Why We Revisit Google Profiles

Meredith's Husband 0:00

Okay. Podcast. No, shit. I'm going to start that one over.

Meredith 0:03

Okay.

Meredith's Husband 0:04

Google Business Profile.

Meredith 0:06

Oh, yes.

Meredith's Husband 0:07

So this is something we've talked about before. I probably mentioned it many times.

Meredith 0:11

Okay. I'll take your word.

Meredith's Husband 0:13

We dedicated an entire episode to it.

Meredith 0:15

Uh-huh.

Meredith's Husband 0:16

But that was like over a hundred episodes ago. Oh my goodness have changed.

Meredith 0:21

I don't I see I I I don't know about that.

Meredith's Husband 0:24

And this is also something I teach more in depth. I have lessons in this on my website. So what I was thinking.

Meredith 0:32

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 0:32

Because things have changed.

Meredith 0:34

Yes.

Meredith's Husband 0:34

And even if things have not changed, lots of people have started listening to this podcast since like episode 41 or whatever that was.

Meredith 0:42

So I'm going to cover it again.

Meredith's Husband 0:45

I'm just going to drop in a little segment here from one of my lessons about this. Okay. Portions, portions of that lesson. Okay. Because it's it's already it's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful.

Meredith 0:54

Are we going to listen to it together?

Meredith's Husband 0:57

Yes. I'm going to make you listen to it.

Meredith 1:01

I I'm happy to.

Meredith's Husband 1:02

All right.

Meredith 1:03

Especially if I don't have to hear my own voice.

Meredith's Husband 1:05

All right. So let's go. All right. In this video, I'm going to talk about how to optimize your Google business profile. So in the last video, there was some homework. You went to Google Search Console and you looked up which keywords, which queries were most popular for your website. How are people most often actually getting to your website? One thing that you may have found is that people are searching for your name or your brand name. It's pretty common. And

Two Goals For Better Visibility

Meredith's Husband 1:33

in fact, you may have found that that's the most popular query. That's the most popular way that people are finding your website. That is also common, whether the numbers are small or whether the numbers are big, because people could be looking for you by name for a number of reasons. Could be they maybe have worked with you in the past and they just are trying to get to your website. Could be they have seen your name on social media or heard your business name from a friend or heard about you somewhere else and now they're interested. They need a photographer. They're thinking about hiring you. Could also be, uh could be your mom. Could be, it's like competitors, you know, looking to see exactly what you're offering. At least some of those people are going to be looking for you because they are interested in potentially hiring you and they are doing at least some amount of research. Okay, these are going to be probably your best clients, the ones who do a little bit of research. They're not just contacting you blindly. They're trying to learn a little bit first. And they obviously have already heard about you. Okay. They they have your business name, they have your personal name, and they're searching for it. They are taking the next step. We want to make a really strong first impression or a really strong next impression on those people. Because not only do they are they likely to be good clients, they are also going to be much higher converting. And that means those people, they have a much better chance of actually contacting you than people who find your website by some other sort of search than anything else. I can see that from looking at Google Analytics. It's just a simple fact. And the difference is very noticeable. So we want to make a very the best first impression or next impression that we can on those people. That's number one, why we are doing this. Number two, the second reason why we are doing this is this improves the odds of your website appearing in local searches. So when people do a search for photographers near me, taking these steps is going to improve the odds that your website is going to show up for searches like that. Okay, so I have 12 steps, 12 things that we can do here. I think that I would call these the must-do items. Number one, your business name. Whatever you put here in your business name, it's going to need to be consistent. A few lessons from now, we're going to talk about local business citations and creating business listings on other websites and directories. The business name always needs to be exactly consistent. If you that means if you use an LLC or an INC in your business name, you're going to want to use it everywhere. And there's no

Name, Images, Address Decisions

Meredith's Husband 4:00

benefit to that, by the way. By putting that in a including it in a business name, there's no benefit to SEO. So it's just your personal preference. But whatever you put here, we're going to want to use it everywhere. Number two, the cover photo. There is a, at least at the time I'm recording this, this changes occasionally with their Google setup. The cover photo is going to appear right at the top left of your Google Business profile, probably next to the map. It is usually cropped into square dimensions. But what you want to do here is you want to put an image there and then you want to open up another browser window, preferably in incognito mode, so you are not logged into your Google account and see what that image looks like. You don't want it to be cropped. If you upload an image with like four by five dimensions or something else and it's and it's cropped, that's not the first impression that we want to make. We want to make sure that whatever we put here is going to look good. Can be your logo if you want to use your logo, can be an image of a friendly smiling face if that's your type of photography. Whatever image you use here, you want it to be it. Remember, it's going to be the very first impression, the first, the first image that people see after Googling your name. So this image should represent your business fairly well. Okay, that's number two, your cover photo. Number three, your service area versus address. So Google gives you the option here of choosing a service area where you would go to your clients' locations. And as a photographer, that pretty good chance that might be true. That's one option, a service area. And the other option is using an address. Now, what Google would say to you as a photography, especially if you go and visit clients at their location, is that you should choose a service area here. I'm going to say that's really not in your best interest if you want your website to appear in local searches. The reason for that, think about what local searches look like. If you do a search for photographers near me, there's going to be a little list of three to five businesses next to a map. And on that map, there are going to be pin markers. And those pin markers are at the address of those businesses. If you have a Google business profile that does not have an address, you will not have a pin. If you don't have a pin, you don't show up in local business listings. And I have seen this firsthand with some of my early students. They were using an address and Google Business, Google suggested that they use a service area instead, and they did. And their traffic, the leads that they were getting immediately went to zero. They were getting all of their leads through the through local searches. And so when they changed to a service area, all of a sudden they're no longer appearing there. So my advice here, if at all possible, and I realize sometimes it's just not possible, but if at all possible, use an address. If you work from home and don't want to use your home address, I get it. Neither do I, neither does Meredith. We want to find some sort of address that we can use. Do not, however, use a PO box, a post office box. That does not work. That will probably get your listing suspended. But do look for some sort of private solution. There are some national chains that sell these sorts of this address service solution to small businesses. I don't know what's going to be available in your area, but that is often a good solution. Keep in mind when you're doing that, there is often there's going to be a few uh hoops that you might need to jump through. You might need to validate your um, you know, you might need to send somebody your business certificate ID or something to prove that you're a business. And it's gonna seem like a hassle. It is, it is a hassle, but it's there for a reason. And the reason is that SEOs, especially representing local businesses, for years have tried to spam this system. And lesser quality SEOs have done things like try to fake a whole bunch of different addresses to improve odds of our clients getting displayed in local results. And so Google is trying to eliminate that or reduce that amount of spam, that behavior. And so getting a local address often is going to feel like a hassle. It's that way for a reason. It's absolutely worth it. Just know that when you're doing it, there's a reason you're doing it. And it might seem like a hassle. Hopefully that prevents some of your competitors from doing it, and you will then have the advantage. And the only other thing to think about is if you think about the geographic area that where you serve clients. Try, if you can, to get an address right in the middle. So if you're visualizing a map and you have a circle on that map and that's where you serve clients, a pin right in the middle of that circle would be probably what you want to do. That's what that's going to give you the best odds of appearing in those local search results. Okay, so that's number three, service area versus address. Number four, your logo. So at the time I am recording this, you can still upload your logo to Google inside your Google business profile, but it's not being displayed on the front end. This not long ago, it was being displayed. Good rule of thumb here, upload your logo, use whatever dimensions that Google suggests. If they don't have a suggestion, again, these things change with Google, but upload your logo again, go to your incognito browser and take a look and see how it displays. Also, here, we don't want to have our logo cropped. So it might be square, it might be four by five, whatever it is, just make sure it's going to look good to users on a browser. Okay. Number five, uh, your business info, your business phone number is important. And the reason it's important, you want to have a local area code. You don't want to have, like Meredith, for example, has a cell phone, but she moved from LA. So she still has that area code. If that's the case, you would not want to use that phone number. You want to have a local area code. It could be either a landline or a cell phone, but you want it to be local. One option, depending on where you live, this might not be easy. I know in New York City it's kind of hard sometimes to get a local area code phone number, but uh Google Voice is one way to do this. Again, sometimes if you're doing that, if you put in the area code you want, they won't be available. They will suggest like a neighboring city or something. I would highly encourage you to look for some sort of solution where you can get a local area code if you don't already have one. Okay, so that's number five, your uh business phone number. Number six, products and prices. So Google will allow you to place in your business profile uh your products and services and the prices. Now they have gone back and forth. I think initially it was just products, and then they added products and services. But even if it's even if they have gone back or will go back to just products, you might think that as a photographer, you don't have a product, you have a service. That that's close enough. That's a product. Your

Pricing, Categories, And Better Copy

Meredith's Husband 10:45

session is technically a type of product. It's something that people purchase. I would say you probably have a session fee, you probably have some sort of other fee for however you deliver the photos, whether it's on a hard drive or in an album or whatever it is. Those are products. Products that you can include your prices so you can start to educate people here, and you can include images. You can include an image for every product. Again, remember, this is one of the only opportunities, probably the only opportunity where you can control exactly what image you are going to display on Google before people get to your website. Okay, you can't do that very often. In fact, you can pretty never do that. So absolutely take this opportunity to do that. That's number six, your products and services with prices. Number seven, product categories. So in addition to the products and the services, you can also have categories. So for example, Meredith's a photographer, she has a session fee, she has albums, wall art, digital files, those are all products. Product categories would be something like children's photography, pet photography, event photography. Again, we can include images. And here what's important is you don't put prices on a category, but the way you name the product categories, and this applies to the products and services also, but the way you name them is important because there's not a lot of space. You're not working with a lot of, so you can't have a really long product name or product category name. It's going to be truncated, meaning Google's going to cut it down to like, I don't know how many characters, but it's going to be, it's going to be relatively short. So enter something, then again, go out to your incognito browser, take a look, see where it's truncated, make sure that it still looks good and that it still sounds like something that's appealing after Google has shortened it. A lot of times what people might do is they'll say, like, you know, fabulous, such and such. And then what appears to users on the front end is just the fabulous or part of the word fabulous. What you want to do is you want to make sure that whatever it is, whether it's an album or pet photography, you want to make sure that those keywords are up near the beginning so that they don't get cut off. That's still going to look appealing to a person, to somebody reading it. And if nothing else, just confirm in their mind subconsciously that yeah, you have what they are looking for. Okay, so that's product categories and product naming number eight from the business. So there is a section there called from the business. I think on the back end of Google Business Profile, this is actually called business description. Again, Google changes things like this. So business description or from the business, from the busage, from the business. It's a message from you, probably about your business. Now, what people expect to see when they see a section like this, you know, a business description or from the business, people expect to see something, some sort of description like I've been in business 20 years and this is what I do, and et cetera, et cetera. I like to do something different to kind of stand out. And personally, what I do is I put a testimonial in this section and I try to choose a testimonial that has a really strong beginning. And the reason I do that is to sort of capture people's attention. Because like I said, people are expecting some sort of generic business description. If you put something different there, hopefully it captures their attention because it's just not what they're expecting. So that's what I like to do. Whatever you do there, I would encourage you to give it a strong, you choose something with a strong beginning or create something with a strong beginning to capture people's attention. And definitely just make sure you have something there. Do not leave it blank. Okay. Number nine, updates. So you can create updates here for your Google business profile, just like you would do for Instagram or Facebook or other social media platforms. There's some debate here on whether or not this helps improve your odds of being displayed. My opinion is that, well, yeah, Google says this doesn't improve your odds of being displayed. And of course, Google is going to say that. Inside the industry, we all expect Google will say that. My feeling and my colleagues' feeling is that it absolutely cannot hurt, and it probably does help a little bit. So what I would, well, what I do personally is I take a thumbnail from a recent podcast episode and it has, you know, a thumbnail and some text there, and I use that. Another chance to display an image, another chance to send sort of marketing message about what, you know, for me, I'm educating people. What do what do I talk about? What are my topics? For you, it might be some images about, you know, of weddings or whatever type of photography you do. Something else you could do here if you are active at all on Instagram or Facebook or other social media, look back over the last month or two or three and just take a few updates that were, you know, popular, your whatever however popular they were amongst your updates, choose the ones that were most popular and post them on Google. And I would say you don't need to do this more than once a month. I don't think there's an advantage to being like really active here, but Google

Updates, Reviews, And Social Proof

Meredith's Husband 15:50

will over time remove updates. So if you put an update here and leave it for six months or 12 months, at some point it's going to be old and it's not going to display anymore. So I would say you want to do this, I don't know, I have one a month. And it can be just an image and a caption if that's all you want to do. Again, an opportunity to put your images in front of people who are already searching for you by name. Okay. I don't think you can go wrong in doing that. That's number nine, updates. Number 10, reviews. And this is number 10, but it's these are not an order of importance. This is super important, and that's reviews. You really, really, really want to have reviews for your business. I hope that's obvious. And the trend has been over the last few years, used to be that reviews were not very important in order to get into local rankings. Now I can't remember the last time I saw any sort of business in local rankings that didn't have reviews or that had poor reviews. So reviews are important for that. Reviews obviously important potential clients to see that you have good reviews. And the thing to be careful of here is to spread them out. Don't feel like you need to get a whole bunch of reviews all at once. In fact, that is a red flag to Google that it's not natural. That doesn't happen naturally for a business. You don't go from no reviews to all of a sudden getting a whole bunch of reviews. And when that does happen, sometimes Google will assume they are somehow spam or they're not legit and they will take them down. Okay, so you don't want to do that. So it is much better to spread your reviews out. Don't feel you need to go out and contact clients from years ago. In fact, I wouldn't bother trying to do that. Instead, put it something into your workflow where you can ask your current clients and clients moving forward. Choose some time. I like to ask for a review when I know a client is happy about something. Doesn't matter what it is, if they're in a good mood about something that I have done, that's when I ask them for a review. And something else that I think goes a long way in how successful your request for a review will be, don't use a template here. I say put it into your workflow, but don't have like a checkbox where you send somebody a template asking for a review. The success rate of those is so much lower. Just write a personal note. It can be simple, quick, can be along with some other good news that you are sharing with a client. Just make it personal. Doesn't need to be perfect. I have found that like even the smallest personal notes, especially when they're not perfect, they have a better chance of people helping you out. So make this something that you do probably, you know, now with whatever clients you're working with now, or maybe just very recently have worked with and moving forward. That's number 10, reviews. Number 11, your social media profiles. So this is something else Google has gone back and forth with that used to allow you to attach your social media profiles to your Google Business profile. And then they said, oh, we're going to stop doing that. We're going to do it automatically. We're going to determine which social media profiles belong to you. And they did a terrible job of that. I don't know what they did, but there was all sorts of problems with people having the wrong social media profiles attributed to their business. A lot of times it was either a similar name or similar business name or the exact same business name, but in a different state. Whatever the case, it didn't go well. And so Google has gone back now to allowing you to enter your own social media profile profiles on your Google business profile. Absolutely do this. It helps demonstrate to Google your sort of ecosystem. All of your profiles will be linked together. This is something that's just good for all of SEO. Absolutely do this as long as you do have some social media profiles. And that can be Meta, Instagram, Facebook. It can be TikTok. Actually, we'll see what happens. Right now, TikTok is kind of up in the air with their future moving forward. It can also be YouTube. I think LinkedIn is an option there. If you don't use LinkedIn, I do recommend you get a LinkedIn page. I know as a photographer, you're a B2C, you're dealing with families or individuals. A lot of times you might think that a LinkedIn profile is not appropriate. It absolutely is. But please do it. Even if you don't use LinkedIn yourself, the people you hire, they they there's a good chance they do. And it just makes your business look more legit in the online world, especially to Google. Okay, so that's number 11. Social media profiles. Number 12. Number 12 is sort of a summary, but it's this is really important. Photos. Okay. People love photos. You're a photographer. You should have photos. I can tell you this for a fact from looking at heat, what we call heat maps. And a heat map is if you've ever seen like a an image of a website, and on that image is like colors kind of swirling around, that's a heat map. And what it does is it's meant to tell website owned, like marketers and developers, what areas of a website attract the most attention. Either by the way, people are looking at it or what they are clicking on, and it's images. Images always attract the most attention. So in creating your Google Business profile here, just know these images are they're gonna be the first things that people glance at. Even if they only look at it for a tiny fraction of a second before then scanning text, they're gonna look at the images first. Images, super important. Like I said, this is the only opportunity you're going to have to choose very specifically which images you want to display on Google before people get to your site. You don't

Photos, Hours, And Optional Tools

Meredith's Husband 21:20

have that option. So your Google Business Profile is the opportunity for you to do this. Add images wherever you can. The more the better. And in fact, that's probably true for all the information here. Not just images, but anywhere you can add text, probably going to be beneficial to do so. Now, that being said, there are a few other places where you can add more information. Number one, your hours. Whatever your hours are, you may or may not have official business hours. Whatever is appropriate for you, I would say try to include business hours. For me, my business hours, I made them 24 7 because my website is available 24 7 and content is available on my website. 24-7. If you have hours that you know do or don't offer sessions or days of the week, or you have hours or days of the week that you do or don't say respond to emails or answer your phone. Whatever is appropriate, do have some office hours, very helpful. And also we're going to want to make these hours consistent everywhere. So, like I said earlier about the business name, same thing is true here. Just choose whatever is going to be appropriate for you and use those as business hours. Now, a couple other options. They have Google Business Profiles allow you to have a chat feature. Now, I don't use this personally because I don't want to be responsible for monitoring the chat on my end and getting back to people. So I don't use this. If that's the case for you, I certainly understand you wouldn't want to use this. And then a similar feature is they have questions and answers. Again, I don't use this personally because I don't want to be responsible for answering questions that come through there. If you can do either one of those, probably questions would be the one that I think would be easier, it's probably not a bad idea. It is not a requirement. You don't need to do this. You can try it out. If it doesn't work, if it takes too much work on your part, you can disable the feature. Or if you're just uncomfortable with that idea like I am, again, it's not a requirement. And then the final option is something called bookings. And this is when you use a service like Calendly or something, where people do some sort of automated booking. Google connects directly to services like that. Now, again, I don't do this, wouldn't be appropriate for me. If that's how people contact you, if that's what's on your contact page, for example, is people schedule a phone call with you or a Zoom call with uh something like Calendly, then I would say maybe try to connect it here and see how that goes. Again, it's not a requirement, but I have a feeling that using that sort of feature here would be beneficial because it would be something that Google wants to do. They want Google wants to keep people on Google.com, using Google.com. If your potential clients can book a call with you right on Google.com, that is something that I think Google might, they're never going to say this, but they might give some preference to to businesses doing that. But again, that's only if you already use Calendly. If you don't use Calendly or something like that, I would say probably not in your best interest to create it just for Google Business Profile, only if that's how you already capture leads. Okay, so two things we have learned today. Number one, how to make a better, stronger first impression or next impression on the people who are already searching for us by name. And number two, we have improved the odds of our website being displayed in local searches, like photographers near me. If we take these steps, we could our website has much better chances of showing up for those searches. And remember, we've done this, we haven't even touched our website yet. We haven't done anything to our website. So that's what we're going to do next. We're going to look at the CTAs, the calls to action. That's where people either contact you, they decide to contact you, or they decide not to contact you. And how we can make that better. I hope this helps. Okay, so let's pretend that you actually just listened to that. And it was, of course, amazing.

Meredith 25:16

Oh my gosh.

Meredith's Husband 25:17

Do you have anything to add?

Meredith 25:19

I can't add anything except uh you were so right.

Meredith's Husband 25:23

Yeah.

Meredith 25:23

Yeah. I don't even have any questions.

Meredith's Husband 25:28

The first time for everything. All right. I hope it helps.

Meredith 25:32

Thank you. Bye.