10 FREE Google My Business Tools You Need To Know
In today's video, I'm going to show you 10 free tools that you need if you want to grow your business on google and get more clients so I'm Zane from Zanet Design and I help businesses grow on the internet so if you've got a small business and you're wanting to get traffic locally or if you're just wanting to grow your business online and do the right thing so that google rewards you with traffic and new clients then these are the videos that you need to watch if you've tried in the past to perhaps do seo and it's not worked but you're wanting to grow your business the right way and maybe you've now registered your google my business which is a great way to do that then this video is for you so make sure you subscribe down below you know what to do click the bell comment below give a like those things help others then find this channel too which means then as it grows in popularity you'll be able to get more great tips from this channel okay so if you're a small business and you want to grow your channel your business and to get more clients through google then these 10 tools are going to be ideal for you the ones that i use all the time for my clients and i found useful they're free as well now of course if you've got any questions then put them down below in the comments and if you've got any tools that you use that you found useful that are free as well then put them down below as well and i'll take a look for an update on this video so stay to the end of the video because at the end of the video i've also got a bonus of 13 tips that you can also follow if you want to optimize your business after using these tools but let's discover what these tools are and how they actually work for your business that's free tool that i want to recommend to you is video maker and this comes from google my business it's a new thing that came out just over a month ago now and it does appear that it's working for quite a few of the American clients, I've not been told about Australian or New Zealand or India so maybe if you've got if you've tried this and it's worked for you then let me know in the comments below but I'll show you that if I go for example my website if I go Zanet Design it doesn't come up and yet funnily enough it does say is available available to businesses in the united kingdom so it's a little bit frustrating that that doesn't work but it does work for some of my clients so i've got a client in america and this is the video this is the type of thing it produces (video plays) so as you can see it's pretty useful you can upload it to youtube and you can edit the video so we're going to edit video you can select photographs that you want to use you can change the story or how it pans out you can also change your ratings so you can take different ratings that you want to include in the video you can change the style so we add a classic but we go for different types of color schemes and so on which will fit in with your business you can choose the music as well so maybe want to do something like this whereas we were on funky flex i believe which is cool or we can go for cues the drums so I think in all cases you want to just think about what would be appropriate for your business and you can update them the video and so on so video maker it's free it comes from google it's uh to help market your google my business it's no more than a minute long uh you can upload it to your youtube channel and you can point customers to there as well if you want to know more about your business so a great little freebie there for you to first of all look at now the next one number two is the fact you've got a free website so many of you will know this already to find your free website if you log into your google my business business and on the left hand side here you've got so this is when you normally log in you're in the home screen and all you need to do is go to on the left hand side to website and there you'll be able to purchase a domain name which then you can time with this website you can do edits within the website itself you can add photographs and so on what does the website look like what it does it takes all the information that you've put into your google my business listing and then it takes it and puts it together and makes a kind of reasonable effort to i mean this is the new website that i've been developing on the uh current larue window cleaning services so if you're following that video series you'll know that this is so far this is how far we've got so we've got a cover picture we've got get to quote we've got a few people now giving some testimonials which is useful and we've started adding some photographs that we got from instagram uh if you want to know how to do that or from facebook then that video will be useful so have a look out for that video i think that's video number five and then we've got again where it's based and it's opening hours address and this basically all works as a one-page website there is a little bit of a menu that we've got building up so if you want them to go to testimonials you've got hashtag testimonials at the top here that takes them there if they need contact details you could send them to the hashtag um contact details so that's all kind of coming together and that's a free website and you for 10 pounds a year you can have the domain that goes with it which will make it a little bit more professional of course ultimately if you're going to grow your business this is just a starting point you really want to think a bit more about a professional website from a web designer which is obviously the type of thing that i do let's look at the third one is how can you add reviews now i did cover one of these i looked at several widgets you can use so if you've got a wordpress website if you're using a cms or if you're using a website you've built it in elementor or maybe just some other um like google sites you'll notice that you'll need from time to time you want your google reviews to appear and this is a great little free plugin that takes google reviews and then shows them how they can fit within your website so basically you can have it various ways so you might want it so that it's in a list you may want it so it's boxed out you may want it where they they click through to a certain rating so they can rate you as well so there's lots of little things you can do there's a few add-ons as well but as you can see it looks pretty smart you can change the styles of it as well if you want to see how that looks live then if i go to my website so this is the footer of my website you notice i've just got it here just a small area that fits in with my branding if i want to know more about these or read more i can click on next reviews it gives me a bit more again so it can grow if you want to if they wanted to know more about what this person was saying you can click on that and it will give the full information it also gives you an overview of the rating and it generally takes a few weeks to update so don't update so i think i've got 67 reviews at the moment but it picks up the last few and you may want to also just as a bonus really but if you want to know how to get more reviews then if you go into your google my business you just notice that in the home page you get this box here called get more reviews share your business profile and get new reviews so if you want to actually kind of make sure you've got plenty of reviews i've got a few videos that look at how you can get more reviews and how you can integrate them into your website so there's a bit more detail on how to do that but this here is really useful because if you've not used it it's like a very small um so you can just copy that very small way of getting people to give reviews it's just a smaller address or url and you can tweet it whatsapp it out or facebook it to clients and people that you think would give you a favorable review if you just want to see what that looks like i'll just open up the webpage so what that does it takes them through so that small url is then linking them through and it takes them through to the whole thing there where they can fill out the stars they can put some information about the review and also you want to encourage them to upload photographs because you'll know i don't want to kind of go off topic here but you'll know from um the importance of that if you just go into so there you go this is another little bonus you're going to insights just notice that at the bottom here when it looks at customers photos says looking at customers how many customers are uploading photos and the way they upload photos is they can do it through the reviews that's one of the ways you can do it they can just upload photos as well so google rates others putting photos on your particular um your particular business notice there again a whole section by customers so when customers upload photos then they appear here too so that's quite important to bear in mind that when you want to get reviews then try and encourage them to do photos now that was that wasn't really 3.4 really how to do that but we'll give that as a bonus let's go into 0.4 anyway so you want to grow your business and this is interesting that grow my business or grow my store is a section of think with google and it's one that most people don't realize exists and you can just log into it and then you can reach more customers and the way this works is you basically have to fill in some information about your industry you want google to kind of give you some information about what would be useful and what that does is it then takes it takes a look at your industry it takes a couple of hours it looks your website as well sees how you're doing and eventually they email you with a report now that report is really useful if you're wanting to know how you stand in google's eyes so this is kind of something that again gives you a bit more detail about what competition you've got how you've scored how you're considered as an experience by google so as you can see here my advance my website is above the industry average that's good that's what you're aiming for but i can have a real breakdown as to what types of things i'm doing well so my ratings how does google view that how does it think about what does it think about my product search if you click on these things as well you get these really quite detailed bits of information about my business and uh you know it's really can quite useful to read through this and see how it's going to help you to get greater insight into your business uh if we just go back here again you can see there are things i need to work on as well so i don't do next day delivery but that's not really my industry um but i do have other things here i do offer live chat actually so maybe i need to look at why that's the case but it's picked up on the fact my phone number's clear so again just looking through here um and just seeing again as it brings out some great stats here as well about um it will take your your business in your area and it will then give you information so rather than go through all this i think it's better for you to just go to this i'll leave a link down below and just run through your business get a report on your business uh you'll get the email then start reading through your report so great to get some insight from google my business for free now the fifth one is uh this tool here which has been recommended to me a couple of times now by the owners it's quite new it's just been released it's got very few users but it's always good when some things out there that others haven't used yet it's called google my business crush i've just done a video on it that will show you how it works you'll notice that when i was in to my here you'll notice this is categories found by gmb crush so it just gives you the insight into what categories people are using normally only the the main category comes up when you're searching for businesses but this gives you all of the categories um so you can see the secondary categories of of what's been used on a business which is helpful but it does a lot more than that as well and if you want to know a bit more about how that works there's this video called reverse tool for success um it's actually called if you search in youtube google my business posts seo reverse engineering or there's the address if you wanted to find it too and i'll put a link down below to it it's not been released yet so i've actually done it the video but i've not released it yet so if actually you go there because if you if you do go there you'll get an insight into it before it's actually released for public use so that'll be useful and you'll see how google my business uh works i'll just go into a little bit of this um come up at the top so it just looks at things like how it gets this type of information from others then finally this bit here again that's really so that that may prove useful so the next uh the sixth free tool that i want to cover that will help you to get more clients is just making sure your website is fast and you can test your site now to see how fast it is in google's eyes now i wouldn't get too hung up on this at the moment google's trying to improve whether it's mobile compatible whether it's a fast site these things are important they want fast sites to load one of the best ways to do that is what's known as amp which google's very much pushing at the moment but what is interesting is if you do put your domain in here you get then a report now what i did actually i thought this would be quite interesting we've just seen the rewindo cleaning services is a website so i took their um their kind of their business site that google's produced and it's not very large as well just to see well how does that stand up on google's report here so run the report and you notice that even though it's mobile friendly which is good but it does need optimizing and you notice there that you get some stats here as well but it's considered slow well 3.4 seconds is is slow in the terms of google's trying to get things to below two seconds ideally having said that 3.4 isn't
too bad you can see how it work on 3g it becomes more like seven seconds so you get an idea of that but it's slow and yet it's google's code so that's no code from anyone other than google so i think google they do make it hard for businesses to get this working correctly and they don't tend to always follow the rules themselves so just bear that in mind now the seventh area is that of getting the driving directions and there's a reason why this is a really useful tip if you go to google and type in your business i've typed in xenodesign and you'll then get your knowledge panel on the side hopefully and if you haven't then you've not optimized your business enough yet and you've not got enough branding yet but if you do get your business coming up on the side which is all important and certainly should be aiming for then there's all sorts of things here you can do but one of the things is you've got directions and this is important because if you click on this it sends a signal now maybe if you're clicking on it because you're the owner it's kind of nullifies out as nothing but if others are clicking on this getting directions to your business that sends an important signal to google and if enough people click on these things it's going to only give a positive signal to google now i can do a right click and i can then copy the link address which is pretty long it's pretty much like this one up here so what you might want to do is then go to a way of shortening your url so in this case i've managed to shorten this long url and it's down to a much shorter version there's lots of um lots of ways in which you can shorten it so i'm not particularly saying this one works i'm not even tried it so once you've shortened the url then it brings them through and it takes them through to like a map area and it shows them where your business is one of the things you can do is you can go into your google my business and you can there um view it on maps and then you can shorten that url or you can just share your business profile so if you just go for share your business profile and you send that through to someone that in itself again will give a signal so if i open that up you'll see it will take them through to my business it shows it on the map but it also gives them the opportunity then they can get directions here as well but if you go on the on the map version um so if you go for view on the map instead the advantage of that is they can put their location up here and they can get directions themselves so so you notice these two ones more about the branding of your business to get directions one's more about just the map itself so you might want to choose which one of those two all you do is then grab this euro up here so you just copy that and then shorten that so that's another way to do it there's about three different ways to do it one of those is going to work the thing is is if someone says where are you don't try and describe it because you're missing out on the opportunity to give a good signal to google for your google my business so in your website in your emails in fact if you just take the website let's just go show you that as well got a little bonus here go to the website and if i go to my page here which is like a contact page that's got a map on as well and you'll notice here get directions to xanax design limited if i click on that and that again sends a signal if someone wants to find out where i am so there's lots of ways to do that but the thing is is do it i get give free driving directions give the signals to google and that's going to help you rank google my business now the next one google trends is more to do with if you're wanting some say for instance your flower shop is just doing a bit of research here so you can go into here you can search for say flowers and then what it will do it will just show um the trends over the last year or over the last few months as to how flowers have worked obviously with covid it's made a big difference because flower shops have been closed but of course your kind of valentine's day and suddenly it goes to 100 um the best it's been for the year so if you're wanting to know the trends of certain things this is useful you can check the trends in different countries as well so you can go throughout the world is any different so yes it is different and then you're looking also for if there any breakout things that are affecting flower shops now this here could appear to be oh great there's these new types of flowers um hybrid flowers perhaps i need to get those into my um my flower shop but unfortunately that's not always the case if you go into a bit more detail and find out a bit more about what this actually is and why it's suddenly risen so much you kind of get this idea that it's a console game or a video game but again it just goes to show doesn't it and in fact i did a bit of research and this is what it's kind of connected with so a flower shop isn't necessarily going to want to sell that game it's not quite related but the point is is you need to go here every so often just to see if there's any trends in your business because if you can get a breakout trend then you're going to and say you write an article about it or a post about it on google my business you're much more likely than to be found for those people and there's lots and lots of huge traffic and there's no competition and when you've got lots of traffic and no competition then you're going to get a lot of clients so that's a great free tool google trends and i'll leave a link down below for that too so the ninth thing is the marketing kit so i've mentioned this a few times in my previous videos it is really useful we did a video just recently that showed you you can get a qr code from this but there's lots of other things you can get as well we've seen that you can get the the video this is kind of connected a little bit to the marketing but you can get all sorts of extra um details information you just type in your business so we'll go for say larue window cleaning services and what it does it just analyzes your business it looks at who's been uh giving um ratings and it will take some of those ratings and it will make posters for you it gives you all this material you can change how it looks as well and you can share it so you can go whether you're online and share it on facebook or twitter or linkedin or whether you want to just print stuff off your shop window but there's a lot of different bits in here if you haven't taken advantage of the marketing kit then that's another free tool and the final one is to identify new potential in your business and this is again say for instance you're wanting to set up another shop somewhere or you wanted to know whether you should branch out into a different type of business a lot of people are experimenting to find out where is there in the next potential market in my area so this is called a market finder google again just recently released this and you can type in your url or you could do it of perhaps a business that you're wanting to to kind of um compete against and it will give you information about how your business could be set up and the types of things you might want to consider so you just notice here it's going to tailor recommendations bearing in mind your area and the business you want to get involved in it's going to look at the local markets it's been basically going to give you some good advice so a little bit similar to the way in which we looked at that individual report for the business you already have earlier on you've got here another opportunity to just find out what is the latest ways in which things are going to develop so if you just think about a few years ago say 20 years ago there wasn't really any cafes that had cafes for pets or it could be a new market opening up for say um coffee shops that are for cyclists or you know these things do come and go even vegan shops have obviously sprung up in various areas as well so if you're thinking of doing something a bit different but you want to see what would work in your area then that might be something to consider so you type in your website you then click uh that you agree and it will look it'll put together some of the categories from your website i'll go for those for now so looks your business just checks the categories and then it just looks at what markets we better for you to spread out into so maybe if you're this is really going outside of local seo this is going perhaps into more international type of seo as well but it just gives a little bit of information about what types of competition there is if you were to spread or to go elsewhere and go outside of your profile but that's based purely on what you do on your website and the categories that you're trying to compete against and of course you can get updates and so on if you wanted to so that's again a nice little useful tool if you want to go beyond being local so hopefully those tools have been really helpful and you've now got two or three that maybe you've never known before that you're going to use maybe the three or four there that you've used before and now it's just reminded you to get them out again but hopefully you'll be able to go away now use some of this information and see some of the benefits as you look at your insights and your analytics and see how it gradually helps to grow your authority in google but you notice in the video i mentioned larue windows services as being a business that's kind of new and we're optimizing and and growing and as you can see it's still got lots of things to be done to it but if you want to know how that started how he registered it right from the beginning just a few weeks ago and you want to follow that series of seeing a real business grow from scratch then there's a video here that's going to show you the very first episode but if you just want to know how to get more tips how to grow even more in google my business then here are my 13 tips that are going to help you this year to get more authority and more clients i'll see you there
2021-03-12 12:44
