This FREE Profile is the #1 Organic Traffic Source

All right, today we're going to discuss the number one free profile that every local service business should have. And it's the number one traffic for organic search. And that is a Google My Business. We're also going to discuss how to set it up, why is it so important? And how to know if you're actually doing a good job. So what exactly is a Google My Business? So I'm sure if you've ever searched for a restaurant near me or any type of service near me, or even just a business by name, for example, our company Flash Consulting, you can see here, this is a Google My Business. If you notice, you have Google reviews, you have pictures, you have all your contact information, you can add products, you can post on your Google My Business, you can talk about yourself. So all of this stuff is important. But if you notice that what this allows you to do is to tell Google what type of service that you are Internet marketing service and where you are located. We are in Montgomery County, Maryland. And so what this allows people to do is when they search online for Internet marketing service in Germantown, Maryland, then Google says, okay, well this company, Flash Consulting is an Internet marketing service located in Germantown. So they put you into their local service package and maybe in their map section you'll see their name. And we're going to discuss some strategies to rank higher inside of your Google My Business for those near me searches. But just in general, having a Google My Business is going to allow people to find you when they search for your name. If they get a referral from someone and they go online and they search for Flash Consulting. Wow. Well, they have 29 Google reviews. That's great. And then they scroll through them and they see that you respond to the reviews and what have you. It helps build your online reputation significantly and just gives another check mark to prospects to say, hey, this company is actually legit and I do think that I can trust them. So let's go into the back end and figure out how exactly can you set up Google My Business if you don't have one and how can you access it? So if you go to business.google.com or google.com business, you'll be able to get to your Google My Business here. Alright, so you go to google.com business or business.google.com to set up your Google My Business. So the first thing that you can do is you can type your business name and it's going to see has this already been created and can you go and request access to this Google My Business so you can type in your company here. If you know for a fact that you don't have the Google My Business. You go to add your business to Google, it's going to ask you for some names. So let's just come up with some names here. If it thinks that you already have one, it's going to show it to you. But we're going to just go like this, test companies. We're going to say a business category and we're just going to say we're consultants. Okay. Then we're going to continue along. Do you want to add a location customers can visit? Do you have a store or office? No, I'm just working out of my house. Or yes, I have a front, a storefront. What's the address you're going to put the address in? Let's say it's here. Let's see if it allows us to do this. So you have to put in a valid address. And this is important because what you're going to do is give them this address and then they are going to send you a postcard that has a PIN number on it. And you're going to be able to verify that yes, you are in fact are the person that created this Google My business and you are the person that you say that you are. It's not going to necessarily show your address on the front side of Google. You can hide that, but it's going to allow them to say, yes, this is the right person. So once you get that postcard, it usually takes about three to five days. Then you're going to go and you're going to have access into here. Now before you get the postcard you will have access, but it's going to say that your Google My business is not live. And so it's going to have a red bar here that says insert your PIN number or whatever. So once you get that, you can add that PIN number in there. Now why is this so important to have? So under this Insights tab over here, and we've looked at the insight tabs before on some of the other videos that I've done about content creation. But let's just take a look at our performance. So if you notice, our company Flash Consulting is not a typical one that people search online for. It's B2B business to business. So a lot of it, as you can see, discovery is only 10% of our searches. But for a lot of our clients that are local service businesses like carpet cleaning or Realtors or moving companies or H Vac, their discovery is a lot higher because not that many people know H Vac company for example. So they go to Google and ask them H Vac near me. And so typically it's actually the exact opposite of ours which is discovery is 90% or 80 or 70% and direct is 20 or 30%. So you can see your breakdown which is really cool because we can say okay, 150 people 1 discovered us in the past month, that's good. 1400 people searched for us direct in the past month. That's really good. And then we can go here and see, okay, well what exactly were people searching to find us? So we can pick a specific amount of months. Let's just leave it at this. And we can see, okay, Flash Consulting, 36 people have searched this by name. Digital Marketing Consultants Flash Consulting Best Internet Provider Germantown Click and grow right? And you can see all your breakdown of all these different queries. You can see it happen on desktop or mobile, etc. So gives you a lot of cool information. You can see if you had any calls or messages or bookings or directions, website clicks, all that information. This Google my business is very, very important for a local service business. Flash we are all across the United States. It's not as important for us because we're not focused solely on Germantown, Maryland. We're focused all over the world even. But if you deliver a service inside of this geographical location, it's extremely important to get all of this data. And in the info section you can set up your service area. So Google knows well what area do you service. You can set up your hours so Google knows are you open or closed and then you can also tell it, okay, I do these types of services so if someone searches for that they can show them. So this is very very important. And the best part that I like is that you can see the data. So for us you can go here and you can see that we've had X amount of search views, 124 map views, 3400 map views searches. This is kind of what we looked at before. But more importantly you can see the activity. So how many website visits have we had and how many calls have we had and how many direction requests to our physical location. So this is a really really good tool just to quickly high level see how you're performing on this on your Google my business altogether one really really good strategy to help increase your ranking. About 10 to 15% of your ranking is your Google reviews. So on your homepage here, if you go to share review form they actually give you this link and this link allows you to get Google reviews. So hopefully this helped walk you through how to set up Google My Business the most important organic traffic resource that you could ever use is a Google My Business for a local service business. We grow local service businesses here at Flash. We are working on Google My Businesses all day long and so if you like this content, be sure to like and subscribe. We post videos every single week about growing your local service business and different strategies. If you want a video, be sure to comment below and let us know what you think. Maybe you have some thoughts about Yelp or Bing or Yahoo or something? We're definitely looking for some content ideas, but I'll see you on the next video.