Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most valuable FREE tools currently available to small business owners across industries. By optimizing your profile page, you can make it easier for searchers to get the information they need about your business, including reviews, directions, and photos.
Google is constantly updating this system and providing more tools for business owners to learn about the searchers. The latest additions are particularly helpful, and we’ll walk you through them and how you can take advantage.
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Branded Search Reporting
Google Analytics might feel too intimidating to approach if you’re new to the platform. But luckily, GMB has made it easy to see metrics through their own Insights dashboard. And now, you can see the percentage of people who find your business on Google in maps and local search either through searching on your company name, company brands and generic keywords such as categories, products or services.
These metrics are displayed as a pie chart in a yellow section for “branded” related searches. The three categories are:
- Direct (green) – Customers who find your listing searching for your business name or address
- Discovery (blue) – Customers who find your listing searching for a category, product, or service
- Branded (yellow) – Customers who find your listing searching for a brand related to your business
This information is invaluable as you discover how customers are finding your business. You can learn how your SEO efforts are shaping up, and how many people are finding your business because they know the name, or if their search is more generic.
This tool is great for busy small business owners who want to quickly glance at some metrics and insights that can inform them on the status of their marketing efforts. If you haven’t explored it yet, look around the Insights tap in GMB and see what you can find.
2. Add Products to Listings
This new feature is for businesses that sell products online. It allows your profile to include lists of products, as well as the existing services list. For each product, businesses can display the name of the product, a 1,000 character description, the price, and a photo.
With this new feature, it’s easier for those browsing your Google My Business page to understand exactly what they can purchase from your business.
The option to add products or services depends on what type of business you own, and Google will determine the correct specification for you.
This feature is still in the testing phase, so you might not see it in your account quite yet. Take a look and let us know what you find!
All these improvements come just a few weeks after the elimination of Google Plus. It’s easy to see that by removing that platform, Google has been able to put more effort into improving their other products, such as GMB. Google is always making changes both to its search engine engineering as well as its products. Stay tuned on the blog for more updates from Google and other social media sites.