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all right going live right now hello everyone and welcome to today's expert Talk part of our CMO um Community series here um so today is all about our Google Business profiles and what are your franchisees missing out on it is one minute past the hour so we'll give it about 30 seconds or so for those to come on and join and then we'll Dive Right In so sit tight and we'll get started in a second and while we're waiting um just a few kind of ground rules we have our question and answer box that will be open the entire time today so feel free to engage with us there and we'll answer some questions as we go that naturally pop up as well as towards the end we'll have a dedicated question answer session so definitely don't be shy and we look forward to hearing what you think about today so we're right past the hour and it's time to get started so welcome again for those who are just joining today is all about Google Business profiles and how to optimize what your franchisees are doing so to introduce myself my name is Raquel I run the customer success Department here at promo Republic and I'm also the face and voice of CMO peer talks our community all about the franchising faith and marketing and I'm helping you you know discuss peer-to-peer which is exactly what we're here doing today and if you're interested in a little bit more about promo Republic we are a local marketing platform that helps franchise Brands and multiplication companies win customers across all locations our platform empowers marketing and Ops teams to grow visibility online enable suggestions and tools and our intelligence engine really generates some cool insights through our enhanced reporting across scale which is really unique so um here if you want to scan this and book a call with us we can have our new Google visibility dashboard that we just launched which helps you understand what is happening and where it's happening you have a heat map of your average ranking you have a view from all locations and the leaderboard so you can see who's performing well and not and the sources of the search engine you can dive deeper into a specific location and you can export everything into a CSV so today while you're all here is to learn more and how to optimize Google business profile and we've invited Andrew because he's an amazing source of all things SEO in the local space specifically so he will be in the driver's seat today and I'll pass the mic over to you so you can introduce yourself welcome thank you nice to be here thanks everyone for tuning in so I'll give the 30-second um hype about why uh what we do so local SEO guide we're full service SEO agency um we specialize in multi-location SEO and uh local marketplaces but we basically like I say are perfect customers anyone with a website and a budget so we do B2B SAS and all that kind of stuff and our claim to fame is that we've actually done SEO for the onion which is a big source of Pride um anyhow let's just go right into the right into this stuff um so Raquel if you can just proceed ahead absolutely all right computer unfreezes here we go so our agenda we're going to break this down into four uh distinct chapters the first will be the multiplication approach to SEO the Google business profile optimization some nightmares that we've seen and website tips and opportunities so with that said I will again pass the Baton back over to you Andrew to dive into how multi-location Brands can approach SEO great and so just to start off this is not going to be a hey here are all the basics about how to optimize a Google business profile I'm assuming you guys can add your name address and phone number um and in fact the the dirty secret about GBP is that there's really not much to do with them um once you set it up um there's you have a very limited set of capabilities and so we have taken kind of a quote-unquote data-driven approach to how to make your uh gbps and your website work together to both improve your local pack rankings as well as your what we'll call local organic rankings the non-local pack stuff so we're gonna give you kind of a kitchen sink approach um and uh anyhow take it away Raquel keep just take us to the next slide please all right so whenever we talk to anyone particularly CMOS uh you know we have to admit that SEO is perhaps the most ridiculous marketing channel there is oftentimes the things that seos tell Brands to do is feels like the equivalent of what Dorothy here is doing which is close your eyes click your heels three three times together and you'll be magically uh getting an Roi um so we know it sounds crazy but um uh that's one of the reasons why we like it because very few relatively few brands are able to invest in it because they don't trust it and so if you're able to invest in it you'll have an advantage so let's just go to the next slide please so let's just start at a very high level so um what do you see Suite types need to know about SEO um enough to to sort of invest in it so basically for local SEO a big factor in how to do well is have a location near where your customer is searching and there's usually not much you can do about that particularly with brick and mortars you have a physical location that's kind of it and then from um from a a website point of view you need a website that is accessible to a machine meaning it can find all of your pages and all of your content and understand it you need content that's relevant to what your customers or potential customers are searching for uh you need links from other sites uh and you need what we'll call engagement which is often the fuzziest part of this which means like when someone searches you guys uh when searches in Google clicks on a link to your site and goes there do they stick around do they buy something do they do a lead form or do they bounce back to this results and and um and do they uh go to a competitor's site that's assigned to Google that maybe you're not worth ranking for that particular result you could also put things like customer reviews and the engagement part of this because it's another way for Google to observe people interacting with your brand anyway that's kind of a very high level very quick SEO 101 but I find with CMO types that's all you really need to know to make decisions about this stuff uh so let's go to the next one so unfortunately uh We've dealt with a lot of franchisees and franchise networks and typically they don't care anything about that stuff they just want to know how much money am I going to make how fast and are you going to screw up my uh my leads um or are you going to cost me money uh and so we're very aware of the tensions there and it's probably not just an SEO problem that's an every channel problem so let's go to the next one next slide okay so the good news for all of you guys with multi-locations is this is the trend um the localization of search results so this is an example of a client of ours uh and the number of keywords that they rank for where um the incidence of local packs across those keywords and all you need to understand from this graph is that over the last two years the percent of the keywords that they rank for there's a higher higher and higher percentage of local packs in those those search results and I think that's just going to continue uh probably the covid pandemic uh accelerated that because people um maybe wanted to find stuff closer to them or something but we're just seeing every Google is trying to localize everything it can across every type of search let's go to the next one that's that's an advantage for for guys like you so this is a local Serb probably doesn't look too um too unfamiliar to you it's basically a bunch of ads um so if you search mattresses you get a bunch of ads at the top uh let's go to the next one and then you scroll down you tend to get a local pack on mobile or on desktop and let's keep going and then you get what we call the local organic and what we find is Brands tend to look local Brands tend to obsess about the local pack rankings which are good because that's where a lot of people are clicking but they don't think so much about these local organic uh rankings which is where a lot of traffic can be had as an example Yelp ranks exclusively in the local organic section and they get something like I don't know 100 200 million clicks a month uh so there's a lot of traffic in these local organic and often you'll have a better shot at ranking in the local organic because there's a lot more results there than you will in the local pack because that's highly driven by your physical location and um by a lot of factors that you have no control over let's keep going this is another example of a local query we work a lot with automobile companies um and so uh what you can see is if you just search F-150 which is the most popular car in the in the country um you can see three out of the five top five results here are local and doesn't mean they say like F-150 near me or anything like that it's that those pages take you to a local experience and so Google is trying again to send you to um local results as often as it makes sense which is a lot of times next please so let's talk at a high level about how multi-location SEO works so essentially you need an optimized website with store locator I'll go into a little more detail on that later um you need national and local content by national content I mean like if you're a dentist a national idea of national content would be how does teeth whitening work because there's nothing local about that and then local content would be a teeth whitening in my city page right we do we present we provide teeth whitening in Pleasanton California where I where I live uh you need backlinks uh so links from other sites that are both relevant uh on a on a on a topic uh so if you're a dentist ideally you get links from sites about Dentistry if you're a dentist in Pleasanton you'd ideally get links from a site about dentistry in Pleasanton or a site about Pleasanton um but that said what we typically see is uh just a a um a steady stream of links will do no matter where it's from uh you need relevant local citations and oftentimes this is not so much to rank well but really to make sure that uh that you're showing up where your customers are with the right information so in Apple Maps uh citation a listing for your business is not going to help you rank in Google but if someone sees your location in Apple Maps and it's wrong they're either going to drive to the wrong place they're going to call the wrong number that kind of thing and so um so you should definitely have your local citations um checked and up to date on the uh on the sites that matter most to your customers and the way we think about that is if I do a search for the key words that I want to rank for what local citation sites show up does Yelp show up does yellowpages.com show up does Facebook show up those are the those are the local citation what we call local citations um the local listings that you want to make sure are up to date again not necessarily because it's going to help you rank so much better it's that those are that's where your customers may be seeing your brand uh and then gvp optimization and reviews we broke out reviews separately because in my opinion there's not much you can do about reviews other than encourage your customers to leave them and answer and respond to them when you feel it's relevant to respond like a negative review and so you definitely want to get reviews you want to get a lot of them um but other than having a process for doing that spending a lot of time trying to manipulate your reviews to improve your rankings uh I think is it kind of a Fool's earned so um let's go on to the next one so keep going let's talk about the things that the kind of unique things you can do to GBP so as you guys might know the GBP and I hate GBP as an acronym I like GMB it kind of rolled off the tongue better um so I'll try not to not to slip up when I say GBP um GBP is the front door of your website for a lot of queries uh even though even with big brands that we work with they get let's say 50 of their traffic is direct and it goes It goes right to their website well probably like 30 to 40 percent of their traffic uh depending on their paid budget of course is coming through SEO and coming through brand queries which most of the time uh will show a local pack or your your Google business page um for your specific location that's relevant to them so making sure that these things are uh optimized up to date you know you've done all the the right things to make sure that they stand out is important because a lot of your traffic over the last several years um probably has been cannibalized by your brand gbps so we've had a number of cases where uh marketers have of clients have kind of called us concerned that their SEO traffic is going down over time and what we had to point out to them is like well it's kind of the case you're getting fewer people to your website but really what's happening is it's almost all brand traffic that's now going to the GBP because most of the time instead of clicking to your website they just wanted your phone number or driving directions or to see what's in stock and that kind of thing so um so taking control of your GBP is critical let's go to the next one so we're going to give you a couple of um let's call them tricks or observations things that we've done in the over time that we found work um so gvp is notorious for keyword um for businesses that you know basically create spammy business names like keyword and city in the business name they tend to rank really well even if the business doesn't exist so if you're in a really spammy industry like legal or garage doors or locksmiths you'll see this over and over again so you should be looking at your uh locations business names and figuring out do you have a case to use what Google will call the real world business name meaning if you're the Archer Hotel well you could easily be the Archer Hotel Napa because that's what people might call it and so you might want to name your GBP arjo Hotel Napa because it will definitely rank better for searches for hotels in Napa if you do that let's go to the next slide and so this is uh this was a study done by a company called Sterling Sky which is an excellent local SEO company uh they do a lot of proprietary research on their customers and you can see what happened when they added keywords and removed keywords to their gpp names what we call keyword stuffing when you added keywords the rankings and the clicks went up when you took the keywords away they go down and we've done our own test of this and it's absolutely the case let's go to the next one um this is uh some proprietary research we did last year what we call name consistency and what happened was we were working with a big local directory like a Yellow Pages site and we looked at all their data for every they had like millions of business listings and we basically looked at all the listings and how the the business name on the site compared to the business name on the Google business profile for that business and what this charts these charts show is that um across different types of sites the the site tended to rank better when the name on the directory completely matched the name on the Google business profile and so we even looked at um we even looked at some brand sites and we found that in it was exactly the same in those cases so if you're a multi-location brand and for whatever reason your names don't match up with your Google's business profile names the names on your website you should go right now and correct that on your site or on your gbps can you go next um the three main things that we find are the easiest and had and kind of move the needle the most in terms of GBP is category categorization so basically make sure you've got the right primary categories on your GBP that has a huge impact uh you can basically um pick several categories I don't know what the limit is maybe it's five or six but the primary category matters most so make sure your primary category matches up with the primary category of the competitors that are out ranking you for the queries you want to rank for um services are also a big thing you can list a number of service attributes so if you're a pest control and you want to rank for flea removal make sure you have flea removal as a service and make sure you use the words flea removal on your website Google will grab that data from your website and say hey this site these guys do flea removal uh the last thing on this page is are GBP posts gbv posts are like one of some of the cheapest easiest things you can do to try to convert customers they will not do um huge volume but basically what these are are kind of a little offer like you see on the right one for Sam's Club that you can attach to your GBP page on Google and essentially those pages tend to show up those the those yeah the gbps tend to show up mostly for when someone searches the brand so they already know who you are so in Sam's Club's case they already are looking for Sam's Club and now if we can put an offer on our GBP we might convince some small percentage of those who are looking to click on that and convert and we see it across all the brands we we work with they don't get huge traffic from these things but it's easy enough to post these on a regular basis and they convert at a relatively High rate so it might be a cheap way just to get some extra conversion like a couple percentage points let's move to the next one uh Department listings is a strategy we've tried with several Brands so um uh basically if you have a department that meets Google's guidelines and so um essentially uh uh you have to basically have a couple of different criteria like it needs to have its unique phone number it needs to have unique signage I think it even needs to have a unique entrance way um uh you can create a department so you see for Sam's Club that we've been working with they have a department for their tire stores inside their department store and those can rank for tire queries all over much better than say a Sam's Club generic GBP can rank for Sam's Club also has a florist a pharmacy all those kinds of things so if you have departments that meet the guidelines you should definitely be creating Department listings in GBP let's go to the next one uh if you sell products uh and you have a Google merchant center feed which any of you who are running ads should have you should be linking your Google merchant center to your products feed and essentially now you can start to get um your your ads connected to your gbps pretty pretty nicely and what's really great about this is you can start to see data in your merchant center about which products generate the most Impressions and convert the most in terms of clicks to your website so in this case let's say Super Mario Odyssey converts the best that's a signal that maybe you want to put a Super Mario Odyssey link on your location Pages because that's what your customers are looking for and that will tend to convert better uh if you um if you put them there I think location pages are a big kind of Forgotten opportunity for most brands they just set them up and say okay here's what we do and here's our address and phone number but it's really an entryway into your site and so the more you can kind kind of hone in on what your customers are looking for for your location Pages the better they'll convert let's go to the next one um adding videos to your GBP uh that's a over the last I don't know three or four years that's been a um an opportunity uh there's a link on this slide that you'll get uh that a guy named Darren Shaw from White spark who you may know just this morning posted seven ideas for GBP videos uh none of them are rocket science it's like hey like show off your product and show off your service maybe do a tick tock dance or something but um some good easy ideas and these don't have to be like highly produced things you can just take your phone and make a video today and upload um upload a video to a listing like in two minutes and these will be just more ways to get your listing to stand out they may not help you rank better necessarily they may help you convert better next one please um this is an interesting technique we've been playing around with for a couple of years Google has this thing called The Vision API and it allows you to classify your photos like this is a storefront this is a car this is a truck uh if you if you classify if you figure out what Google thinks your images are about then you can make choices about what images to add to your GBP and I'll talk about this sort of later but what we found is there's definitely a correlation with the images you use and how you perform um the more relevant the image it tends to help you perform better in GBP and in local organic let's go to the next one foreign we've got a couple of what I'd call obvious considerations for service providers uh so if you're able to set up appointments in your GBP you should definitely do that um uh you know it's just a people want to interact they don't want to go to your website and do stuff they just want to interact with you as quickly as possible so if Google is offering you a way to um have a customer get in touch with you via GBP you might want to do it that said Google may just force you to do it and put in a provider that you don't like so that's another reason to take control of these things so you can put in your own providers and um uh and sorry I'm having a blank let's just go to the next one um same it's the same thing with restaurants so um you know a couple years ago they started pretty aggressively putting order online things and uh this is gonna happen for any any type of business anywhere Google can get in the middle of it they're gonna try to kind of take over the middleman part of this so uh you should get used to these things and start using them let's go to the next one foreign in retail there's nothing special you can do in retail other than again tailor your your images and your services to what you think your customers are searching for let's go to the next one sabs is where it really becomes interesting so if you have a service area business like a plumber or electrician uh you're going to have a challenge because you really are only going to rank well you tend to only rank well within um a very specific radius of your physical location and so for saps particularly those that have no physical location like businesses operate out of a truck it's really hard to rank well uh so there are a couple of different strategies uh mostly it involves what you do on your website but I thought this company repair Smith had a really interesting strategy that would I would call aggressive um so repair Smith is a mobile automobile repair company they just drive around and fix your flat tires and engines and things uh and what they've done is they've Incorporated a unique company in every state all right and I think maybe even in a lot of the major cities and so by incorporating they can have a physical location even if that physical location doesn't really exist like customers can't go there um they may have a uh you know like a fake office or something like that um and then they basically what I think they're doing is once they get um a Google business profile they then um connect all these things and create a um they get 10 gbps which is the threshold you need to create a bulk account and once they create that bulk account now they can add usually add additional locations without really a lot of scrutiny doesn't always happen Google's trying to kind of turn the screws on this a bit but what I think is happening here in this case in Los Angeles is they're using all their service all their service pros home addresses to um create locations uh based on their you know they have a single let's say corporate location somewhere in LA and then all these other physical locations they're building um a bulk account for and I don't know how long this is going to last um this is the kind of thing we would expect Google to torch over time but you know the last time I looked they had a lot of locations in La so if you're feeling aggressive and kind of what we'll call gray hat you may want to test out some strategies like this because service area businesses have a really hard time ranking in local packs if you're not being aggressive like this let's go to the next uh store within a store is one of our favorite uh tactics for service area businesses uh or any business really so in this case uh Walgreens um uh has a photo department in Walgreens Walgreens also has a FedEx department so you'll notice if you search for FedEx near you sometimes you'll see a Walgreens show up Home Depot has a tool rental center inside their department store uh and so if you can basically create a partnership with a brick and mortar brand and create a legit location there that is like the best way to get um more gbps to get more bites of the Apple we did this with a very large service area business brand and it's their number one Revenue producing um uh uh Channel right now It's tricky because you have to actually do a partnership with locations a brand with locations but if if you have your business development resources and can get this done I think this is one of the best tactics you can do let's go to the next one uh just a simple note on tracking we we always see a lot of businesses not tracking clicks from their GMB or GBP landing pages so basically what you want to do is set up UTM parameters on the links from your Google business profile and in fact from all your local citations so you can track in your analytics where the traffic is coming from you also may want to consider using call tracking if you have budget for that on your GMB phone numbers and you can in GMB or GBP you can add what's called a primary number and a secondary number so your primary number could be your let's say your call tracking number and your secondary number could be your actual phone number let's go to the next one so one of the more interesting things about local pack rankings is how your website content affects it so we've done a lot of research on what which the on linking different pages from your GBP to your website and I can tell you without a doubt it absolutely makes a difference as an example we had a fake listing we created for a moving company in a specific City in Los Angeles and we are ranking number two in the local pack we changed the link from the GBP page to the link of the number to the website of the number one ranking profile and the minute we do that we started out ranking the number one ranking profile which kind of shows you that the page you link to the authority the what it's about what's the content on that page matters uh images and copy really matter first thing we do with multiple location Brands is we rewrite the the location page content and it almost always has a positive effect um images on the landing page actually strangely enough also could help we were working with a truck driving school last year and we noticed they were ranking behind competitors all of who had um images of trucks on their landing page so we just added some images of trucks on their location pages and immediately we saw an improvement in performance because my guess is Google was like oh like if you're about trucks maybe you should have a picture of a truck it's it's Google is like a a very brilliant child right it's it's kind of very smart about some things and very stupid about others so um learning how to kind of appease the child is part of our job let's go to the next one okay we're gonna quickly go through some GBP nightwears because most of the time we're not called in to help people where everything's great with Google Business profiles usually it's everything's not so great so let's talk about a couple not so great things let's go to the next one this next one is one of my favorites um I've been showing this for years um so we work with AutoNation and one day they sent us this um this this note what's up with this thing um a picture of a cat showed up on one of their um car dealership profiles um I could talk about how we figured out how the cat picture got up there but let's just say Google's really stupid um and so we had to basically go in there and delete that photo or mark that I got like 100 people to say hey this photo is irrelevant and um got rid of it and what this really kind of the lesson it taught us is that we really need to proactively audit these things and there's no good way to do that so you have to build your own tool sets to to kind of look at it and when you get uh when you have like a thousand locations it gets a little tricky so get in the habit of auditing stuff especially with the franchises like you don't want your franchisee pinging you and saying hey why is this happening we have a co-marketing budget to do GBP stuff and you're there's a cat picture here why aren't you on this you'd rather find this before your franchisee finds it let's go to the next one this was a funny one we were working with a luxury apartment building company and they had just announced a new building they were launching and Google just automatically created a GBP for them and using their street view I guess they drove by the construction spot and so all you could see was a row of porta potties and the client had no idea this was happening and so they're you know trying to Market luxury multi-million dollar apartments and if you went and searched on Google you this is the first thing you'd see so if you have new um new uh locations opening you might want to get in the habit of just checking to see if Google is doing something like this and claiming the profile and updating the photos let's go next uh so this is another one AutoNation because of its size I guess is the guinea pig for all sorts of weird stuff um so what you'll see here is that this is for AutoNation Ford Jacksonville which is in Florida but the address is for East Palo Alto California um I could go through a long long like list of a story about how we figured out what was going on here but essentially what was happening is um AutoNation had been working with reputation.com um years ago and nothing has reputation.com but they were no longer working with them but reputation.com still had a connection to their dashboard and something was going on with reputation.com on their back end where they kept making incorrect updates so reputation.com hadn't purged the AutoNation data either and so it kept overwriting the data and all we had to do to fix this was to delete reputation.com from access to this profile but it took a long time to figure out that the that was the case so make sure that old vendors that you're no longer working with do not have access or not connected to your GBP dashboard because they can cause Havoc like this let's go to the next one um I'm not going to go through all this stuff you can read this at your leisure but right now if you make a lot of edits to your um to your gbps that's going to send up a flag an automated flag and there's possible that you will have you'll get suspended it can be straightforward enough to get unsuspended but you definitely don't want to have to go through that um so um be very judicious about the edits you make let's go to the next one uh and so basically don't make too many edits use an email address that matches your domain when you do the edits so if you have an agency working for you give them an email address from your brand your domain um isolate your um your accounts so you may want to create a separate account for editing versus those for managing your gmbs um and uh there's a whole bunch of other things you can do um but basically what's happened is I we think that Google has reduced the staff of GBP like the budget is just a lot lower probably even after last week's layoffs um is probably even lower and so they're using a lot of automation to try to detect spam and that automation may be good and may not be so good depending on let's go to the next one actually we're gonna let's just let's just keep going here um since we're we're going to getting a little long I want to go through a couple of things so let's go to the next one Raquel keep going yeah let's just talk about a couple website things let's go to the next one so store locator Basics uh essentially to have a successfully SEO um multi-location website you want to have a state page a city page and a location page if you're National if you're not National you don't need States um and on your location Pages you might want to have a local service page and local content and then you want to have national service pages so hey we do brake repair and National content so like how to repair your brakes or how to tell if you need brake repair let's go to the next one that's a very basic level the kind of pages you need um this is a study we did a couple years ago we looked at the top 50 retailers and how many keywords they rank for and what we found was those that had search only locators meaning you put in a zip code or a city name and search for the location versus those that had clickable location pages I mean you could go state city location like just click around and get there the clickable location Pages tended to have twice as many keywords they rank for so if you haven't updated your search um your search locator your store locator from search to clickable you should definitely do that because it'll probably give you a big boost in SEO let's go to the next one um I'm gonna keep going but basically rewrite your location Pages let's go skip this one um geocategory Pages could be an opportunity so if you look at U-Haul they have a location plus service page for a number of services they do this doesn't work every time but you should look at your services you do and just and make a decision about whether or not it's worth creating a unique service page for each location it may or may not be you'll have to look at what's working in search results for those queries and whether or not you have enough content to justify a page let's go to the next one um this is one of the most easiest things we do that has an impact link from your if you have e-commerce link from your location pages to your category Pages we did this for walmart.com a couple years ago and saw amazing results just from simple links let's go to the next one um I'm not going to even try to explain this one at the time we have left but suffice is to say if you can figure out how to Target neighborhood queries or or or um cities near you there are ways to do that and what you want to do is look at the locations you kind of rank okay for that are outside of your current physical location and see if you can Target content so like the next neighborhood over the example I'll use is if I'm in Greenwich Village in Manhattan and I want to Target Soho it means create some Soho content if you're already ranking well for Soho and you might rank better let's go to the next one um National intent versus local intent um when you're looking at um uh potential search targets make sure that the searches you're targeting generate local search results oftentimes we get clients right I created a thousand pages to Target long-term care insurance in my city and what it turns out is no one searches for long-term care insurance in your city they just search for long-term care insurance so you want to make sure there are Pages the search results that generate local packs or um results that have um your city or state names in the title that's a way to figure out if they have local intent let's go to the next one uh I think this is like the last thing I'll go over and then we can go to q a um we've done a lot of work for franchises that wanted to consolidate they have their franchisees have um a bunch of local domains so um my brand nashville.com versus mybrand.com they also have mybrand.com so we this is a study we did recently for a brand that we wanted to pitch their franchisees whether they should consolidate it because managing all those those those single domains uh over time can be a hassle expensive um you have franchisees who are off the reservation doing different things that you don't want them to do let's say and what we looked at was in this case we looked at our thousands of national keywords so like Teeth Whitening um and thousands of local keywords so like dentists near me and what we found in both cases the national brand site this is for Home Services uh company tended to outrank the local franchisee sites almost every time that's what this chart shows uh so that was some data that said well the national brand site is a lot stronger for the queries you care about so maybe you might want to push all these domains over to the National brand site let's go to the next slide and this is actual data from a company we worked with called AFC urgent care that did just this in 2021 in the middle of 20 we did an analysis like that told them that we think that that was the right move and um in mid 2021 they redirected all of their their uh franchisee domains to their National domain and what you can see according to this chart this is ahrefs.com um it has worked out pretty well for them now most of this traffic is just shifting um the local domain traffic to the National one so it's not like they got more traffic magically but over time they actually got a lot of net new traffic um so we think this is a good tactic uh there's a few other things in here I think that are kind of cool but we're not gonna we don't have time to go over those so if you you need to um you can always hit me up on uh LinkedIn or um or Twitter or whatever and we can we can talk about it um so Raquel I will throw it over to you yeah thank you so much all right my camera hello everybody for diving into everything today as you've said and gone into there's a lot more detail that we could cover on literally each and every bullet point that we have um and for I've seen some questions what is this recorded yes will you get the information afterwards yes and if you have any questions on anything today please use this QR code contact us and we're happy to help in any capacity um but with the remaining time left I do want to dive into some questions so we will do that um here's just the last QR code to join the community so you can stay in the loop for our next uh webinars and expert talks and peer talks um and any series that we do so feel free to scan and questions and answers so we'll start off um with one and I'll I'll read it and throw it to you so feel free and here's one from Cheryl waldwin are there search or ranking benefits to having your franchise GBP set up as locations under the main franchisor GBP views or setting them up on their own Standalone profile uh I think what you're what you're asking is should they all be in the same dashboard like kind of related um or like a what we call a um a business group I think they call that uh so I don't think there's any benefit to ranking at all it's just more a management thing um yeah and there's no there's really no good way that I know of to connect them together um like hey this is a this is a department of um this gpp let's say or anything like that um you can use what's called structured data on your website to basically in the code of your pages tell Google Bing or anybody that these two different businesses are connected it's called organization schema um somebody look up that but there's nothing I don't think there's anything magical about having them connected on um in the GBP dashboard all right thank you um one for Mariana Barros um is it possible for a restaurant that has online ordering to have the product tab as well within the Google business profile uh I don't know the I assume there is I don't know the answer off the top of my head um if you want I'll make a note of that and I will um talk to my team who spend a lot more time working with restaurants than I do and we could maybe get back to you on that perfect and then one more is there a limit to the number of services or categories you should have your franchise locations use on GBP I know Google allows multiple but Does having too many or too few hurt your listing I've never seen it like hey I added a bunch and and suddenly things went crazy I've never seen that happen what we do see happen is when you're um when you change the primary category that's that's like the the the TR the key like having the right primary category all right thank you thank you can you talk a little bit about how to optimize uh service area businesses Google Business profiles using your website yeah so like I said sabs are the hardest uh because um Google doesn't really seem to want you on them on their Maps um because they really are looking they want people who businesses that people can go to it's kind of stupid but but they allow service area businesses um so basically the way it is start this is you're going to have a location page let's say and let's just let's just call it um I'll use Pleasanton my town as this so I'm a plumber in Pleasanton I should have a plumbing and plumber expert plumber in Pleasanton page that connects to my GBP and what I'll probably do on that page is I'll start out and say these are the areas we service so we service Dublin which is the next town over Livermore or San Ramon and I'd start there and just having those words those locations on that page can start to help because it gives Google a little signal that oh you're relevant to these things that said it tends not to be enough unless it's really low competition to get you over the hump so you should consider creating a service page let's say a city or location page for those neighboring towns that link from your Pleasanton page so now I it says servicing Dublin and it you click on Dublin and it takes you to plumber in Dublin page um there you're going to want to have unique a uniquely written content that targets stuff in Dublin and there's a there's a lot of kind of theories about how to optimize location Pages using different types of data so you'll kind of want to You'll kind of wanna figure that out like what are the things that people are looking you know you can write an amazing thing about everything to do with plummet like 24-hour plumbing services we fix trains all that kind of stuff you're going to want to figure out what are the top n topics people are looking for and put those on there um and then if that doesn't really move the needle the next thing we see work is if you get reviews from different uh service areas you pipe those reviews onto the location Pages as they come in so the Dublin page just gets Dublin reviews hey here's a customer in Dublin we just serviced and they said we're awesome um and what that does is two things is it gets um unique content on the page it also refreshes the page over and over and Google really likes pages that get updated a lot if those tactics don't work then your next Resort is link building um meaning get a few links from relevant pages in Dublin or pages about Dublin to your Dublin location page and all that as you can imagine sounds like a huge pain to do if you have multiple locations like 500 or something so you can only figure out really you can only really do stuff that's kind of automated or templated to do that so um so we face this all the time and so if you can't do that at scale what you can do a lot of the template stuff content stuff at scale but then what you want to do in terms of linking is you want to have a national piece of content let's say how to unclog your toilet or something right you want to get a lot of links to that and then that page you have linked deeply into um the service areas that are highest priority to you so I'm for whatever reason Dublin is a priority I might link that unclog a toilet page to my Dublin page and set up to my Pleasanton pitch yeah a lot of information all um we have one last question that I think is a really good one um and we do see this quite a bit um so one question is for example an ice cream truck business or again Sab businesses do you recommend franchisees to use a home address for the search results to get that physical address because I know obviously that goes into murky Waters with your personal information public um I I don't remember the guideline recommendations off the top of my head about using home addresses but often what happens is you'll you'll set it up like hey I'm a legit business here's my business license and you'll um you'll you'll claim your Google business profile and then they might say it needs to be verified uh or they definitely will say it needs to be verified and verification can happen via a postcard like they'll send it to you and you know you enter a code and you're verified or um it might be via a phone call or even worse a video phone call well they'll ask you to like go out in front of your office and show me the signage right and show me how a customer can find you and so um we've actually worked with attorneys who had to basically were like you need to um create a sign for your business put it on a post in your front yard and then show Google that this is a place that people can come like when I was a kid my dentist used to operate out of his basement so I used to go to his house for um for cavities and stuff so that's the kind of thing if you got your ice cream truck business you may have to be prepared to do I would try to set it up at your home first and maybe you won't get verified like don't go through jumping through all the hoops and if you don't then you know you have to jump through the hoops perfect but um but mailboxes mailboxes are absolutely like the worst thing you know one of the worst things you can try they they tend not Google does not basically those things have been spammed and so don't use mailboxes thank you for sharing um so thank you for sticking with us afterwards and answering a few questions um I did see some questions come through the chat um in regards to putting the personal information up again so if you want to connect with Andrew directly feel free to scan this OR screenshot because you have the websites here and his Twitter in case you want to interact that way so leave it on for like 10 seconds or so um and then I'll put back our um QR code which is how to join our promo Republic CMO peer talks Community where you're able to ask questions peer-to-peer join our next series um and stay in the loop WE Post Tech news we post webinars all the recordings informations like that and our via this link here so there's um a lot of members in here franchisors and we're really loving the community that we've built so feel free to scan that then once again I just want to thank you so much Andrew for joining us today this was such an interesting conversation where I know our franchise Partners learned quite a lot from you on how to optimize the their Google Business profiles and make the SEO actually work for them as a multi-location business mm-hmm happy to be here thank you yeah and again anyone I know I ran through a ton of stuff um anyone who wants to you know kind of go over to whatever just hit me up on Twitter on LinkedIn or through my website I'm always happy to to kind of um obliviate about this stuff so um thank you thank you everyone thank you for joining us today we hope you have a great day speak soon
