Local Search Dominance - Driving Sales with Your Google Business Profile

Eric James Eden: 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest is Marilyn Jenkins. She is a digital marketing guru with more than 16 years of experience. She works with clients to help them get a 14 X ROI or better on their marketing. Welcome to the show.

Marilyn Jenkins: 1:17

Thank you so much, Eric. I'm excited to be here.

Eric James Eden: 1:21

We appreciate you making the time, so tell us a little bit about yourself and then we can get into to some of your story, your remarkable marketing story.

Marilyn Jenkins: 1:30

Absolutely. I work with primarily law firms and local businesses to help them grow using paid digital marketing, seo and focusing on their Google Business Profile.

Eric James Eden: 1:40

Cool, and the Google Business Profile. It's interesting that a lot of people wouldn't normally think how important that is right out of the gate, right? What is the importance of the Google Business Profile?

Marilyn Jenkins: 1:53

before you go into your story, the biggest part of it is Google has provided a free location for you to list everything about your business. What you do is, when they do a search, if they can provide you the information without clicking off of Google, then you get more weight. So by using your Google Business Profile and updating it with everything you can possibly think of about your business and then adding a photo or a question or something like that once a week, google sees you're engaged. They'll give you more weight in the searches, in your local searches. So that's really the big part of it. People only think of it as a place to store reviews, and it's so much more and so much more powerful.

Eric James Eden: 2:32

And it's also a way to stand out above the other noise in the Google search results right.

Marilyn Jenkins: 2:39

Exactly. You want to be on the top three of the mat pack and you don't have to have the most reviews to be in that top three, which is what it used to be, but it's not that anymore.

Eric James Eden: 2:48

Okay, so with that context, let's hear about some of the best marketing that you've done.

Marilyn Jenkins: 2:55

So one of the really quick Google Business Profile story. I had a client come to me and in the course of a couple of weeks her phone just stopped ringing. She didn't know what happened, and so what we did is we went through and we auditedly analyzed your Google Business Profile, her website and these different things and found a few places where she was missing the mark. She either didn't have the information on it, that sort of thing and so we went, worked with her to update her Google Business Profile, make sure it was consistent with what was on her website, and in literally 48 hours her phone started ringing again. So she was able to get seed direct improvement and get new clients. That was one of the best success stories that we've had with an existing Google Business Profile improving it and making it work again. It's just one of these things.

Eric James Eden: 3:41

It seems like a small thing, but it can have that kind of a huge impact, right, because the phone stops ringing. That's pretty bad for a business owner, and so being able to go in there and just add some of these things, it seems like a tweak or a small thing, but it makes. In the world where people go online to just find things, it makes all the difference. True, if you have any question, even the question what's the biggest impact you've had on your business, it makes all the difference.

Marilyn Jenkins: 4:07

True. If you have any question even the question of how, where can I get a birthday cake made You're going to search Google for it. So if you're a local bakery, you want to make sure that everything you do is in your Google Business Profile. There's even three categories. Most people only think of one, like lawyers. A lot of the times we'll put lawyer OK, but if I'm searching for, say, an immigration lawyer or a family lawyer, doesn't tell me enough. If I'm a bakery and I do birthday cakes, maybe I want to add that as my second or third category. So it's so much more and just those little additions can make your phones ring, get more people to your website and get more people to your location because you can get directions.

Eric James Eden: 4:49

Yeah, absolutely so. You said you had a second story. This is a doubleheader episode. This is a doubleheader.

Marilyn Jenkins: 4:56

This is a doubleheader. So I've been doing marketing for a very long time digital marketing since 2010. And I have a client that was referred to me about three years ago and only wanted to do Spanish language ads. So this was new for me. Yes, I speak some Spanish, but it was new for me to do the whole program. So we reset up the whole program that we have in Spanish for this particular client and almost immediately the ads started paying off. In the end, what we ended up doing is, over the first year, he got $38 return for every $1 invested. That is a massive return on investment, all from servicing and underserved market. So my suggestion would be is if you have the capacity to reach an underserved market or a market you're not necessarily as comfortable with, it's worth going for it. We just assume that everybody speaks our language, and that's the other thing. Whenever you're talking to a client that wants to do ads, we think about keywords and that sort of thing. Well, when we write keywords for our business, we write keywords that we think about for our business. The question is, what does your ideal client type in to find you? Those are not necessarily the same things, so that's why, when it comes to your ads or your Google Business profile. I think it's very important to think about how does your customer refer to you? It could be a colloquialism, it could be any different kinds of keywords that maybe that's not what you want them to type and what you want them to type is not what they're going to type to find you.

Eric James Eden: 6:29

That's right, and it's an interesting way to think about things differently. If you try to make your message so broad that appeals to everybody, sometimes it appeals to much less people.

Marilyn Jenkins: 6:43

Yeah, it's like in to copywriting If everything's bold, nothing's bold.

Eric James Eden: 6:47

That's right. So I think it's interesting to think about experimenting with messaging and advertising in such a way that you can uncover those markets to get that sort of insane ROI. Let me go back and ask you a question about the Google Business profiles. What would you say is the secret to people who do the best with their Google Business profile? You can tell us Pretend we're having a coffee and we're best friends. Just tell me what's a secret to the best business profile?

Marilyn Jenkins: 7:25

I think that there's two really big, important secrets that I think people just don't realize, and that is photos and videos. And that's one. I got another one. Photos and videos are very important If you have a business that, say, service is a certain area, you've got a truck with a name on it, something like that, or you do deliveries, or you live in a town that has some landmarks, go out and take selfies out near the landmark. What that does is it location services, that GeoFence is your photo, so when you upload it to Google Business profile it tells Google that you're relevant further than a mile away from your office or your business. And especially if you've got trucks with signs on the side, vans, any of that sort of thing take pictures at the job site. So that would be the first thing I would do Pictures and videos, absolutely. The other one is going to be questions and answers. So there's always a Q&A section on your Google Business profile. So if you think of that, about your FAQs, what are the top say 10 frequently asked questions that all of your customers or most of your customers have? Right, we all have FAQs. So if you say once a week you put a question and then answer up, google's going to see that you're constantly engaging with your Google Business profile and then when people go to Google and ask a question, there's a possibility that your Google Business profile will come up and your question, if it answers the question.

Eric James Eden: 8:46

Those are two really great hacks. I love it. I didn't realize either of those, but I did notice because I do have a Google Business profile that you do get a really nice report at the end of the month. That is pretty cool because it shows how many people engaged with your Google Business listing and even how many people search for directions to your location, which I thought was a pretty cool insight for business owners, right.

Marilyn Jenkins: 9:16

Exactly. If you go into the Insights or do manage your Google Business profile in the Insights, it tells you all of that how many people click on the click to call. There's also the Google Chat, so you can actually, if you've got a cell phone for your business that can accept text messages, you can put that in there and then when people chat with you directly from Google, they're chatting directly with you in real time.

Eric James Eden: 9:38

Thanks so much for these insights. I think you have an offer for listeners if they want to learn more about some of these strategies.

Marilyn Jenkins: 9:45

I do. Based on some of my experience, I wrote a book called the Google Business Profile Training Guide. This is to help you, step by step, claim it, verify it and then optimize it so that you can dominate your local searches. And you can find that book at maximiseyourgbpcom and for your listeners, I've got a coupon so they can get the book for only $5. And that coupon is $5. Remarkable.

Eric James Eden: 10:13

Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that offer with the listeners. I'm going to check it out. Everyone should check it out. This is something that's really important for growing your business. I would encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends. They should know how important this is and how much it can help your business. Thanks so much for being with us today, Marilyn. Thank you for sharing these stories and appreciate your time.

Marilyn Jenkins: 10:40

Thank you so much, I appreciate it.