News reporting: In this episode Pat Quiroz will guide you to learn GMB SEO Optimization tips that you can implement for your business.
Local Falcon
Pat: What’s going on guys, today I got another Google My Business SEO tutorial. So, I’m going to be showing you through a roofing client of mine that I did a video about a month ago. So I kind of wanted to update you guys with some of the results we have so far. And then we’re going to be getting into some of the tips so let’s get right into it.
Pat: So let me go ahead and show you some of the results over these past few weeks. So let’s go over to the local Falcon. So this was, this scan was done two days ago for metal roofing near me and you can see it looks like they’re nearly almost dominating their immediate area. And if we take a look, this scan right here was from August 10, right. So, you know, almost roughly 60 days, right, I think 60 days, we’re in October now. So we can see that the geo grid was nearly all red. And let’s take a look now, October 6, you can see it’s looking a lot better. We’re getting in those top 3 positions, which is where we want to aim for, for metal roofing Houston, which is one of the main keywords. So this is a great improvement from these past 60 days approximately. So we’re definitely seeing improvements for that and then metal roofing.
So we did a scan on August 10 and this is what it looked like about 60 days ago. And then this was done at nearly the end of August. So you can see it did improve slightly in about 20, 20 something days or so. And then this is two days ago so you can see the progress over these past couple months. Now he’s nearly dominating a lot of his main keywords, which is what we wanted, right. And the great thing about this was that previously, the client really had no online presence. So as soon as we took on his campaign, you know, whatever makes sure that he saw some results with his Google My Business and his SEO overall so we’re definitely going in the right direction.
So now let me get into some of the tips that we’ve been doing in order to get some of these results. As you can see, let’s go into Google My Business, right. So obviously, we always want to start off with the initial GMB setup, which is where a lot of the initial optimizations and where you should always start whenever you’re talking about local SEO is because we want to make sure that the Google My Business is set up properly in order to start optimizing it further, pointing links at it, optimizing the website as well, making sure everything matches together. So whenever you’re talking about the GMB setup, some of the more important stuff is really going to be under the information section. So first of all, obviously, we want to start off by making sure you have the proper name in it. If you want to add a keyword or like your city in your actual business name, to be safe, I would recommend doing business as a DBA. It’s very inexpensive to do and this legally gives you the right to be able to include a keyword or the city that you’re located in. Because everybody knows that having keywords in your actual business name is going to give you a significant ranking boost. This particular client, I would say he has a partial match so he does have roofing and sheet metal and his name but we don’t have the city but that’s perfectly fine. So just want to give you a heads up there guys so if you do get suspended, you can show you have proof of the DBA, show the paperwork and your Google My Business is going to get reinstated immediately.
Relevant Categories
Pat: Next thing we have the Google My Business categories, so you want to choose the most relevant categories to you. Some people say to choose one, some people say to choose three, I really don’t think it really matters. I tested it out with both, and I haven’t really seen any significant increase or decrease in rankings. What I would do is I would just choose the ones that are very specific to your main services. In this case, he is a roofer and he specializes in sheet metal , metal roofing, so we do want to make sure we’re picking categories that are both talking about roofing and also talking about metal roofing, which is what he does. And he does fabricate, fabricate his own sheet metal so that’s also another thing we take into consideration. So his top categories right here are roofing contractor, metal fabricator, roofing supply store and sheet metal contractor.
Pat: If you want to find out what your competition is using because that’s going to be the easiest way to figure out what categories you need to use. I would have a Google Chrome extension called GMB crush but let me show you guys what I mean. So if I do metal roofing Houston, let me see. All right, so if you download GMB crush, it’s a free, free extension to download. Do a search for the keyword you want to rank for. Then we’re going to go into here click on ‘View All’ and this is very standard guys. I’m sure most of you guys know it but I just want to make sure we’re covering the basics before we get into some more advanced stuff. And basically, let’s make sure this is on, click on that, I don’t know if this is properly on. Let me see here. Alright guys, once you download the Chrome plugin, do a search for the keyword, go into the maps. Now we want to take a look at the top competitors, I clicked on the top competitor right here and it gives you the categories that they’re actually using with their GMB which we can see roof roofing contractors, their main category. If we got to the second place, roofing contractor, and then they have a contractor. And then let’s go to third place and let’s make a note of what these guys have. And they just have the roofing contractor right. So we can see a common denominator here is roofing contractors so obviously, we want to make sure that that is our primary category. And then you would just list the secondary categories that you think are the most relevant to your business right now. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go overboard and I wouldn’t do more than 5 personally. So I would just keep it to, you know, your top 4 top 5, so that’s what you want to do with your business category to make sure you’re choosing the right ones.
Service Areas
Pat: So let’s go back to the GMB right here. Alright, and then, you know, make sure you, you include your service areas isn’t a huge deal, just go ahead and include those in there. But choose all the suburbs in your main city, which is what we did here, we listed out all the suburbs around Houston. And then make sure you have your website, your money website link, here in the, in the URL. And then also make sure you have an appointments link, you know, usually this is going to be like your contact page. So make sure you have a contact page under the appointment links. Do not leave this blank, because people can actually click on this from your actual main Google My Business profile so make sure you have that in there. And then just go ahead and make sure you have your services and I’ll cover that briefly. And then make sure you have your business description and make sure you’re including all 750 characters, go ahead and sprinkle your keywords in there. You know, add your brand name, and then whatever keyword you want to be. Make sure you’re like you’re related so brand name and then main keyword, make sure you include that within your business description.
GMB Services
Pat: Now let’s take a look at the services. So for the services, usually Google will auto, auto-populate the services related to whatever categories you choose. So make sure you go in here. And what a lot of people don’t do is they actually don’t include any type of description with the service. You know, a lot of the times I look at this, and it’s really just blank. So make sure you add just a few sentences, because it’s really going to go a long way. Because nobody is doing this, nobody’s taking the time to add a description within the service so make sure you go ahead and do that. And there’s a very easy tool that you can use, I like using Jarvis, but it pretty much just rewrite, rewrites content for you. That’s completely unique, then you can use that content and add it in your, within your service description, right. So let me go ahead and show you what I mean. So for an example of you know, roof inspection, what I would do is I would just go into Google and do like what is roof inspection. And then you can really just take a look at you know that sometimes you’ll get like a rich snippet like this. Sometimes you’ll have to look at the people who also ask, or if you have content with all your actual money websites, you can use that content as well. But what I would do is I would literally just copy this over here at Jarvis. They have a content improver feature that you can use and literally just paste what you just copied in there and then let’s click generate content. And it’s going to spit out about 3 different types of content that it automatically rewrites using its AI and it’s completely unique. So you can literally just take a look at this, if everything is good, you literally can just copy it, go back into here, and then paste it into the description and save. That’s really all it is, it’s already going to have the keywords in it, you can, you know, add further keywords if you wanted to add some location modifiers if you wanted to, but we’re all about efficiency. And but we do want to make sure we’re taking advantage of this section, which a lot of people do not use. So go ahead and add, you know, just a few sentences to all your services within your GMB. So that’s going to be the next tip.
GMB Post Strategy
Pat: Another tip is you want to make sure that we’re doing Google My Business posts. And then we also want to make sure that we silo them so what does that mean? Whenever you post a silo post, that just means that you’re linking them to another post, right? And what I would recommend is to silo around 4 to 5 posts so basically, you’ll take your top level, category or keyword. So let’s say your top keyword is metal roofing, then you want to pick 4 to 5 sub topics around that main keyword, right? So you can use questions which would be a very good idea for this. So you can take 4 to 5 questions about Metal Roofing, and then you can make those posts up all together and I would do that consistently, right. So I would do maybe one week about metal roofing, the next week about aluminum roofing, and so forth. And then you can do a lot more stuff with those Google My Business posts but that’s something you definitely want to do.
For an example, let’s take a look here. So this is a recent post we did about metal roofing Houston and then we added some nice content here. And again, you can use Jarvis or any AI writing tool to do this very efficiently because we’re all about time at the end of the day. So what we do is we just write some content about metal roofing. And then you can see right here that we silo to the next Google the previous Google My Business posts and that’s a great way to power up your GMB. So make sure you’re silo-ing in the post. So if we click on that, it’s actually going to pull up the previous posts that we did, so you want to do that, like I said, in bursts of around 4 to 5, and you should be good there. Just make sure you’re switching out the main keyword, you know, after you finish your batch of 5 posts, move on to another keyword you want to target. So that’s another tip right there.
And then make sure that in the Google My Business posts, you’re also linking out to your money website and like your outside properties like Facebook, your YouTube business citations, you can link out to your Yelp page. That’s going to be very powerful to boost up your GMB so that’s another tip right there guys.
GMB Website Optimization
Pat: And then also, we want to make sure that we’re taking advantage of the free Google My Business website that Google My Business gives you, right. So you can see it auto populates your posts into here and they actually let you add quite a bit of content on their website. So we do want to make sure we’re taking advantage of this so you can see we do have some content here about our services, about our location. So take advantage of this, I really don’t think most people do so it is going to help you power up your listing as well, because then you can also build backlinks to this Google My Business website. And it’s, you know, there’s really no risk of penalties because it is a Google property. So you can bless this with links, with links, or I would hit it with some pretty nice PBNs just to power it up but basically, you do want to set this up because you will get follow do-backlinks from this website and for your Google My Business posts. I’ve seen them at [inaudible] they show up so make sure you do take advantage of this. But basically, I just like to include keywords on the titles and I like to bold them, really all I do is I take the main keywords, obviously it’s going to be like your services. So you can see I took metal roofing, aluminum steel, standing seam, so I took all of his main roofing services, and then I added them in here as a header. And then I add a description about that specific service and then I provide external links and internal links to our main money website; YouTube, you know, Facebook, kind of like I said earlier, you want to make sure you’re connecting all of your properties online, to make sure that Google understands that you’re a real business. So you have to be linking out to all of your properties online and that’s where you’re social media profiles come into play, your business citations come into play, press releases you’ve done, you want to connect everything together so that Google knows that you’re this brand, and you’re in the city targeting the services. So it’s very important guys, take advantage of this, this is what let me pull it up real quick. By clicking ‘View Site’, just so you guys can get an idea of what it actually looks like. If we scroll down here, this is pretty much what it looks like. Very powerful guys, make sure you add your Google Maps link and then also a directions to your actual location, if you have a showing on your Google My Business, and then make sure you had some good quality content on here, but your services obviously and add some content about your local area. So that’s another tip guys take advantage of the GMB website.
Geo Network
Pat: Alright guys, now talking about some off pay strategies moving into a geo network, what is a geo network? A geo network is really just a network of web 2.0’s that you optimize for a specific area. And I like to use these because you can pick a specific point of interest in your area, create some content about it. And then you can actually link out to your website, link out to your Google My Business, they can also embed a map from that point of interest to your actual location and what is that going to do, that’s going to help spread out your proximity. So we want to make sure we’re choosing a point of interest so whether it’s a point of interest, it can really be you know, anything, a place, you know, parks, buildings, it can really be anything, but you want to have some content about it. And then we want to have our linking out to our main website that you can see we have an exact match of one of our main keywords here, going to our CID link, which is obviously our Google My Business. If we take a look at our Google My Business the CID link is just a popular link that SEO is used for, you can either use the CID link or the share button, I mean the share link, both of those are going to work just fine. If you have GMB crushed, it will actually populate it right here for you so you can just copy that link. And then if I just paste it in there, you can see it’s going to pull up how we’re GMB listing. So some examples of web 2.0 properties you can use for this, this is a site dot google.
So a Google site right? Very popular, a lot of people use these. Another one is BlogSpot so we built another geo website using BlogSpot and again, doing the same thing, linking out to the main website making out to Google My Business, then we embed directions, from that specific point of interest to our office, right. If you’re displaying your location, and I would even do this even if you’re not displaying the location because honestly, who’s going to see this website, really no one’s, no one’s going to see this website. And then another one is yodasite.com. Here’s another one that we did and doing again the same thing content about that specific place, go down here, have your links again. Make sure you make sure your GMB link is an exact match of your main keyword, right. And then again, we have the link going to the directions if we click on this, it’s going to pull up the directions. And again, this is really easy to get just click on the menu, share and then that’s going to be your link. So either you can embed, you can actually embed this or add the share link and that’s pretty much how you can utilize the geo network to increase your rankings and proximity. So we build out about 10 of these websites and then we power them up with tier 2 links. So that’s another tip for you guys.
Interactive Maps
Pat: The last tip I have for you guys today is using an interactive map, right? This is basically like a business citation, but specifically for the maps. And one website that you can use for this is zeemaps.com, they have different pricing tiers. I believe they have a free plan where you can get the basic plan, I think that gives you about 5 maps that you can create. But basically, we create a citation using their website right, so you can see here we have the business name up here, and we have a bunch of keywords that we can add into our listing. And then it actually will create the point on our actual location and you can see we have a nice business description right here. Then we can add a link to our main website, then we have our email, our phone number, and then you can see that it can even give you directions. So this is very popular again, very, very, very, works very well, whenever you’re talking about local signals, we want to send as many local signals as we can to Google to make sure they know that we’re a real business and these are the services that we offer. So you can literally include as many keywords as you want in this description and then again, you can take this, you can embed it anywhere you want. And another website that you can do this with is batch geo. Now this one is $100 a month, but if you have, you know, multiple clients, then it will be well worth it. The listing that you can see is going to look something like this, we have a description down here about our company. Again, we have our actual location displayed here with the pin, business address, phone number, email, and a link to our main website. And then it also has another link that will open up if we click on that, it’s going to open up our actual address on Google Maps. So that’s another cool way to send more proximity location signals for your GMB that not a lot of people do right. No one really is going to take the time to build out these GPS listings so that’s another thing that you can do, guys.
GMB Embedding
Pat: So last thing I wanted to show you guys is if you want to, let’s say you want to embed your GMB website, I can show you how to do that right, you can actually embed your Google My Business website, on your actual website, right. So let me show you what that looks like so we actually have a page that we embedded our Google My Business. So you can see if it just auto populates all of the posts, the entire website just auto populates. And we just have a specific page on the website obviously, it’s hidden. But we have this page to increase our signals, right, we want to have as many Google properties as we can on our website. So all you would do is you would copy the URL of your Google My Business website, just do a search for free iframe generator, it’s going to be the first one right here. And then all you have to do is where it says iframe URL, paste the URL and click Generate. Now you can copy this and you can literally just add it anywhere on your website as HTML, right? So as long as you can add HTML, you can add, you can embed your actual GMB website on your main website.
So those are the tips I have for you guys. Let me know if you have any questions, leave me a thumbs up if you learn something new guys. Hope you guys stay blessed, stay well, stay active, get some exercise. You’re probably sitting at home a lot, right these days. So make sure you get some exercise, get some cardio, lift some weights, whatever it is, keep your mind healthy. Keep studying, keep learning and that’s all I got for you guys. See you guys in the next one.
Listen/Watch the full episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axDCljJrWNg
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