In this tutorial, I’m going to be showing you guys how to leverage Google with a mobile application to help your customers get found on Google. What this means is more customers, more new customers, and, basically, more revenue for a small business. So, getting found on Google – obviously extremely important and high of mind to all of your small business clients and I have a strategy for you guys to basically allow your customers to finally understand how to rank in one of the most prominent places on Google for local searches and how you can use a mobile app to leverage that which, again, is where all of this strategy comes together is helping small businesses really understand how a mobile app can really benefit their business by showing how it helps other marketing channels and it’s a complete marketing tool and not just a mobile application.
So, without further ado, I’m going to go through this PowerPoint, “Getting Found On Google” and how to add or claim your business on Google My Business.
Get Found, Get Social, Get Customers
Let’s say you’re searching for “Juice in San Diego”. A lot of people are probably wondering, “How do I appear in these listings?” Maybe you’re in this are right here, “I can’t find my business on Google. What do I do?” I have the answers for you, don’t worry.
The first thing you’re going to want to do is you’re going to need to claim your Google business page. So, on the left hand side, I have them listed:
- You need to claim your Google business page.
- You need to optimize your Google+ page.
- You need to include Google+ with more social interactions.
You have to be posting on Google+ which is a huge surprise! But if you want to win with Google, you have to play Google’s game and this is a huge advantage to your competitors because they probably don’t know that. They’re probably posting on just Twitter, just Facebook, but they’re leaving out Google which can drive the most customers.
- Most importantly, you need positive reviews to rank highly in Google when it comes to local searches.
A mobile app can help you accomplish this and really help dominate your local competition because everyone who downloads your mobile app loves your business or loves your client’s business. A great thing about a mobile app is you weed out the people who might write a bad review. So, other strategies for adding reviews are not as powerful as a mobile app because you’re asking everybody and you may get some bad reviews out of that, it might backfire. But, with a mobile application, when I download a mobile application, I love that business and I’m utilizing that mobile app on a regular basis. If they ask me for a review and give me some sort of incentive to do so, I’m definitely going to write a great review because they are doing customer loyalty right, they are doing marketing right, and I would be thrilled to write them a review. So this really helps weed out all the people that might not want to write a great review and you also have the opportunity to make it really easy for them to leave reviews, which is also a huge plus.
So, the first thing you’re going to want to do is go to Google My Business and, if you’re an established business, chances are your business is already indexed by Google and the My Business directory and you’ll just need to claim it. New businesses, you’re going to have to search up your location and probably have it added – I’ll show you how to do that on the next slide. But the first thing is Google My Business and then click ‘Get on Google’.
Step 1:
Find Your Business. If you’re not in the directory already, you’re going to want to type in your business’s address in this bar here and then you’ll be able to get into Google My Business and start building up your Google My Business page.
Step 2:
Select or Add Your Business. Depending on if you needed to select or add your business, click on your business listing if it appears among the suggested matches. If not, select ‘Add Your Business’ and provide the necessary information. As you answer questions, you want to remember that the more specific you get and the more accurate the information Google has about your business, the better it’s going to display. And Google likes accurate and specific information, so if you are really specific with your business – and this example here on the left or, excuse me, on the right, you’ll see that this is a searched for juice in La Jolla, so you’ll see how specific these businesses are. If I’m looking for a smoothie, that’s what I’m typing in, so you want to be really specific to what your business is serving up. So, if you’re serving up smoothies and hamburgers, don’t select categories that have just things that are irrelevant, get as specific as possible. Health-minded foods, specialty drinks, juices, organic, healthy food, everything among that topic works.
A note is, you want to keep everything consistent. See the tip at the bottom. If you spell your address a certain way or your phone number a certain way, make sure you keep it consistent across everywhere. If you spell street out, make sure you spell it out in your Google My Business listing. If you do St. for street, do that as well because Google loves consistency.
But what I’m showing you right here, this is called the local packs. When you search for a local business, any local business, type in maybe “hamburgers” and your city and you’re going to see three businesses that appear. And this is where you want to appear, this is the holy grail of search engine optimization for local businesses. Take notice here. Look at this business at the top; they have eight reviews, but the business below has fourteen. What gives? Well, it’s probably their higher rating. And then this business at the bottom doesn’t even have any stars. What’s up with that? Well, you need five reviews to even have stars, so you have to be getting reviews and you have to be active with reviews. And you need to be getting positive reviews to get at the top of these listings.
These listings really do drive new customers to your business because, when people are in the area and they want to eat or they want to get some sort of service, whatever service you provide, they’re going to type in generally the service, plus your location. And with those two combined, Google generates this – they call it the local pack or the three pack – and this is where you want to get into. With a mobile app, you have a strategy to get into this three pack, because the most important thing is the review aspect of this and the accuracy of your Google My Business listing which takes, like, five minutes to set up. But the reviews, you can get more reviews, you can get more positive reviews and I’ll go over in a little bit about how you can do that.
Once you’ve selected or added your business, select your category. You can pick up to five, so near the bottom of the form, you’ll be asked to choose a category that describes your business. The category selection is very important as, essentially, it’s the way that Google classifies your business, so be very specific. In this example, you’ll see they’re picking things like interior decoration, interior designer, interior paint service; things that are very relevant, but not specifically the same, but they’re relevant. So, in the hamburger example, maybe it would be American food; it would be, obviously, burgers; it would be french fries; stuff of that nature, like American food. And then, again, Google has pre-set categories or keywords for each industry, so you can start typing in keywords to see if Google produces a match, then select the ones that you think fit your business best. But keep in mind, you only can add up to five, but you will get a chance to add more later on if you’re not sure which ones to add, which five to add right away. But, definitely, start with the top three would be my recommendation.
Step 3:
Verify your business. Google will want to know that you are actually the owner of this business, so they’re going to send you a mail card which takes one to two weeks to arrive at your location with a PIN in it and that’s how you verify your business. So, if this happens to you, a tip that I highly recommend is to tell your clients to tell their employees to keep an eye out for this card, because it happens more than you think, but I’ve seen a lot of businesses basically miss the mail card and they throw it away for some reason, they think it’s spam. So, have everybody on the lookout for this card, because, the sooner you can get into this three pack or what they call the local pack, the sooner you’re going to be getting more customers. Occasionally you’ll be given the option to receive your PIN by text or an automated phone call and if you get this, take it as it’s much faster and it’s so much easier and you can instantly activate your Google My Business page.
Step 4:
Connect Google+. So, I’m going to have a frank talk with you guys right now. So, I know a lot of you guys don’t like Google+. It’s not something that a lot of local businesses think is important. Google+ is almost like a joke to a lot of local businesses and people. But what we’re doing is playing in Google’s world, so, in order to make Google love you, you need to give Google some love back. What that means is, you need to start sharing more on Google, you need to start adding photos, you need to connect your page to your Google My Business page or your Google+ local page.
But, regardless of your strategy for Google+ content, the most important thing is that your business is active and consistent and using it as a part of your social marketing strategy. So, you want to be posting on it, you want to be adding photos, you want to be having an optimized Google+ page and, trust me, Google can definitely tell the difference. A cool tip and a cool reward that Google actually gives you if you set up a connect to Google+ page is they will actually remove a competitor’s ads and showcase your business only. When a customer specifically searches for, say, jamba juice, they will remove all their competitors if they have an optimized Google+ profile with its Google+ local page. So, any time you get a review or update photos, they will show this on the Google Maps page that I just showed you which is the local pack and this is huge. So, definitely take Google seriously, because they can control a lot of customers either coming to you or your competitors.
Step 5:
Asking for reviews. Asking for customer reviews on google through your app with push notifications is easy as every customer who has already downloaded your app likely already loves your business. Most review systems that I have come across, they’re asking pretty much everyone to write a review. But, with a mobile application, you have basically taken your most loyal customers, because that’s who mobile apps really appeal to is the 20% of your customers who are driving 80% of your revenue. By asking them for a review, you’re basically dodging bullets. You are basically avoiding negative reviews, because you are only asking the people – you are cherry-picking – you are only asking the people that love your business the most and you are incentivizing them to do so with, maybe 10% off their next meal, maybe 10% off the service that your client offers, whatever it may be.
Entice them, get them to review, get them engaged. Putting yourself out there and asking for reviews anywhere and everywhere possible is extremely beneficial to your business SEO in the long run. If you do get negative reviews, definitely make sure you don’t ignore them; you want to respond to them, you want to see if you can turn that maybe 3 star into a 5 star, reach out, see if you can get those rankings as high as possible because it’s extremely important to ranking #1.
Once that you’re in that three pack, you basically get all of the clicks. You get all of them. That’s not an exact stat, but you are definitely going to get more than the listing below that who have done maybe tens of thousands of dollars of [SCL] work. Maybe it’s, you know, “lawyers in Atlanta” or something like that. That’s probably a very competitive key term, but if you’re in the local pack, you’re going to be getting a lot more click-throughs than the Google listings below the local pack, which is, again, this three listings right here on any search that you do which is a service, plus a location.
What a mobile app can do that makes it just taking things over the edge is you make it really easy for a customer to review your business. So, what’s really great about a mobile app is, you can set up a push notification where, as soon as I receive it, I slide it open and I’m able to go directly to where to leave a review. For example, on my last slide, it shows ‘Write a Review’. You can grab this link and have the push notification instantly send the user to where they should write a review because, if you make people jump through hoops to write reviews, they’re probably not going to do it. Your conversions are just going to go down. That’s the same with anything; sign-up fields, the more information they have to give, the lower the conversion rate. So, when they just slide it open and it says, “Please write me a review. I will love you forever and I will give you a discount on your next order” and it takes them directly to where they need to write the review, the conversion is going to be much, much higher than pretty much any other review software out there. So, definitely something to take into consideration.
Conclusion
After you’re all set up with Google, starting by enticing users to write reviews for you, you’re going to be beating your competition in no time. And that’s what everyone wants to do is, basically, beat their competition because that’s your total adjustable market. There’s only so many people in your area looking for the services you offer, so the name of the game is to steal away from your competition and out-market them. So get found, get social, get customers. Ultimately, what all this does is it grows revenue.
So, after you’re all done setting up with Google, start enticing customers and ask them to write reviews for you because you’ll be beating your competition in no time and, seriously, I’ve got to zoom in my face again, because it’s that easy! With a mobile application, you are, basically, enticing customers to write a review in the easiest way possible: you send out a push notification, they receive, you slide it open, they write a review, they’re already a happy customer, and you’re on your way to getting into that top three local pack, or the tri pack as they call it.
I hope this sales tactic was helpful and definitely explain to your customers how a mobile app is so much more than what you think it is. It’s a complete marketing tool that can help so many other aspects of marketing, even search engine optimization.
Thanks, everyone.
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