Help Your Google Business Profile Generate More Leads

More Leads from Your Google Business Profile

Today we’re going to talk about generating more leads from your Google Business Profile in Google Maps.

I guarantee there will be five techniques to optimize your listing for better rankings that you’ve probably not heard before, so stick around to the end.

First, let’s talk about some changes Google has made to the platform and your profile.

Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile (GBP) in late 2021, and now Google has announced it will be retiring the GMB app sometime this year in 2022.

You no longer need the app because they have made it so you can now edit your profile, add photos, update holiday hours, and reply to reviews directly from the search results page and within Google Maps if you’re logged into the account that manages your listing.

And of course, you should always be responding to reviews, uploading job and team photos, and updating holiday hours in your listing.

Multi-location businesses and agencies like us can still use the desktop Google Business Profile Manager for all editing.

Protect Your Google Business Profile Listing from Competitors!

Now before we get into powering up your listing to grow more leads, let’s talk about protecting your listing from competitors and others who may be trying to sabotage or undermine your listing.

Unfortunately, Google allows other people to edit some of the information in your listing using the “Suggest an Edit” link found in every listing.

This allows people to say a business has closed, the hours listed are wrong, upload photos and images to your listing, and make other suggested edits, including phone number, address, and more.

This can and does happen to businesses quite often.

To protect your listing from manipulation by others, you should regularly log into the Google Business Profile Manager website and examine the details of your listing for accuracy.

Double-check everything!

Log in and go to the “Info” section – the link is found on the left side menu.

Then confirm everything is accurate:

Business name
Categories
Area served
Phone
Website URL
Appointment URL
Open hours
Holiday hours
Products
Services
Business description
Health & safety attributes 
Date opened

Next, go into your photos and videos section, the link is also found on the left-side menu, and make sure the photos in there belong there.

Customer uploaded photos are great but keep an eye out for stock photo images, which should never be used and Google may penalize you for them.

Keep an eye out for any images that don’t belong.

Beware GBP Suggested Edits to Your Services

The next step is to click on the “Services” menu link in GBP and look for any suggested changes Google has placed there.

This is THE most common area where you’ll regularly find “suggested changes” by Google.

If there are suggested changes, you’ll see an orange alert at the top of this Services section plus orange text in some of your services.

Do NOT click on “Accept changes.” Instead click on the words, “View updates” in the paragraph at the top of the page where the orange warning symbol is.

Instead, examine each and every change they’re suggesting.

Most of the time this is just Google suggesting additions to your services based on your listing and your website.

Most of the time some of these changes do NOT apply to your business.

You can then review each one and delete any that don’t apply to your business.

Always Check Customer Reviews in Your Google Listing

The last accuracy check you should do is to keep an eye on customer reviews.

Be sure to reply to every review.

Reply to any negative reviews by asking them to contact you offline to see if the issue(s) can be resolved.

If you find reviews from people who were not your customers, click on the three little dots in the upper right-hand corner of the review, then click the option “Flag as inappropriate.”

For more info check out this advice from Google on reporting reviews that don’t belong.

Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Okay, now let’s take a look at five powerful ways you can power up your listing to try and get it in the top 3 listings when people search locally for your services.

First, if you did everything else we just mentioned then you have made sure your GBP is up-to-date, accurate, and completely filled out.

This should include naming all of your services in the services section under each proper category.

This should also include taking advantage of the “products” section in your listing to include the major products you sell, like water heaters, softeners, and more if you’re a plumber and solar panels, inverters, batteries, and such if you’re a solar panel installer.

Now here are five more ways to add power to the ranking ability of your listing.

As you may very well know, links from other websites to yours and the number one ranking factor on Google.

They look at it as votes. If those links come from local, industry, or other powerful websites, then those links tell Google that others believe your site to be worthy of checking out.

That the information and services on your site are worthy according to those sites where the links are coming from.

What many people don’t know is that the same holds true for your Google Business Profile (GBP).

Growing links from other sites directly to your GBP listing can help power up your listing to rank better.

Five of the best ways to do that are:

1. Add links to your GBP in press releases

– create monthly or quarterly press releases and have at least one link in the press release go to your GBP listing. Use good keywords in the anchor text that links to your listing

2. Add links to your GBP in PDF documents and then upload them to PDF document sharing sites.

We suggest creating an article about each one of your primary services. One article per service.

Within that article link to your GBP profile as well as your website.

You can get the shareable link by going into Google Maps, searching for your business, clicking on your business name which brings up just your profile, then using the “Share” icon to bring up the sharing options, and then copy the link.

Use that link to create a link from the document to your GBP listing.

You can even take a screenshot of your Google Map listing by clicking on the “Share” icon, then clicking on the tab that says “Embed a map,” and then taking a screenshot of that map.

Now you can embed that image into your document and make the image a clickable link to your GBP listing.

Why not do both? Create both a text link in the document and embed the map image and make that a link to your listing also.

Also, include at least one link to your website. In fact, it’s best to add your full company name, address, and telephone number at the bottom of the document.

Once the document is completed and all links tested to make sure they work, then save the document as a PDF.

Make sure the layout looks good once it converts to a PDF and tests the links again to make sure all works well.

Once everything checks out perfect, then add this PDF document to several free document sharing sites including:

• Google Drive
• slideshare.net
• docdroid.net
• wetransfer.com
• mediafire.com
• scribd.com

3. Create links to your GBP in photos and on photo-sharing sites.

• Google Photos
• Pinterest.com
• Behance.net
• Flickr.com

You can also add links and business names, addresses, and phone info in the “info” section of an image. Right-click on the image and click “Get info.” Use the tags and comments fields to add data and links.

Upload images to these sites and more and add links to your GBP profile to the image and your account info on each platform.

Be sure all images are set to share with “everyone.”

4. Create links to your Google Business profile in your syndication network posts.

In episode #83, we talked about creating a syndication network to repost your indexed website blog posts to grow links, traffic, and domain authority.

Now for an extra boost, why not add a link to your GBP listing while you’re at it. Create links from every syndication network post to your website and your GBP listing for extra ranking power.

Now as a special note, after you create all of these PDF, image, and syndicated posts, you have to get Google to index them otherwise they have no value.

We use a simple inexpensive tool called OmegaIndexer.com to get this done. It costs about 2 cents per link to get the URLs indexed.

So you’ll obviously want to keep track of all the images, PDFs, and syndicated posts you’re creating and then request Omega Indexer to get each one indexed.

5. Turn your website blog posts into your Google Business Profile posts.

Once your blog posts are posted and indexed by Google, then take a snippet of the blog post and it’s featured image and post that to your GBP profile in the Posts section.

There’s a character limit so you probably won’t be able to post the entire text, but take a good size snippet of it and the featured image and make a GBP post with a link back to your website.

This will help power up both your website and your GBP listing.

Do this once a week or however often you create a new blog post. be sure the blog post is indexed by Google before posting to GBP.

Use Google Search Console to request your blog posts are indexed immediately after they are published.

Then wait a few days or a week and post each article to your GBP listing post section.

Summary

Alright, there you have five of the secret tactics we use to help power up our client’s Google Business Profile listings to get them in the top three listings for local searches for their services in their areas.

Once you do this regularly, you should start to see a very nice increase in calls from your Google Maps listing and growing sales as a direct result.

We also have two other podcast episodes to help you rank in Google Maps

#14 how to rank better in google maps

#26 how to keywords into your google reviews

Check out those episodes also and get your company ranking in the top listing of Google Maps for more power, traffic, calls, and sales to your service business.