Ultimate Google My Business Guide and Masterclass for Accounting Pros
Being proactive does not just mean being able to deliver your services well. It also means creating opportunities to make dream clients more aware of how you can help them grow fast. To help you out, here’s the ultimate Google My Business masterclass for accounting, bookkeeping, and tax professionals.
When you’re looking for a service provider, it’s natural to always ask questions like “How do I know that I can trust you?” or “How do I know that it’s a good deal?” While they can convincingly reassure you to just trust them, it’s wiser if you take the time to check and evaluate the feedback of their past clients.
Even if you’re in startup mode or a solopreneur, you can still generate reviews. When you deliver a positive result for someone, there’s a way to ensure that they will be willing to share that great experience with others. Knowing how to do this makes it much easier to attract the right people to your firm.
Online reviews are the digital equivalency of goals. This fact will be the guiding lesson for you from now until you are in possession of your dream firm. Let’s dive into how you can masterfully use Google My Business to make sure that you get positive reviews for your business and so much more.
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What Is Google My Business?
Google My Business is a free tool that lets you manage how your business appears on Google Search and Maps. It allows you to increase the online visibility of your business, generate and respond to client reviews, upload pictures or media, learn how people search for your business, and more.
This tool can boost the frequency at which you or your business is mentioned online, so you can increase your “level of proliferation” or your ability to easily spread a message to your target market. With a lot of people talking about you online, you will be more likely to get calls from prospective dream clients. Setting up your Google My Business is so easy that most people don’t even need a guide for it. Get it setup once, keep it running, and reap many of the benefits associated with it. However, many people who are already using it are still missing out on a lot of tips and techniques that can drive more results to their businesses. If you want to be in the know, here’s how you can set things up and get the most out of Google My Business today:
Google Your Business to Know if You Already Have an Existing Listing
The first thing that you want to do is search for your business on Google. Especially if you have been operating for quite some time now, there’s a good chance that you somehow already have a business listing. This lets you know whether you are going to add or claim your Google My Business listing.
Add or Claim Your Google My Business Listing
To add or claim your listing, go to the Google My Business site and sign in with your business Gmail account. Then, you will be directed to Find and manage your business page to claim your listing if it’s already on Google. If not, click Add your business to Google and follow the instructions carefully.
If your business appears on the search results, simply click on it. To then claim your existing business profile, click Manage now. At this point, take some time to correct or update your business information.
If you clicked Add your business to Google earlier, you will need to fill out the needed information, such as your business name, category, and contact details. Moreover, you will be asked to drag a Google Maps marker onto the exact spot of your business location.
For both cases, the final step is to verify your connection or ownership over your business listing. Most people will only have the Postcard by mail option available to them. In rare instances, Google may allow some eligible businesses to finish the verification step through their email or phone.
Update Your Business Hours
Not updating your business hours online can give your prospective or current clients a bad experience. If they come to your office thinking that you’re supposedly open then, learn otherwise, they will be disappointed and discouraged to come back. This way, you can lose potential dream clients.
To update your business hours, click Info on the left panel of your Google My Business dashboard. Then, click the pen icon to edit your regular operating hours for a given week. Finally, you can use the drop-down arrows to change your opening and closing times for each day.
To schedule your opening hours on special events or holidays, you can edit your Special Hours just below your regular working hours. You can either pick a holiday from the list or click Add new date to manually enter a date. Setting these up will tell Google to automatically display your working hours online on those special dates, so your clients can avoid wasted trips.
Fill in the Health and Safety Measures That Your Business Is Taking
By filling in the health and safety measures that your business is taking on Google My Business, you can make your clients feel more at ease when you need them to physically come to your office. This also lets them know whether or not you require them to wear masks to gain entry.
Bookmark Your Share Review Form Link
If you want to take away only one thing from this article, it should be that Google My Business has a Share review form. This feature is what enables you to efficiently get reviews from your clients. It gives you a shareable short link that immediately loads the page for writing a review on your business listing.
On your Google My Business dashboard, you can find the Share review form button inside the Get more reviews section. You can then either copy and paste the link or share it directly via Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, or email.
If you want to be more efficient in asking for reviews from your clients, you should create a bookmark for the Share review form link. To do so in Google Chrome, simply launch the link and click the star button on the right side of your website URL. Customize the bookmark name to make it easier to find.
Bookmarking this link ultimately removes the need for you to spend more time logging into your Google My Business and navigating your dashboard just to obtain a short link for your clients.
Bookmark the Links to Your Business Profile on Google Search and Google Maps
Google My Business also provides quick access links to view your business profile in Google Search or Google Maps. These make it easy for you to check how well your listing looks online, so you should bookmark these too. You can also share these links with clients struggling to find your business profile.
Fill Out All of the Information That You Can
Fill out all of the information that you possibly can on Google My Business. Aside from your usual business info, you can also add your appointment link, short name, and “attributes.” These will help Google aggregate your data better which will make things easier for your clients.
If you want action buttons like Reserve or Call Now to work on Google My Business, you should provide an appointment link in your business profile. To replace messy URLs, you can also set short names which will be used to distinguish or customize your quick access links.
If you want to make your listing stand out better, you will want to look into how “attributes” can help you. These let you spotlight your business amenities and service inclusions through keywords that your clients are more likely to look out for. Taking the time to tweak this information section can help increase your visibility on search rankings.
By filling in specific details such as these, you can give your clients a less tedious online experience. They won’t have to contact you for such trivial matters, so you can focus more on other high-level activities. If you make things easier for them, you can also expect good long-term working relationships with your dream clients.
Create Posts Out of Reviews
Inside Google My Business, there is an internal posting platform where you can write about your offers, events, and updates. To keep the presence of your business fresh and encourage more people to try out your services, you will want to create posts out of public reviews.
Posts out of public reviews can give more life to your profile. Having the faces and quotes of clients who had positive experiences with your services can give your business more credibility. If you regularly publish these kinds of posts, more and more people will eventually reach out to you.
You can also add Call to Action buttons, such as Learn More, Sign Up, Buy, Order Online, Book, Visit, and Call Now, at the end of your posts. Using these will make it clear and easy for your prospective clients to do the next thing that you want them to do.
For creating posts, you will want to set a frequency of at least once per week. This may sound hard, but you can learn how to keep this up with the help of experienced professionals and practice.
Respond to Your Reviews
When someone takes some time away from their business to share how you were able to help them, make sure that you reply to their review. Doing this not only strengthens client retention but also shows your prospective clients that you truly are proactive and someone they will want to do business with.
Upload Photos
The human brain inherently prefers images over text, so you should take the time to upload photos onto your Google My Business profile. You can add a logo, cover photo, and business photos to make lasting impressions on your prospective and present clients.
While you can add photos to your posts, these do not end up in your gallery. The ones that do are the business photos, which are meant to highlight the features of your business and win your dream clients. Google recommends business owners to have exterior, interior, and team photos on their profile.
View Insights About Your Business
Google My Business Insights allows you to know how your clients find your business listing on Google Search and Maps. These also inform you of their actions on your listings or profile, which can give you a better understanding of your target market to be able to make better business decisions.
You can use Insights to track how popular your business is with your current and prospective clients. If you’re into in-depth analyses of reports, you can also bulk download a spreadsheet that summarizes all its useful findings to help improve your business listings.
Create Your Free Website
If you are paying for a website that isn’t making you rank on the first page of Google, you should consider cutting that off then just create your free website with Google My Business. This will allow you to reallocate your wasted resources on marketing, so you can increase your profitability.
If you want to know more about creating and even customizing your free Google My Business website, check out our previous article on how to build a top-tier accounting website for free.
What Should You Do Now?
Set up your Google My Business account now if you still don’t have one. You don’t want to miss out on increasing your visibility online, sharing fresh updates about your business, getting more reviews of your services, and interacting with your clients.
All of these make it much easier to attract the right people to raise their hands and initiate having quality conversations with you. If you want to get more results in no time, we can help you with our expertise, wisdom, and experience in the accounting, bookkeeping, and tax space.
If you want to make more money, you need to focus on three things: expanding your networks, having the right mindset, and improving your skill sets in the industry. With quality coaching and training, you can significantly improve your skill sets and produce more tangible results that can increase your value and worth.
