Google shut down its My Business app in July 2022. Business owners can now manage profiles three ways: through Google Maps, Google Search, or the backend at business.google.com. Missing backend settings like service areas and services can hurt your local SEO.
The Google My business app is gone. And in this video we're going to discuss how do you respond to reviews, how do you track analytics, how do you post pictures? Specifically, most local service businesses are out on the road. So the owners are using the app and now they are not able to do that. So what do we do next? All right, so you may have logged in to your app and you got a message that looks like this, this app is no longer available. They did tell us about two months ago that in July 2022 the app is going away. And, and so we had already started planning for this, but we didn't really know how it was all going to work. So the app is going away. So what does it give you options to either manage on maps or manage on search. And so both of these are the front end side of Google that if you are logged into your Google business account, like this account right here on your phone, it's going to allow you to go in and edit your Maps account if, if you are owner on that account. And so it's going to take a little bit of back and forth whether it's web based versus also using the Google Maps section because you're not able to do a lot of the same things on your Google Maps. I'm going to show you what this looks like, but so let's go through here. So what exactly is Google Maps? Basically what Google Maps is when you search for a company, that little map section right here, you find it and this is what it looks like. So there is an app and it's the Google Maps app. And again if you're logged into your profile, it's going to allow you to edit the companies that you are either a manager of or an owner of the business profile. So what you can do is obviously you can click on your reviews here, then you can scroll through and you can go to edit your reviews or respond to reviews and as the owner, again, because you're logged into your account, if you're not logged into your account, it's not going to register that you're an owner on the account. The good things about this is that you don't have to go into any backend to make any updates. You can edit things right on your Google Business profile, which is really nice. Even if you go on search right just like this, you can just search your name. And again if you're logged in, you can go through and you can make edits so you can add updates, you can add products or services, you can add photos, you can click on reviews and again respond to reviews. So those are the two options either in Maps, which is this, or on Search, which is this. Now some people that use analytics and track performance and they want to add people to their account and do more on the back end, which is what we do as a digital marketing consulting company. So in that instance, it looks like the online is still available business.google.com, google.com business and what this will allow you to do is to see more of your performance analytics and really build up so you can see their performance analytics and really build up the back end, which is like your target service areas, your services, your hours, that kind of stuff. Where on the front end you can't really make any adjustments to what locations you service. And this is going to actually hinder a lot of companies because if you're not putting in your target service areas, it's going to hurt you as far as your search engine optimization. Also if you're not putting in your services that you offer, it's going to hurt you. And then the other thing is you're not able to add users onto your Google Business profile on this section. So how you would do that, you would still have to go into the back end, go to your businesses and then manage your users accordingly. So right here, users. So hope this helps. If you have any questions about how to manage your Google Business profile now that there's no app, I'm happy to help. But these are the two options that they give us. If you either manage it on search, manage it on Maps, or you can manage the backend online. Hope this helps. Good luck. There are always changes, so be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses and as you know, Google's always changing stuff. So we'll see you in the next video.
