Do you wake up in the morning and think to yourself, oh why is it so hard to rank my business in Google? Surely there's an easier way. Well you know what?
There is an easier way. It's a lot easier than you think. You don't have to have a massive marketing budget. In this video I've decided to go back into my archives to get the 37 best tips that are going to help you today.
All 37 tips are being tried and tested and they range from the rocketing reviews to the marketing reviews. To the sublime citations. Products that will make your shop pop. To... you get the idea.
Some are totally unique tips that you never would have heard of. Others perhaps are just good reminders that you've seen before on this channel. But try them out and your business will start skipping to the top of the Google results.
So let's jump straight in to tip number one. So the first tip is completion. This is a new thing that's just occurred this week. Google business profile so if you've been following the things on this channel you'll know that by putting things that Google's asking for when they ask for it so you're looking to build your strength of authority in Google and this is a little signal back from Google to say that you've now got it so number two is insights a lot of people don't use their insights it's very easy to get to and it gives you so much information you just go to your account and then you then click on your views this month that takes you then through to performances just come down the page you'll see then it mentions your searches your breakdown your keywords click on see more and that will show you some more keywords and the reason why this is important is this is telling you what's working in google so when it comes to your local seo these are the keywords that customers are using to find you in google and there's loads of other things you can do as well you can see what photographs are working if you go back you can see also other areas such as what's giving you calls messages bookings directions how people find you on what platforms are they finding you lots of information that's building up an understanding of what's working within google at the moment with your profile so you need to react to your insights the third thing is to just check your mobile site speed and how it's viewed by google now this is a new tool i've not seen before from think google it shows you what google sees as regarding your business website and that in itself will have an impact on your local search results this tool can help you to make sure that you are achieving mobile being responsive coming back with a quick turnaround as you can see here i've got a result back and i can improve so it did a search for me from india on 4g it says that my average rating is there but it says i've been speeding up 0.9 of a second it's sped up in the last month or two but there's ways i can optimize it i can get a full report and then i can see what's failing and what's improving so my site speed was 2.8 seconds so i can certainly improve on that but all that has an impact on how google views your branding your website your authority and so on and my fourth tip is a bit of a trick really because sometimes when you look at your keyword research as we've just seen in insights it'll use a two or three word expression how can you use that naturally so you're writing for humans how can you use that how can you get inspiration so if i go to my breakdown of keywords there i can see i've got bespoke web design as one of the keyword phrases so how would i put that into a sentence that makes sense well just put it in quotes put it into google and then see the results that come up and there immediately you can see some great ideas come up so what about this um It can be incorporated from the very start of your bespoke web design.
What are the benefits of bespoke web design? Discover our recent bespoke web design work. All this is just giving us a little bit of an inspiration as to how you could use that keyword naturally in a sentence.
And that will inspire you. But here's a little hidden bonus for you too. If you go to the bottom of the page, you'll see that when you use those keywords, Google also uses other words that it expects you to use. So words like smart services. meaning, agency, examples.
Those things also are very naturally used by Google in its algorithm. And if you can use those words too, Google will see you as you're creating the information, but you're creating what it's expecting, even though you're writing it for the customers. Now, the next area is to add your opening date.
The majority of businesses that I work with, they haven't put that opening date in. Now, if it was just this year or last year, maybe I can understand why. The reason why most businesses don't have their opening date is because this has been a new thing added quite recently by Google and so the majority of people didn't know that it was added. So if you've got a few years under your belt that in itself will then start to show in the results. So for example I was established in 1999 so I've got 23 years under my belt.
So Google will show that as I've got 20 plus years. So that's something that again will build trust and build my authority. if i don't put those opening dates in to the google profile if i don't put it in there then google can't use it now the sixth tip is really something not to be worried about if you've already verified your business and your business is up and running a lot of people have said why does it still say claim your business why is that appearing to just joe public well the simple answer is and the tip is not to be worried about this because all businesses have an area where you can claim it why well because businesses can sometimes change hands but mainly because the majority of businesses that were put on Google Maps in the first place were done so before the owner had actually registered it.
So if you're registering a new business or if you're going to register your established business the chances are it's already been added on Google Maps. So the reason why your business already exists is because it was probably already registered for you but that's nothing to be concerned of you just need to make a claim and prove it's your business. And of course if your business doesn't exist on Google Maps and you can't find it then by all means register a brand new business.
Now tip number seven is quite closely related to tip number six which is what happens if I've now got a duplicated business. What happens if I registered the business and then a while later after building it up and getting some great reviews I then discovered actually the business had already been registered elsewhere and the two are there kind of combining and I'm worried that I'm going to then get banned by Google because they'll think that I'm trying to run two businesses out of one venue. so if there are duplicate listings for your business don't delete one or the other you can actually merge them together and if they're merged correctly and if google's approved it then you'll see that actually boosts the ranking of your business the eighth area is trends so just be aware of trends that may be coming up in the coming year your business can react ahead of time so if you say for example doing cosmetics or beauty do a search on google trends for say eyeliner and see what is it what brands are people talking about currently what's trending so if I do that for eyeliner here which I know nothing about and look for worldwide in the past 12 months I can see that there was a peak October last year there's a breakout for Julia Fox eyeliner so again you might just want to look into that or Victoria Beckham or reverse eyeliner lots of things there just gives you ideas as to what you could be blogging about what you could be talking about in your posts what offers you could have through Google business profile. Now number nine is about rising categories.
Now as you'll know from my previous videos I've always explained that primary category is one of the key factors in ranking but I've also mentioned in other videos that Google's always updating the categories. So it could be that the category you chose when you registered your business isn't the right category anymore because there's better businesses, there's better categories, there's better explanations as to what you do out there in the Google world. And Google gives you lots of clues on what's coming up. It gives you ideas as to what trends are going to happen by think in Google. So here's another link to a page that you'll find useful.
It's about consumer insights. And if you go to this page, it's just going to show you a little bit more information about what is going to happen in consumer behaviours in the coming 12 months. And there you'll get some articles to understand what is Google noticing? Where are the demands in fashion? Where are the demands in certain searches?
What can you expect is going to be big in your particular world in the coming 12 months? Now you might hit on a trend here that gets you a lot more traffic in the coming weeks. So you then build that into your articles, you build that into your posts, you build that into your articles.
your posts your blogs and you can quite quickly see a change in traffic if you hit on a trend that's up and coming now the tenth area is proximity proximity is how close are you to the person searching for you so obviously if you're in an area that's highly populated then you're going to be closer to a lot more searches which is a good thing but of course that also means that you have extra competition so why do we talk about proximity being so important well if you were deciding to open a new office up If you're deciding to move somewhere, move your business somewhere, think about proximity. There was a recent update called the Vicinity Update from Google, which is for local searches, and proximity doubled in importance. So don't underestimate.
When you're choosing an office, there's a massive factor involved getting close to where people are going to be searching for you. The closer you are, the more likely you are to appear number one in their search. That's a fact. Now the 11th area that's going to really help you to get ahead, delegate out to a manager if you don't want to manage your Google business profile.
And it's not been easy to find where this is, but I'm going to show you where you can do this. So if you go to your particular business, bring it up on the browser. And then if you go to those three dots, you'll see there on the right hand side under looking good.
On those three dots gives you a few extra bits that you often miss. You want the first one, business profile settings. You click on that and there you'll see it says managers. and this has now changed because managers now just enables you to have two types of managers you've got either the owner or the manager so an owner can edit and add managers and transfer ownership the manager can make changes for you now if you want someone to then manage it on your behalf you make them a manager you can always take that off them they don't own the business they just can manage it all for you and of course i've managed quite a few businesses already if you want me to manage your business go to the description down below while you're there obviously make sure you give this a like and subscribe and then contact me and I'll see if I can fit you in to my schedule.
Now the 12th area is reviews. You hear it all the time. Everyone on this channel is asking how can I get more reviews.
I've done several videos that will show you how to do that but what I will say is when you get a review make sure you thank the person and make sure you encourage reviews for those that do business with you. When someone says they've enjoyed your service say would you mind giving me a review. In fact I'm not going to repeat all those tips because they're on my other videos but customer service has never been more important than it is this year and reviews also if you get one bad review well others will defend you because if that's a bad review is an untrue representation your business you can guarantee all your positive customers will defend you and people don't expect every single review to be perfect so having a bad review in context of what you do as long as you give a great service doesn't really tend to affect people's views of your business the 13th tip is to do white hat maintenance so what do i mean by white hat maintenance well if you've heard of seo often they talk about white hat grey hat black hat white hat is just doing the right things it's doing really what google's asking you to do it's not looking for the shortcuts that get you a quick win which is often grey hat or black hat why do we say white hat's so important well because if you're there to then get traffic in the long term if you want to have ranking not just now but in the future then a gradual constant maintenance is what's needed. Google's definitely smart enough to know when someone's cheating the system and if they haven't worked it out today they will work it out tomorrow.
So keep your profile up to date, make it useful for customers and that's part of the white hat method that I use here. Now if you're regular on this channel you'll know that these tips can make all the difference to getting ahead of the competition. for you and your business and if you're new to this channel then make sure you subscribe because you'll learn from the 22 years of experience as a web designer i try and share these things with you so that your small business continues to grow now the next area came from mark oakley who put this to me where even though i have my what i consider a knowledge panel or my business information that's on google business profile he showed me that there was a section here that said claim this knowledge panel now i think the word knowledge panel is kind of interchangeably used between businesses and entities but basically what he was doing was explaining how he managed to get more information through wikipedia about his business so he does the british beekeepers association and what he does he shared with me how i could check mine too so i checked mine there's also an entity so what this is is about google understanding that zanet design limited or zanet design is a company now this was unclaimed if you've seen his email you notice there it says claim this knowledge panel and you know most people haven't claimed their knowledge panel basically they will give you more traffic if they understand what it is that people are looking for for so the knowledge graph is a knowledge base used by google and its services to enhance its search engines results with information gathered from a variety of sources but as interesting they do film booth as a similar company in the uk do they know about their knowledge panel their knowledge graph so there's a tool here and i'll give you the link down below where i typed in business film booth which is the name of their company if i then do a search it's going to see what does google know about them if i do a search for it you'll see then it comes up the entity type it says it's a thing or an organization but if i view it on google notice here this is a knowledge panel to claim so ed and the company need to claim this and no one else can claim it you have to prove that you have that business you've got to be registered company okay they've got their knowledge this is what we call knowledge panel and they've got it nicely optimized and doing well there google doesn't really understand when it puts the words business film booth together it doesn't necessarily understand what it is by then claiming it you can tie the two up which will give you a greater authority in google so that's what i did with zanet design got my knowledge panel but i also managed to make a claim to this and now i can edit things i can add more information i can even change things if relevant now this next tip's more for business owners that have a shop front and sell products now you'll know you can add products to google business profile but you'll also know that it's a lot of a bind to do that but there's this new product that's come about called pointy and you can add it to your till to your scanner and basically every product you sell in your shop it can be scanned and then it goes into your product database so every single item you sell will then be showing so when someone does a search for that product locally your products will come up so if you're a business that's got no online presence by just adding this simple little extra part to your till this little tool It can then get you immediately local traffic so people that would never dream of going into your shop suddenly realize that you do sell certain products that they've never come across before. It can be easily explained in this little video about a hardware store.
One of the things that we have struggled with has been how do we reach a younger generation. I think having an online presence is huge. The coolest thing that we've had through Google is having this see what's in store option.
Every single item that we scan that's run through our register, it'll pop up and say, hey, this is within, you know, five miles of you or three miles of you. And that is huge for us. Oh, it's definitely helped with bringing new people in the store who would never think to come here or not even know that we exist.
And they've looked up and they've wanted, you know, a part or a product or an item near me and they found us. So how does it work? Well, basically two ways. If your POS is supported by Pointy, then it just integrates freely with an app. If not.
you can just get a small little box that you attach to it and what it then means every time you scan something for your tools that gets updated onto the database and then that can appear as a shop as a product it can appear under any searches on google search on maps basically anywhere your products can appear google will do that for you and that will then bring in local traffic for people that didn't know that you supplied those products in the first place so if you want to know if google can support your products then simply just go into products on your google business profile and then if you click there put in your business and it will tell you then whether or not you can be supported currently as it stands you will generally need to have a shop front though for your products it's not just a case of selling electronic products now the next tip i want to share with you is one that's not really been fully rolled out yet but why not give it a go today and see if this works for you what it does is google produces a mini video about your business but it puts testimonials on there it puts images on there and it makes this nice little succinct video that then you can use and you can even make changes to it if you feel certain things need to be changed and you can then use this for marketing purposes you could put it on youtube you could use it in social media it also looks professional because google is showing that they are supporting small businesses so simply go to the link down below put in your business name if google can do it in your country at the moment then it will then start to produce a video it takes a little while and then the results are quite good so you can see then how it produces this video it also uploads it then onto google business products under videos and then you can start to then share this through social media to your clients now no one likes to air their dirty washing in public that's a well-known saying and surely that kind of has the same effect when it comes to having bad reviews so if you've received a review from someone that didn't do business with you or someone you just can't seem to please and they give you a one star review well we know that you can deal with that in various ways but the one thing you're not going to want to do is have people go to your website and there you've got then integration of google business reviews and there's your one star review showing all the time you don't see about a remover So how can you get rid of bad reviews so they don't show on your website? Well you'll be familiar with the fact I used Trustindex, did a video and shown you how you can use this free account and that can integrate your reviews whether it's from other authorities, so if you're a hotel or if you're booking area for say holidays or maybe you're a business that runs a restaurant or a takeaway service, there are various indexes you can get reviews from. Now personally I just use Google review as my main review, Google business reviews.
but there as they come in you can then use a setting and to get to this setting you go to review management click on management and there you'll then see all the reviews now you can then filter out the review so if we filter out say the five stars just show those that aren't five stars and there you see i've got a few four star reviews so say for instance i just wanted five stars to show then on the review if i had a one star review obviously i'd filter out down to one star You can then just click on hide and what that means then is when you go to your website and it shows your reviews Which is like this on this widget Where you can integrate it onto your website like this or various other ways you can do this In fact, this tool is quite amazing You notice now it's filtering out and only showing five star reviews and in effect That's what you want is you just want the five star reviews or the better reviews to show I think realistically four stars fine as well probably one and two star might be ones you're not wanting to show. Maybe three stars still realistic as well, you can choose on that. But that's the first tip.
So for the second one we're just going to consider that not all reviews are the same. So even though you might get one person give a five star review, another one give a one star review, we're aware that they also have authority as reviewers. So if you give reviews you have an authority, if I give reviews I have an authority.
Now my authority at the moment is level eight. Most people start off at level one level two, but it's a bit like someone who's say a reviewer of a hotel If he's a hotel inspector, he has an authority behind what he reviews Whereas if he's never lived in a hotel or he just goes from bed sit to hostel and then goes to a nice hotel Maybe his reviews won't be considered quite the same So the fact is is not all reviews or the reviewers themselves have the same authority and you can see that here Google reveals that you all have different authorities, you can see a star rating and you can get more information on local guides as well and maybe it'd be good to become a local guide and improve your ratings so that when you do give ratings it has a higher impact on those that you're reviewing as well. Now for the next tip it's about as I mentioned you can have too many reviews but before I go on to that you can also have too many five star reviews which is a slightly different tip a bonus tip here.
In fact I did a whole article on why 4.3 as an average for a business is actually better than 5.0. So here's the article if you want to know more about that there's a video on there as well have a look at that after you've watched this video I'll put a link to it down below in the description. While you're there you know what to do make a comment give us a like and I won't say subscribe because if you've already visited this channel you'll know why people come back.
So let's take that tip don't worry about getting a bunch of reviews in one go. Why? Well because Google's proven and it's been expressed many times that having a whole load of reviews in one go can give the wrong triggers to Google's algorithm. Now the reason being is that when people buy reviews sometimes they'll receive 50 or 100 within a month and looking at the track record it might look good for a while but Google knows that that doesn't look right it looks spammy.
A natural business that does well over a period of time will get good reviews over a period of time. So just think when you make an effort or a campaign yes get two or three reviews in for that week but just try and get them so that they're more natural and in that way then it gives a better rating to Google how Google views those reviews. So the speed in which you get reviews actually has an impact on how Google views the authority of those reviews.
Services can rank too. now there's often this idea that unless you're a shop you're not going to be found on google maps and that's not true google's can also rank services let's just take one second now to explain how it works so basically google has algorithms it's not just one algorithm but it's several different algorithms so if you're using google search it'll be a different algorithm to the one for say google maps or if you're looking for a local search it may be different to a national search google's intelligently trying to work out which algorithm to serve up the results with and sometimes they overlap as well so rather than thinking that you're optimizing for one algorithm you need to bear in mind that google business profile is a different algorithm to say a national organic seo effort and advertising is different again so keeping these separate in the way in which you think is going to help you then make good progress when it comes to optimizations most business owners just want to be found locally and nationally and just get found everywhere and that's the problem is it kind of overlaps with different algorithms in that thinking and then what happens is some just don't bother at all for a while because they say well I didn't get any success well interesting in a moment I'm going to show you some results of what happens if you don't bother optimizing your Google business profile after you spent some time optimizing it some interesting results there the speaking Darren Shaw the other day from white spark he said this is one of the biggest questions he gets asked as well So over to Darren answering this question, how can services rank in every single suburb around their city? Yeah, I would say that the answer is you have a few options. Ranking. Google will only rank a Google business profile within a fairly tight radius.
It varies based on your competition around your address. And even if your address is hidden on Google, it's based around the address that your business was verified at. Every Google business profile does have an address associated with it.
And that is where your rankings are based on. So you want to rank in a 50 mile 50 kilometer radius. You're going to have a very hard time.
So what you can do is actually open up new locations, but those locations would have to be staffed during opening hours, like in real have signage, be a legitimate business, legitimate location, very expensive, hard to do. You can get into the local packs in all those surrounding areas with Google local ads. That's different than Google local services ads. So you can definitely buy the ads and just targeted placement in the local packs and maps.
You can do that. You could target those areas. Organically, so instead of trying to get into local packs and maps you could build Location specific we call them city pages or you know neighborhood pages You could build those pages on your website and rank in the blue links that are under the pack or sometimes above the pack So you could target those organically and I think that's that's it.
Well, that's brilliant advice down. Thank you for that So before we go on to the next few tips I just wanted to share with you something that Dean Ayer from GBP pilot sent me the other day and in this email he just revealed to me an interesting situation. He showed that if you stop optimizing Google business profile it does show and interestingly the businesses he optimized for weren't seasonal. So we can rule that out because it was to do with a walking clinic, mental health clinics, he was optimizing for those and after pausing or stopping the optimization for a few months you can now see what happened.
It pretty clearly shows that things fade out rather quickly if you don't keep updating the google business profile google likes to see a business profile being kept up to date and the majority of business owners they spend a month or two and then they then forget to optimize their business and as you can see from these results that darren shared with us that really caused bookings they were coming through they then dry up once the optimization stopped now later on in this video i'm going to show you also how you can get extra things to help as well to get calls get directions, a schedule button, all those things, eye-catching images are also going to help bring in traffic. I'll come on to that later in the video if we get time. And this is all about EEAT and using EEAT more than ever before. Why is it more important than ever before? Well AI is making it even more important that you become an expert, that you're trustworthy, that you're an authority.
In fact the EEAT stands for Experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Now again I was speaking to Darren to see what his thoughts were on EEAT. Whether he felt it was necessary if you want to help a business grow locally. This is what he had to say. Yes and I think it's a great time to invest in it because it can be a competitive advantage.
If you look at most small business blogs, most small business websites, you don't see the author, you don't see the person behind that and you often don't see them talking about their own experience, their own expertise, what makes them the best plumber in, you know, Manchester, all these things like when you do take that time to put that on your page, you talk about your credentials, you really anchor every page of content to an expert, to an author, that is a competitive advantage because most of your competition is not doing it. And it becomes even more important with the dawn of AI generated content. AI content can't do that.
Google is trying to sort out and they're going to have this huge problem where the web is being flooded. flooded with regurgitated content, all same, same, same. It all looks the same because it's all coming from the same source.
And the AI source can only say things in so many different ways. So the way that you differentiate is going to be really tied to the EEAT signals. And you send those by being original, being authoritative, talking about your expertise.
So I actually think that there's no better time to start thinking about that and integrating it into your local SEO. strategy very important absolutely you're right there Darren and I totally agree with that too would you also agree though that you need to have video uh YouTube again shows your trust whether it shows you're a real person 100% yeah so it's a really great point that video itself it's like you can't fake it it's you talking to the camera and Google algorithms they're working hard they're you know the smartest company in the world they're trying to figure this out how do we differentiate between ai content and real human generated content that video transcripts it's beautiful it's perfect that was definitely written by him although then the ai is gonna be able to to make theirs look exactly like that so i don't know uh i don't know how long we've got left here before the ii just Completely takes over so trust by using video is another important factor one of the reasons why I'm doing this YouTube channel was because my web design needed to be marketed and Marketing is often done now free video. Now. The next area is a controversial one because for many years I've said that keywords in a title for a business particularly on Google business profile I've avoided it and I still don't think it's the right thing to do But interesting there's some controversy here because it still gives an important ranking factor. And the reason I thought it was perhaps dangerous was because possibly you could be suspended if you had keywords in your reported and then Google recognizes it and then removes it.
But interesting what Darren had to say on this, as he had recently spoken to some other insiders in Google. So keywords in the business name, actually, I've just been chatting about this with various local search experts. And I asked them a whole bunch of people that are really Tied in to Google, they're all Google business product experts. How often does Google suspend a listing for having keywords in the business name?
This is a great question. Never. Almost never.
Google does not ever proactively suspend. You could, what they do is they take the keywords out of the name. They will do that if you get reported, which of course then the business owner can put it back in. But what it. The only thing it really, if you have other problems on your listing, like problems with your address, it doesn't look like a real business, then that can trigger the report.
And then they see the other problem that you get suspended for that. But you're not actually getting suspended for keywords in a business name. Google will just take them up.
That's not your business name. They'll take them out. So it's very hard to get suspended for this, which is why this ban is so rampant. But it does make me wonder, you know, if the risk is so low and the reward is so high.
Those keywords in your business name, you might want to do it. So it appears that keywords aren't actively causing a suspension for the majority of businesses. Now the next area is to think in terms of letting the AI know where you're based.
Google's for a while now been mapping businesses and when you understand your location and your nearby towns and cities and you're talking about them within your business, within your branding, within your website, within your profile settings. Google's picking that up now and going to match that with local searches google bar has been asking for some time now where the location of the searcher is as you can see here but it's so they can provide more relevant results to the person searching and with the recent palm 2 release which came out just recently from google you notice google has updated the bard the chat tool this learning language is looking at your website it's looking at your profiles it's looking on the sites that talk about your business it's looking to google it's looking at facebook and yellow pages and it's trying to understand where you're based so are you making it easy for google to know where you're based now of course if you're a service and you don't have an office then you just need to speak of the service areas that you're based so that's the importance of location but also the importance of thinking about your user too we've often mentioned that on this channel so what does that mean think about your user well most people tend to think in essence terms of the algorithm but the algorithm is trying to think about your user too so think of what your user is going to search for next how does your user think what is your user the person that's going to be your next customer what is he going to type into the search engine? Is he going to use things like if he's looking for a web designer would he look for a web designer near me?
Would he look for a London web designer? So he mentions the location. He may be interested in the price so he might go top web designer but a reasonable budget price. Those words budget, top, they're words that again you need to think in terms of your user will use those words. So how does AI then match this up with your business?
well ai will look to your settings look at your description look at your website look at your profile on google business and it will then connect the two up so old conventional seo is very different because that was just using keywords and now we're looking at location keywords and user keywords so you've got an opportunity here to optimize your google business profile and that has to be the best SEO you can do currently if you're a small business. Now the next one is consistency. It's actually consistency with your citations.
So a citation is where other websites talk about your business, particularly indexes, particularly local citations are really valuable if you want to be found in local searches. Now this tool that I use gives a massive SEO advantage because what it does, it focuses on knowing what citations are important to your business industry. So I use this tool all the time. It helps me get local citations, it scans my local competition, it finds what are they using to rank and then it finds me opportunities where I haven't yet registered my business and I can then look for ways of literally clicking on it, finding the website I haven't registered with, adding my business to it all for free and then this then builds my links, improves my ranking, it improves my recognition of being an authority and it provides consistency and the reason it provides consistency...
It's because you can copy and paste the same information. So your business really should be the same wherever you look. It should give the same telephone number, the same business name, the same address. We often talk about NAP, name, address, phone number, and so on.
So I use this tremendous tool from Whitespark, and I thoroughly recommend you try it yourself. I'll put a link down below for you. So you may be wondering, well, is all the old SEO information now not relevant? Well, if you've been following this channel, you know we've been changing the way we think. We've been thinking more about the user.
and less about the algorithm. We've been thinking more about optimising with Google Business Profiles or we used to call it Google My Business and not focusing so much on the old SEO keyword research in the past. But also we've been preparing to change the way we think about being authentic, being trustworthy because again those are key elements that Google's going to pick up on particularly through AI in the future.
Now I did a video interview recently with Darren Shaw from Whitespark. And this was the types of results people were saying incredibly knowledgeable. They were saying great video that summarizes years of experience. Another one, great video. I trust only both of you for local SEO.
Zanet, you are awesome. Well, the thing is, is we're just trying to teach the right way to go about SEO. And we've been trying to be a bit different because we're knowing where things are going to go with AI. So hopefully, if you haven't done so already, you'll subscribe to the channel and you'll benefit from the future videos too. And here you can see Darren Shaw was speaking to me recently about some of the solutions he thinks will make a difference with AI coming along.
So all those tips in his video, in my interview, are really going to be helpful. And hopefully you'll be putting the same comments yourselves after you've watched it in full. So I'll put a link to that video.
up above and you can watch it afterwards as well so back to these local seo things what do they need we've looked at location think about the user consistency with citations and now the fourth area is that of services services really is a great opportunity on google business profile because often we can't change the categories and we don't talk about changing primary categories too often but what you can do is you can keep updating your services and recently google has been constantly changing services giving you more of an opportunity to really give the details of what your business does. So services should be clear, detailed and consistent both on your website and also on Google Business Profile. So the fifth area you might want to look at is your welcome message.
In other words, when people first meet your business, how do they feel about the manner in which you talk to them? So when you write your opening paragraph, whether it's on Google Business and your description, or whether it's on your business website under the About Us page, or your home page does it start with a warm greeting does it convey enthusiasm for what services you offer think of the words you're using and again you want the website citations and the descriptions and google business profile description to be consistent now these words are going to prove valuable in providing results especially When you think of voice search, so people are going to use voice search even more in the coming months with AI. But you want to appeal with clarity, you want people to know exactly what you want them to do. So if they're going to respond to your invitation to take your services, your products, they need to know how to go about it. So do they call you?
Do they text you? Do they visit the website? Clarity in those few opening lines as well is going to help you get a successful business. If you're new to Google Business Profile, you'll know there's lots of tips your competitors are using to get ahead of you on Google Maps and Google Search. So I'm going to share some of those tips with you today.
And I'm also going to enable you then to get straight onto your business so you can apply those tips and you can do most of these tips straight away. that will get you ranking immediately on google business and google maps so let's take a look at the first tip that was released just this week you're going to need to go into google business profile so see if you type in your business name and then your business comes up and of course you always want to make sure this is up to date if you can but so that's a just a little bonus tip there so what we're going to do is go to customers and this is going to enable us to make sure we've got messaging so if you're messaging then you go to the three dots and messaging settings and here you can turn on your messaging on your chat your read receipts and so on but also what you can do here is you can edit a welcome message and you can include links in this and also what's even more important is you can add links to these frequently asked questions now you'll know with links themselves it's a great way of building up your authority within google and also getting your customers to various places that are going to benefit them and also benefit your business So here I've got add a question and then if there's constantly questions being asked on the chat then I can make sure I give the answer and the question as an automatic response. So just think of the value of that and then take them through to maybe a landing page as to how they can benefit.
So I've done this for example here do you offer a Google business course I often get asked that and now I can then put the link through to where that course is and then that takes them through to the place they're looking for. and that's automating so that's giving a much better service to my customers when they visit me now a second trick you can do is to actually find internal linking benefits by a little trick you can do in google and it's all to do with understanding how google indexes your site so if you type in site and then your website so my website is zanet.co.uk that'll produce all the results that google has on me but now if you put into quotes let's say for instance i wanted to find that 30-day course i do so if i type in 30 day and put that into quotes now i can see images to do with 30 day i can see my free 30 day business challenge i can see again and what i want to do now is if google ranks these as being important to 30 day on my website and that's the most important page on my website my free 30 day challenge then what i can do is start using that as the main keywords through to linking through to these pages so this is a great way of finding say local seo and now this tells me that google ranks this page as the best local seo page that i've got on my blog local seo and then i can link through to this so whether you're internal linking within your business website whether you're internal linking within your offers your posts whatever it is on google business profile by using that site part of your website you're boosting even more the very pages that google's already valuing Now for the third trick go back to your business profile again by typing in your business or my business and just pull this up you'll kind of we call this a knowledge panel side panel and just look at products for a moment now here should be a list of all your products if I click on view all and these are my products but where do you get products from we can get products from either services or you can get it from various products you sell so if you've got a lot of products then you can fill this up. and you may want to then categorize them as well so you notice that we have various categories so it picks these up as well and you notice that those categories then so if i wanted say special offers click on this and these are my special offers i'm currently doing what you should be doing is these should be then reflecting what's on your website so if i go back to my website go to my home page and you'll see these five various services here are reflected as five special offers here and of course if i go through to one of these select mailchimp click on this and order online and this then takes them through to that particular landing page and there then i can contact them and deal with whatever it is that their inquiry is about you notice here also i have product posts if i click through to this it could be that you're offering certain types of packages or plans So again I've got a page here where I speak about WordPress care plans. Care plans silver, gold and platinum and then I can make these into products themselves. Google at the moment is showing products and as you can see that is quite a large chunk of a business profile and a lot of people aren't using that at the moment.
So make sure you at least get three or four in there and try and categorize it if you can too. For my fourth tip have you ever wondered how you really rank? and how you rank perhaps compared to other businesses because when you do a search on your own maps of course it already knows from your cash it already knows from where you're sat it knows kind of already that you're going to be ranking high because it knows that you own that business but what about for someone around the corner what would they how would you know what they're finding when they're searching for your business well i'll do a search for my web design business but the way i want to do this is i've got a free local rank checker for you so I'll put the link down below and you can just now type in your business so let's uh let's take a window cleaning business that I've worked with at the Roo window and it'll then find it so that's good it tells you first we're on there and then you may want to know then what actually would a person type in to find it so they're not going to be putting appliance or pet groomer but they would put window cleaner so window cleaning service there you go and this is totally free you can see then how you perform when a search is done so this is now going to go out there it's going to go to various areas around where you're particularly registered now while that's populating surfer local is a really useful tool so i'll put a link to this down below and i've also got some credits that you can have as well so try those out but you can see for yourself where you come so the average position it looks so far for window cleaning services position three and it looks like it's now completed that's it gives you a rough idea it's saying it wants these activated as well so the fact is it's done those queries for free which is an excellent service and you can try that out so once you've done that you can then make some adjustments to your business go back and see if it's had an improved result now for the fifth tip it's so important to get photos and relevant photos of your business So I've done other videos that have explained how you can take good photos, what types of photos should be taken.
But one of the things you may want to do is just nail your photos this weekend. So you can get a photographer to come along, hire them for the day and then have in mind what it is that Google is actually looking for. Now, not everyone realizes, but Google is very specific as to what various photos should be done in various categories.
So I'm going to put a link down below again that will show you what you need to follow. when you do these photos but basically as you can see here these are tips from google and they explain what exterior photos are interior product photos photos at work food and drink if that's relevant common areas rooms team photos and so on but just read through that produce those photos photos produce a huge amount of traffic for me and if you haven't tried adding recent photos if you haven't had good quality photos of your business not generic photos not ones off the internet not ones from other businesses but your photos then you've missed out on some benefits of ranking so just next time you're at work take some photos but have these things in mind and you'll see a tremendous boost in your ranking now for my sixth tip it's about understanding your customers so how do your customers actually find you how do they come across your business well google doesn't let you guess it tells you but most people don't realize where you need to go to to get that information so if you head to your business again in google sign in if you haven't done so and you'll see here it shows you views this month and you just click on that and what that will do now it will tell you how many calls you've had how many messages you've had how many bookings what directions websites but also what it does is it tells you where they came from and how they found you so just looking at my business i can see that The majority come through Google Maps on a desktop. So that's my audience. Having said that, some do find me through Google Search. If I add these together, I can see that about 72% of people find me through a desktop.
So my audience isn't really mobile. It seems to be they're on desktops, they're businesses, maybe offices. Whereas yours may be very different. So if you want to know more about mobiles, then you can see my search 15%, my maps. 13% and of course the other thing as well you may be interested to know is what are the keywords that they're finding you with So when they're searching on Google, these are the keywords are using when they're searching on Google Maps These are the keywords.
So when you combine these two things together You're beginning to understand what it is your customers looking for and how they're finding you So don't ever avoid looking at this This should be looked at each week when you're going for your business and when you're deciding also how to appeal to your audience because when you understand your audience google will rank you higher because the signals go through to google to say that your audience is spending longer it's getting answers to its questions it's being given a good service through google business profile that's what google's trying to produce by means of this profile now from a seventh tip it's all about citations but again that surfer local will give you some help to know what it is your competitors are getting their citations from so if you think that there's a reason why your competitors are doing so well in google it could be down to the fact they've got some great citations that you've yet to discover so how do you get citations how do you get them for free well if you head over to surfer local i'll put again a link down below if you want to go there and here i've got my business and i can just accept that this again just helps me to see if i'm ranking on keywords and it's suggesting i just this is just a side point suggesting that there's a good number of searches for UK web design and it's just working out how I do on that. I'll just let that play out. Okay so what I want to do is go to guidelines and citations and I know that there's quite a few that I need to still do here and what this has done is it's looked it's found 20 of the most important citations that my competitors are using as well as myself. so there's a few here that I've not come across so I can click on what do they they know I can see find open it's done for local and I can see there's others here yellow pages I haven't actually done that one so all these are considered important in my niche and you can just run yours as well so you just click on your location you add it and then you can just work through these as well but citations is always one that most people forget to use But now early in the video I mentioned that there was a video that you need to watch next and it's right here and it's going to help you rank for the coming year ahead. So don't miss this one.