Google Marketing Strategy

I want to tell you why a Google marketing strategy is so important to your local SEO and to your business. And this is something that most website designers will never tell you, but if it's a good website designer, we are always experimenting with different things, different SEO things that come out, just different methods. We're going to see what works for us. And then we share that with customers. And if it doesn't work, we of course don't share it with customers. I am guilty of experimenting a lot with my websites, all kinds of different things all across the board. Occasionally I will find something that really doesn't work and it will Hank, my website. As far as organic search listings go, I'm usually on page 1, waffling between spot 1 and spot 4 or 5 in my local market for website designers. There's 4 or 5 of us that are consistently just trading back and forth as to where we land. I'm good with that. I don't care. Sometimes I'll do something and then all of a sudden I will be on like page 10. No one goes to page 10. That is Timbuktu. You will never get a call if you are on page 10 for anything. But when that has happened, I've of course changed things, adjusted, quit doing whatever it was. And I get my rankings back. But there's usually a 4-ish month timeframe where I'm nowhere to be found on page 1. I can tell you my phone doesn't stop ringing when that happens because I am consistently number 1 in Google Maps, no matter what I do to my website. Google Maps, I am consistently at the top. It is not affected. Those rankings are not affected by what I do on my website. I want you to really hear that. You can have number one rankings locally in your industry in Google Maps. Independently from your website. It's best and ideal to be on page 1 in the first spot in Google Maps and organically, but that doesn't always happen and things change and you have to adapt what you're doing. But in Google Profiles, you don't really, you just use their stuff. Literally use their stuff. They allow you to put posts in there, put posts in there. They allow you to upload videos that are under 30 seconds. You know what, if you're doing video, make videos under 30 seconds and put them up there. They allow you to put images in there. And I know a ton of service providers that work from home that say, I can't put images in there. I don't have products. I don't have anything to take pictures of. I work from home. I don't want my home office on there. It's, there's nothing to put images of. BS. There is. Look at mine. All of the things that I create for social media, voilà, show up in Google. Everything. A customer gives me a review, I'll do a screenshot of it, put it in Google, in my Google Photos section of my Google Business Profile. Literally use everything that they allow you to use, and you will earn that number one spot. Now let's talk about reviews because it is so super important. If you don't have reviews, Google will not rank you number one ever. I'm fairly confident that's a true statement. Um, when I first opened an account, I have two, and the second one I opened many years after the first one, and it's for my Ask Dotty website and that piece of my business. When I opened that, I kept getting prompts from Google. Hey, you need to do this. You need to do this. And it helps you build your profile. And I would get, someone would leave me a review and I would get a message that said something like, so-and-so left you a review and you need to get up to 10. So what can we do to help you get up to 10? It was some sort of a message like that, which tells me Google Google doesn't look at you as a valid, legitimate business until you have 10 reviews. So that's your number one goal. If you don't have 10 reviews, get to 10. After you achieve that, I want you to look at your competition. How many reviews do they have? If it's 20, you need 25. If it's 50, you need 55. You need more. Whatever that number is, you need more. And that will earn you, in addition to using everything that Google offers, using it all and having the most reviews will earn you that number one spot. And I can tell you, when my business falls off of page one for some stupid thing that I did, That is what saves me because my phone rings, I'm still listed in there on a cell phone, which is how most people search anymore. Google Maps is the first thing that shows up. I'm sure you've searched on your phone and you've seen that. And sometimes only one spot shows before you have to click the see more button. You want that one spot. So what are you going to do to secure that spot for you and your business? In Google. I've given you a whole lot of ideas in this post. Please take advantage of them. It is in your control. You don't have to pay anybody to do it. It is local optimization and it is way cheaper than paying anybody to optimize your website or for search engine optimization. I believe in my business, I do things one time. I offer optimization tools to my customers that are one time, and it will work for a very long time. I do not offer pay me every month and I will do this and this because I've not gotten good results for that. I'm not going to. Recommend my customers gets results from something that I'm not. But Google Business Profiles will save your tush in local search. Please believe me in this.