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The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast
Your Google Business Profile Is the Secret to Local SEO
00:20:21
John breaks down why your Google Business Profile is now the most powerful tool for local SEO. He explains how Google’s shift toward AI-driven search and zero-click results means your profile has become your new “mini website.” John shares...
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Hey, this is John. And before we get started, I have a gift for you for being such an amazing listener. Everyone's talking about AI these days, but most of it's about tactics. We've created a series of prompts we use to create strategy and you can have them for free. Just go to DTM World/free prompts and grab yours. Now let's get started. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is Jon Chance and no Guest. Today I'm going to do a solo show. I'm going to talk about SEO. I'm going to talk about Google Business profile. I'm going to talk about publishing on rented land. So you remember one point, a lot of experts, okay, I might have done it too. So we're saying don't publish on rented land, right? In other words, build your house on your website, build your email list. Those are things you own and to a large degree still very important. However, many of the publishing platforms no longer really want you to and so consequently reward you for just going there and saying, hey, check out my new blog post. Click here and leave the platform, right? So LinkedIn won't show your stuff if you do that. Facebook increasingly is doing everything they can to keep people on their platform. Google doesn't even want people leaving a search, right? They're giving the, that's what the AI overviews are doing. They're giving the answers right there. So I think we have to rethink our strategy. And I'm again, I'm not saying give up your website or your email list. I mean, those are the things that are going to convert in the end. But we do have to start taking, I think, a more disciplined approach to publishing fully in other places. And so today, rather than just talk about that topic, I want to, I want to zero in on one of those places and that is your Google business profile. Now this is important for every business because it is an important piece of real estate that Google owns. So guess what, they're going to give it a lot of credence, right? Hyper, hyper, super, super. That's two hypers and two supers. Important for local businesses. You know, there's a lot of fuss about going on right now about zero click and about AI searches, you know, taking all of your traffic. Well, for that person who's looking to remodel their home, looking to find the local tax preparer, your Google business profile showing up on Google Maps in the three pack, however we want to refer to it today is going to remain extremely important. And so I want to focus really on how you get the most or how you need to rethink first off, to get the most out of your Google Business Profile. Most businesses today, I'm going to assume you know what your Google Business Profile is, so I won't go into the nitty nitty gritty. But if you don't Google your business and the town that your business is located in and you will find your Google Business Profile, whether you've claimed it ever or not, is probably there because Google's in the business of creating a directory. And speaking of directories, most people still think of their Google Business Profile as a bit of a digital listing. I mean that's kind of how they started, right? I have my name, address, phone number, maybe a couple photos there and call it a day. But in 2025, I think that's a little bit like thinking of your website as a digital brochure. It is now. We now have to think in terms of it as a powerful publishing platform. We have to think of it in our daily or at least weekly marketing routine. So it's not a set at once and forget it. It is something that we have to focus on as a tactic, as an ongoing tactic in all of our marketing. The reason is visibility today is going to be less about ranking and really more about just that word visibility, about being discovered, trusted, chosen whenever somebody is out there in the mood to buy, when a buyer searching, right. So Google treats no surprise, the Google Business profile as content and not just as a directory listing. If you look at the things they've added over the last few years, you can actually post like a blog. There you, there are Q and as you can update photos, reviews and, and all of that data that's going in there is Google is monitoring how fresh it is. They like to see ongoing reviews, not that you did a review push two years ago. They want to see daily activity, weekly activity, even phone calls coming there, how driving directions. Those are all signals to Google that your profile is active. All of that data is also very structured. I won't get into the weeds on what that particular means. But under the hood it is structured in a way that not only does Google know exactly what a review is, exactly what a direction is, exactly what a question and an answer is, so do all of the AI crawlers today as well. So that content is structured in such a way that is very easy for all of the publishing platforms. All of the search related platforms are able to access it and know exactly what it is. So you need to think of your profile today as, let's call it a mini website that, that lives directly inside of Google. Doesn't that sound like that would be a useful thing to actually feed information to mean every post that you make, every answer, every photo you publish, it feeds signals about the activity and your relevance entrust directly in to Google. So I've seen, I've seen increasingly local clients getting featured in that AI, that top AI overview, not because of their website but because of information and reviews that have come directly from participation in their Google business profile. So hopefully I've hyped it enough as to why. So now I've got you really pumped up and you want me to tell you how. So if we're going to think of this as a publishing arm or as a publishing platform, we have to think about the way that Google wants content delivered to them. I've talked about it on previous shows, maybe you've read about it. The acronym eat, it's with two eats. So E, E A T. How would you pronounce that? Eat I don't know. Any rate stands for experience, expertise, authority and trust. So you have a publishing platform now where you can show real work, right? That's our experience. Proof of experience, behind the scenes posts, photos, the whole bit. Expertise. So using your post to demonstrate thought leadership, to demonstrate you know what you're talking about. See the question and answer section. So let me, let me talk a little bit about that. There is a section there on question and answers. If a random searcher, if a customer, if a prospect goes in there and asks a question in your profile, which they can do, the public can do, and you take the time to monitor that and answer that. You have incredible expertise that you've demonstrated right there on the spot. But guess what? You can actually see those questions. What questions should be people be asking? What answers do you want people to actually see? So if you see those questions, then answer those questions. That content is actually there. They want to see authority. And one of the easiest ways in your Google business profile to demonstrate authority is to actually respond to reviews. Hopefully you're getting lots of reviews. That's a whole nother component I'm going to talk about. But you also need to be responding to those reviews and not just thanks Mrs. Jones, glad you're happy. Respond with an answer that is actually going to be seen by the public. It's going to be consumed by Google. So answer thoroughly, throw in, and I'm not talking about spammy ways, but throw in project details, throw in descriptions Products, things that you've done for that person so that that information is actually getting fed in there and really makes you an authority. Go with substance. Take the time, don't just look at it as an afterthought. Take the time to respond publicly. And quite frankly, this goes for negative reviews too. If you get that occasional negative review, respond with substance. Certainly don't respond in ugly way that you feel like responding, but respond not only in a very positive way, but with substance. And then the last one, trust. One of the fastest ways to erode trust, quite frankly in Google's mind, is that you're being inconsistent, you're not being transparent, you are actually not keeping the details current, as crazy as that sounds. You can I have seen people not rank anymore on Google because something changed about their location and they didn't really get that updated everywhere. AI is increasingly pulling structured data from your Google business profiles. And so having not only that information on that is correct on your Google business profile, but having it match exactly, I mean exactly on your website and having a schema for there so that it's clear that's what that data is. And, and that structured data is something that's been around with us for a while, but I think it's become more important. Here's the deal. When Google sees consistent transparent information across your site, across your listings and reviews, it just makes the assumption, I mean that's all it can go by. So it makes the assumption that your business is trustworthy. And when AI can extract clean answers from your content, you're going to get rewarded. I mean, admittedly showing up in AI overviews is not the same as a click, it's not the same as a visit to your website. But in today's visibility world, we have to start there in order to get known. And if I will tell you that if you're showing up in those AI overviews, what we're seeing is traffic that's coming from particularly Chat GPT, which has the big head start traffic wise. But if traffic is coming to your website from ChatGPT, we are seeing it convert at seven or eight times that of say an ad or even of an organic search of old. And certainly the engagement and the time on site is much higher because somebody's typically gone and given very strict details and filter about what they're looking for and then they found you. And so consequently that a great deal of their search has really been done for them or their research, I guess I should say has been done for them. Hey, you want to keep up on all things Duct Tape marketing. The stuff I read, the books, the people I interview. Check out the Duct Tape Marketing newsletter. Every week we're going to send you out, we're going to keep you up to date on what's going on in the world of marketing. And just for subscribing, you're going to get our free chat GPT prompts that will allow you or assist you in the creation of marketing strategies and plans. So check it out. It's at DTM World/News. That's DTM World/News. All right, next section. What do you publish on your Google business profile? Well, at least weekly you should be adding a post this. If you're already producing content, if you're already doing things on say LinkedIn, repurpose that on your Google business profile. If you have any kind of changing offers, any kind of specials, if you want to actually do a whole list of quick tips that are related to your industry, short stories, client stories, I mean just there's endless things that you can post there. It gives you the ability to have a headline, to have a link back to that content or back to your website or to that product or to that offer. So I mean, why wouldn't you take advantage of that on a weekly basis? Already mentioned the Q and A section seed your most common questions. You've probably seen this, but increasingly people go to AI and ask detailed questions. And so that's where AI is often looking to FAQs on your website, to these Google Business profile answers for, you know, factual content. Somebody who is an authority has answered a question in a very factual way. That seems like good content. Already mentioned review responses. Every one of those is a trust signal. I'm seeing those show up, you know, when you do a search in Google and they show a business in the maps, even pack. I'm seeing reviews and review responses coming in there directly related to what the search query was. So if you need proof that that's worth taking your time to do, that should be it. Photos and videos, keep them fresh, keep them human, put your staff in there, put locations in there, put projects in there before, after again, countless reasons or countless opportunities to to post photos and videos. If you dig in there and look at all the sections and I will tell you this as a rule, if Google puts a section in there that you can add content to, you probably should because they're flat out telling you that this is a, this is something we're going to read, this is something we're going to pay attention to. So fairly recently they added a great deal of information about your products and services. Tabs, I mean, don't skip those. Again, structured data that AI can parse easily about, you know, very detailed information about a service or a differentiator or something that you have that nobody else has. So every element on your profile, think of it as now as content. Every piece of content is a ranking and visibility signal. So optimizing for the age of AI, but remembering local search. So interview the visibility system, claim and verify your listing fully. I'm sorry I had to say that in 2025, but I still find that is an issue. Or maybe somebody claimed it, their nephews, boyfriend's cousin set it up one time and they've never looked at it again. So consistency across all the directories. Make sure that what shows up on your Google business profile also is in yext, is in bright, local is in Yelp, you know, pretty much everywhere you can have a directory listing. I would go as far as saying that you should. Some people have lots of customers, some people have fewer customers. Just that's the nature of their business. But have some sort of automated weekly review request. Really keep those fresh, really keep them coming. Respond to every review that you get. Increasingly, we are adding FAQ pages. You know, it used to be you had an FAQ page, all your most relevant questions, all in one place. Great, very convenient. But increasingly we are adding them to almost every piece of content. So every service page, every product page, every location page. If we're doing authoritative content on a blog post, we'll have an FAQ section at the bottom of that. We'll actually add structured schema to that FAQ page. Because think of these as answer engines. A lot of these AI tools are really. You've probably even heard the term answer engine optimization instead of search engine optimization. And there's a lot of relevance to that, a lot of our content. Now we need to be thinking about the quality questions. In fact, if you want to use a tool for AI or you want to use AI for a great bit of research, put in your industry and just ask it. What are the types of questions that people that are buying accounting services, that are buying remodeling services, what are the types of questions they're asking? What are the types of questions that never get answered? What are the types of questions that make them lay awake at night and wondering whether or not they should move forward? And just keep that bank of 20 or 30 questions and think in terms of producing content around the answers to, or at least Addressing every single one of those questions. You need to start tracking AI mentions and you can do it through your analytics in the organic search it'll actually show you you have traffic coming from chat GPT so you can start monitoring that. But also AI searchers are funny. I mean they are by nature quite often very long, very unique. And so you're not just going to rank for some AI search because almost every one of them is different. And so you want to have some of your key search terms, especially locally because you'll find that in some industries you can show up in AI overviews locally for you know, some pretty high intent searches because the competition is not the same as it might be nationally. So start monitoring that. Do a couple searches every week, every month and see if you're showing up, see who is showing up, see what sources they are citing. So in some cases it might be that they're citing industry websites and, and associations and things. And so knowing where they are getting their content can be another cue for a site you might actually need to participate in. You can't optimize once. This is a weekly process. So here's how I'd suggest that you think about it if this is starting to make sense. First thing, audit your Google Business Profile. I mean where do you have the gaps? Some of the things I've talked about, are you doing them. Create then processes for getting consistent about updating content. Add at least three keyword rich FAQ type of questions and answers. Post a current off. Do that in week two. Week three, I'm gonna let you off so I can give you a whole month to do this. Week three, add 10 new photos. And here's a hint, add captions to the photos too. In a lot of cases we don't know what we're looking at and Google doesn't either. And so by adding captions to those photos, you give it some context so it understands the photo. And then week four, set up your review process. Go out there and at least ask for and respond to five new reviews. I mean if you do those week four or those four weeks worth of efforts, you will probably take you an hour a week to, to accomplish that whole list. And at the end of a month you'll start to build some momentum in your Google Business profile. So not just a place for people to find your phone number anymore, it's where Google decides if your business deserves to be found at all. Now there are many other factors in terms of your Google Business Profile ranking. Proximity is one you can't really control, but for the things that you can control, the things that you do own, the things that you really can update, take full advantage of it. All right, that's all I have for today. Look, go to Duct Tape Marketing. Hit us up if you want us to fix these things for you. This is part of just about every marketing engagement that we do. Is helping people with their Google business profiles. One of a small part of an integrated strategy, but an important. All right, thanks for tuning in and may we'll see you one of these days out there on the road. Take care.