If you follow me on Instagram or TikTok, you’ll know how much I LOVE Google My Business. It’s a product from Google and a very underrated and also underused business tool that can help you grow your business and get in front of a wider local audience in search and maps.

We all want to appear in the search results of Google, but how can you make sure your local audience find you?

You claim your Google My Business listing!

Ready to find out everything you need to know about Google My Business and its fantastic features?

Let’s go!

What is Google My Business?

It’s super easy to use, a free tool from Google for businesses to manage their presence in Google Search and Google Maps.

As the business owner, once you’ve claimed your listing, you can keep your customers informed about everything they need to know about you! You can share valuable information about your business or service, including opening times, location, contact details, reviews, photos, and so much more!

It’s a secret social channel as you can share posts that get shown on Google!

What does Google My Business do?

Have you ever googled a company on desktop, and then on the right-hand side up pops a profile of the company with everything you need to know, including their phone number, address, pictures, opening times and more?

That is the Google My Business listing!!

As you can see in the example image below of Gails Bakery (I love this spot!), on the right-hand side they have prime real estate on the Google Search page! Everything you could want to know about Gails is here as you scroll down the page, including a snapshot of their reviews, their opening times, photos, events and more.

Who can use Google My Business

ANY BUSINESS of any size, in any location!

I’d recommend that small local businesses claim their Google My Business listing; it’s free and a great way to get exposure without spending any money.

If you have a small budget, this is where you should be focusing your marketing efforts above anything else!

Why should you claim your listing?

By claiming your listing, this is how customers will find all of the information about your business, including your reviews, opening hours, business number and website! You’ll be able to update your information and respond to reviews and questions quickly.

Your listing is also how people discover you on Google Maps, when they are on their phone and looking for something in the local area, for example, a local restaurant, a local coffee shop, your Google My Business page may be shown.

This is an excellent tool for locally based businesses to get ahead of their competition!

It also gives you prime real estate on the search page; if you know about SEO (search engine optimisation), you’ll know just how much effort goes into optimising your website for search engines. Having this listing is effectively a shortcut to get you on the search results page!

How to claim your Google My Business listing

If you are a local business and you have not claimed your profile, please DO IT. If you haven’t set it up, there might be a chance that it lives on google somewhere already because of your website or other directory enquiry information, but you need to go and find it, and you need to claim it if you haven’t already.

It’s straightforward to see if you are on Google My Business; simply type into Google, ‘Google My Business’, and you’ll be able to see if you’ve got a login or not. You’ll tend to know if you have set it up; if you haven’t, then head to the search bar and type in your business name; on the right-hand side, you’ll see your business with reviews, info and your website.

Scroll down and click ‘claim my business’; what will then happen is that link will send you a code to the domain URL linked to your website, and then you can start to control what you post.

What can you do on Google My Business?

There are some fantastic features available for you to use, and I seriously recommend you use as many as you can for maximum exposure. (After all, it’s free!)

Below is a list of some of the top features:

Photos

You can add as many photos onto Google My Business as you like that are of your business, products or service; I’d also recommend geotagging your posts with your location!

Reviews

Your customers will be able to leave a 1 to 5-star review of your service from their Google account. As a business, you can respond to reviews and don’t forget to include keywords in your responses!

Location

Add your business location to appear on Google Maps!

Contact Details

Add in your contact information, including phone number, email address and web address. Remember this will be public and available to all to access.

Opening times

You can pop in your opening times for your business and add any special opening times; this is super important to do over the Christmas break and any public holidays.

Products & Services

In your management area of Google My Business, you can add your products or services; with each product, you can add:

Photo
Title
Description
Price or price range (in your chosen currency)
Category
Button with a URL link (the options are: order online, buy, learn more, get offer)

Post

Did you know that you can create posts just like you do on social media channels! You can add offers, share what’s new, add events, product announcements and trending updates; across the pandemic in 2020 & 2021, there was the option to add a COVID-19 update.

Take Bookings

If you take bookings as a restaurant or service provider, you can integrate a booking service such as Viator or Checkfront.

Another feature that is very Google, is the ‘busyometer’ (not the official term but a little artistic licence), where it gives you a line chart of how busy the place is! How does this work? Google takes the data from users who have opted in, to Google Location History, and generates typical popular times based on movement. Check out the example below. As a user, this is SUCH a useful tool.

Top tips for using Google My Business

Keep it updated regularly.
Respond to reviews using keywords.
Post offers and updates.
Share photos regularly, and don’t forget to geotag!
Complete every section available.
Use the offers post to share discount codes.
Use the categories for your products.

It’s time to get visible online!

And that is everything you need to know about getting started with Google My Business! This is one of my FAVOURITE game-changing tools in marketing that is massively underrated.

At Firebelly, we offer a Google My Business management service to ensure you are getting the most out of this incredible tool. We understand that managing another platform on top of everything else can be challenging, so our team will manage your profile with your approval and guidance.

Ready to get started?

I hope that you’ve found these tips helpful and will go onto Google and claim your listing!

If you’ve made it this far, I’ve written another blog post about getting found on Google that I think you’ll find interesting; you can read more here.

Remember, you don’t need any budget to be successful on Google My Business; keep it updated and relevant!

BIG love,

Mary-Anne. x

p.s if you would like to check out more SEO tricks that I’ve been sharing on TikTok, you can view ALL of my videos here.

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Get Started with Google My Business