can do here. It's always five things here with us.

Michael Utley: That's right.

Chris Raines: We're going to do five things you can do to improve your Google My Business and helping improve your SEO.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Go ahead, Michael.

Michael Utley: I would say it's been less than 12 months since I had a new potential client tell me that Google Maps was not really relevant to their business. You could not be more wrong. I showed them that their listing had not been claimed, and that they were subject to someone getting it. They said, "Well, people don't drive to where we are. We don't really depend on that for business." I said, "Okay, well, let's back up. Let's think about how the Internet works."

Michael Utley: Google is looking for external signals to know how to rank websites. The ones who have their act together rank higher. Here's where this gets tricky. This is kind of obvious, claim your Google My Business listing. Anybody who's been around marketing for, I don't know, six months, 12 months of their career or whatever, should know this.

Michael Utley: But here's where it gets tricky. Sometimes Google will do things like identify. . . If you have a separate website, maybe for a product that you've launched, that's just a subsidiary service or a product of your company, occasionally, Google will do things like look at that product and see it all over the Internet, and say, "Oh, you know what? I guess that's a business. I guess that's a company."

Michael Utley: You might say, "Well, we don't really want to set that up as a separate thing." Well, guess what. The Internet's going to decide for you. Even if it's not a separate corporate entity, they will often create a new Google My Business listing for you.

Michael Utley: So what we recommend is go ahead and claim it, decide how to manage it from there. But yeah, for any kind of exposure that you have, anything that's unclaimed, you need to lock that down. You need to claim it.

Michael Utley: The way you do this is really easy. Get on your computer. Go to Google Maps. Find your business. If you see that it's not claimed, go ahead and make sure that you're logged in through a Gmail account that you like having, that is not a trash email account or one that you don't have a password to or something crazy, but make sure that you're logged into a Gmail email account, create one if you need to, and use that as your home base for Google My Business stuff, and claim the listing.

Michael Utley: You're going to get some kind of verification option and go through the steps. Google. . . I don't want to get too deep into the steps, because that stuff changes, but just basically work the process.

Chris Raines: They'll send you a card.

Michael Utley: Yeah. They're going to send you a postcard in the mail is what's going to happen. You need to figure out how to have somebody set up to make sure that they know that that's important. Have them take a picture of it and get it to you right away, because it's going to expire.

Michael Utley: You may have to do this process a couple of times. It's really easy to throw those cards away. If you're doing this on behalf of someone, a lot of times we're trying to coordinate for somebody who's at a different location, to receive the card and then claim it, you just need to communicate, show them a picture, what they're watching for in the mail, and get it claimed.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Awesome. Step two here is complete and update your Google My Business listing. This is probably something that will take a couple hours maybe depending on what all you have to put in there, but there's all kinds of places you can fill out information.

Chris Raines: Photos. You can describe photos, tag photos, all that stuff. So just a list of things you can do to complete that. Business info, location, hours, description, phone, email, website, reviews, although reviews are user-generated, so we'll cover that in another step.

Chris Raines: Messaging. Set up your messaging so people can actually message you from your Google My Business profile. Set that up.

Chris Raines: Photos. You can do external photos that users submit. You can do your own photos. You can categorize your photos of what they are, either the building or internal, staff photos. You can categorize those. Make sure that, if you have all that, upload them, categorize them appropriately.

Chris Raines: Posts. This is more of an ongoing thing, but you can actually post updates to your Google My Business profile. Google loves to see a regularly updated GMB listing or Maps listing.

Chris Raines: Keywords, putting in your keywords of what you want to search for, especially local keywords. Seasonal updates, if you have different hours for different holidays.

Chris Raines: Services, what services you provide, you can rank your services that you provide. Make sure all that is filled out, and as many as you can. I don't know what the math is, but as many as you can fill out, if you're a business that has a lot of different services, see if they're listed in one of the pre-populations, and fill out as many as you can.

Chris Raines: There's even stuff now where if you're a woman-owned business or a Black-owned business, there's a little signifier you can put it for that. If that applies to you, fill that out, too. Anything that you can fill out that gives Google an indication of what you are, who you serve, what you do, that sort of thing.

Michael Utley: They may have veteran-owned in there too. I can't remember.

Chris Raines: Veteran-owned might be one, yeah.

Michael Utley: That might be one, yeah.

Chris Raines: It's in there, so if any of those apply to you, stick it on there. Fill out your profile as completely as possible. It might mean you need to go snap some pictures of either the team or work sites.

Chris Raines: Oh, another thing we can put in here—this is a little bit of a sidebar—but in terms of location, a cool thing you can do in the photo section, if you're a business that serves different communities, a little sneaky thing you can do is go out and, with your phone, take a picture of a work site or something that you've done in the community. If you upload that from your phone, your phone tags that geolocation with GPS, and Google uses that information. If you can tag that "Denver worksite", or whatever, however it applies, Google will use that and the location from the photo as a signifier of like, "Oh, this is an actual photo taken in this location."

Michael Utley: Right. That's a good one.

Chris Raines: That's information that Google uses to know that this is an actual service area. They actually have a picture from that area, and you know from the GPS that gets tagged in a photo. All the phones do this. They'll tag the location. So that's kind of a cool [crosstalk 00:06:47]

Michael Utley: It's kind of a pain to have to go manually set that meta content with a JPEG, but we've had to do that before.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: All right. Next, Michael.

Michael Utley: Yeah. That's great. Thanks, Chris. Oh, and one more on that service area. If you want to look at that more, look at Episode 40 of the DodgeballSEO podcast.

Chris Raines: Yeah. We went through that in a deeper way. Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Next up, know your goal for Google star ratings, and work your review rating up.

Michael Utley: One of the big factors in Google My Business that's been major in SEO ... This is a really major influence in the industry over the last. . . I don't know. What? Five years? Ratings and reviews? But it's been one of the things that's been top of mind for us in all of our conversations around SEO, going back for a few years.

Michael Utley: I would say that Google was not necessarily the front edge of this, but they reacted quickly and became a major player. I feel like Yelp was an instigator here.

Chris Raines: Yelp was probably, yeah.

Michael Utley: But Google has made this a major factor.

Chris Raines: Actually, Amazon was the instigator.

Michael Utley: Oh, yeah. Amazon. Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah, sure, with product ratings.

Michael Utley: Also, we used to do a lot of user-generated content for websites when rating systems and reviews of products were new for user-generated content. But this has really crept up in a way that's really critical. For a business, this Google My Business rating is almost a business asset.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: That's another way to think about how to justify resources around this activity. But yeah.

Michael Utley: We've got a little interesting stat that we want to share. This is from BrightLocal. I'll describe how this plays out a little bit in more detail, but positions one through three in the local pack in search results are often, in the aggregate, going to average a 4.7 star rating out of five. Positions four through six, a 4.6.

Chris Raines: A 10th of a star.

Michael Utley: Just a 10th of a point from being on the snack pack ...

Chris Raines: Yeah, being the front.

Michael Utley: . . .being the easy choice to being the Dark Web.

Chris Raines: To being you have to click to see more. The Dark Web.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: It's like, "I don't want to click that."

Michael Utley: And it continues. Slot seven through 10, another small blip, a 4.45. Yeah.

Chris Raines: Crazy.

Michael Utley: Check BrightLocal for the actual numbers there, but it's this really small step from one to the other. And there are other factors that are influencing. . .

Chris Raines: I don't think the story this tells is, "Oh my gosh. If I'm at 4.7, I'm on the edge."

Michael Utley: That's not the story it tells. That's right.

Chris Raines: What it says is what you were alluding to.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: There are other factors. You don't have to have a 5.0 to get on.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Talk about what those other factors are.

Michael Utley: Yeah. If you go out and do a search, you're going to see people with 3.6 star ratings popping up above a 4.6. This isn't true in an individual search. This is true in the aggregate. What we're saying here, it's statistically relevant as an SEO factor. Other factors are going to include location.

Chris Raines: Proximity.

Michael Utley: Proximity. Yeah.

Chris Raines: And what. . .

Michael Utley: And what they searched for.

Chris Raines: What they searched for. Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Right.

Chris Raines: So if have that listed on your GMB profile and on your website, you're more likely to sign up for it than somebody that didn't do that.

Michael Utley: That's right. And following that user behavior. If users have clicked on something where there was a high correlation, say, to service area proximity, a highly localized term like a city neighborhood name, like Green Hills dentist, as opposed to Nashville dentist, so the click and the user behavior is a signal to search—

Chris Raines: Use that as a feedback, yeah.

Michael Utley: It's a very complex picture, but what BrightLocal's teased out for us here through their research is very helpful. It's telling us that reviews are statistically relevant. There's no getting around it. Yeah. This is a big deal. So know your rating and have a plan. I would treat this as a KPI.

Chris Raines: Yeah. How many are you requesting each month? How many are you getting each month? What the average star rating each month. Track all that.

Michael Utley: Yeah. The KPIs we're using for ourselves is how many ratings we're trying to add every month. That's where we are right now in our evolution.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: But for a bigger company than us, I would say some KPIs would be what you just said.

Chris Raines: Requested.

Michael Utley: How many are we requesting? How many are we getting? What is the new average, the average of the ratings received?

Chris Raines: So you can see how it's moving over time.

Michael Utley: So you can see how that's changed over time, and capture that every month. Then what's our average, in the aggregate, for a live Google My Business listing?

Chris Raines: Mm-hmm. That's great. This next one flows directly from that because your star ratings are so significant in how you rank in Google Maps. You need to have a workflow set up. Number four here is set up a workflow to get reviews. This should be a core part of your marketing standard operating procedure if you're a local business.

Chris Raines: It's really three steps. There are tools you can use. If you have a high volume of customers, there's tools like BirdEye you can use to automatically ask for the review and then notify you. The more customers you have that you can automate this using tools.

Chris Raines: But the basics are: 1) Identify prospects or happy customers. That's important because you don't want to ask somebody that's angry because you did something wrong or you made them unhappy. You don't want to ask them for the review, because they're going to oblige you on that, and they're going to roast you. So identify happy customers. Make sure they're happy. Make them happy, then ask for the review.

Chris Raines: Then: 2) Contact them and include a request for a review. This can be part of your standard operating procedure. You need to have an email template. The secret here is Google Maps gives you a link, a specific link that you can share to your customer, where they don't have to go and search for you, and then find your Google My Business profile, and then find where you can. . . There's a link where you can give it to them and say, "Hey, click this link," and it pops up the review box.

Michael Utley: Yeah. The way we like to evangelize this within the organizations that we serve is we create a document that says, "Hey, here's some text that you can use in an email to ask for a review, Mr. Sales Rep." We have in that text the link that drives the recipient, their ultimate customer, directly to a pop-up modal for entering that five star.

Michael Utley: Something we do in that email text is we use the phrase five star. Yelp is really sensitive about driving more reviews, but other platforms are a little bit more flexible if they know that it's legitimate, real stuff coming through, then it's cool. Refer to Google's Terms and Conditions for anything you do. That's not our responsibility. We're not offering, for example, legal advice.

Michael Utley: But when we market this in-house, or when we promote in an organization how to go about doing this, we encourage saying, "Hey, if you feel like we've earned a five-star review, we'd love for you to share your experience on the Internet. Here's a link if you want to do that."

Chris Raines: Yeah. That's great. Then finally, I would say: 3) Have a process to follow-ups. This should be considered a little mini sales effort. I would gently follow up with them maybe one or two times after getting a yes from them, like, "Yeah. I would be happy to submit a review."

Michael Utley: I think there's a real missed opportunity that you've identified that we've talked a lot about this year.

Chris Raines: Yeah. I would just reach back out. Maybe give it a week. Reach back out to him, like, "Hey, did you get a chance to leave a review? No worries either way if you choose not to do it. Either way, we're happy that you are a happy customer. Just let me know how we can serve you in the future." Just a really kind follow-up.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Most of the time, people will, especially if they said, "Yes, I'll leave a review," they're like, "Oh crap. I told them I'd leave a review. I better go do it."

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: It's a really soft follow-up.

Michael Utley: Yeah. I've heard you say people are busy. How many touches do you think is appropriate for something like that? How many pings, or how many check-ins, or soft, gentle reminders.

Chris Raines: Yeah. "No rush. It just really helps people. It really helps us in getting new customers. Just let us know when you're able to do it. No rush." Just a really soft follow-up is a good way to catch people that were busy the first time you asked them, and they fully intend to do it, but stuff happens.

Michael Utley: Got buried in the inbox.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: How many do you think, Chris? Would you go three to five touches is fine to try to follow that review and chase it in?

Chris Raines: I would do two to three. You don't want to follow them five times. If they don't do it after two to three times, then it just wasn't important enough to, and you don't want to bother them.

Chris Raines: I would do the initial outreach. Get them to say. . .The initial outreach, I think, should be really short, like, "Hey, would you be open to giving a review?" Then usually you'll get, "Yeah, happy to." Then you send them the link.

Chris Raines: After you get that yes commitment, it's going to be easier to follow up after they've committed to, "Yes. I will do it." Then it's going to be really easy to follow up, because it's like, "Oh, I'm just following up, because you said you would do it. Just wondering when. Let me know if you need help," that kind of thing.

Michael Utley: Yeah. A best practice along that that a lot of folks do, if they have folks who are out in the field who are meeting with customers, is they'll literally say, "Hey, we just finished up the project. Did the walkthrough. You're happy. We're happy. Would you be up for writing review right now? I'm going to send it to your phone right now. Can we do this?"

Chris Raines: Yeah, get the yes.

Michael Utley: Get it in real-time.

Chris Raines: All right. We're running out of time here.

Michael Utley: Great.

Chris Raines: What's the last one here, Michael?

Michael Utley: No. No. That was it. We just covered the last item. Yeah.

Chris Raines: Oh, okay.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We just tag-teamed the item on creating a response.

Michael Utley: So yeah. That's Episode 41. Hey, we're really excited about new episodes of this podcast coming out. Follow us on social media channels to get the new episodes. We're @DodgeballSEO on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. We would really love for you to subscribe and stay aware.

Michael Utley: This is a podcast for practitioners. We want to serve marketing directors, managers, VPs, founders, owners, people who are figuring out how to increase their business on the Internet. We're not really trying to be a podcast for experts. There are plenty of good resources and people smarter than us to do that. But we want to be here for the people who are trying to learn how to do this to improve their businesses. So follow us on those socials. We'll see on the next one.