Google My Business Management - The Importance Behind Managing Your Google my Business at an Expert Level. by Navads
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Google My Business Management
The Importance Behind Managing Your Google my Business at an
Expert Level.
by Navads
1
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
About Google My Business 4
What is Google My Business 4
The Google My Business API 4
What is Google Maps 4
Google Insights 5
Why You Should Manage 6
GMB Accounts?
The Costs Explained 6
Brand Performance 6
Use Case for GMB 7
Mobile-friendliness 7
Conversion Optimized 7
US Local Mobile Search vs. Desktop Search 8
GMB as First Point of Contact 8
Turning Locations into Revenue 8
How It Connects With SEO 9
Google and It’s Rankings 9
The Link Between Local SEO and General SEO
10
What is a Direct Search? 10
What is a Discovery Search? 10
GMB Management and Optimization for
Multiple Locations 12
Optimizing Your Listings 12
Daily Required Actions 13
Time Spent On Maintenance 14
Duplicate Listings Suppression 14
How We Correct Duplicates 15
5 Ways to Assure Accuracy Across the
Navigation Ecosystem 16
Consistent NAP 16
What Navads Does for You 17
Google Suggestions 17
Duplicate Analysis and Reporting 17
Manual Marker Correction 17
What we did for our Client: Case Study 18
How a Local Listings Platform Adds Value: 19
In Conclusion 20
2
Introduction
Google My Business is Google’s portal which connects businesses to consumers at the local to
national level. Whether you’re a, SMB or enterprise (multi-location) business, the importance of
managing your Google my Business local information such that business name, address, phone
number and website
are consistent is
paramount.
There’s long been
a manual claiming
process which
ensures the phone
number or physical
address are correct
by generating a pin
number which the
owner must verify.
This process
changed recently
and Navads holds the capability to claim a listing based on our four-point stringent verification
policies which happen to encompass some manual elements on our end.
3
About Google My Business
What is Google My Business What is Google Maps
Google My Business is a free tool that Google Google Maps is a web mapping service developed
offers business owners or their agency of by Google. It offers satellite imagery, street maps,
record to manage their business locations, 360° panoramic views of streets (Street View),
otherwise known as local listings, within real-time traffic conditions (Google Traffic), and
Google Maps. It basically offers all of the tools route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle
and insights you need to market your business (in beta), or public transportation. The operating
in Google Maps, hence the term local marketing. system has more than 2 billion active devices
which utilize the platform per month.
The Google My Business API
You can use the Google My Business API to create
and edit locations in Google My Business. Though,
using the API requires significant IT investment,
and once the API is installed manual effort
remains required to fully update the content: pin-
placement, deletions, Google Suggestions
These locations can be used in Adwords to create
location-based ads but you need to be verified
to be eligible to appear in Google Search and
Maps. Note that verification of locations is not
supported via the API.
Google Maps has difficulty processing ZIP code data when dealing with
cross-boundary situations. For example, users are unable to obtain a
route from Hong Kong to Shenzhen via Shatoujiao, because Google
Maps does not display and plan the road map of two overlapping places.
[161]
Sometimes the names of geographical locations are inaccurate. An
example of this type of error could
be found in Google Maps Laona,
Wisconsin. In this instance Google
Maps identified one of the town’s two
major lakes as “Dawson Lake”;[162]
the USGS, State of Wisconsin, and
local government maps all identify
that map feature as “Scattered Rice
Lake”.[163] Another example was
Samoa, labeled with “Western Samoa”,
accurate only as recently as 1997.
4
Google Insights
figure1: Example of Google’s Google My Business brand page
Google Insights allows the business owner or agency to pull important action details in to assess
the overall value of having a GMB profile. It will tell the owner how many actions were generated by
way of that profile.
They’ll be able to assess how many calls, website clicks and directions-to the location have been
generated. In certain instances, marketers
can look at the high level data in order to
produce specific ROI calculations around
average spend in a shop, conversion traffic
to sale, and ultimately ROI per invested
dollar.
We were able to determine for our client
Shell for instance that for every dollar
they invested in Navads managing their
location-data, $313 in revenue was
generated for Shell.
5
Why You Should Manage Your
GMB Accounts?
The Costs Explained
The question posed in the title already
hints to the fact that not all people “about $10.3 billion worth of potential
understand why managing GMB is so annual sales are lost because of wrong,
important. Many people think that missing, or incomplete local business
by default their Google accounts are information.” (YP.com)
already perfectly filled and setup.
Though unfortunately, this is not always
true. Not managing your GMB accounts
means that you are not actively
competing with your direct and indirect Brand Performance
competition, as you are using a free tool
that Google affords you. Have you ever
wondered how much potential revenue
And what about the intangible losses? When
your company or your clients miss out your customer is faced with false or incorrect
on by not managing their accounts on business information, leaving them left nothing
GMB? but a closed door. How much do you lose in in
terms of negative customer experiences? The
Every second 40,000 queries are performed, last thing you want for your business is to come
aggregating to a total of about 3.5 billion across as an off-brand.
searches a day. What would it mean for
your business when customers can’t find
the information they were looking for, on
maps, in Google, on their mobile ? In their
research paper ‘The why before the buy The
Local Search Association (LSA) joined YP
in a research and posed the same question,
‘how much money do businesses lose by not
managing their Google My Business Accounts?’
The results were astonishing:
figure2: Survey by Placeable*: Relation Between wrong NAP and
trust
To stop giving your customers the suboptimal
local experience, we offer you this guide in
which we will offer you insights in how you can
improve your multi-location GMB account.
* https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2338839/73
-lose-trust-in-brands-due-to-inaccurate-local-business-listings-survey 6
Use Case for GMB
Google Maps monthly attracts more than Conversion Optimized
158.03 Million visitors to each platform
monthly, and it’s averaged that Google
Maps has over 1 billion users worldwide The site should load quickly to decrease bounce
per month. rate, Javascript and slider images only slow
down the load time. The site should be primed
The use case for Google My Business increases for conversions including ‘click to call buttons’
as consumers not only use their desktop to on the site in colors that indicate a call to action
find businesses but also use their mobile – obvious reds and oranges. The click to call
technology and other devices including tablets button will also be on the GMB page, this is
to find businesses in the go. Therefore, Google one of the easiest ways to prime and track the
suggests that consumer behaviour has shifted business page conversions.
to complement mobile technology and results
in micro-moments where consumers try to
learn as much of a vendor as possible in a very
short time frame. It’s essentially an informed Google Maps monthly attracts more
and flash data dump in order to assist the
consumer in their decision-making process. In than 158.03 Million visitors to each
a recent study by Google, Think with Google, platform monthly, and it’s averaged
they have acknowledged that desktop searches that Google Maps has over 1 billion
are decreasing and that mobile searches will
eventually take over. This has some obvious users worldwide per month.
implications for businesses such as;
Mobile-friendliness
Businesses should be mobile ready and have an
optimized mobile brand experience. This means at
minimum having an HTML and mobile site and / or
a responsive site.
Mobile Responsive
Fast
Call-to-Action
7
US Local Mobile Search vs. Desktop
Search
figure 3: Local Mobile vs Dekstop Search in the US, measured in Billions ($)
GMB as First Point of Contact Turning Locations into Revenue
Consumer buying habits indicate they will often With Google My Business, businesses of any
just shop information at the first superficial layer type can market their business online and ensure
they receive – looking for pricing, obvious contact that people have no trouble in finding their
details, directions. This often reduces the number business and action-oriented contact or location
of website visits which are then produced. You information.
clearly can see the overall trend in local searches
on mobile increasing each year, reaching 110 GMB helps consumers to make their purchase
billion total searches in 2017. decision in both search and maps as in both
portals’ information about the businesses can
appear in various formats and types for consumer
review.
8
How It Connects With SEO
Google and It’s Rankings
Google has reduced
the number of local
results from the
local 7-pack to the
local 3-pack in 2015
for local search
results which are
based on proximity
to search, category
accuracy and
number of reviews
as well as star
rating. * With 13
search results being
organic search
citations thereafter,
that means there
is huge potential
for organic traffic
figure 4: Local Ranking Factors, segmented as categorical variables
to be captured.
Businesses should understand that by simply being where their
competition isn’t, they have a huge opportunity to capture a larger
audience.
In addition, Andrew Shotland from Localseoguide.com. a renowed
SEO and Local SEO consultant, researched over 200+ ranking
factors from 100.000 local businesses.
Shotland writes that:
“The data suggests that Google, while attempting to shift to more en-
gagement-based and locally relevant factors for its Local algorithm,
is still susceptible to the traditional organic SEO tactics. The imma-
turity of the Local algorithm combined with the power of a focused
SEO effort can yield outsized benefits for smart location-marketers.
This study illustrates the foundational building blocks of a Local SEO
campaign with the goal of helping marketers prioritize their invest-
ments in tactics that will move the needle.”
* (https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2423578/google-local-pack-is-233-percent-more-
important)
9
The Link Between Local SEO and
General SEO
What is a Direct Search?
This is an essential part of the local puzzle for
businesses: by investing on traditional SEO
efferts you indirectly increase the effectiveness With direct search we mean a search
of your local SEO ranking factors, and vice ver-
that is directional, a specific query to find
sa. So, Local SEO is not just embedded within
SEO, it also has a two-directional relationship a brand based on the proximity of the
with it. And Google My Business is the hub searcher. In this example, the searcher
where the two can intwine. would have queried ‘Shell station near
me.”
At Navads, the goal is a competitive edge in both
direct search and discovery search. For instance:
• When a searcher types in a branded search What is a Discovery Search?
such as the business name, they will have
no difficulties in finding your business and
visiting it. Some key factors come into play
in this search process.
A discovery search means a non-
directional search. i.e. The searcher does
not know which brand the searcher
• When people type in a non-branded search specifically wants. The search is
(also referred to as: discovery search or unbranded and broader, mostly to find
broader search term such as “gas stations”) information about fuel stations of any
they will see your listing within in the search
kind in a radius around the searchers’
results.
location. In this example, the searcher
could have queried: ‘fuel station, near
me”
figure 5: Example of Google Insights’ direct vs discovery
searches pie chart
10The graph captured from the study produced by Shotland shows that many GMB-
related ranking factors like responding to reviews, have accurate business hours,
photos and account-verification have a big impact on the way your business will rank or
not. For multi-location business owners managing all these variables can be an itense
job, imagine for example the gathering and processing of variable business hours from
100.000 shops all over the world.
Although Google My Business is a great tool,
was built initially for managing single business
locations. Franchise businesses with multiple
locations often face many problems in properly
managing reputation and listing information,
optimizing and distributing across multiple
accounts. Not only does Google not support Andrew Shotland
editing in bulk mode, it does also lack the ability
to bulk verify and claim listings.
Among these ranking factors, two very
important ones are NAP+W (Business name,
address, phone number and website) accuracy
across the navigation ecosystem and proximity
to the searcher.
Andrew is the CEO of
LocalSEOGuide.com, a 10-year-old search
Due to These Factors; consultancy with a specialty in SEO for Multi-
Location brands, SEO for Franchises and White
Label SEO Services. Follow Andrew on Twitter
• Your business should not be accurate via @localseoguide and via the Local SEO
on Google alone, but should have the Guide blog.
same level of accuracy across the web to
include major search engines, mapping and
navigation sites.
• If your location is not claimed and optimized
as well as appearing on other important
sites for cross-reference, Google will have a
hard time prioritizing your businesses rank.
“gas station near me”
“coffee, near me”
11GMB Management and Optimization
for Multiple Locations
Managing Google My Business for • Account Verification
a single location business is easy to
Account verification is only possible for brands.
handle. The problem arises when
This way, your brand will be white-listed and
multiple locations are at stake. To start new POIs will be automatically published.
to edit and optimze listings, one has to Direct contact with the brand required
go through a tidious process of claiming [affiliation confirmation]
verifying
and optimizing every listing. Therefore, • Bulk Location Verification
for large accounts, outsourcing seems
After completing the account verification, your
to be a far better idea. locations will be analyzed by Google for quality
purposes. After approval, locations will jump
to ‘pending review’ and the publication will be
The process of accuracy starts with claiming completed within 48 hours.
and verifying your listings. Google luckily has Storefront images are mandatory if the
made a few steps towards offering a tool which street view non-existing or unclear
caters to multiple listing businesses. In order to
be verified by Google as being a multi-location Build Credibility with Customers
vendor a few conditions must be met:
Businesses that verify their information with
Google My Business are twice as likely to be
1. Have at minimum 10 locations considered reputable by consumers. It was
2. Not being a service-basedbusiness found by Placeable, that over 67% of people
3. Not being an agency with multiple clients surveyed said to not trust a business anymore
when any of the components of NAP was
incorrect.
Optimizing Your Listings
Verification
Verifying listings is the heart of the operation
in the quest for location accuracy. Before the
process starts, Navads checks whether a client
is already enrolled at Google My Business and
has an account.
12Daily Required Actions
Technical % Manual % Communication %
Maintenance Maintenance
Recleansing 5% Correction E-mail management 1%
+ submission
errors
Testing API 1% Daily checks 4% Google Support: account 35%
improvements + listing verification,
storefront images,
Reporting disabled/
suspended locations
Submission 1% Onboarding
Photo 1% GMB HR 1%
Management
Claiming 1% Google HQ 1%
[maps]
Transferring 1%
locations
Marker 1%
correction
Access 1%
requests
Access 1%
rejection
Accuracy
checks
Account 1%
integration
Location 1%
removal
When you outsource your Google my Business Management to Navads, then what to they do? The chart
above shows exactly what our Google My Business team does on a daily basis. Their daily tasks are
divided in three main parts, Technical Maintenance, Re-cleansing and submission and API improvement
tests, oh which the latter takes up the major part of their day. As we have pointed out several times in this
whitepaper, Google My Business Management is not just making sure your Locations are put on the map.
The core part of the job is to actually maintain a healthy location score and to improve wherever possible.
13Time Spent On Maintenance How does the problem come to existence?
Each address can only be assigned to a single
POI, but in some cases two POIs are assigned
to the same address, causing confusion at
When analyzing our current daily maintenance, Google as described. If we are referencing spe-
we’ve discovered that our current processes cialization in the real estate, legal, healthcare or
are time-consuming. A single POI costs us daily insurance verticals Navads has the capability to
about 1.5 minute of operational work. As we produce a master listing with individual agent
cross the threshold of 1,278 POIs, the time or physician listings below the master listing.
spent per account stabilizes. There are three main causes for duplicate list-
ings;
• Multiple people can claim the same POI on
Duplicate Listings Suppression the map.
Let’s say you have store owners, regional brand
managers and a general brand manager at HQ
all trying to claim the listing. This can cause
Duplicate Listings can cause a real problems for multiple claims on the same address which
your account’s listings accuracy. Same as with causes a duplicate listing
duplicate content in SEO, duplicate content
is seen as negative by Google. GMB crawlers • Sometimes, by default a listing can be
check GMB accounts for any inaccuracies and listed double as a result of the crawler
if they find any duplicate listings, they will from Google;
automatically downgrade your account in the this is just an error that is the result of the au-
rankings, causing you to lose customers, value tomatic crawling process. This puts even more
and money. Many listings go from page one to emphasis on the claim that listings should be
page 15 depending on how many duplicates owner-verified at all cost.
they may have.
• Most of the time, Google issues its own
Quality Checks and when duplicates are
discovered, a notification by Google is sent
to let the owner know that the listing has
an error.
This enables the owner to check and correct
the listing.
A clear example of what we find often is with
gas stations which are often located across the
street from each other. Because they are locat-
ed as so close to one another, sometimes Goog-
le can become confused based on the vicinity
and sees them as one and the same.
14How We Correct Duplicates “You need to have a physical location in
the city you’re trying to rank in, and it’s
helpful for it to be close to the searcher.
Then, make sure to have the proper
Navads corrects duplicates in bulk by categories associated with your listing,
submitting the legitimate POI to the map. Then and get your citations built out and
using street view, we prove which POI is the consistent on the most important sites.
real one and should be assigned to the address.
Now, to really move the needle, focus on
getting links and reviews.”
- Andrew Shotland
So to answer the question in this paragraph: why
are reviews important for my local SEO? The
answer is threefold:
• One, they are used as ranking factors
• Two, people use reviews to decide whether
or not to visit your business.
Why are Reviews Important for my Local SEO?
One, they are used as ranking factors
Two, people use reviews to decide whether or not to visit your business.
Three, they help create brand advocates for your locations
155 Ways to Assure Accuracy Across the
Navigation Ecosystem
Consistent NAP
This is essential for the overall success of your Google also allows for additional information
listings, and is often considered as the holy to be added to your GMB listings such as
grail within local marketing. Google takes website URL, business hours and even menus.
the information your provided in GMB as a Our advice is that you fill these fields with care
baseline to check other listings’ information across all selected directories and recognize
to verify the accuracy of the information. So, them as opportunities for additional listing
basically they check whether the information optimization. The more robust the profile is, the
in GMB is the same as for example Apple more prominent it will appear in search results.
Maps.
They do this to
assure their platform
presents accurate
information to its
users, fearing that
users would have
decreased trust
in the platform
otherwise.
Therefore, Google
checks and
double checks its
sources and when
inaccuracies are
discovered be ready
to see your listings
decrease in ranking. Businesses are also permitted to provide
photos, videos and even Virtual Tours (see
It is essential therefore to have one master the Indoor Street View feature) for their
sheet of the information you provided to locations. This information will give your
Google in order to cross check that information potential customers valuable information
against other data sources. that will influence their buying decision. Users
want (expect even) complete, accurate and
informative details about your business – don’t
stop at NAP+W data – make sure you’re giving
them all the information you can!
16What Navads Does for You
Google Suggestions Manual Deletion, Temporarily
Closed
As Google is an open-source model, people
are given the option to make suggestions or Smaller brands rarely have to deal with manual
crowd-sourced changes to the locations they deletion / temporarily closed locations. Where-
visit based on conflicting data sources. These as larger brands almost always do, due the fact
‘suggestions’ are called Google Updates which locations open / close or are being re-built for a
need to be managed on daily basis as a crowd- certain reason.
sourced change could potentially cause muta-
tions or changes to the listing.
Duplicate Analysis and Reporting Manual Marker Correction
As explained earlier, Google has certain ‘qual- Google works with geocoding and latlongs via
ity’ checks for their maps as well. These auto- API are not being used. When there is a mu-
mated checks are via a built-in algorithm or tation on a latlong, this is definitely not being
even via queries of a Google employee who can used, because different lat/long means differ-
manually mark locations as duplicate. These are ent location. This is why our team’s process is
mostly falsely marked due to close-proximity to check markers manually. It’s almost dou-
locations within the same category classifica- ble-cleansing or verifying the location in our
tion. This happens frequently to malls and fuel information chain.
retail locations.
17What we did for our Client: Case Study
The following results are taken from a case study which Navads created based on one of our clients
after being a client for one year.
The case compared two date ranges:
Ist Februari 2016 – 30th April 2016 vs Ist Februari 2017 – 30th April 2017
The case stuy uses insights statistics from Google Insights over the period of 1 year. The goal of the
case sudy was to see the effectieness of our GMB management programm, after we made sginifant
imporvents on behalf of their account. As the charts show, all KPIs that define succes have increased
significantly. Total views, or the total amount of times locations were viewed on the map by drivers
have increased 3x.
The number of searches on Google Search and Maps have increased with a staggering 80%.
Actions, divided in website visits, phone calls and get-to-directions increased by 149%; of which ‘get-
18How a Local Listings Platform Adds
Value:
This whitepaper has outlined several First, all locations have to manually claimed
reasons why managing Google My and verified. For companies with multiple
Business might become a real hurdle for locations, this means that you have to be
companies that have multiple locations. whitelisted by Google to perform bulk-
verification. Not only does this require time
to understand the process, it also demand
At the beginning of the whitepaper we the person in charge to manually check the
explained our current environment and the locations continuously to see wheter the
place that Google has in this regad. It’s suffice preferred validation status is reached.
to say that Google still has a dominant position
in search and that like contemporary web After locations are claimed, we identify
search optimization, optimization for discovery 4 core processes in which we, as a local
and direct searches is an ongoing process. marketing vendor, can add value.
Alogritms change and in the case of locations,
many things can change on a daily basis which
might open up the risk of losing visitors. As 1. Google Suggestions
the introduction states, this can have serious
consequences resulting into real money losses.
2. Duplicate Analysis and Reporting
To avoid that, a local marketing vendor might
be just what you need to avoid this. 3. Manual Deletion, Temporarily Closed
We have outlined several ways how, in case of
Navads, value can be added. 4. Manual Marker Correction
Navads has a team of Google My Business
specialists who handle all the claims,
suggestions and errors on a daily basis; which
often implies weekly calls with the Google team.
Navads saves costs by effectively managing the
process at a large scale. At just 1/5 of the price
brands would do it themselves.
The ongoing communication is necessary for
the verification process (account verification,
listing verification, storefront images to be
added), Google quality checks (disabled/
suspended locations), and to resolve duplicates
(in account or plotted on the maps).
19In Conclusion
Navads takes care of all of the heavy lifting for Google
My Business management. We manage all of the time-
consuming and manual elements to keep our clients happy
and report back through our reporting tool on listings
status to communicate changes.
Navads offers businesses great tools that can really help
the progress in their local marketing.
Within Atlas, the all-in-one location management
dashboard, Navads offers a diverse set of tools which
brands can utilize to progress their local marketing
efforts. About Navads
Navads offers local listings management for
The Insights tool for example, views the progression and enterprise brands and media agencies who
overall value of active GMB management, continually require their business listings to be optimized
for search throughout the whole local search
validating the effectiveness of your brand’s strategy. ecosystem. Through its data quality focused
platform, Navads is the leading provider of
It's mobile-friendly format will help to better location data to the databases that power
the navigation and mapping industry. Navads’
communicate key attributes such as hours of operation, mission is to provide an industry standard
website and promote actions such as calls being made, for location data quality and to be the global
directions being generated and clicks to the site. preferred supplier of POI data to all the
mapmakers. Through years of experience
These actions then turn to revenue and over time, your in the location marketing domain, Navads
cost for conversion decreases with a well-managed has acquired strategic relationships with all
strategy. the principal map development companies,
including Google, TomTom, Apple and HERE.
Navads is trusted by over 500 companies and
has published over 600.000 businesses on the
map.
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