Products – The Powerful GMB Feature You Need to Start Using (NEW! Animated Image Hack)

Google My Business Products were officially rolled out in 2019, but many businesses are still missing out on this powerful feature. In today’s Whitespark Weekly episode, Darren explains why the Products feature is an untapped goldmine and why you need to start using this feature on your GMB listing.

Video Transcript

Hey there, Darren from Whitespark.ca. Did you know that Google My Business has a feature for promoting your products and services, that’s even better than Google Posts and hardly any businesses are using it? In today’s video, I’m going to show you the Products feature and why it is awesome.

I love the Products feature because it has excellent visibility on your Business Profile. But shockingly, hardly any businesses are taking advantage of this awesome feature. Many of you will remember that Google Posts used to show up really prominently on your business listing. When Posts first came out, they were awesome. They took up this great space on your listing right near the top, it would just be like name, address, phone number, and then Google posts. They were great. Everyone was so excited, they were there promoting their products, their services, offers, specials, whatever. So it’s kind of like Facebook posts. And they had great visibility, because they were front and center on your business listing. 

Well, in September 2018, they removed Posts from that nice placement right under the business info and dropped them way down to the very bottom of the business profile. Joy Hawkins posted about this and you can see here that it’s just lost all its visibility. It was a bit of a sad trombone at the time, people were not too happy about that. A lot of people even question should I bother doing Posts anymore? Well, it turns out that they had to move Posts because they were making space for something even better: the Products section. Shortly after this move, Products started appearing in beta for many businesses. 

Businesses are able to use the Product section to feature their products and services and take a look at where products show up, right in that same spot. You can see that on listings that are taking advantage of this feature. 

Here’s Milwaukee Furniture of Chicago, and they’re taking advantage of this feature. Here it’s showing me some sofas, you can scroll through them and see the different products, you can click ‘View all’ and see a full breakdown of all these different types of products that they’ve added to their listing. Wonderful. 

Honestly, if you’re trying to feature your products and services, this is even better than Posts. Here’s another example of how it shows up in the Local Finder too. It doesn’t just appear when someone searches for your brand name. If someone is doing a keyword search like ‘Chicago auto dealers’, and your listing has these products, it really helps to highlight these products and make them stand out because they show up really prominently in the local finder as well. 

But apparently not too many people got the memo about the launch of the products feature and it has been left sadly empty on the vast majority of listings. Allie Margeson did a fantastic presentation about this at our last Whitespark Local Search Summit, she researched over 800,000 listings and looked at all kinds of feature adoption, what kind of features were these listings using and Products actually, were not being used very much at all.

In our study, we found that on average, only 4% of businesses have products listed on their listing.

Only four percent! That means 96% of you are missing out. You should take advantage of this feature because it has excellent visibility on the business profile. It can definitely drive additional views, sales and business. I suspect that one reason why it has such low adoption is because it’s called Products. People think – well, whatever, I’m a plumber, I’m not really selling pipes and physical products. I’m mostly selling my services. 

But Google’s totally fine with you using this feature to actually present your services or specific offers. It doesn’t mean only physical products. That could have been part of the barrier for a lot of people where they think – oh, well, I don’t sell any products, so I’m not going to take advantage of this feature. 

Well, I’m here today to tell you that this feature can definitely be used for everything that you want to promote. It’s a great opportunity to get in there. 

Services As Products

Here’s one of our clients, a criminal defense lawyer, and they have featured the different types of law that they practice. So different types of legal services, impaired driving, sexual offences, drug offences. We’ve made products where each of those services.

It’s a pretty obvious one for auto dealers. Here’s another client, King of Cars, they feature all of their hottest products that they want to move. This is a used car dealership so they’re trying to move cars, and so we use the product section for that. 

CosaFina is a retail shop. So it makes a lot of sense for retail, but you don’t only have to feature physical products even if you’re a retail store. For this business, we really wanted to highlight, you know, in the pandemic, that they’re doing curbside pickup, that you can shop online. You can really use the product section to feature whatever you want. 

Products Feature is Dependent on Primary Category

Now, it’s worth noting that not all categories in Google My Business get Products, there are some categories if it’s set as your primary category, that you’re not going to have this feature available in Google My Business. 

Categories that do not get the Products feature include:

• Hotels, 
• Vacation rentals, 
• Camps, 
• Conference centers, 
• Casinos, 
• Cannabis shops, 
• Gun shops, or 
• Adult entertainment. 

So those categories we know, they don’t have Products. If you’re in one of those categories, well leave this video right now stop watching, this doesn’t apply to you. 

Products Get High Visibility in Search Results

As I mentioned, the main reason that I love GMB Products is the placement on the listing, it just has high visibility that can really help to promote your products, your services, any special offers. It shows up great if someone has completed a branded search. It also shows up really well if someone is doing a keyword search. So if they search ‘Edmonton Criminal Lawyers’ and start clicking through the results here. So like this one, now they have products queued up, but this one here has no products – sorry, not calling. 

But you know, the businesses that do have products, it really stands out, you can see them nicely in the Local Finder. It really helps your business to stand out and drive additional visibility to your listing. It’s kind of like free ads on the internet. People are paying a fortune for Google Ads. All you suckers are out there paying thousands of dollars a month on Google Ads. And Google My Business has given you this free ad spot that hardly any businesses are taking advantage of. This is a great opportunity, so definitely get in there. 

How to Add a Product

Okay, so let me show you how you can add Products to your listing, 

1. Log in to Google My Business.
2. On the left side, you’ll see the Products section. If you don’t have any products yet, you can just click ‘Get started’. It’s gonna bring up a little ‘Add a product section.’ 
3. You’re going to select a photo. In this case, my product is going to be a service. This is an electrician’s business. Add title: Residential Electrician Services. 
4. Next, you’re going to create a category. So I’ll go with Residential Services for the category. 
5. Set a price, if it’s a single priced product, you actually know how much it costs, then you can specify it. But if it’s a service, you can actually specify a range. (Or leave it blank). 
6. Add a product description. 
7. Choose a call to action. So I’ll say learn more and then link it to their website. 
8. Then click save. 

Now I’ve added a Product to my listing. Typically it can take up to 24 hours for these to go live, I don’t know if there’s an algorithmic or human moderation process process but it typically takes a little bit of time they don’t they don’t usually go live immediately. 

Products Hack 

Okay, now I have a tip that I think will blow your mind. It kind of blew my mind. I’ve never seen anyone talk about this. I think it’s new. I just discovered it when I was playing around with this. I wanted to see if I could add a Product and I wanted to see if we can add a video because you can add videos to Google posts, so I thought maybe it’ll accept a video in products. Invalid file type selected. All right, it doesn’t like videos. 

What about GIFs? Maybe they’ll take a GIF So I got a little gift here. Let’s give this one a shot. Again, invalid file type. 

What if I tried to trick Google and I said save my GIF as a JPEG? Success. Look at that. You can add GIFs to your products, as long as you rename them to JPEG.

You can add GIFs as your Product image! So why would you do that? What are the benefits of that? Well, let me show you. If you had a little bit of animation, wow, wouldn’t that make your listing stand out? Here, these are the examples I was playing around with on the Whitespark listing. Look at the way it shows up on the listing, very prominent, it really stands out. 

Now, you’ve got to be careful. You don’t want to make it like the blink tag in HTML from back in the early GeoCities days. You want to keep it subtle. And so how would you do this for a real business? I think we figured it out. So this is one of our clients, Ogilvie LLP. We added real subtle little eye catchy animations for the different types of law that they practice. I think that this really works well. And it makes our listing just stand out a little bit more. Particularly if you’re looking through the local finder results, something that catches your eye like that, I think can be really valuable. So that’s my mind blowing tip of the day. 

Well, I hope I have convinced you that using Products is a good thing. I hope you like my renaming a GIF to a JPEG tip.

I encourage you to check that out. And as always, please subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications so you never miss a video. Thanks, everybody. See you next time.