Maximize Your Google Map
Peter Brissette • November 15, 2017
Hey, everybody. This is your monthly marketing message. Peter Brissette here. Just wanted to share with you some ideas around your Google Maps page, probably a few things you haven’t thought about or didn’t realize. I’m going to share my screen here with you, so that we can look at a couple of these important items.
When it comes to online reviews, the number one site that you want to get reviews on is going to be Google. How you know how many reviews you should have really is a matter of how many your closest competition has. Check out your competition and see what they have, and try to get more reviews than that.
There are quite a few (listings) with a number of different sites, we call them citations. They’re directory listings, or any place where there’s a website similar to Google, Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, Apple Maps, that has your business name, address, phone number, and usually your website as well. All of those need to be claimed and updated, but the most important is Google. There are a few things going on with the Google Maps page that I wanted to bring you up to speed on, and up to date on, as to what’s going on with that right now. So here on my screen you go to … on Google.com/business or business.google.com, and go to the dashboard for your page. You’ll have to be signed into your Gmail account associated with your Google Maps account.
One of the first things is the pictures and virtual tour. People really look at the pictures that are tied to your Google Maps account, so if you’re not adding pictures on a regular basis, that’s definitely something that you should be doing. You can also add the 360 degree virtual tours as well. That’s something that we’ve started doing for our clients. If you have some interest in that, please let me know. We’d be happy to help you out with that.
One thing people don’t realize, is that outside of Google Analytics, which is the normal Google Analytics for your website, there’s specific insights for your Google Maps page. The information that you have here is really tied around people that have searched through your page, and then people that have taken action. Have they visited your website? Have they requested directions? Have they tried to call you? That’s all interacting with your Google Maps page. It also shows photo views. It shows how many times your pictures were viewed, and then if there are similar businesses like yours, they kind of give you a comparison. And photo quality. I mean, I think all that’s kind of new there. They keep adding new stuff to this. Really good information. Direct customers that found your listing, searching for your business name, or discovered they were searching for your business category, and your page came up. Again, it’s reminding you here to post photos. The other thing that is new, is that you can actually post on the page now, and make a post. It’s fairly limited. You can add a picture, it’s 100 to 300 words. You can add a button so that it links to it, and you can put in the link here, so, “To learn more,” or, “Buy now,” or whatever it is that you’ve got, and you can post this to your page. It’s really kind of a new feature. Not a lot of people know about this, but definitely it’s another way to get more information out there about your business, so that people can find you when they’re searching for businesses in your category.
Another thing that I wanted to remind you about, is there is something called Google Contributor. I’m a Google Contributor, meaning I leave reviews for businesses, and I also recommend changes to their Google Maps page. If I see information that’s not correct, or Google will actually ask me questions about a business. Is this business kid friendly? Is this business got good parking? Is it expensive? What’s the price range? Google is always asking me these questions, and getting my feedback. There’s who knows how many people like me out there, that are doing that. You’re going to get requests to your Facebook business page … not Facebook … your Google Maps page from people asking you either questions, or recommending changes to your page, based on information that they believe is accurate. It’s another reason really to be checking this on a regular basis, and knowing what’s going on with your maps page, because there could be recommended changes that people are making to your page that you’re not aware of, and you should be.
The other thing that they’ve added here is this messaging functionality. Right now on your Google Maps page, when you pull up your Google Maps page, people can go to your website, they can get directions, or they can call you right from the Google Maps page. If they’re on the mobile device, they just hit the number, and the phone will dial. The other option that you can add, is the ability to let customers message you, basically meaning a chat app. So whatever chat app that they access and use, they’ll be able to chat with you. This is all done through SMS messaging through your mobile phone. If you want to be able to get messages from your Google Maps page directly to your phone, with questions and so forth from your customers, then this is a good way to do that.
You can check your reviews here as well, (which is something) you want to do, and you can also reply to the reviews. You can make sure your website link is up to date. (That’s a little feature that I’ve kind of looked into a little bit, where they want to basically offer you a way to build a separate website. I’d rather not have my website that connected to Google in that sense) Then of course, you want to make sure all your info is updated, current, accurate. Your hours, the location, business description, and all that. Then your pictures. If your pictures haven’t been updated, you don’t have a logo, other information, and you can really break these up. Interior, exterior, people working, people on your team, your basic identity. So your logo, that type of information, you want to make sure is all set up and good to go there.
That’s just a little bit I wanted to share here this month with your Google Maps page. If there’s something that you would need help with on that, again, we can help you with getting the 360 degree virtual tour set up for your business. If you’re a business location, we can do that for you. If you just need some help with getting your Google Maps page verified, or getting the information updated, be happy to help you with that as well.
That is your monthly marketing message. I hope you enjoyed it. Please let us know if you have questions, if we can support you in any way. Thank you, and have a great month.
Hey there everybody, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. I want to give you an update this month on email and website security, kind of a combination there. One of the things that we’ve noticed over the years is whenever you put an actual email address listed on a website, it usually just gets scraped by spam bots and AI now. And then that email gets used to send you spam. A lot of it can be fairly innocent, but in some cases, you can get a situation like this. Clients started to send me this email that they were getting, and it comes from [email protected] First sign, it’s probably not from us. We send from our dmdude.com email. But they start talking about support and due to one of the vendors that we use for some of our services, which our clients, you know, they don’t know that. So it’s kind of like, what is that? We always do a full SEO setup from the very beginning for all our clients as well, so it’s already been done. There’s nothing else to do anyway. Where they got this email and this information was basically just from the website itself. So we really highly recommend that folks use a form on the website versus just having your email address just sitting on the website, because it can get scraped and used for purposes like that. So we recommend, you know, have a contact form. Contact forms can get spam as well. And so we use, you know, Google’s got a tool for CAPTCHA to help limit the spam that can come in using CAPTCHA. So I’ve got a calendar there to book with, but I also have this basic contact form. It uses the CAPTCHA from Google to help prevent spam from coming in. It still does happen. It doesn’t prevent all of it, but it prevents the majority of it. But if you go through my website, you’re not going to see anywhere where it lists an email address, “Contact us at this email address.” So we recommend just using a form. For our clients, we’re just going to start changing that out and making those changes over time. And then the other thing where we get a lot of spam from as business owners, if you have a business email account, there’s this platform called Apollo that allows marketers to buy access to email lists. So what we recommend, and I’ll put this link in the blog post, is that you go to this link here where it says “Don’t sell my info,” and you can opt out your email address from being in their database. And that will help cut down on the number of spam emails that you might get from that. So to recap, this video is about your email address being actually on your website where it’s visible, or even if it’s a link there that says “click here to email” and then it opens up the email. We don’t recommend that either. We recommend that you use just a form on your website and not have your email address just listed on the website, because AI bots and other tools can scrape that off your website. You wind up in a database like this, and you wind up getting a lot more spam. And it can actually lead to things like this where you’re actually getting fraudulent emails, people trying to actually scam you out of money. So if you have questions about this, just put it in the comments where you see this, and I’m happy to take a look at your own website and make sure that you’ve got the right things in place for email security. Here is the link to Opt Out of Apollo Email Database - Click Here to Opt Out
Video Transcript: All right, hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I wanted to share with you something new about Google reviews that you want to be aware of. So Google now will allow users to update their profile, their name on their profiles, so they can be more anonymous. So they're not entirely anonymous, but if they want to use an initial on their last name or shorten their first name, you know, if it's Jennifer and they just want to put Jen or whatever, Dogmom1234. They can change that on their reviews. So that change here just recently was updated means a couple of things. I just wanted to go through this article real quick and talk about that. So what exactly changed in the review system? So Google now allows any user to set up custom display name and profile image, which will appear on all reviews, photos, videos, and contributions across maps and search. It's also retroactive to all the other reviews that they have left as well. So you don't need to have a different Google account to protect your identity. You can just update your profile information. So in practice, what this should mean is that customers can leave reviews under a nickname instead of their full name. All past, future Google Maps contributions, adopt the pseudonym, applies across Q&A, images, and videos. So Google still knows the account behind the review, only the public name is going to be different. So it should allow, in some industries, folks to be able to leave reviews where maybe in the past they haven't. For example, legal services. So in legal services, can you imagine if you were charged for a crime and your attorney helped you and kept you out of jail or whatever it was, and you went on to post, hey, I got charged with shoplifting. And thankfully, my attorney helped me out. You may not want to put your name on that and have it out there. So things like that, mental health is another big area, various medical or health care practices, a lot of health care practices, I think this could affect. Definitely addiction treatment and recovery, financial advisors, and some sensitive home services. The big question is, does this is, The Increase fake review risk. Most people don't think so. Again, this article is from taprocard.com. They certainly don't think so because it's still a real account. It's not like it's a fake account or something like that. So I think it's still going to produce good reviews, but it should increase the number of reviews. And that's really why this matters for business. You should be able to get more reviews. What you want is more frequent reviews, more recent reviews, and that will help build trust from potential customers. And even with all the AI hype and everything that's going on, it's going to help you with your SEO in maps and search, in particular from phones. So how do businesses adjust the review request strategy? How One thing that can be added when you're requesting reviews is to mention if you'd like extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name. And so that can be something that you add in there. I'm also going to put a link here in the post on how to change your Google display name so that you can see that and be able to offer that for your clients as well. So I just wanted to throw out this quick little update. If you have any questions about this, I want to talk about how your reviews are being managed right now. If you're using our services or someone else and would like to talk about that, please reach out. Thank you again, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Visit our website at dmdude.com. Here is the link to the original Post: https://taprocard.com/blogs/article/google-anonymous-reviews-update-2025 Here is a link that explains how to change your display name on google. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15294714?hl=en
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.