TRANSCRIPT: Ecomm weekly: Level Up with Google SEO Platform ‘My Business’. EP17 (10.28.21)

[00:00:15] I’m in Arizona now. Uh, but, uh, I’m glad to say that we have Google business clients around the world. So there’s a chance that one of your neighbors is using some of my techniques. You know, one of the things that blew me away was, and I hear this a lot. But I was one of these people that said the same thing.

[00:00:38] I get the question. Uh, can my brand use Google, Google my business, because it was always for bricks and mortar, right? It was all local SEO and no one like a year ago, at least my knowledge was using this for brand building. Is that correct? Yeah, that is correct. Uh, early in, uh, uh, 2020, uh, Google changed the rules and allowed, uh, uh, area only businesses.

[00:01:08] Uh, the drawback is if it’s a drawback is you do have to still use. Physical address and it has to be a legitimate address. Uh, it can’t be like a suite number or private mailbox or anything like that. Uh, but you can make the address private. So just to give you an example, I have a number of clients that sell.

[00:01:31] Globally on Amazon, they’re actually clients of, uh, norms, uh, that we, uh, we actually use my address for their physical address. They’re in Australia, New Zealand and places like that, selling on Amazon in the U S so, uh, the address really isn’t so important as the message and the product that you deliver.

[00:01:52] You know, this is when we started talking. One of the things you told me about was a car dealership that you were dealing with. So this is a great example of how effective and how cost-effective. Uh, Google my business can be, you want to just talk about what you did and how it is virtual. Like it is a bricks and mortar.

[00:02:12] It’s a car dealership, but what did you do for that dealership? And what were, how did you cut the expenses and. Okay. Well, that’s actually a chain of dealerships in each individual store is spending an average of $55,000 a month on digital marketing. And, uh, we came in, we’ve been with them now. We’re on our fifth year.

[00:02:36] They just, they just paid for another year in advance. So. Uh, but there are seven dealerships in that chain right now. And the average store gets 220,000, uh, opportunities to do business a month from their Google, my business profile. Uh, it’s actually crazy. Because they have a lot of inventory and this is important for all of you retailers out there.

[00:03:01] Your inventory has to be on the Google business platform. And there are a number of ways to do that now. Uh, but people will look at your inventory and my clients are getting 200,000 views a month of their inventory that they’re going to sell a few cars. In fact, They’ve completely eliminated all of their other digital marketing expenses.

[00:03:24] I’m not saying that they’ve done away with marketing altogether, but their digital marketing is only based around their Google business profile. So I believe that the numbers that you were talking and were around 50 ish, 50 plus thousand a month, and you eliminated most of this and. It was a, roughly around a thousand bucks a month.

[00:03:49] Was that, am I correct? You are absolutely correct. All right. Yeah. So imagine that. So 50, $55,000 a month in. And I, you know, I I’m an old school SEO guy. Um, and when I first heard this, I couldn’t believe it. So, you know, I hear this all the time, give me three months and give me X number of dollars. And I’ll either do this locally or nationally for you at X expense.

[00:04:17] And it can grow very quickly, especially if you’re trying to grow a brand. And here’s Craig going out there with this dealership, getting them down to basically a thousand bucks a month. So. Ah, I think that’s doable. So let’s talk about like, what is Google my business. So it’s really interesting. And I’m going to give you the long explanation in a very short amount of time, like Google, like, like Facebook and LinkedIn and everyone else is trying to keep people on their platform as long as possible.

[00:04:49] So Google has generated all of these tools that are designed to hold content that they can deliver as what we call as ClickList searches. And so that content is delivered through the Google, my business knowledge panel. Now, normally. Uh, Google business knowledge panel is not being manipulated. Only comes up when you say the name of the business city and town, etc.

[00:05:15] But if you utilize the profiles and optimize the profiles with your products or services suddenly, uh, when somebody types in. Solar powered light or a soy candle or Southwestern style blazer or whatever. Right? All of a sudden the Google business panels are relevant, uh, because of the manipulation of the profile and the Google business panel actions and miniature weapons.

[00:05:46] So instead of driving people from Google to your website or to your Amazon page or your Shopify page, you can actually have your products onto Google panel. People can engage with the Google panel, they can buy the products. I can have it delivered and they’re right back on. And the thing is Google rewards that because they want to keep people on their platform as long as possible.

[00:06:09] So they’ll actually push your content to people that their algorithm has decided are most likely to engage. And that’s huge. The engagement on every Google panel I run is at least 12% from search to engagement that. Right. And you know, one of the things I love about this is every piece of content can go on to your Google, my business account or your profile.

[00:06:38] So like for, for us, for example, if we write anything, if we write a blog article, it’s there. If we have a guest blog article, it’s there. If it’s a product, so we have different product categories I sell on Amazon, I sell, um, you know, different products and I can have a variety of. Products like categories and then the product itself.

[00:06:59] And then any of the images that I have can automatically be searched in Google image as well as you can see it in shopping. So it’s just something that you just get so much extra ranking power from this. And not only that, every social media post that you post, all of a sudden goes into Google my business.

[00:07:23] What about like on a mobile phone? I don’t know if anybody knows, like, if you’ve seen this, you probably have, but when you, you can’t be number two with Google, my business, your number one. And Craig, how many times do you dominate a mobile search? If you come up number one, how many swipes? Uh, if the, uh, the miniature website fully OD, fully managed Google business profile is three full swipes of the thumb.

[00:07:55] Uh, before you get to any ad content or anything else, it’s just a, that’s a tremendous amount of real estate. And you remembered everything from every conversation we’ve had in our well, you know, it’s just, it’s so impressive. And you know, when I, when I, uh, I get into. Debates with people that just absolutely don’t believe the power of this, or they don’t understand that they can do it.

[00:08:22] Like I see Brian Johnson here. I see Rosalyn on here. I know both of these people from the Amazon world, and I’m sure Brian’s either heard me talking to people about this at events or, um, you know, have seen it in, in some of the groups, but this branding, this whole issue of a branding. If you’ve got a pet item, Any of you that have supplements if you’re in a competitive.

[00:08:47] How would you like to start ranking in your competitors? Won’t know what you’re doing because you’re all of a sudden ranking. And like, for me, um, all of a sudden I’m in these carousels, you know, and I’m in like just things I would never dream of being. Because of Google my business and this clinic was searched by the way.

[00:09:09] So if I’m selling bully sticks, okay. Or natural soap, and then all of a sudden I’m relevant and I’m not even targeting lavender soap or handmade or cold press soap. These ClickList searches. All of a sudden they’re pumping me up and promoting me to these other searches that I not even targeting. That’s absolutely correct.

[00:09:32] And it, and it’s really crazy. I just give you a real easy case study. Uh, one of your clients came to me, uh, it may sell a. And, uh, they weren’t, they didn’t have any traction at all had. So I think in the last 30 days, uh, something like 53,000 people visited their website and fact, the doctor sold his supplement company for quite a little tidy song.

[00:09:59] So, um, so he’s a happy camper all the way around, primarily because of Google my business.

[00:10:09] Yeah. Yeah, you do. I know. You know, so, uh, but, uh, so that, that, that’s awesome information that the other side of the coin, and this is how cool it is. If you’re actually managing a Google profile, when you optimize it, you can utilize your competitors. That might be actually having a larger marketing. You can actually use their keywords or their name as one of your keywords or key phrases that will trigger your profile.

[00:10:39] And I did this for a furniture company. A local furniture company was starving and, uh, one of the big, big furniture companies in town was spending about 400,000 a month. And advertise it. And so we utilize his name as a keyword in the backend of the profile. And in, in that first month that he did that, he got 4.9 million views in 28 days.

[00:11:06] That’s crazy. Blew my mind. That’s the biggest number I’ve ever had in one month. But, uh, uh, but yeah, but yeah, it works. Here’s the crazy thing. Norm 94% of the people in the world use Google to search. Yep. So why wouldn’t you want to be there full time instead of just trying to drive people from the search engine and they’re fighting you by the way.

[00:11:32] And the old SEO in my opinion is gone because Google is fighting to keep people on their platform. Well, now we’ve also talked about this, uh, you and you and I have talked about this. Now there’s people on here that are selling on Shopify or they’re shopping on Amazon, they have a listing on Amazon or their Amazon store, or even now their brand feed page.

[00:11:57] Right? Imagine this, you know what, there’s there? It’s under a hundred people listening right now. I can’t like, maybe it was just because it’s Google my business and they didn’t think they could get that much out of it. We should have a thousand people on here listening to this right now, because the information is so crazy.

[00:12:17] You can take your Amazon product. Okay. Your, your, um, your listing, your product page, you can put it onto Google, my business. You can put all the images that you have, and you can use that. As what we w we’ll call an anchor URL. So your anchor anchored L is your unique identifier, that if you put that unique identifier into a social media post into any form of content that will drive.

[00:12:46] Like that will start ranking your product. That’s the that’s that’s right on the money. And not many people do that. And for the technos in the crowd, I will explain that the Google algorithm update pigeon gathers social media signals and. About two months after they launched the pigeon algorithm update, uh, they launched the Google, my business profile, Google my business profile, or as panels, whatever you want to call them, they are a social media panel.

[00:13:21] And, uh, to that end, if everything that you connect. Virtually in other words, using anchor URLs, uh, indexes to search, and that’s the big key we can do everything we want to try and SEO and try and get stuff to index, but it’s all based on what the bots like or don’t like. And, uh, so you can just utilize in Google tools and Google my business.

[00:13:49] You can get your content to index. In seconds to search, which is a game changer for people trying to sell online. Yeah. That’s what I love. Uh, the word in seconds immediately. Uh, let’s help. Let’s start, you know, targeting. How do you even get a Google profile up? Uh, you know, we’ve got a bunch of people on here.

[00:14:12] Let’s show them how to set up a. It’s it’s really easy. And, uh, uh, so if you have a Gmail account and you really do need to have a Gmail account to make the most effectiveness, when you’re logged into your Gmail account and you’re on the Google search page, just type in business.google.com. It’s really easy business.google.com.

[00:14:39] As soon as you hit enter, if you don’t have a Google business profile, there’ll be a little mobile phone icon up there or a photograph rather, and it says type in the name of your business type in the name of your business and get started. If you utilize your cell phone as the contact number on the Google, my business set up, you’ll be able to activate your profile in about five minutes.

[00:15:05] If you utilize a, uh, a landline or R a, a virtual number or something like that, uh, you have to get a card in the mail, uh, which takes about, uh, about five business days. But you know what, norm everybody that’s listening to you. If they want, uh, I have a website. And this is not a pitch. Okay. I have a website where they can learn how to manage their Google profiles and Google tools.

[00:15:31] It’s normally a $500, uh, get on. I will give it to all of your listeners for free. If you’d like, I’ll give you the URL so they can go in the back door and register for this program for free. Would you like that? That would be great. Okay. It’s a TVI for the visibility is to tbi.education forward slash best hyphen R O.

[00:16:00] T V i.education forward slash best hyphen ROI. And then there’s a little icon on there that says, uh, or a button rather it says, get my credentials, do that. And you’ll have access within 24 hours. It’s simply videos of me managing my client’s Google business profiles and teaching you how to do it. It’s the same.

[00:16:22] Very good. And I, I do know that, um, you you’ve done this on the podcast before and you know, it’s, there’s no pitching, it’s just, here’s some training videos go and learn or, you know, hire somebody, but it’s simple to set up, uh, once they get the, the profile set up, what do you think the first thing they should do?

[00:16:43] Well, first of all, I think we should stress because if nobody, if everybody hasn’t tuned in at the very beginning, Do not put a phony address in you. Won’t get registered. You have to have the address. And the address does not have to be visible. There’s a check box there and you just don’t have to, you don’t have to show it, but you have to provide.

[00:17:05] Yeah. So I think what it says, you put your address in, it says, do you have a place where people can come, uh, to do business or do you do it outside? And you have to click the outside. You know, we, we go to you or we deliver the products, that sort of thing. And then you’re there. Then you’re. Your your residence or whatever address you sh you’re utilizing does not show.

[00:17:29] And, and, and also this is important to note, uh, if that’s the case, then you also are not visible on Google maps, which is, which is fine because we only want to use the Google business panel anyway. Right. Okay. So going back to the question after that, you, you get your business name set up and your address and all that other stuff.

[00:17:53] Where would you focus if you’re an easy tailor or if you’re on Amazon or Shopify, um, how do you set or what would you set up for? Uh, when you’re, when you’re in there, there’s a, there’s a really cool dashboard has got lots of buttons. Don’t be intimidated by it. Every one of them is simple and easy to operate.

[00:18:12] Uh, gosh, if I can run 280 clients around the world, uh, anybody can run. Promise. Uh, but anyway, go to click the button that says products and then start listing your products. Start putting your products up there. Put good descriptions. Good SEO descriptions. If you don’t don’t have SEO descriptions of your product, utilize a Jarvis or some other AI to write a.

[00:18:38] Uh, a highly effective, uh, product description that that will, uh, uh, optimize start putting all of your products on there. And once you have your products up there, then there’s a thing called a Google post, and you can start making regular Google posts that increase the relevance of your. Of your products.

[00:19:01] So, uh, for example, uh, you know, norm you, you’ve got your lunch with norm, so we have to talk on those regular Google posts about your lunch with norm, uh, episodes. And we link to Google to it. We linked the, uh, uh, YouTube to it. And all we’re doing is talking about the lunch with norm podcasts and it gets a tremendous amount of visibility.

[00:19:23] So there’s, that’s put your products on there first. That’s all I’m saying. Right. And again, it’s the content that you can put on. I can’t stress enough. As long as you use the anchor URL, wherever you’re driving it to. So if you’re driving it back to your Amazon product page or your store, just have that there, it will rank every post will rank anything that you put up there and including.

[00:19:52] Like for me, I’ll go. And I’ll, I’ll, I’ll do a presentation. I might go on a, um, somebody else. I might be a guest on somebody else’s podcast or a webinar, and I’ll do a presentation. I take those slides and I upload them. And all of a sudden everything that was presented in those slides. On Google, uh, or sorry are ranked in my profile and Google instantly, by the way.

[00:20:18] So every piece of content that you do that you’re writing for your, um, for your listing, if you’ve got a plus content and you can take that again, I’m talking to the Amazon crowd here. Um, if you’ve got product descriptions or, you know, something that you could put into a Google sheet. Okay. So we’re talking about all of everything.

[00:20:37] So that car dealership. Craig was talking about, they changed their prices on a Google spreadsheet every week. I think that’s what you were telling me. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, so they utilize one of the Google tools. We all probably know what it is. It’s called Google drive. And in that Google drive, there are a Google documents, Google forums, Google slides, a lot of, a lot of things that you could do, but on the Google docs, you can actually make webpages that are priceless or, you know, tech centered of course, uh, and, and utilize those pages on your website.

[00:21:13] So. What happens is that technicians are the girls in the office can make price changes on parts on services, or what have you, as they’re linked on the website without having to do anything specific to the website, uh, it makes managing a business onto a website, uh, your business on a website. It makes managing it much easier.

[00:21:35] And. Everything that you do on a Google doc when it’s attached to a website is indexed to search. That’s just powerful. Right? So can I, I’m curious about like what they were doing in the dealership. Could you do that with a Shopify, like an e-commerce. Yes, you can. Uh, but even better. Uh, if you have a Shopify site, Google has just released a program where the Shopify feed goes right to the Google business panel.

[00:22:09] Uh, it just gets better. That’s actually a pretty good deal. So once you’re, once you Shopify panel is connected to the Google panel or your Shopify site, your products are automatically listed on Google, including your inventory, et cetera. Okay. I just want to, you know, ask the audience that if they have any questions, like Craig is the guy to talk to about Google my business.

[00:22:35] If you have an e-commerce business, or if you have a business at all and you want to get some extra juice, uh, you know, throw your hand up, let’s get you up on the panel and be happy to answer your questions out. Of course, Roslyn is going to be coming up. Here’s your.

[00:22:56] And we’d love to hear from anybody. So we’ll keep this going. As long as the questions are coming in. am I un-muted? Uh, you are, how are you? Oh, I’m good. How are you? I’m looking forward to seeing you next week down here. I can’t wait to get out of this fall weather. We can’t wait to embrace you in Miami. So I have, what’s probably a really rookie question.

[00:23:25] I’m just in my own vision, trying to assemble all these online and, and different websites into one kind of cohesive picture. So the. I guess the threshold question that I have for Craig is, so there there’s Google my business. There’s Facebook advertising. There’s Tik TOK. There’s my own. Hopefully soon to be completed.

[00:23:54] Website. How, how do you prioritize all of those and how many of them do you need? If you, if you have Google my business and how do they all intersect and do they need. Uh, well, yes, they absolutely need to intersect because if you have, well, first off, I believe personally, didn’t most important aspect is setting up your Google, my business profile for sure.

[00:24:25] Because as soon as you set up your Google, my business profile, your content on your social media platforms can be configured to index. And that’s really the key behind it. All, you know, Google business panels look, nice websites, look, nice products look nice, but unless you’re being found by people searching, it’s a waste of effort.

[00:24:46] So, uh, so I highly recommend the Google business panel first, and then whatever you RL is anchoring your Google business panel. Whether it’s www I got something for sale, or what are your www, Amazon buy my product, whatever your URL is, you need to utilize that URL in your social media posts in order to make an index.

[00:25:09] And let me explain. So you put your media in first. You put your description or your post, whatever it is that you’re writing. And then you put the URL in. If you put the URL in first, it inhibits your view possibilities on Facebook, because Facebook doesn’t like external links, but if you put the media in first and then your content, and then put the URL a as a very last.

[00:25:35] Piece of it. It will index to search and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram. They won’t penalize your visibility on those, uh, on those posts. Does that make sense? Yes. Cool. I hope I answered your question Roslyn. It’s really easy to set up your Google profile takes you about five minutes. Okay. You did.

[00:25:57] Thanks. So very much. And Roz as for all that, you know, the hooking up and putting all your different social media platforms and, you know, you don’t have to go on to every single social media platform. A if you’re focusing on one or two, you know, that’s, that’s good enough. But like Craig said, make sure you just have that anchor URL in there.

[00:26:24] Okay. So you are very welcome prio. Welcome to the panel. Hey Norman. Hi Chris. Hello everyone in the room. Uh, I have, um, two quick questions. I have seen the charm of, um, you know, Google my business for, uh, for hospitality space and I have worked an optimized profiles, uh, Dell, uh, in the e-commerce space. I have.

[00:26:51] So when normal, you started the room saying that we were, we’ve always been under the impression that there has to be a brick and mortar, or there has to be physically address. Um, I, I do that. You could have your home address and kind of hide it, uh, from the public view, but, uh, for an e-commerce brand, how much sense would that make was, uh, was something that I was debating internally, but after.

[00:27:14] You know, listening to Craig for, for last, uh, 20, 30 minutes. I believe that it, it might make sense. Now, my question is that when you link your channel, Uh, so Google channel two to Shopify, or you activate the Google channel on your Shopify backend. It definitely pulls in all the product data and kind of updates the merchant center for you.

[00:27:36] So that that’s the API that, that does the job for you. And I am currently running my shopping ads like that, but my question was. Successfully create a GMB profile for e-commerce business. Uh, what industry do we choose? Do we choose just the e-commerce or, uh, is there anything else that we need to put in for better search optimization?

[00:27:58] And second does the data by just activating the Google channel on Shopify, get automatically pulled up on GMB also, like it gets pulled up for shopping ads. Yes. She asked him yes. So the, the most important thing is that that I gathered from your question is, is the categories. So you can list more than one category.

[00:28:22] And I personally would probably list as many particular categories as I possibly could. Uh, so e-commerce, uh, retail. Uh, the cool thing is, is that once you set the panel up, you can go back and you can create custom categories. You don’t have to utilize when you’re first setting it up and you type in a category, it will only allow you to type in specific categories.

[00:28:47] But after it’s set up, you can go back and you can put in a custom categories, you can type your own. You don’t have to use Google, but, uh, yeah. Put, put 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 categories in there. I would. Okay. So, so the one that we put it put in initially, does that become the primary category or something like that?

[00:29:07] Is there a differentiated solution? And that, I think primarily when we first start, we always use the retail retail shop retail. Okay. Okay. Got it. Yep. Thank you very much. Okay. So you know what Craig, um, I think this is a. Place to stop. Uh, we’ve talked about sort of the let’s get set up, let’s set up your profile and we should get you back on into the room.

[00:29:37] Uh, you know, maybe later on next month or the month after, and let’s talk about intermediate or more advanced, uh, marketing techniques using Google my business. How’s that, that would be, that would be awesome. And I’d look forward to helping your followers out norm. All right. Fantastic. So if you like what you heard, you want to get in touch with Craig or follow up with Craig, just click follow him.

[00:30:01] If you want to hear more information about what he’s talking about, make sure you ring the bell. Um, if. If you, uh, want to get more information about entrepreneurs, make sure you go up and hit startup.club up in the top left corner and make sure you click the little green house. So my name’s norm Ferrari.

[00:30:21] I have a podcast called lunch with norm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Um, just love having a community showing up every Thursday. Listening to me talk next to next week. We’ve got another great room here that we’ve got another great speaker here and, uh, I’m going to close the room and we’ll see you next week.

[00:30:41] Thanks for tuning in.