 Here's one thing that I think flies under the radar. It's Google My Business. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist here at Slam Agency, a digital first full service marketing agency designed to help you captivate, motivate, and inspire people to action through advertising. And today I wanna share with you how to get more online visibility using Google My Business. Now we all know about Google AdWords. We all know about SEO as ways to help people discover our pages and to appear more favorably in the search engine results pages. We know about social media as a way to drive awareness and to increase target lead generation. But here's one thing that I think flies under the radar. It's Google My Business. Now if you're a local business, you'll probably have a Google My Business account or page. And what you've probably done is you've gone to that page, you've filled out all of your information and you've done this for your local SEO so that you can appear in the map pack. So for instance, you'll know that you have a Google My Business page. If you go type in your business name and in that search result on the right hand side, you see a map that says website, directions. It's your business and it's links to your website. If you have that, then you have a Google My Business page and account and it's important for local SEO because it allows you to appear in the local SEO map pack or that Google Maps directory if you will. And here's one way that you probably aren't using Google My Business but that you should be. Google My Business post. A few years ago, Google released the capability for businesses to be able to post on their Google My Business page which appears in the search engine one post at a time. And okay, so what you do is you leave a post and it's out there and then it expires, then you gotta go back and post another one. It's not like social media where you can schedule this stuff out in advance but what we've found is that it does provide lots of visibility specifically in Google. If a competitor is consistently posting in and on their Google My Business page, then they're immediately gonna look more relevant and more up to date. So when someone types in your business and they see that you haven't had a Google review in a while, you haven't had a rating, you haven't posted anything, you're immediately gonna look dated, okay? As compared to your competitor who is posting these things. Okay, so these Google My Business posts, they last for seven days. They'll expire after seven days but you can post as many as you like knowing that just one at a time will be there in the Google results page. You can post today's special, you can post a community update, a current event, you can post a picture, you have up to 1500 characters that you can use and the best part is you can post a call to action. You can actually say, okay, go to this page, do this thing, call me, visit my online store. So if this is the first time you're hearing about this, maybe you don't have a Google My Business page and that's okay, let me tell you about Google My Business. Google My Business is a free service provided by Google to allow you to list your business in the search engines. So when I search for your business, you're gonna pop up, it's gonna let me click on your website, get directions to your physical location or click to call you, see your reviews, all of these good things. If you've ever gone to Google and said let me find barbers near me or pizza delivery near me, this all comes from the Google My Business platform, from the Google Maps functionality and these types of searches have increased drastically over the last six months. People wanna know what's near them and the way that you can tell the people that are searching that you're nearby is by getting a Google My Business page. You can also set your hours, your info, you can provide a virtual tour, you can invite people to your online store and most importantly you can manage Google reviews. Think of a review as a free advertisement. I would encourage you to figure out how to get people to leave Google reviews. Not only does it help you rank with local listings but it provides social proof to that potential customer looking to do business with you but they're just not quite sure. A rating, a five star rating, a positive review, these things are critical today, they're critical, they'll be critical tomorrow and these are important, you can manage them on your Google My Business page. So these are all things that if you don't have a Google My Business page, there's a link in the blog post, go there and get signed up. If you're not quite sure what to do, give us a call, we'll help you, we'll walk you through that and then once you're there, use Google My Business post. This is a secret that not many people are doing right now but we wanna get the word out because this is important, this is something that when they search your business name, you have an opportunity to provide a customized message via posting for your potential customers, for your community, for your audience. It's something that you definitely need to do and your search engine visibility will increase as a result of it. All right, so here's a couple of tips for your Google My Business post. Number one is set up a calendar. Google's not going to remind you and it's not something that you can actually schedule. So set up a calendar, just a reminder. So every seven days or so, if you're doing the seven-day thing, to get back there and to put something timely, custom, personal on your Google post. And then also, if you have a good offer, if it seems to work, reuse it. I mean, it's gonna expire after seven days but if you've been seeing a lot of business from that specific post, copy, paste, reuse. It's okay to reuse content, especially in this case. Remember, this isn't a social network. This is what they see when they Google your name. So set up a reminder and when it's working, don't reinvent it. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Use it, reuse it. If it's working, make it happen. All right, if you've enjoyed this show, let me know. Leave me a comment, send me a message. If you're listening on a podcast network, be sure to subscribe, rate and review. 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