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Miriam Ellis is a local SEO columnist and consultant. She has been cited as one of the top five most prolific women writers in the SEO industry. Miriam is also an award-winning fine artist and her work can be seen at MiriamEllis.com.
Engagements are always big news! Google thinks so, at least according to analysis of the Google API leaks which suggests that user behavior is a major ranking factor. You want the public engaging with and clicking on your digital assets as much as possible, and your Google Business Profile (GBP) is no exception.
Today, let’s look at a ton of ways you can optimize your GBP with the goal of increasing online searchers’ interactions and engagement with it.
Apparently, both a TV romcom and a military film have much to tell us about “The Rules of Engagement”, and your GBP can either be a source of love or conflict for your customers, depending on whether you are getting the basic building blocks of engagement right. Be sure that customers in a hurry are all able to access accurate information in these fields and features for a quick and successful transaction:
Though memorable characters in Jane Austen’s romantic novels are not fans of long engagements, you should be! Persuading potential patrons to spend enough time on your GBP to begin liking and trusting your brand is a smart strategy in an online world full of distractions, and I can’t think of a better way to engage limited attention spans than with video content.
91% of global internet users watch digital video on a weekly basis, and your local business has multiple Google Business Profile sections for serving this popular consumption trend. The most obvious is to post videos to the Photos tab of the New Merchant Experience (NMX) dashboard via which you manage your listing.
Get to know the GBP video guidelines here, but do take note of the recommendation of your videos being “up to 30 seconds long” and “up to 75 MB”. At first glance, you might take this to read that your videos can’t exceed half a minute in length, but as long as you keep the file size under 75 MB, Google appears to be okay with longer videos. Use a free video compressor like VEED to reduce file size if necessary. If you’ve never made a video before, check out the capabilities via a free trial of a product like Canva.
Meanwhile, your GBP Updates (formerly known as Posts) can contain videos to enhance engagement. Click the Add Update tab in your NMX to write posts that contain short video content:
Remember that visitors to your GBP are likely on the verge of deciding which local business to transact with, so try to focus Google Updates video content on topics that support sales. Showcase desirable inventory, special deals, and any policies or offers that would persuade a potential patron that your business is the best choice in town for what they need.
Finally, a third form of video content is based on your ability to engage reviewers. The potent little blue button on Google’s review form enables patrons to include not just images in their reviews, but also videos!
Huddle with your team to ideate ways in which you might encourage customers to film their experience with your brand, and include their video in their review.
It might be as simple as creating some in-store signage which lets guests know how much you would appreciate them getting out the old smartphone to document their visit with moving pictures. Or, perhaps there’s a strong visual component to your premises that could be further developed to entice filming. Maybe there’s a share-worthy before-and-after aspect of your services. And, maybe if your brand takes the time to showcase video-based reviews on your social media, it could encourage your most socially-engaged customers to add videos to their upcoming reviews in hopes of you making them more famous.
Bring your full creativity to acquiring binge-worthy GBP reviews with video.
Apparently, psychologists don’t have reliable statistics on the degree to which we all experience gamophobia – the fear of long-term commitments to something like marriage, but the advice I see given is similar to what is suggested for addressing most phobias. The first powerful step is always to acknowledge the fear, and this is something I’ve come to believe underpins how our society uses online local business reviews as a safeguard against making a mistaken commitment to a local business.
No one wants to partner up with a brand that has terrible customer service standards, and every review survey I’ve ever read has found that modern people read multiple reviews before choosing a local business for a transaction. While the significance of entering a marriage commitment would be obvious to most of us, commercial engagements also have a risks/benefits calculation, particularly in any your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) industries. Who wants to be swindled by a shady locksmith, get food poisoning from a dirty restaurant, or find themselves in the hands of an unethical medical practitioner?
Thus, we turn to reviews as a source of local wisdom and protection, and the more you can encourage your patrons to review you, the better you’ll ensure that your GBP contains content with which the public definitely wants to engage. Answer the following questions:
Whether it’s fair pricing, generous return policies, satisfaction guarantees, modes of accessibility, safety, or sanitary practices, try wording some of your review requests to specifically ask for mentions of factors that address and reduce fears. For example, some of the review requests for a restaurant might be worded:
We take pride in providing an immaculate seating area, running a spotless kitchen, and keeping our restrooms fresh. We would love your review to mention whether you found these parts of our premises to be beautifully clean and welcoming!
Just at the moment when a potential customer who has had food poisoning in the past is deciding whether they can trust your establishment for a safe and healthy meal, a well-worded review could move them past the fear of commitment and onto a satisfactory transaction.
And remember that reviews are not a monologue. They are a two-way conversation with your customers. Swiftly respond to all the reviews you receive, offering thanks for praise and apologies+solutions for complaints via the owner response function. There is no better GBP field for proving that your business is accessible, caring, active, responsible, professional, and trustworthy.
Adept owner responses not only win back unhappy customers, but prove to the public that you will treat them well if something goes wrong. And, importantly, seeing that you respond to customers’ sentiment is a great encouragement to new patrons to take the time to review you. If your brand doesn’t bother to respond to reviews, why should your customers bother to write them? Proactive management of owner responses is critical to both fostering and practicing GBP engagement.
One of the easiest competitive edges you can gain with your GBP is to fully embrace the Questions and Answers section, which I can almost guarantee is being ignored by some of your nearby peers. The entire point of this element is to fuel engagement between customers and brands, but just as in your personal relationships, you sometimes have to be the one to sit down and spark conversation on an important topic. If you leave it up to the other party to take the initiative, silence may reign and opportunities may be lost.
I think the smartest thing Google did when they rolled out GBP Q&A was to allow brands to ask and answer their own FAQ, in addition to responding to incoming questions from the public. Make the most of this oft-overlooked listing feature with the following activities:
Be sure you’re logged into the Google account that manages the listing. Ask the question and then use the response field to answer it, as the business owner. This will carry lots of authority.
This will signal that you are now actively responding to queries and are ready to engage with your audience. Set the goal of responding quickly going forward.
I don’t know anyone who really enjoys hearing the phrase “we need to talk” from a partner, but we really do need to talk about how neglected this GBP feature has been since Google rolled it out in 2017. When questions are not answered by the business, it turns this large area of the listing into a serious liability for the brand. Not only can the public provide wrong answers about your business, or use it to leave negative reviews that need to be reported as inappropriate for this field, but they can also treat your potential patrons with disregard. Google’s Local Guides program has incentivized this behavior, encouraging some participants to leave unhelpful answers to real customer questions in exchange for points and perks:
What should have happened when that question was asked, of course, was a sale of a high-dollar product, supported by someone from this business quickly letting the potential customer know the price of the most economical Blu-ray player on their store’s shelves. Instead, the business ignored this opportunity for a transaction, leaving their PR up to a random jokester who has earned points by giving a non-answer to the petitioner. Google’s local index is filled with this type of interaction, and it is set to the soundtrack of money going down the drain for businesses that don’t embrace this feature.
By booking the necessary time to monitor and respond to your Q&A, you will be immediately boosting the engagement potentials of your GBPs. If you’re struggling with Q&A management, Whitespark can help.
The “it” being engagement with your GBPs, of course! Scrolling through photos is, indeed, a time-consuming task, and if you want searchers to spend a few more seconds or minutes interacting with your listings, photos are your brand’s best friends. The image appeal of your GBPs comes in four rather exciting flavors:
You should be photographing every possible aspect of your business and uploading via the main Photos section of your NMX. Consult Google’s image formatting guidelines and consider this your snapshot starter list:
Experiment with both simple photography and photography overlaid with text to increase the catchiness of this feature.
Whether it’s a selfie wall, gorgeous food, before-and-after shots, vacation photos, or whatever aspects of your business are most photo-worthy, consider ways to let customers know you’d love them to upload their image content to your GBPs.
Just as with adding videos, a customer who adds still images to their reviews is doing you a big engagement-boosting favor. Sterling Sky finds that reviews with photos can stay at the top of your review section as much as 6x longer than those without images, emphasizing their ability to influence potential customers. Make sure your customers know how much you would appreciate them including photos in their reviews.
With just a little extra effort, your local business can actively invite more clicks and other forms of engagement from searchers, while also demonstrating your willingness to engage with the public. Particularly if you’re in a market where competitors are letting things slide, your fearless commitment to building better customer relationships will help you distinguish your brand. Good will and good business are yours to be won!
