Adam (00:13):
Welcome to Jobbers Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros by home service pros. We are in Las Vegas, and today, we’re talking about Google Business Profile and how to fully maximize it for your business. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. Today’s guests are marketing experts David Brooks and Katie Donovan. Welcome to the studio.

Katie (00:34):
Thank you so much for having us. It’s really an honor to be here.

David (00:37):
Yeah, thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Adam (00:38):
Yeah. Katie, why don’t you tell our listeners who you are and what you do?

Katie (00:42):
My name is Katie Donovan. I am the CEO of CAMP Digital. We are a digital marketing company that is solely for the trades. We actually like to think of ourselves as a technology company that does digital marketing, so a little bit different spin on that. Everything we do is based around the capacity of a business. It’s actually what camp stands for: Capacity Aligned Marketing Platform CAMP.

Adam (01:04):
Cool. David.

David (01:05):
David Brooks, Contractor Rhino, CEO. We’re based out of Philadelphia. We specialize in digital marketing and accounting services. For the trades we service the whole United States and even some clients up in Canada, as well.

Adam (01:20):
I’m glad you guys are both here. Let’s get into it. So, Google Business Profile, it’s changed names over the years, just that we’re on the same page with our listeners of what it actually is. Katie, what is Google Business Profile exactly?

Katie (01:31):
I think Google Business Profile is probably one of the most powerful tools that exists inside Google, but it is a free tool that you can publish directly to Google. There is no other place you can publish directly to Google. There’s no other place where you can say, Hey, a lot of people think, oh, my website. That still has to go through Google, kind of crawling it, discovering it. When you do a GBP update, a Google Business Profile update, it is there instantly. It helps. It connects to Local Services Ads, it connects to traditional organic. It is probably one of the most important parts of a local business. The local SEO is super, super important, and it’s something that everyone can do at no charge. I really just tell people anything that Google gives half a page to, that’s free. You got to pay attention to in the business and making money.

Adam (02:19):
So that’s a great explanation of what it is. What does it look like if someone’s completely unfamiliar with Google Business Profile? What does it look like on their side, and describe it more from a visual standpoint?

David (02:29):
From a visual standpoint, if I was to type in on my phone on Google Maps, a contractor near me or roofing contractor near me, when you see the map section on Google on your phone, you’ll get a list of different businesses that come up and what you’ll see is the business name. You’ll see a pinpointed position where they at on the map. You’ll also see their name, their address, their phone number, how many reviews they have, their website address, and you’ll also be able to see what categories they service. So, visually, that’s what it looks like when I’m scrolling through on my phone

Adam (03:07):
And the most important thing, I think, we can edit all that stuff. We control all that information. It’s not like Google just came up with all that on their own. We go in there, it’s our account. And so for our listeners, it’s like these are things that you can manipulate for free that we really need to be taking advantage of. What are some things that our listeners need to be doing with Google Business Profile to really maximize lead generation and that kind of stuff?

Katie (03:29):
Not only can you edit it, but so can your competitors. It is really important to make sure that you’re out there on your Google Business Profile regularly doing what you’re talking about. So when you log into Google Business Profile, you can change the categories that you serve. So in your case, you’ve got windows, you’ve got gutters, you’ve got general, I think, lawn care, household maintenance, outside. You can add all of those different categories. You can change the order of those categories and what your primary category is based on seasonality. You can add offers and posts which help with search justification and eventually ranking. And most importantly, I think you can also get reviews from your customers, which I think is the heart and soul of Google Business Profile.

David (04:08):
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Really taking care of those individual things on Google Business Profile and being proactive in making sure that you’re monitoring that, because things change. Competitors try to change your phone number or where you’re located at and you wonder, where are my phone calls going? 

Adam (04:28):
This is news to me. This is a thing I didn’t know. That happens a lot. Yes, it happens a lot. It’s scary. What do you do, David? When it happens, your competitor makes a suggestion. Is that what you’re talking about? 

David (04:37):
Make a suggested edit. 

Katie (04:39):
Yeah, it gives you a notice so it won’t just automatically change it. You’ll get a little orange notice on the account, which is why I tell people, you should be logging into your Google Business Profile regularly, making sure you’re logged in consistently. We all think about competitors writing bad reviews on our site. We don’t think about all the other things that they can do. It can really take a business down.

Adam (04:57):
So a lot of our listeners are familiar with posting on Instagram and Facebook and Nextdoor and all these different sites, but I think on the whole, most people are less experienced posting on Google My Business (Google Business Profile). What are some tricks for making sure that you’re not just posting, I mean posting’s fine, we want to start there, but how can you make a post really juicy?

David (05:17):
I would say being able to come up with a good offering, right? Everybody offers replacing the roof, getting your gutters clean, getting your house cleaned, but what offer do you have? What makes you stand out different than your competitors? So you could be running a post or posting an update, being able to do a giveaway, right? A free furnace for veterans or elderly people in need. Those are good things to be able to post about, or let’s just say it’s a community event that you’re sponsoring, and you’re offering a discount on your services. Something like that is really good information to be able to put out there that will be able to attract a local presence into your community.

Katie (06:03):
Posts come up in what’s called search justification, so if you ever searched something online and you’ll notice a few of the words are bolded, that’s search justification. Earlier, you were talking about maps, and on the map, sometimes there’ll be a little symbol and a note. A lot of times, it’s a review or something from the website. It also will hold posts for search justification. So I love to put in my posts a lot of relevant content. Don’t put just content for content’s sake, but a lot of relevant content. I also say that Google Business Profiles, one of the last places where keyword stuffing can be encouraged in some cases, because if someone’s looking specifically for a business that works with veterans, if you have that post and it’s an active post, it’ll come up in search justification. It’ll help you rank.

Adam (06:48):
So if you’re really trying to hammer a certain part of town, you could say you could be even more hyperlocal and say, Keswick, Virginia Gutter Cleaning Services. Is that what you’re talking about?

Katie (06:58):
A hundred percent

David (06:59):
A thousand percent.

Katie (07:00):
A thousand percent. Heck yeah.

Adam (07:02):
Yep. Interesting. Okay. Both of you have mentioned not letting your competitors screw up your posting, but what about clients? So, how do you get clients into the equation? Because I experienced this several months ago, where I learned that you could do the Q&A, where clients could ask a question, and then you could answer it. Is that useful?

Katie (07:21):
So it’s not necessarily a ranking factor, but if a customer is looking for someone who offers emergency services and they see, “Hey, do you offer emergency services?” and you answer, “Yes, we do,” you’re more likely to get that conversion.

Adam (07:30):
So it’s better for customer experience.

Katie (07:33):
Correct.

Adam (07:33):
Got it. Okay.

Katie (07:34):
I will tell you the biggest thing for customers to me, though, is those reviews, and one of the advantages we have as small businesses is leaning into that. I think it’s really hard for most contractors to ask for things. I think most contractors are problem solvers. Oh, your gutters are a mess. I’ll fix that. Oh, your electricity’s out. I’ll fix that. We’re fixers by nature. We’re helpers and doers. It’s really hard for contractors to ask for things, but if you ask every time for a review, you’ll get the reviews, and it’s to me, I think, the most powerful part about Google Business Profile.

David (08:08):
And just to back that point up with the reviews, it’s not only just getting the reviews or getting five-star reviews. If you can get your customers to be descriptive with those reviews, Google looks for keywords inside of those reviews, so not just Adam did a great job, but Adam, and then they state your business name, where you’re located, what service it was.

Katie (08:31):
And it comes up in that search justification exactly like that. I was going to ask you a question. Do you have a sense of how many reviews you should be getting?

David (08:37):
Yeah, I’d say being able to set that, how many jobs that you do per week, and then if you divide that by half, I mean if you could just get half or a little less than a little less than that, that’s going to be able to make a significant difference inside of your business and how you’re coming up on maps too as well, because at a certain point, if your competitors are doing an exponentially good job with reviews, you may be trying to play catch up for a really long time if you’re sitting at 120 and they’ve eclipsed 600.

Adam (09:11):
So I really want to talk about ranking factors here because that’s really was what it comes down to. And so what are some of those ranking factors? What are they and how do our listeners turn the knob on those so to speak?

Katie (09:26):
I’ll start by saying, Google obviously does not ever share its ranking factors. So whenever you hear an expert like one of us talking about ranking factors, it’s either from forums, studies, or personal experience about five things you should really be doing to help your ranking. One is your name must match your legal entity name. I think that’s one I see a lot of people trying to get queued in and end up getting flagged. If you want to have your services in your name and you don’t have your services in your name, you can solve for this with a DBA or a fictitious name, depending on the state you’re in. But your name is a huge ranking factor. Your location settings and areas you serve are a ranking factor, reviews. They have come out and acknowledged reviews in three forms: relevance, consistency, and recency. So don’t just run out and get a whole bunch of reviews and be like, Oh, my problem solved.

(10:18):
It has to be consistent. It has to be relevant to your service. So it can’t be like, my boy, Jimmy is the greatest. Please go out and use his business. They want to see it relevant to the business. And then consistent, making sure you’re doing it all the time, and recent. So they’re looking at, did I get a bunch of reviews two years ago? Is that business still in business? Those are probably three of my top ones. I think the other ones that I always tell people to look at is making sure that you’re getting content, fresh content, photos, images, and how you tag those photos. I know it’s a controversial one. Those are some of the ones I always make sure people are doing just to cover the basics.

David (10:52):
No, I would totally agree with that. The basics is if you could just not do anything else, make sure you do those things. And consistency is the key with profile updates too as well.

Adam (11:03):
What about service categories, David? What about service categories, the order of those services, rank, all that kind of stuff.

David (11:09):
So I’m glad you brought that up. So service categories are the huge importance, especially depending on what the priority of your business is. So let’s just say you do pressure washing and gutter cleaning, but what is more important to you? You may be more focused on getting gutter cleaner leads rather than pressure washing leads. So you may make your primary service category that, and then the secondary would be pressure washing. So you want to make sure that you identify what’s important inside of your business to you, and then make that the primary category, and then the secondary categories can be added in afterwards. Now, if you’re a seasonal contractor, those things could be switched around. So let’s just say you run an HVAC business, so in the summertime, you would want to put an air conditioning contractor in the wintertime, you want to put a heating contractor, and those things are going to be really important for your business to be able to get that and maximize that visibility.

Adam (12:11):
Katie, David, this is a great conversation. I’m going to pause for just a moment to talk about Jobber. A lot of your clients are home service pros, and so they are in the trades, they’re doing work at people’s homes. What do you see between your clients that are using a software like Jobber versus they’re just using pen and paper, Google sheets, these random things

Katie (12:30):
Besides night and day, and I mean that sincerely. It is a marked difference. I don’t know how people using pen and paper, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully at all. We all started there, but how you know what your KPIs are. I don’t know how they even know real booking rates. How do you measure anything if you don’t have software and tools in place? I have also seen it make marked differences in the success of a business. Everybody who’s ever put software in, like Jobber, in my experience, it’s paid itself off unbelievably quickly, and then some skyrocketing their growth.

David (13:02):
Yeah, I’ve seen customers lose track of their notes. Not being able to have that customer’s information using software like Jobber allows more transparency and more potential business growth. But things left on the table. I always say, you’re leaving something on the table if you don’t have that information into a CRM or a system where you can follow up with a customer, reengage with them if they are still going through their buying decision, is super important. Now you’re able to cultivate that relationship and keep track of things moving along in the pipeline.

Adam (13:37):
You can’t do any automated follow-up on pen and paper, so I’ve never met anyone who started using Jobber and then was like, “Oh, I wish I’d never done this.” It’s always a good decision. So you need Jobber. New users can get an exclusive discount by going to Jobber.com/podcastdeal and starting using Jobber today.

(13:58):
What about photos? So I know that you can post your own photos. I think there’s a couple of different ways you can post photos in Google Business Profile, which is kind of annoying to me. You can do an update, you can just add hundreds of photos all at once. There’s different ways of doing it. Is there any kind of strategy, and how to actually post a photo?

Katie (14:17):
Oh, I have a controversial take on this. That’d be interesting to see what you think, David, but so the things you just mentioned are two different things. You can go in and post an update post an offer that goes to a different spot than just when you upload your photos. I have done this for clients and done this with clients multiple times, and actually seen it work, but I love renaming the photos with relevant content that I’m loading. So, gutter cleaning near Charlottesville, gutter cleaning in Roanoke, adding that information I have seen actually help a business.

Adam (14:49):
But that’s controversial?

Katie (14:51):
Everyone says, Oh, don’t bother to rename the photos. It doesn’t do anything. I’ve literally seen it do it. We had a contractor in Vail, Colorado. He spent time posting his photos with different versions of Vail and his business in it, and sure enough, he began to just dominate Vail. Could be a coincidence. So we did it again in another area, and we did it again, and since then we’ve just done it. Worst case scenario, you spend an extra few minutes renaming the photos. Best case scenario, it does help, but overall, photos is, I always joke that Google’s like a fat kid. It loves to get fed, so let’s give it as many sweets as we can. So I love to get that content on the fight and their site, and they love, love, love photos.

David (15:29):
Yeah, I a thousand percent agree with that based on—not to try to get too technical—the Google API documentation leak back in June stated that if you really looked and scanned through that documentation, that is a ranking factor. Geo-tagging photos, keywords, and photos will have a significant impact on your business.

Adam (15:54):
The photos that are displaying on the page, is there a way to manipulate those so that the photo you want shows up first? I’ve always wondered this. Is there a way to make sure that I would call it a banner image, but there’s always a big one, and then the smaller one, and then a bunch of little ones?

Katie (16:11):
It’s the map. There is now one you can designate as your logo, which is probably what’s popping up on the big one when it comes to just photos in it. Google’s trying to rank those with what they think is going to do well and some recency. I will tell you, there’s the thumbs up feature, and I have seen that if you can get enough people to just thumbs up a photo, Google starts to go, oh, people like this photo. And it doesn’t take a lot because no one uses it. So you just get a couple of thumbs up, and it does kind of help.

David (16:37):
When you’re posting, I think jobs and trying to shuffle things around. If you could do a before and after photo, I think that is really good for Google and also good for customers, too, because now they can see that, hey, this problem is similar to what I have going on inside my house. Now we don’t want the absolutely crazy as the craziest befores, but if you can give an example of here’s what we can do, posting it on Google, the before and after.

Katie (17:08):
And people, of all of the photos, I think that we see rank, it’s always the team pics. I don’t know if people are using it like Tinder in some towns and looking through their contractors, figure out who they want to date. But anytime you have those team photos, people absolutely love those photos, and they do really well.

Adam (17:25):
Yeah, everybody loves to see faces, and yeah. So I have a question. Labor Day is coming. I get an email from Google saying, Are you guys open on Labor Day? Does Google monitor that to see if you’re engaged? And so if you update your hours, does that help? Is that a ranking factor?

Katie (17:41):
Hours is an acknowledged ranking factor.

Adam (17:43):
Okay.

Katie (17:43):
Yep. And it’s one of the few that actually came out and just straight recently acknowledged. If you have, and this is probably one of my biggest pet peeves, if you are a contractor and you close at five, people, oh, I close at five, well, you’re not going to show up anymore. So customer gets home, they pull into their driveway, and there’s a gutter hanging, get homes from work, there’s a gutter hanging off, they want to solve it right then and there. They go to Google, they type you, and they don’t see you because you set your hours to close at five. If somebody can answer the phone, I would strongly recommend you have your hours set to when that phone can be answered. If you’re using any kind of after-hours, set it to 24 hours. They’re free leads if you can push it. Otherwise, it is definitely a ranking factor. If you don’t fill out the holidays, it’ll say holiday hours may affect this business, so it may or may not be open, kind of thing. If people are picking between you and someone else and they see that and theirs are definitely open, yours might be open again, you’re probably going to lose out. So I am a huge advocate of updating your hours and really pushing it to the limit

Adam (18:43):
So this might be a little controversial, too. So I did that for a long time. I set my hours 24 hours a day, and I had a call answering service, answer the phone at midnight whenever the time was, and after a while, I got a hunch that people calling that time of night were a bit surprised in my industry to get someone on the phone. They would rather just leave a voicemail and then just get a call back the next morning. So because we aren’t competing really strongly with other competitors for gutter leads, I just made 24 hours, but then just have ’em go to voicemail and I was afraid that Google might ding me for that be, oh, well you’re saying you’re open, but no one’s answering the phone. So I would say to our listeners, if you and you guys can tell me this totally, totally terrible idea, but if our listeners aren’t in a strongly competitive market, they can probably get away with not answering their phone even if they’re open. But if you are in a competitive market, especially with HVAC, plumbing, and some of the emergency services, then that’s probably a bad idea.

David (19:37):
I totally agree. Yeah, if you’re an emergency service and you’re not open at that time, the customer could leave a voicemail, but they may be expecting you to come out that night. If you’re doing emergency plumbing, that might be a kind of sticky situation, right? Oh, I called and nobody got back to me, and we know people love to leave bad reviews. If you’re able to get back to them quickly through answering service and just letting them know that, Hey, we took down your information, somebody will be in contact with you, maybe the next morning. That kind of puts their mind at ease, at least like, Hey, I called and somebody actually picked up.

Adam (20:20):
Yeah, okay. Let’s talk about insights because under your Google Business Profile account, you have all these data points, all this insight data that you can use to really grow your business and all that kind of stuff. So what are some of those insights that you guys like to rely on, and what should our listeners be looking at first as they start maximizing out?

David (20:38):
Yeah, I love to be able to look at the searches, what people are searching for. At the end of each month, Google will give you about a list of 10 or so keywords or phrases that people have typed in to be able to find your business on Google Maps. That’s really helpful. We talked about earlier keywords and using keywords in your business description and updates. So being able to receive that data and have that knowledge is really helpful. Being able to look at the calls, how many calls you’re receiving each month from your Google Business Profile, and then also too, how many website clicks are you getting as well, and then being able to look at that data and keep track of it so that you know that if the seasonality is going to change month over month, year over year, be able to capture that data to see if your profile is really growing and you’re getting more customers out of your Google Business Profile.

Katie (21:32):
Controversial take, I think the reporting sucks. I think it’s poor reporting. I agree with what you said, looking at it for search terms and things can be insightful, but I don’t think anything beats your own reporting, and in our world, it’s how much did I get that phone to ring? How many jobs did I book? I think their reporting leaves a lot to be desired, and there’s other places to get that. That’s a little bit more Google Analytics, GA4 is a great spot to see website visitors and traffic coming from it, things like that. But I agree. I think if you’re going to look at that for anything, it’s really those search terms are really helpful. And then am I growing or am I not? And even there, I give a small pause because they’ve, in the course of my time, a Google Business Profile have had several drops in reporting where reporting just stops working for a few days, and unless you know that that happened, it can give you kind of misfires, but your point is well taken. I think that looking for some of those search trends is great. I’m just a little leery about how much I lean into those reports.

Adam (22:31):
Google likes to keep their cards close their chest. I think their insights are elementary, but for most of our listeners, it’s a great place to start. So I want to switch gears a little bit. Some of our listeners legitimately don’t know how to log in to Google Business Profile. It’s not as easy or as simple or straightforward as logging into, in my opinion as say Facebook. You just go to Facebook, you log in, but Google’s a little different. It’s just slightly different. And so I’d like for you guys to say, how do our listeners go about doing that? Because in my view, it’s changed a little bit over the years, so how do our listeners go into their business profile account?

Katie (23:07):
Well, there’s two ways that I’m familiar with going into the Business Profile account. The easiest one when you’re looking for a URL is just business.google.com. If you type in business.google.com and you have to be logged in with the user that’s on the account, and normally, if you look at your website, in the top right corner is a little picture. If that’s the user that’s logged into the account, business.google.com will get you there. The other way is you can search your own business. I find that way to be more confusing for a lot of contractors, so I still use the old school business, www business.google.com, URL to get into it. That’s probably the easiest. I think the biggest challenge I see a lot is especially the small, they don’t have ownership of that Google Business Profile.

Adam (23:49):
Oh my gosh, okay, let’s go there.

Katie (23:51):
That’s one I see a lot too.

David (23:52):
I totally agree. A lot of times they’re looking for something that they don’t have access to.

Adam (23:57):
So, how do they fix that?

David (23:59):
They have to request ownership access from whoever created the profile. That could be a former employee or a former marketing agency or the current marketing agency. You should always have ownership of that profile.

Katie (24:13):
Yep. Interesting. I always say it’s like your sister’s cousin’s next door neighbor’s uncle was taking an internship on social media and helped you set up an account, and now you don’t know how to get it. It’s pretty simple to request. The ownership agencies cannot take your Google Business Profile hostage. If they have ownership for whatever reason and you request it, they have seven days by Google’s regulations to turn that over to you. I will give you just one real quick tip, and I cannot recommend this enough. support.google.com is one of my favorites. I use it all the time, still every single day, support.google.com. If you scroll down the page, there’s a whole section to Google Business Profile, and it has all the latest and greatest updates. It puts the announcements out there. If you have questions, there’s a whole knowledge base out there.

Adam (25:00):
That’s great. Yeah, what you guys just explained describes my sister-in-law in Texas, she has two or three different Google Business Profiles. She doesn’t really have access to any of them. They point to random websites. It’s a mess, and I didn’t really know that was possible until she told me about this a few weeks ago. I was like, man, I’m not really sure how to fix that for you, but yeah, so if our listeners don’t have access, the first thing they need to do is go get ownership of their account. That’s really good.

Katie (25:24):
Sounds like those might’ve been stolen though, if they’re going to a different website.

Adam (25:27):
I think it was an uncle’s, cousin’s sister

Katie (25:29):
Yeah, I got it. Yeah. Okay, good.

Adam (25:31):
Guys, this has been a great episode. Thanks for all your insights. I’m going to try to break it down to three actual items here. Number one is with your Google Business Profile, you want to make sure that you’re changing your service categories so that they’re in the right order, primary, secondary, and changing it for seasonality, heating in the winter, cooling in the summer, that kind of stuff. Number two is reviews. They need to be consistent, relevant, and recent. Just get reviews, get reviews, get reviews. And third is you need to monitor your account, be in your account regularly to make sure there aren’t any unauthorized edits from your competitors, changing your phone number, this kind of stuff. Make sure you’re in your account, active in your account. That’s going to be how you drive leads in your business. Guys, any final thoughts here, David? Any final tip for the listeners?

David (26:14):
Make sure you have all your city categories or areas you serve, categories listed. A lot of times, I see Google Business Profiles and they just have one location listed, and that’s usually where the office at the primary location is at and they miss out on all the other locations that they do service.

Katie (26:33):
For me, I think my big tip would be one of the ones that you just said, you should be logging into it regularly. I know we’re super busy and we have a lot of things on our plate, 10 minutes once a week to go in and touch that account. Make sure you’re updating everything, responding to those reviews, adding any photos from the previous week. It will pay its time off for sure, with a phenomenal return on investment.

Adam (26:53):
Yeah, absolutely. Katie, thanks for being here. How do people find out more about you?

Katie (26:56):
Katie Donovan with CAMP Digital. You can check us out by going to campdigital.com, or you can email me directly at [email protected].

David (27:06):
[email protected] is my email. You can go to contractorrhino.com directly to the website, and if you want to reach out to us on LinkedIn, it’s Contractor Rhino, or my LinkedIn account is David Brooks.

Adam (27:21):
Well, you guys are helping your clients get leads and marketing is the most important thing about business because you don’t have leads, you don’t have business, so keep it up. Good work. Thanks for being here.

(27:29):
Thank you, and thanks for listening. I hope that you heard something today that will make your business profile better, more robust, and more compelling. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me at adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to ’em.