So What? Setting up and using Google Business

Well, hey, howdy, everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. I am Katie, joined by Chris and John. How's it going, guys?

Good. Doing well. All right, love the enthusiasm. Today we're talking about uh setting up and using Google Business. Formerly Google My Business, and we could probably go on a rant about of all the things that Google has rebranded.

That was probably not one that needed to be rebranded. They've had some other issues. And so this came up because we're looking at, especially for clients, we're looking at what are the other foundational tools. You know, generative AI is cool, it's shiny object, but there's still some foundational pieces that we need to be thinking about, especially when you're trying to do local search, if you're a B2C, even if you're a B2B. And so we wanted to make sure that we were covering to you.

Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about Google Business. First of all, if you are, who can get a Google Business page? You can get a Google Business page if you have a physical business.

So yeah, meaning there's a there's a physical location, uh, some locus where where you are. So I'm gonna uh bring this up because I think this is kind of funny. Uh, this is the Google Business Manager page in my Google account. And you notice there's three businesses here. There's Boston Martial Arts Center, there's trust insets, and then there's marketing over coffee.

Uh marketing over coffee's page has been suspended. The reason why is because we haven't recorded at that Dunkin' Donuts on uh in Natick in years. And Google Business from time to time does audit and see um is is this really there? And and we're not really there. So uh one of the things that would be on our to-do list uh for for that would be to fix it and basically adjust it to John's house, because that's that's where it um it was.

So you need to have a physical bit uh locus of business. And when you go in to add a business uh in Google Business, it will have you go through all these steps, one of which will be validating to the businesses after there. And part of that process is they will actually send you a physical postcard to that place uh with a code on it that you have to type in. So that's the other thing is that Google Business Um requires you to do that validation and thus it's not instant. So if you wanted to set up your your stuff today, and like, okay, we're launching our business.

Well, you you you need to give yourself at least three weeks um in case the postcard gets lost in the mail and so on and so forth. We ran into this problem with oh gosh, oh, it was uh it was a chain of hardware stores that we were doing some client work with, and and you know, they had to get postcards to each of their stores, and each store manager had to find the mail and then hand it off to us so that we could then help them validate it, which was a lot of fun. Is there what's the rationale between using the postcard versus like you know what we do with two-factor authentication, which is like I don't know, a text message. Is it to ensure that you're setting up an actual real physical address that can receive mail because they don't want PO boxes in Google My Business? That would be my guess, yes.

All right. Well, John, we're gonna uh we're gonna fix this to be or at least the coffee shop closest to your house, John, so that we're not giving away your actual address. Oh, yeah, no, the business has an address that I can use that's uh set up for that. The thing is funny though, that just got clicked about a month ago. Uh you know, I just got the it's been like over 10 years of of out of there.

But yeah, it finally we finally did get caught up on that, which was kind of funny. So that's that's the basic. So let's go into uh into Google Business. There's there's a few things you can do just in the interface. There's obviously the businesses you own, there are the reviews that each business gets, there are your linked accounts, and this is ad accounts.

That's the the nice way of putting it, uh, and then your settings. There's not a ton to talk about in the settings. It's mostly about you know what do you want to get notified for? And generally speaking, except for things like you know, uh Google ads uh for your business, you can just leave stuff mostly checked on because it's a good idea to have notifications turned on. When someone leaves you a new review, you probably want to know about it.

Um, particularly if it's not a great review. Um, this speaks a little bit to the governance of this. If you are doing this for your business, you probably want to make sure that someone is checking those notifications on a relatively regular basis, especially if you're a retail business where you know one and two uh star reviews would be bad. Someone had better be watching the shop. Yeah, no, I agree with that.

And so um, if you go back up to the businesses themselves, then this is where you could edit the actual business, like the all the profile and everything that's captured in there. Um, and this is you know, to your point about governance, uh, setting up a Google business profile, you should also have some governance or nay, even maybe some business requirements and maybe go through the five P. So, you know, it's interesting because Trust Insights has a Google business profile, but we've never gone through the exercise to say why do we have one, other than we probably should go in and just have one. And so, you know, I look at that because every once in a while I'll get an email from Google saying, you know, are you open on this, you know, recognized holiday? Do you want to update your hours?

I'm like, we're we're not a brick and mortar, it kind of doesn't matter. And so we should have a more clear purpose as to why we trust insights have a Google business profile. And the reason for having a Google business profile is because it changes your search results, particularly on mobile devices. If someone is in say your area, your region, and they do a generic search like consulting firm or even better, consulting firm near me. Well, the Google already splits its results into desktop versus non-desktop.

And then if you're on the mobile device, it changes the results even more to say, like, okay, well, let's prefer local things because their understanding is the intent of this device is different. So this device is used for active activation. Um, right? If I'm if I search for McDonald's on my desktop computer, I might be looking for information. If I search for McDonald's on my phone, I'm probably looking to go to McDonald's.

Um, and therefore the logical intent in Google search results is to say, okay, well, you're you're here, you just typed in McDonald's, we're going to infer that your intent is you actually want to eat at McDonald's. So let's show you local results as opposed to the Wikipedia entry on it. So to be clear, if you have, you know, a consumer business, it makes sense, but if you have a Google business profile, then that's what powers Google Maps, for instance. Yeah, because what you're describing to me sounds like I'm on my phone, I put in McDonald's near me, and I'm gonna get a bunch of map listings based on my location. Yes, that that is correct.

So Google Maps and Google Business do draw from the same data sources. Um, however, they're not exactly the same system. So this is tricky. This is where you also want to make sure that your Google Business account and the metadata on your website are in agreement with each other. So if you have a phone number and it's marked up, you know, telephone in the HTML on your website, and it's different than what's in your Google Business account.

Google's gonna be like, so which one is it? Which one, which phone number are we going to be showing? And as of like the last few years, they have preferred Google Business. So if you've got an old phone number in your website and you've got a more up-to-date one in Google Business, at least in search results that, like the one box along the side, um, and in Google Maps, they will tend to prefer what's in Google Business. Okay.

So where do I edit all of that stuff in my Trust Insights account, for example? Okay. So assuming that you're that you have access to the Google Business profile, uh, and again, that's something you want to work out with with the governance because you one real important thing is if your agency sets up Google Business and then you part ways with your agency, then they might not have access to your Google Business account. Yeah. That's happened if you thankfully, I'm pretty sure we set it up.

So we have access to it. Yes, this is this is my personal Google account, which is a governance issue unto itself. So this is actually I wasn't going to even go there, but yes, you're right. That's for a different show. That's a different day.

Um, so let's go into the profile and take a look at what's available. So in here, this is stuff that is that occurs at setup. So you'll get asked these questions, but then you can obviously go through and refine this uh over time. Um you start this is just really one long scroll, and you can start to edit what your business is about. So what's your business name, the category of business it is?

So in the categories, um, you can add multiple categories depending on uh what's available. Uh and Google has a whole uh bunch of them. You edit your your contact information, your phone number, your website. Real important, be sure to use UTM tracking codes in your Google Business account because otherwise it comes in conflated with regular Google search and you can't tell which is Google Business organic traffic and which is regular Google organic traffic. Interesting.

Which makes sense that you would want to know because I assume we're talking about like if you're on a desktop and you click, you know, business consulting near me, you would get not only the list of searches, but also the off to the right, those you know, blocks of text on the side. What we're talking about are those blocks of text on the right side of a search result, and that's what we're controlling. Exactly. Um and so let's actually bring that up. So here the in incognito mode, if I put in trust insights, this one box comes from Google Business.

Got it. Okay. So and that's what we would want to know if people are clicking on that versus just going through a regular search. Exactly. It would you if you click on this link, you can see down at the very bottom uh at the screen the little black type, there is the UTM tracking code that we have in our Google Business profile.

Makes sense. Okay. Uh we have a website. If you have online products, you can use Google Merchant Center to configure that. So if you have like an e-commerce storefront, uh that would be a way to do that.

You have your short name, you have your location and this the areas you you have service for. So I have no location because I don't want people showing up at my house. That makes sense. But I would imagine a lot of virtual businesses are the same. Yes.

Exactly. But could we put something like Boston, Massachusetts, and just have it be that generic? Or does it want like an actual address? It wants an actual address. So if I flick this toggle on, show business address to customers, I will be asked for the City Street zip code, all that stuff.

Gotcha. Yeah, we definitely don't want to. In our case, we don't want that. Now, if you were like a local restaurant, you absolutely want that. Absolutely.

Yeah. Right. So that's why we get the world map when you do that basic search because there's no point on that map. But yeah, you can see how all the location stuff is driven by that point. Exactly.

Um, you set your business hours, any kind of special hours like holidays and things that whether you observe them and so on and so forth. Uh, and then you can add also the the different uh features, what kinds of happy uh do you have happy hour? Do you have pickup? Do you have senior hours? Um again, these are not things that we have to typically worry about, but they are certainly things where um if you were like a retail business like a brick and mortar uh store, you absolutely want to do this.

Well, yeah, that is all food service all the time. That's basically that's the the Yelp killer that they're going with. Exactly. Um you have more from the business, you can add in um, you know, for example, you identify as a women-owned business. One real thing important thing about these toggles, they cannot be undone.

The moment you tap one of these, you you must stick with a choice of either yes or no. Why is that? I don't know why Google does that. So let's say, let's say I was the sole owner, but then, you know, so we click yes to women-owned, but then all of a sudden I add on Chris and he becomes the majority owner. So technically, I guess it is still women owned, but I couldn't click no.

If I want to click no, but you can't click no choice. Right? I see. So once you've done it, you have to just commit to it. Exactly.

And now it's gonna show up. Exactly. Got it. So I can hit save now and this will this will work. But I can't there's no way to uncheck it so it's left blank.

Got it. So this goes back to making sure that you're going through your requirements process to make sure look at all of the settings first and decide what you want before committing to them because looks like Google is not going to be forgiving if you decide to change your mind. Yep. Here's the one that's uh gonna make a lot of people irritated. You can't choose no choice on LGBTQ friendly once you tap one.

So if y like you have to have you have to sit down and think, do I want my business identified as this? And that's they all that's personal preference. When we we can't speak for other businesses, but if you tap that by accident, you can't undo it. And then you either show up as yes or no. So your option is to ignore it altogether or to choose something.

Exactly. Now luckily in our case, Chris, so we didn't talk about it, but I don't have a problem with showing that. But you know, to your point, if I had if well, I am just finding out now on this call that that was that that that is listed, but if I had had a problem with it, now my only choice is to either say yes or no versus not to even talk about it at all. Yep. And, you know, when they say no, that's a bigger problem.

Yeah, that's literally the lose half your customers, but right there. If you're in some kind of, you know, if you're the local bakery off of Main Street. You know, there's no there's no way to win on that question. Yeah. Oh.

Yep. Yeah. That's I mean, yeah, that's those are those are considerations that people are definitely not aware of because I'm not seeing anywhere on here that little like tool tip that says once you click this, this action cannot be undone. Mm-hmm. Exactly.

Are you a COVID testing center? No, we're not. But like what if like someone's scrolling and accidentally clicks something? Like you're kind of effed at that point. Mm-hmm.

Yep. Here's things like, you know, do you need to uh what kinds of you know things do you have for this appointment required. So this there's still a lot of pandemic level stuff that's that's still left over in here that you can you can choose. Right. And again uh once you click something you can't unclick it.

So like we offer online appointments. Um we don't offer any of these languages stuff so um right so that's all the stuff that you put into your profile so that's your basic listing. So one of the things that I noticed on the listing was that it had social buttons at the bottom. So one was LinkedIn and one was Facebook and Facebook is not an account that we use where does that where do you change that information for example or let's say we added um Instagram or let's say we added you know Snapchat or TikTok like where do you fix that information? So that's kind of um because I looked at it, you know, and to be fair, like I did do my own due diligence.

I looked at the Google Business Profile and I couldn't figure it out. I did not see any options to change some of the information that does actually show up. Yeah, that's a very good question that I don't actually know the answer to off the top of my head, because one of the weird things is that it also provides you a second control panel with the Google search interface itself in addition to Google Business if you own that business, which is really confusing. Huh. Uh-huh.

Yeah, it's it's it's it's odd. So and understandable why if you're a small business whose focus is not your digital footprint, this is gonna be an afterthought and very confusing. Mm-hmm. And so it looks like we can add pictures, which you know, the pictures we would add would be, I guess, of us speaking. I don't know.

Like you can do a a bunch of different stuff. Actually, I'm just curious here. Now I actually want to see how do we can we to manage our contact information somewhere. We can't in this website, phone number, which is US. There's there's something that's been deprecated, which is not helpful.

Well, the photos, that would be classic. Again, restaurant stuff, it would be the front of the store and one of the menu, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. So the the things you can do, you can create you can add photos to your listing, obviously.

Um, and then you can also um do posts. So you can you can share content on there, like uh an update. Um so for example, if you want to book now, order online, buy it, sign up now, call now. Uh if you were like a uh say a local restaurant, you might say, like, um, our special tonight is uh cheese sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches made with authentic mayonnaise. Um and you have a photo of it, you have put up the description and you say, you know, uh book book your appointment now.

Uh you know, schedule uh schedule your reservation now. So those posts um they function kind of like little little tiny blog posts, and they're really helpful for businesses where you may not have a website that's easy to update, but you can just go on to onto Google Business right from your phone and do it there. So there is a Google Business mobile app uh for business owners. So you can take like if you were say a mom and pop retail shop, you know, and a new crate of uh pop uh Funko Pops just came in. You take a picture with your phone, you write short update, and boom, you push it straight to your Google Business profile.

Got it. Now, is this another one of those? Uh so the pictures I get, um, but like if you add a button like order online or sign up, is it one of those once you've done it, you can't undo it? You always have to have some kind of a button. Uh you do need well, it says you buttons are optional on this.

Okay, you just have an informational post. Okay, but it seems like I was curious because Google doesn't seem to be consistent. No kidding. Um that said, um, it seems like kind of a waste to not use call to action. If you're gonna post.

But so does that show up in the search results in the right tower, or do you have to click through to the Google business page to see all that stuff? Um that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. I'll have to look back. We're just doing all the hard hitting stuff today, Chris.

You really are. It's like, what does this button do? Well, to our point, we don't use this a ton because we're not the kind of business that relies on local search heavily. If we were a business that was very heavily local search focused and we want to be pushing out information to, you know, our our audience locally, if we had maybe a chain of franchises, like you know, imagine if you were the owner of McDonald's and you had all you know 10,000 locations uh you know stored in Google Business, because you can upload your um your business locations files um and have hundreds of thousands of locations. It would be a mammoth task to to get uh you know the a post pushed out to all hundred thousand McDonald's locations, especially if you had things like, oh, McRib is only available at these you know 280 outlets this week.

And you know, it's like the moving McRib. So you could have you could you would want to have some orchestration behind that. Yeah, again, I kind of keep going back to you know the five Ps to make sure that you have really good governance because doing this on a whim randomly just I mean, it's true of most things, but especially a system like this that is very unforgiving. Uh yeah. Mm-hmm.

So that's more or less what you're capable of doing within the Google business interface. And again, um, if you are a a the business owner, you can start to see some of the the bits and pieces. What's really interesting is that and and kind of weird, things like your analytics are not available in the actual Google Business Pro. You have to go to the Google Business Interaction panel in regular Google to make those changes. Now, because this is part of the Google product family, can you pull your Google Business data into Looker Studio with your other data sources like Google Analytics, like, you know, whatever other Google native Google ads, for example.

Um, I don't believe so. I believe I don't believe that Google Business. In fact, let's look. The answer is no. Google Business is not available as a Google connection within Google Looker Studio.

Yeah, well, even are there any stats of any kind in there? I don't know if there's anything at all. Uh it turns out Google Business is available from third-party vendors in Looker Studio. Way to be consistent, Google. And there are stats.

So if I if I tap in on this um the performance, I can see okay, you know, what kind of I got eight website clicks, no bookings, no messages, no calls. So that's the basic performance. For our business, that's fine. But to your point, if you're a brick and mortar, if you're a retail, if you're a restaurant, you're gonna have bigger metrics. You're gonna want to see that there is a correlation between people clicking on your Google business profile and foot traffic.

Or if you put up, you know, our special today is the burger, you want to see that you've sold more burgers. Exactly. So the fact that you can't easily get that data directly from Google, even though it's part of the Google family, is bonkers. I just I feel like we just keep uncovering things that should are just unintuitive. Exactly.

So yeah, there it definitely could uh could use some work here. Um Brian uh is saying our medical center uses Google Business Law. Some great tips in here. So thank you. So Brian, I'm glad that even though there's some things that we haven't been able to figure out that we've been helping uh you figure out.

But a medical center, it makes a lot of sense because those are all brick and mortars. People want to know, you know, emergency services near me or outpatient or whatever the thing is. It's so important for those businesses to keep up to date on their Google business profiles. And a lot of them may not know that that's something that they even need to consider. They may feel like, well, I have a website, what else do I need?

I remember when we worked at the agency, the question that came up a lot, especially when it came to search results was how do I get that box on the right side to show up? And the answer was, well, what is what's in your Google business profile? And they'd say, We don't have one. Yep, exactly. Um, this is for with that other business to help manage the Boston Martial Arts Center.

And we can see there's a lot more in here now. Um, so from here we can see how many people are making calls to the business from the business profile. This is obviously uh very useful information. Uh, how you know how many calls do we miss? What time of day?

Uh are we getting messages? We're not getting a ton of messages on there. Uh there's no booking setup. Driving directions, however, we are have 411 driving directions requests because there's the school is located in Alston, which um is is one of those things you'd want to know. And then you can see the website clicks.

So for a local business, and that that's really what this is very well tuned for for local businesses. This works really well if you got it set up and someone's you know minding the shop. Mm-hmm. Um even here, I can see like there's new messages. I'm not gonna open up because it contains personal identifying information, but I can I I can just see from this little control panel, oh, there's there's there's something for um my teacher to do for his school.

Yeah, I'm still stuck on the fact that you can't just pull it into Looker Studio easily, especially, you know, to your point, if you're managing a few dozen or hundreds of local businesses, wouldn't it be amazing if they could all be brought into one dashboard so you could see what was going on? But it sounds like that's just not an option at this time. That's right. Now, at least not within the interface itself. What you can do is there are there is third-party software that can integrate, uh, particularly Agora Pulse.

So Agora Pulse, which we talk talked about in the social media monitoring show, um, can you can add your Google business profile to this, and then um you can use the social inbox, at least for notifications, like hey, someone reached out about this? And again, for the trust insight side, um, there's nothing for us to do here, but your reviews will come in here and your messages can come in here. So people leaving new reviews and people leaving messages like, hey, you know, are you open on this day? What about? So obviously Google reviews is one place where people leave reviews and ask questions, but what about services like Yelp or TripAdvisor?

Do those reviews also come into Agora Pulse, or are there other third party tools that we could be using to capture that information? Because if you have a local business and if you have a Google business account, the likelihood of you wanting to know what people are doing in reviews is like is pretty high. Yep. It depends on what services. So there's a whole bunch of different companies out there that can do this.

So Agora Pulse has a Google business. Uh if you're familiar with the uh brand 24 software, uh, this is from a Polish company called Brand 24. Um, they support TripAdvisor, Yelp Booking, and Booking.com uh in their software along with uh LinkedIn. And then the sort of the the granddaddy of them all is uh company called YEXT, and YEXT can talk to pretty much every system uh that exists and allows you to sort of centralize all that information. We actually use it for one of our clients.

We obviously can't show it because it's client data. Um, but it is the probably the most comprehensive system for managing the locations and posting content to locations and handling the reviews. I had a chance to talk with um YEX chief data officer at the Makeon conference, and he said one of the things that's coming uh or you might already be in the product is generative AI review handling, where um generative AI goes through and drafts responses to reviews. Um, you know, you give it your parameters, like this is the kind of tone I want, this is how I want this handled, and then it'll give you a whole bunch of uh pre-written reviews for you that to then go and approve or decline, like you know, someone saying, Oh, your uh your your class is was running too late that night. So, oh I'm very sorry to hear that, and so on and so forth.

Hmm. Interesting. What does that mean for, you know, there's a lot of people who are gonna be resistant to that and be saying like that's not human enough. Like that'll be an interesting. I think we covered that a couple of weeks ago on our different show, but that'll really be interesting to see.

It's it sounds a lot like the way that you train a chat bot where you say these are the acceptable responses. Um these are the ones that we don't want you to use. So it sounds like it's very much along those lines. Very much so, yes. Um, and again, it does the it does drafts, it does not do it for you.

A human still has to push the button to say, yes, this is a review you know response is approved. It's the machines are not going to go necessarily start start responding to reviews on your behalf solely because that could just end real badly. Yeah, we've seen what happens when unsupervised machines just kind of start talking and talking. It's just it's not a good idea. Yes.

It really is not. How about on the ad side of that? Is that the normal AdWords accounts or is that different? Are you actually able to do sponsored business page and jump the queue? Is that how that works?

The ads are regular Google Ads. Oh, okay. So that's good. So you don't have a second thing to worry about there. Exactly.

Yeah, in fact, you link right into your Google Ads account. Hmm. All right. So we talked, okay. So if I were to link up to Agora Pulse or Brand 24, I could monitor the activity, the reviews, the questions, those kinds of things.

Um, where do we factor in something like generative AI? It depends on what you want to use it for. Um, the thing that we've seen some interesting success for are a couple of different things. One is using generative AI to process. I think John hit the wrong button there.

We're having technical difficulties today. Exactly. Um here's an example. The audio for you on that one that was supposed to. Here's an example.

I took a a series of reviews that I generated. So I used generative AI to create a bunch of reviews to analyze because I would like to be able to do this for conference talks. For good reason, you cannot and should not show uh personal identifying information. So we we just uh came out with a bunch of synthetic reviews and pasted that file of all those reviews into um this in this case anthropic Claude and told Claude, hey, you're a restaurant marketing expert, you know, restaurants and so on and so forth. The restaurant's name is Arendel Cafe.

Um restaurant serves primarily Norwegian breakfast foods. Um and in the reviews I provided the star rating, the text of the review, um, and and the date of the review, and said, tell me what's happening with our reviews. If you are a business that gets a lot of reviews, this is the only sane way to handle you know understanding that at a macro level because um you know, for example, one of our clients gets thousands of reviews every month, and it is it was impossible for us to process those reviews in a timely fashion. Now, with the help of generative AI, we can go through and process each of their department's reviews uh for that month and hand them back an analysis like hey, here's three here's the the things that you're this you know company does well, you know, authentic cuisine, staff is commended for dedication, chef receives many compliments, family friendly atmosphere, uh weaknesses, inconsistency of food service, long wait times, noisy levels, vegan options are limited. Um, and then some it comes up with some recommendations.

So, this is an example using generative AI to process review data. But first you would have to be able to extract all of that review data. And so using a system like an Agora Pulse or Brand 24 to centralize all of your reviews first, then extract it into a CSV file, then bring it into generative AI to summarize. Could you hand it the file and just say summarize this, all of this data? Like it you'd probably get what you asked for.

You probably get like a weird summary. Okay. Exactly. And then the second thing is, and this applies to reviews of any kind, including stuff on like Amazon and things, if you can get a copy of the data, which is a totally different topic, um, you can ask it what anomalies do you see in the data? Are there particular standard extremes that are worth analyzing further?

Right. And it it comes through and says, hey, you know, this person left multiple five-star one-star reviews on the same day. It seems unusual for the same guest to have so extremely different experiences in such a short time span. Hiroshi's also left a few duplicate reviews under different last names, always rating five stars. This could indicate someone artificially inflating rates.

Now we know this is a synthetic file. So yes, there's going to be a lot of duplication. But you can get a sense of, as it says, this points to some amount of review manipulation or fabrication. If you are wondering about your own reviews, you know, on your on your profile, this is a handy test to do. If you are wondering about the reviews at a competitor, this is a really handy test to do to see if that competitor is doing a little astroturfing on the side.

Mm-hmm. I my first thought was definitely uh, you know, can you break use this for your competitors to see if they are, you know, uh I don't even know what the term would be, but basically they're just like faking their reviews to make themselves look better. Mm-hmm. Yep. And you know, that's super straightforward.

If you were to go to any business's Google reviews, um, you type in the business name to click on Google Reviews, and Google will bring up for obvious reasons the the reviews for that site. And then after, you know, there's there's nothing super sophisticated here. Select all copy paste into a text file and then and do exactly that. Will it be nicely formatted into a CSV? No.

Um, but would would it be good enough to be able to feed to and Claude or Chat GPT? Absolutely. Can you export your reviews directly from the Google Business Profile Manager? No. Oh my god.

So is this like the forgotten product by Google? Like it's it seems like a really important tool, but yet it doesn't do anything useful. The castle walls are high. Oh my god. I yeah, I don't know why.

I don't know why it's this way. I don't know why Google does this this particular way and makes it so difficult. It's that just seems to be it almost seems like it was one of those things that started out in Google Labs and got released, and and there was never a plan for it, but they're like, hey, this helps compete with Yelp and takes away traffic, you know, and keeps people in in Google. So let's let's put it in production. And it's still it's still basically the the beta architecture that was just put in production.

All right, let me ask you a question that you sh should know the answer to, but given our track record for today, who knows? Um, obviously, you know, people want to use Google Business for really important things like local local SEO. So, what are if you're in if you're setting up a Google business profile and you are editing the profile, what are some of the fields that are the most important to factor in for better results for local SEO? The services fields, the products and services fields within your Google Business listing are going to um strongly dictate how your listing performs because you want to be you want to have the services uh available that are reflective of what you offer, obviously, but also what people search for, right? So kids' martial arts or kids' classes and stuff like that.

There's a whole bunch of uh we can't see your screen, Chris. Oh, whoops. Um so there's a whole bunch of uh keywords and categories and services uh that you'd want to configure in your Google business location that reflects uh what you want to be found for, and a lot of the time it's not just your specific product, but it's also your vertical. So you can see here in um in my teacher's uh martial arts school listing, we practice uh Bujankan Buddha Taijutsu. Like five people on the planet for that search for that.

Um, so we have a bunch of other martial art names and practices in the listing to attract people who are looking for in some cases, they're just looking for a martial arts class, they're looking for a self-defense class, or they're just looking for a fitness class of some kind. And so having a bunch of those these different terms in the listing will pop up when someone's doing a local business search. So you above and beyond the the obvious basics, you want to make sure that you're you you have your your profile completely filled out. The products and services are where you will attract your audience based on all those near me queries. Because automatically, if there's a service listed in the services, someone who types in service near me in Google is it's going to uh potentially trigger your listing to be part of that.

So it sounds like when teams are putting together their SEO strategies, they should also be factoring in their local SEO, their Google Business Profile. I mean, it occurs to me that what we would probably do is first look in Google Search Console to see how people are finding trust insights, and then include the relevant keywords into the services of our Google profile, Google Business Profile, with the hope that when they're searching for those things, they're finding our Google Business profile easier, clicking, calling John Wall. John Wall is saying, hey, let's make a deal, and then we're all go away rich and happy. Exactly. Is that the basic process?

Yeah, it is 100% the basic process. You're looking to try to look at that volume in the SEO tool of your choice, right? Um take your existing keyword list, take your top terms. Uh, particularly, here's the thing about local SEO that's really cool. A term that broadly you would have no chance of ranking for, you can potentially rank for it easier in local search because of the way Google business works.

So if you want to say like AI consulting firm, there's a lot of them, right? If you want to say Google Analytics Consulting Firm, there's a lot of them. Um, you're probably not gonna rank in desktop search for Google Analytics Consulting Firm, right? It's just probably not gonna happen. You put Google Analytics in your local thing, and someone who is on their phone, which is now the dominant form of of internet usage, and does a search for Google Analytics consulting.

Because there's a local listing, you will get some more advantage than just having uh a website and no Google business profile. Got it. And so is there a limit to how many? So it's it's interesting because you want to make sure that you're actually including services and not just keywords. So a lot of times we'll do variations of keywords, uh long tail keywords, but things that also aren't grammatically correct.

So I would imagine that we want to make sure that we are including things that we are okay with users seeing, so no jumble of words that are sort of just keywords, but actual services that they would be able to see. And can we order these once they're once they're in there or they go in as they've been added, like in terms of order, like you can't reorder them, they are just as you added them in. They're just they're as you add them. They're just all in there. Ah, yeah, Google, you're killing me here.

Um, and you can specify with those services, like you know, what's your pricing and things like that if you wanted to list that. Uh by having a service description, does that continue to help with the search? It can, yes. Okay. I'm making a mental to-do list for myself.

Yep, yeah, and you can have up to 300 characters for that. Okay. Um and then, of course, you have products as well. So if you have products that you offer, you could put that in here. Like courses.

Exactly. So, what kind of category is it? So let's create a new category. Online course. Um Google Analytics or Marketers.

Our price is 499. And then I need our. Yep. There's again with with all these things, there's so many different things that you can do within this system. So here is we've now got our product here.

And so there it is. So we could go through and add in more and more and more of these things. That's fantastic. I love it. Finally, a win in the Google column.

It only took 43 minutes. But even something like uh the bookings tab. Um we could put John's calendar equipment in here. If we wanted people to call John. Now we have the the contact page here, which I think is perfectly fine for right now, but you could have bookings right in there.

And again, if you're like my teacher's martial arts school. If you want to have come in and try a free class, that's the place to put it. If um even events and things, you know, you could put stuff like that, you know, in as events. So if you have happy hour at a restaurant, you might want to have that available. Now there's actually a special happy hour button in the in the primary listing itself.

But if you want to have some kind of special thing, um, if you want to do um if if you have users asking questions, um they can ask right from your your one box listing, ask a question of this business. Which makes sense. Yeah, I mean there, and you know, so I feel like again, going back to your governance and having some semblance of requirements that's Google Business can be a really powerful tool in addition to your website. And so making sure you're going through the 5P framework, even at a high level to really understand why you should be youing using Google Business, what you want to do with it, how you're going to maintain it. Because once you set it up, it's like anything else, it needs some maintenance.

Um, you know, I've lost track of how many times like you look for a restaurant and the information is just out of date. The hours are out of date, the events are out of date, and it's a real turn off for as a user experience because it's that whole you never get a second chance to make a first impression. This is a first impression tool. This is where you make that first impression. And if it's not set up correctly and then not maintained, then you are definitely losing on business that you didn't know was possible.

Exactly. So yeah, it's it's a very powerful and it's if you the the local business rabbit hole is a deep one because now you have Apple Maps and Apple business listings. Um, you have Yelp, you have TripAdvisor, you have all these places. So it again, that's where it starts to make sense to look at enterprise style tools like YXT, because yeah, do you really want to maintain there are 74 different uh location-based services that uh you can have a listing for that's a lot to maintain, so you may want to have software assisting with that. Or a John Wall.

Dude, you've got to have governance for this though. Because as we've clearly seen here, you cannot count on the UI to be something that's going to show you the five things in an order that you have to work on. You know, like it we can stumble through now, but three years from now, when the new GA4 course comes out, who's gonna remember that it needs to be updated back in local search? Like if you don't have that on a list somewhere, it's just gonna get lost. So yeah, get some help with this, or you know, get your governance and your peas in order, because otherwise you're just um it'll work great for a year, and then it's gonna be another dead end that a customer's gonna stumble into in years two through seven.

And you know, Chris, to your point much earlier in the episode. If you were having an agency like Trust Insights help you set these things up, make sure as part of that governance you know who's owning the instance. Because if you have an agency set it up and then they walk away or you part ways, that agency still owns the instance, and that could be incredibly dangerous for everybody. Yeah, just asking about how many uh Google Analytics accounts I still have access to over a decade later, after we stopped working with those companies. Yeah, it's not like we've had clients come to us and say, Oh, there's four different versions of GA and I can't get into any of them, right?

I don't know who set that up. That was before my time. Yeah. There's a lot of that. Alright.

Any final parting words? Get it together, Google. Make it native like the other apps in your collection. I don't know. I have a lot of frustrations.

You're not the only one. Another day going through the Google product stack. That's true. Exactly. Alright, folks, that's gonna do it for this week.

We'll talk to you next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast. At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

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