8 Updates for your Google Business Profile

Can you believe at the end of the year is not far away? Your opening hours might be changing, your product and service offerings might change a little bit. Now is the perfect time to have a look at your google my business page and make sure all that’s up to date. So that’s the topic of today’s Tactical Tuesday. G’day, I’m Jason Foss.

Search Engine Journal, recently published an article with eight tips to get your google my business profile all up to date in time for Christmas and new year.

So let’s just step through their eight tips now and just make sure that everything is in order. So if we scroll past this list here a little bit, step number one: set special hours. So there’s functionality within your google my business profile to set extended hours if you’re going to be opening a little bit later, or for the days where you’ll be closed, get in and mark them in your google my business profile so that when people are searching, they can see at a glance when you’re going to be open.

Step number two: review your location information. I mean that probably hasn’t necessarily changed. But while you’re in there, it’s a good idea just to make sure that your address is correct and nothing has gone awry with it. Step number three is to optimise your product descriptions.

So if you’ve got Christmas or new year or other variations of products or services around, make sure that you’ve got those keywords in there. So if people are searching for them they’re a chance – your hat’s in the ring. Number four is update your images, which is sort of something you probably should be doing all year round.

It’s another job that we should be doing all year round, but now is a good time to just make sure that all of the photos are updated. Whether it’s your premises, your office space, your products, whatever the case may be, make sure they’re all current and up to date. There’s a statistic on the screen here about google my business profiles with lots of images do outperform those with fewer images.

I don’t know whether it’s correlation or causation, but it’s a good habit anyway, I have people commenting to me from time to time that they’ve got old images showing up in the right hand knowledge graph sidebar there. When they google their business name.

Get your pictures uploaded. Plenty of them. Number five relates to the interaction that the public might have with your google my business profile. Whether it be through reviews, q and a. Messages those sorts of things that people can leave and write on your profile.

If anybody writes you a review good, bad or indifferent, you should always respond to it. That’s really good practice. There’s a book by Jay Baer called Hug Your Haters if you’d like to read a bit more about some ways and methods to deal with that. But there’s some, at least in Australia, anyway, some much more unused features or some less used features being the q and a and the messages.

But it’s probably a good idea to familiarise yourselves with those, especially if we come down here – especially mentioning the q and a. If you can answer some questions in that section, and possibly you can lighten the workload on phone inquiries or email inquiries if they can find the answer through google before they have to contact you.

It’s probably not a bad idea, and that leads into point number six here in publishing your own holiday faq in terms of what’s available: your opening and closing hours, or any special conditions or anything that’s going on, get those in there and you make it easy for people to find that information and you save yourself answering the same question over and over again.

Number seven is creating a google post. That’s a feature that’s been there for a little while. That allows you to add a status update to your google my business profile like a Facebook update on Instagram update or whatnot. There’s no social aspect to it, people can’t leave comments or like it or share it or anything like that.

But it’s certainly visible if you happen to generate that knowledge graph panel at the side and regularly update your google post. The jury’s out about how much of an effect that has on your SEO, on your rankings. But if you’re adding that kind of information to Facebook or Instagram anyway, you’ve got the info there.

It’s just one more place to log in and do it. It’s another 15 or 30 seconds, probably a good habit to get into, and the last one is to review your attributes. Now, these generally relate to ownership status, health and safety, accessibility, things of that nature.

There are some predefined ones in there, but get in there and update those as fully and completely as you can, because that will help people who are looking for those sorts of attributes in businesses that are looking to deal with. So that’s Search Engine Journal’s list. I’ll leave a link to this article above or below this video or somewhere around the place, depending on where you happen to be watching it set aside 10 or 15 minutes and get this all up to date in advance of the Christmas rush, really starting to dig in.

Search Engine Journal’s article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-business-profile-holiday-updates/

All right, there’s a bit of homework for you. That’s today’s Tactical Tuesday. I’m Jason Foss and I’ll talk to you next time.