← Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
Small Business Quick WINS w/ Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Thryv
OPTIMIZING GOOGLE REVIEWS & BUSINESS PROFILES! Lisa Landsman on Boosting Online Visibility
00:14:29
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- [00:00]
A
Just want to jump in here real quick and let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Thrive. Thrive is an amazing tool that small businesses, thousands of small businesses leverage to run their business in so many ways. And they have this incredible thing called Marketing Center. Now, if you're not familiar with Marketing center from Thrive, great news. For the start of the year, they're doing a special offer right here of a 25% off discount of their Thrive Marketing Center. This thing allows you to run all your ads, boost your online presence, understand all of your customer interactions, and if you want to check this out and get this discount, it is super easy. All you got to do is go to thrive.com that's t h r y v dot com wins. That's thrive th r y v dot com slash wins. And I'm telling you, your marketing is at the center of your business. It what, it's what drives your business. So check out Marketing center from Thrive today@thrive.com wins. Welcome to Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive. This podcast is exclusively designed for small business leaders like you. Prepare to get invaluable insights from every episode, equipped with actionable tips made for immediate implementation in your business. Tune in as we feature firsthand lessons from fellow small business owners and thought leaders. I'm your host, Jay Schwedelson. Over the last 25 years, I've grown multiple small businesses that have generated over $300 million in revenue. Along the way, I've learned pitfalls to avoid and quick wins that can transform your business immediately. I'm excited to share it all. So if you're ready to win on Main street, let's dig into this episode. We are here for Small Business Quick Wins, presented by Thrive, and this is a great episode. Okay. We're going to be talking about Google reviews and Google business profiles, and usually when you have a podcast episode about this, you have somebody who thinks they're a specialist and they're from some random little agency or consultancy and they're telling you whatever, but no, we have Google here. We actually have Google. That's exciting. Not all of Google, but we have an amazing human being from Google. Who do we have? We have Lisa Landsman, who handles global business development for Google. She's been there for a while, so she knows it all. And we're going to dig into all this. Lisa, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:37]
B
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
- [02:39]
A
All right, before we get into all this, I'm curious about something. When you are out with Friends or out to dinner and whatever. And people are like, oh, you work for Google? Do they just hit you up? Be like, hey, hey, can you get my company's website to be ranked higher? Or hey, I can't find myself here. Can you? Blah, blah, blah. Do you get hit up all the time because you work at Google all the time?
- [02:59]
B
So I get questions like that. Like, I'm having trouble with X, Y or Z. But I also get hit up for, oh, my daughter's graduating college. Do you think you could submit the resume? So it's hard because I always want to help people with everything, which is sort of my downfall. I wish I had eternal bandwidth to go and do all of these things for people because I feel for what they're going through. Maybe less about the job search, although I do help mentor folks. But when people are having trouble with their business, I want to dive in.
- [03:24]
A
And help them well. So that's perfect segue here because I am sure when people get reviews for their small business, because a lot of small business owners and marketers are listening to this, they get reviews. Sometimes those reviews are not great, right? And so they don't know what to do. They don't know, do I call 1-800-Google? Do I jump up and down? Can I go on a form? So let's jump right into it. I got my company, I got a bad review, I screwed up. What can I do? Can I do anything?
- [03:58]
B
First of all, don't panic. It happens to everyone, right? People are having a bad day, you're having a bad day, your customers having a bad day. It's okay. It's the reality. I think reviews are helpful even if they're negative, just to understand perceptions and perspectives. I think what's really important for business owners is please respond to them. Respond to all reviews, whether they're positive or negative. You're building your brand, you're building your business reputation. And so it's important for you to get into that conversation, even if it's not one that you love and talk about that or feel free to, you know, ask them to take it offline. So I would say that's the first thing. Be really thoughtful and make sure that you're responding because you're building trust. So if I'm going and looking for an H VAC business and I need someone and I see some reviews and I see one that's negative, but I see how gracious and wonderful that business owner was, I'm really appreciative and I might choose them based on that so don't think, first of all that bad reviews are gonna ruin your business. But what can you do about them? So there is a way. Well, let me start by saying Google does not get in the middle of, like, you and your customer, right? We can't debate the facts of what happened. It is not up to us to decide that. So we're not gonna get in the middle of a dispute. But if you feel like this review has violated some policies in some way, there's a whole bunch of policies, and you can read them and happy to share the link, then you can go in and flag the review for us to take down. So this is not a hard process to do. You can go right into your business profile. So you can do that through Maps. There's like a little business icon on the bottom right. You can go in and find the review section, and you can click on the little three dots and you can go in and flag the specific review. And then you will just talk about, you know, why are you flagging this review? There's nowhere for you to actually write it down, but you, you know, could say that it's violating policies. So that's the first thing you can do if you really believe that it's violating Google's policies or it's spam or there's profanity or something like that. So what happens then? Once you submit the review for, you know, approval to take down, there's a place that you can go called the Reviews management Tool. So sometimes it's hard to find. You can literally just go to Google and search for it. You know, Google Help Center, Business Profile Reviews Management Tool. And there you can either submit a new flag or you can look at the status of the existing flag. And so this you'll be able to see approved, denied. Or you can go in if it was denied and file an appeal from there. That was a lot of information.
- [06:39]
A
No, that was. That was super, super valuable. All right, I want to dispel a myth about getting a negative review removed. Can I pay Google and have a review removed?
- [06:54]
B
Absolutely not. That ruins everyone's credibility. And I wish you could call 1-800-Google. You know, think about, there's what, 400 million small businesses globally or businesses globally. There's a lot of scale in the platform. And so we try and serve everyone the best that we can, but we don't have a 1, 800 number to do that. And absolutely not. You can't pay. And by the way, for those of you who are soliciting reviews, which is a really smart thing to do. Ask customers who are happy with your service to provide a review. You cannot pay them or incentivize them either. That's against policies.
- [07:25]
A
That's good. That's good clarification. Oh, along those lines, I'm curious if I spend money on There's a myth. I think hopefully if I spend money on Google Ads like I'm spending, I'm spending a couple thousand bucks on Google Ads for my business, they're going to prioritize removing bad reviews for me if I reach out because I'm a paying customer. Is that in any way true?
- [07:47]
B
It is not true. And I think it's frustrating for some folks. Right. We're paying you all this money and this could be small businesses or big, large enterprise businesses. We're paying you all this money. We very much keep it separated, church and state. This organic search experience and these reviews, the credibility is really, really important. Right. If you know that there's weird things happening behind the scenes, you don't trust us, you don't trust the business. So we need to make sure that we remain neutral on all of that.
- [08:15]
A
I didn't know we were going to do a myth busting, but I got one more myth I want you to bust. I mean, so I'm curious, if I get some negative reviews, is that going to hurt my SEO? Is that going to hurt my organic showing up in search queries? Because I got a couple bad reviews. Do you marry the two together?
- [08:32]
B
I don't have an answer to that that I can share, partially because I don't know. Right. We don't get this kind of information on that. But again, I would say continue to solicit reviews, make sure you're getting a lot of reviews. So, for example, too, from a user perspective, if I go on and I'm looking and let's say you have 100 reviews for your business and there's a couple that are really bad, but they're so inconsistent with the rest of what we're seeing. You know, there's a lot of themes that you can sort of derive. And we just came out with, I think within the last month or so, AI review summaries. And so what we're trying to do as Google is sort of take those themes and help users understand what, what should they know about the business, the good and the bad. So oftentimes if, if you look at reviews like I do, which I'm a little bit obsessive about it as a, as a customer, you know, you can tell I mean, you know, kind of the reality of the business.
- [09:28]
A
So, okay, moving past the reviews for A second, there's 2 billion people that connect with small businesses on Google every single month. That's what I read. Right. And it's all about your Google business profile. And so that's where the reviews kind of all live. And if I'm. If I have my business profile, is it worth it to put up pictures or to write more detail in there, or do I just kind of. Just the basics is fine. Is there something I should be doing to give myself a better shot of getting even more views or more business or more whatever?
- [09:59]
B
Yes. And this is part of my job is to go and evangelize the importance of this Google business profile. This is your digital storefront, right? This is your home on Google and on search. So the more that you go in as a business and fill out this information, I mean, it's your basics, right? So your website, your address, your phone number. You would not believe how often we get 404 links on, on websites or incorrect phone numbers. Hours is another really big one. I cannot tell you how many times, for example, I want to go get my nails done on a holiday. And all these businesses say they're open, and then they're not open when I go and drive to them. Super frustrating. Also, I would say yes to pictures and descriptions and videos. One of the things I talk a lot about is like, if your business profile could talk, what story would it tell? What do you want people to know about your business? And this is an opportunity for you to communicate the vibe. So, for example, if I'm looking for a restaurant, I want to know what should I wear, Right? And I can see that through pictures. What kind of space is there? A patio. Is this good for groups? Is it good for date night? Like, what am I going to see, feel, understand when I go in there? Now, if you're an insurance agent or you're a doctor, do you need a lot of pictures? Not necessarily. But I want to see what you look like. Right. A friend of mine just started his own concierge. He's a doctor. He just started his own concierge practice. And when you pull up his profile and you see his smiling face, you're like, okay, this is somebody I trust. And so you don't have to be a restaurant or a hotel to worry about that. But I would say fill out as much within your Google business profile as you possibly can. The other recommendation would be to add your social links. So, you know, if you are posting on Instagram and Facebook and X and the other platforms. What we're doing now, if you have that profile linked in your Google business profile, we're pulling in your posts and they're showing up on search. So, like, take advantage of all these things because it will help with your discoverability.
- [11:57]
A
I think this is so valuable because I think people have it backwards. They'll spend all this time working on their website, which people don't even go to websites anymore. And they don't pay attention to their Google profile business profile, which is really. It really is your website. I mean, it's more important in some ways than your website, right?
- [12:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, it really is, especially when it comes to search results. To your point that 2 billion customer connections every single month that came from our Google economic impact report that we put out every year. This is 18 million US businesses that had those connections. And the ones who did a really good job with their profile and they put their ordering buttons or their appointment booking buttons and all those things on here, like the better chance they have to drive business.
- [12:40]
A
That is. That is so cool. That is so spot on. All right, speaking of spot on, there's a webinar coming up that you're a part of that I want to let everybody know about. So there's a webinar that Google and Thrive are doing together is the Google Business profile. Be ready when customers search. It's going to be February 19th. It's going to be 1pm Eastern. It is free. Okay. And if you want to register for this thing, all you got to do is go to Thrive T H R Y V gbp, which stands for Google Business Profile, Thrive Biz gbp. It's going to be amazing. Lisa's going to sing show tunes. It's going to be wild. Is that true? By the way, are you going to be singing any songs during this webinar?
- [13:25]
B
If I did, I think everybody would immediately hang up. So I'm going to spare everybody from my horrible voice. But I will be sharing a lot more detail from what we just talked about. All kinds of best practices.
- [13:36]
A
Amazing. And if Lisa ever does start a show tune business, she will have a Google business profile and there'll be amazing reviews on it, I have no doubt. Lisa, thank you for being here. We're going to put everything in the show notes. Everybody sign up for the webinar. Lisa, you are great. Stay warm in Chicago.
- [13:52]
B
Thank you so much. Take care, everyone.
- [13:56]
A
Well, that was fun and great news. We got way more where that came from. Subscribe make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips from today's top small business leaders. And hook us up with a five star review if you've got at least one new idea you may consider using. Lastly, if you want to ensure you never miss a message from your customers Again, check out Thrive.comWin to get your free account with Command center today.