3 Quick Adjustments to Optimize Your Google Business Profile for Photographers with Lydia Fine

Colie: Hello. Hello and welcome back to Business First Creatives podcast y’all. We’ve got a returning guest. It is Lydia Fine, and today she is here to talk about something that I think a lot of us don’t pay attention to, and it used to be called Google My Business, but she is gonna tell us the new name because I literally can’t remember it.

And she told me like four minutes ago. Lydia, welcome back to the podcast.

Lydia: Thank you for letting me come back. I had so much fun last time.

Colie: I mean, I love having repeat guests. We can skip all the, you know, chit chat and get right to it. So Google my business is no longer, what is the new name?

Lydia: It is called Google Business Profiles, so that’s kind of, that’s they, Google loves to change things, little tiny things all the time. This was a big change, but I have not really moved on when I’m need to go to my Google business profile. I just. Type Google my business into the search. So yeah, same. They all

Colie: I mean, I didn’t even notice. ’cause the truth is I don’t have a Google My Business or a Google business profile, which is what you said. I don’t have that for the system side of my business. So my photography one is still active and literally you just reminded me that I should probably go disable that.

So maybe that will be done by the time this airs, but I don’t think. Granted, we are gonna take this from a photographer perspective. You still do photography? I just took it off my bio. So I mean, you know, we’re still in the photography realm. I understand how important that is as like a local business owner that was trying to get clients locally to find me.

You know, the profile was important. The number of reviews that you get is important. And I really liked, although I never did it, but you could go add in, you know, images or you could make like. Time sensitive offers, even though I didn’t do a lot of it, I knew that that was in there. But today you are going to be telling us why this is important for our businesses and the three things that everything, everybody should stop and like do it right now.

So do you wanna tell us why it’s important or do you wanna start with the three things?

Lydia: I think we should start with why it’s important because a lot of people maybe claimed it and maybe filled out a few things and then just said, I don’t really need to touch this or do anything more with this. I’m just gonna leave it alone and thought they could set it and forget it. Uh, but it is.

Absolutely a super powerful local SEO tool and most of us photographers aren’t trying to reach the entire world. We are just trying to get hired locally by the people close to home. So it, it’s so powerful and I think a lot of people overlook it. I know they do.

Colie: I mean, I feel like we can’t continue until we cover this because when you said people claim it and forget it. The one thing that I remember when I was actually doing my course on how to be a documentary family photographer years ago, and I would tell everybody, Hey, go, go claim your Google profile. Was the putting your address in there?

Because I don’t think anybody remembers this at this point, but I used to be a very private person. I know. It’s ridiculous. I’m everywhere now. I see you’re laughing like I’m all over YouTube, podcast, website, all of that. But. When I first started my business, I kept privacy. Like I was, I was like that person that didn’t wanna share anything.

I, I actually didn’t share pictures of Chloe for the first 18 months of her life. That’s how bad it was.

Lydia: That’s not bad.

Colie: thing in Google profile where they wanted your real address. And so everybody was like, how do you get around it? And I know a lot of people went to like, claim their profile. And either stopped because they didn’t wanna give Google their address or they went through it and then they never got the stupid postcard to verify the address.

So, I mean, is that still a thing?

Lydia: Oh my gosh, so much has changed. Like so much. Okay. First of all, the postcard verification method, it, it’s still there as a last resort. They want everybody to verify by video now, so the postcard verification. Is like the afterthought, only if everything else fails, and Google will try everything it possibly can to get you to not verify by, by, by postcard, because it costs them time and money.

The video’s so much easier. So that part got a lot easier. Now the home address thing is also different, so that. You’re right, there was, there were privacy concerns. Google has since figured out that there are many, many home-based businesses. I’m one of them, that we don’t wanna share our home address.

Because somebody might accidentally end up on our front porch and my 11-year-old son is answering the door and his underwear. No, my mom’s not here right now. Like I, I could see it happening. I don’t want that. Google actually allows you now to indicate if your business is a location based business, like brick and mortar studio, or if your business is a service area business, meaning while you do have to put an address in so Google can verify that you.

Are where you say you are, right? And then maybe I put my address in, and then I, in the video, I show my insurance policy that comes to the same address. So Google can say, okay, yeah, she’s, she’s all, she’s all legit. But you can toggle on or off show business address to customers. And if you have it toggled off, which is what home-based businesses should be doing, then you get to choose, cities, counties, zip codes to make up your service area.

And, um, they just recently took off, took off the ability to choose the entire United States as your service area because nobody should have been doing that anyway. You don’t even wanna choose a whole state. It doesn’t matter if you’ll travel anywhere that people want you to go. Google business profiles are all about local SEO.

Okay? People finding you that are close to you. So don’t think of it as a thing that somebody’s gonna find you with across the country. They will not.

Colie: Yeah.

Lydia: So just your local service area, I say like 50 miles in any direction, kind of maximum, but some really big metro areas don’t even need to do that much, right?

You can stay smaller, but service area, no more sharing your home address. No more making up a fake address. Please don’t do that.

Colie: That sounds like a nightmare. Mine was set and I, I mean it still is ’cause I haven’t touched it in years. Mine is set to 45 miles from my previous house. And that’s important because here in Denver Metro, that actually gets me all the way to Fort Collins, which is where my furthest clients were north of me.

And it gets me all the way to just south of Denver. And so it was, you know, it’s quite a big area, but that was what it took to literally get to. The area in which I was willing to drive to do someone’s photography sessions. And the thing back then was that I was always a service location, business.

But when I did mine, they allowed that. And then there was this very brief amount of time where they took that away. And that was actually when everybody was like, I don’t understand. Like I even had a video that showed people how to do it and they’re like, cool, it doesn’t look like that anymore. And I went in there and I was like, holy fuck.

Like where is the thing where you can set it? They had like taken it away for a few months. I mean it was, you know, again, they’re always changing stuff, but it is good to know that it is much easier to keep your privacy now and not have people just show up at your house because that is legitimately my worst nightmare.

And my business is still registered at my old address. Now that’s not illegal ’cause I still own that house, but. Again, another layer of protection between me and the people who might try to come find me.

Lydia: You have a lot of people coming to find you after you set up their systems.

Colie: no, but you just never know.

Lydia: You’re, this is true. There are crazies out there. You never know,

Colie: All right, so what’s important besides knowing that you don’t have to get Google your address.

Lydia: right? What’s important? Okay. So I, I mean, I have this kind of, this list of the three most important things, but to take like a tiny step backward before that, right? Is to have your business ducks in a row so that when you do claim your business profile, you’re able to verify it, right?

And I mentioned in, in the, video that you would. Submitted you would upload. As part of your verification, you need to be able to prove that your business in has a legal name, and there’s paperwork that you can show in your video that has the name and the address that matches what you’re telling Google, and the phone number would be even better.

Google loves what they call NAP consistency. Its. One another weird acronym, name, address, phone number. It wants to see the same three pieces of information all over the web. That is down to using the ampersand instead of the word A and D, right? It wants consistency. That’s going to help boost your local SEO.

The chances of your. Profile coming up in a local pack, which is that little like bundle of business listings that comes up when you do a search for a specific business. So. Make sure you have all of that kinda ironed out before you start. Otherwise you will not get verified and you’ll kind of be spinning your wheels.

But once you do get that part done and you’ve put in your address, whether you show it to the public or not, your phone number and the name of your business that matches your legal paperwork, then you’re ready to kind of cover like the three most important pieces for your Google business profile. ’cause there’s a bunch of stuff in there and it can get kind of overwhelming if you think you have to do all of it. the first of the three big things, there’s a section called edit Profile. When you go into your Google Business profile and your it, that’s the basics of your business. Now these are the, the first line of defense things that Google’s going to use to match you up with people who are searching for your services.

Now, one of the reasons I love Google Business Profiles and why I think they really matter is because we’re creating websites and we’re spending all this time trying to, um, you know, make this. Website experience, great for our potential clients. However, Google is trying to scrub that same content to figure out who we are, who we serve, where we serve people, what we do specifically.

And sometimes we don’t make that obvious. Sometimes we kind of unintentionally put barriers to Google, understanding that. This Google business profile is essentially a silver platter. We are spoonfeeding Google all of the information about our business that we want it to know so that it can match us up with people who are searching for the service that we provide.

The edit profile section in your Google Business profile is where you are going to provide those basics. You will provide, again, your address or service area, your phone number, your attributes about your business woman owned, um, L-G-B-T-Q, owned, things like that. You can also indicate L-G-B-T-Q friendly.

There you can indicate your business hours, as well as online service hours. Those are kind of two separate sets of hours. You can put holiday hours, things like that can go in there too. All of the things in that first edit profile section are important for Google to be able to, at a minimum match you up with people who are searching for your service.

You’re also going to choose your primary category there, which for most photographers will just be photographer. It doesn’t get much more granular than that at this really high level primary category. And that’s how we’re gonna be able to tell business, uh, Google what our business is. Who it serves, exactly what it does with those basics in the edit profile section.

So that’s my step one, is to fill out the basics in the edit profile section. Start to finish.

Colie: I don’t know what you’re coming for. For number two, guys, Hey listen, we didn’t talk about this before and I did it on purpose, but when you were talking just now, what I was trying to like map it towards, since this is very important for SEO, right? I was thinking to myself when you were telling us to go to the profile and really clearly like what the silver platter indicate, what our business does is this similar to when you’re writing a blog post and you’re giving it your title.

Which, you know, ends up being your H one and then your meta description, which ends up being like you. That is your opportunity to tell Google what the article is about, and then of course Google actually scrolls it to figure out what they think it’s about. But is that what the profile does or is that step two?

Lydia: so that’s basically what they said at profile section does is, but it’s all in Google’s own language. You’re choosing from a predetermined list of business categories. That Google came up with because it understands which search terms match up to that business category, so that if someone who is not, uh, a common consumer of photography services types, child photos or child sessions or something random like that into Google, Google can match it up with photographer

Colie: Okay,

Lydia: and know that those two things go together.

But

Colie: Hit me with number two.

Lydia: does lead in quite nicely to number two. There’s a section in your Google Business profile, called Services. Edit Services is what the icon says, and this services section is the next layer of giving Google the information that it needs to match you up with searching behavior. This list is kind of messy.

It contains all the, the normal stuff that we would say about our service. I’m a family photographer, I’m a senior photographer. I’m a newborn photographer, but it also includes random things like child photo sessions and family pictures, like every variation that people could type into Google that describes your service is.

Probably in this list and your job is to go find all of them and select all of them so you don’t just find senior photographer and stop. You find high school photographer. You find graduation photos, graduation photographer, graduation, headshot, what? Whatever it may be. You find all those different variations and you go through that long list.

You can search it. So you can search for pictures like, or search for words like pictures, photos, portraits, sessions to find the matches. You wanna add everything in there that you can so that Google can again match you up with searching behavior?

Colie: You know what this reminds me of? Have you? Ever run Google ads?

Lydia: Yes.

Colie: Okay, so listening audience, what this reminds me of is when you go and you create your first Google ad or your 10th or whatever it is, you can actually see what people searched in order to get matched with your ad. And if you like it, you can check it.

If you don’t, you can remove it. So to me, this is like you’re kind of doing this research now where it’s listing basically. I mean these, these things that they’re listing for you are not random. These are things that they know that people are searching for, and so they’re trying to get you to indicate to them which ones are good matches so that if someone is doing like child photos at a park, and that’s what you do, you have checked the box so that they will show your profile to someone locally looking for that service.

Lydia: Exactly. A hundred percent yes. And um, the other thing, if you are so inclined and you have time to do this, is they actually allow you for every single one of those services that you select in that very large list to indicate, like to write a short description. About that service and put a, either I think there’s a, a price or a price range or starts at things like that.

You, you can actually go a level deeper. That’s a pretty big time commitment depending on how many things you have in that list. But again, those descriptions that you write are further keywords that Google can use to match you up with people who are searching. So it just gives you another layer of detail to spoonfeed, to Google.

So.

Colie: I’m gonna say I feel like I’m all about priorities these days. I literally recorded an episode yesterday, which when it would’ve aired a few weeks ago, but I did an episode where I was like, these are the bare bones systems that you need, right? And so I feel like I wanna like put this in here now that I feel like number one and number two.

These are like the minimum, and if you don’t have time, don’t do that extra layer that Lydia just said. Save everything when you’re done and you can always go back and and refresh. Right? Because this is not a set it and forget it. This is a, you should treat this like your website. You should come and update things when you have things to update.

Lydia: right. Yes. I listened to that episode this morning, actually. But, uh, so yes, I have not gone through my entire list of services and written those descriptions. I wrote descriptions for maybe like six things and then stopped because. I don’t have time to keep going, but I wanted to throw a few of them in there just again for the Google Juice.

Um, and to make the go Google Gods happy. Do a lot of things to make the Google Gods happy.

Colie: I mean, I prefer the Google gods to the Facebook Gods and the Instagram gods. But yeah, they’re all, they’re all gods. We’re all trying to please them and let them know that we exist in what we do, and we’re basically with our hands out, like, please send me clients. Please send people to my website that are good fit for me.

And of course, Google wants to do it like. That’s one thing. You know, we have a common friend now, Brittany Harrisburg, that’s what she likes. The Google gods really do like to make people happy. And so if you are doing the legwork now and Google is sending people to your website and they are happy, you know, with your website and the services that they found, that makes Google happy, like that makes Google get its own like gold star, if you will.

Lydia: Exactly. That’s it’s whole job is to help people find what they’re looking for. So the, these, this information that you’re putting into your profile helps people do that, which is why Google gives us an avenue to provide that information. And just to add another layer on reasons why you should do this, the AI overview at the top.

Of the Google search results does pull information out of your Google business profile when it is determining which businesses to put into that AI overview and which business information to source when it goes into more detail in like the expanded view of the AI overview. So this is a huge contributor to that.

and think about it like where else is it gonna get the best information about businesses? It has its very own phone book, like Yellow Pages. I’m clearly. Old ’cause I know about the Yellow Pages, but yeah, th this is the Web’s Yellow Pages, and it’s free to have the best stinking listing in these yellow pages.

Remember back in the day, you had to like pay to get like a, a bold square around your yellow page listing. I don’t really remember. I wasn’t in business back then. But yeah, this is, this, you can, you can have the best listing and pay nothing.

Colie: Took 18 minutes, y’all 18 minutes to bring AI into the conversation. That’s okay. I’m just, I keep track now ’cause I’m like, you know, we’re, we’re constantly talking about ai, but it is interesting to know that that’s what’s happening. And this is unrelated to like the Google My Business. Profile conversation, but I am currently going back and forth between number one for HoneyBook versus Dubsado, and number eight.

And the reason that I keep on going up is the AI overview keeps pulling in this one blog post that I have to put me in there. And so it’s just, it’s fascinating to me. All of these things that we are doing, and of course a blog post is not related to Google My business. But what did I do for that blog post?

I went to console. I made sure that it was listed again. I made sure that the title was what I wanted people to search for and the, you know, description, the meta description. So all of these things are aligned. I’m just trying to make sure that the audience realizes that like all of these things that you are doing all together are what is making your website, your blog post, your specific pages get found.

Lydia: Yeah, exactly. This is just SEO, like Google Business Profiles are SEO. You know, there’s, there’s other layers to it too, but kinda outside the realm of the conversation. This is a huge topic and, um, I, I could. I could go out about just the reviews piece of it for a very long time, but I said, okay, we’re talking about the three priorities, the bare bones of where you should start to get the most bang for your buck.

And I’ve seen this in action. There was another local photographer here that when you did the I overview in my city, it said, who’s the, uh, you know, I, who’s the best photographer in this city? And this person’s business was listed third. I was number one, woo Flex. And, uh, somebody else was number two and she was listed third, and then she claimed her Google business profile.

And even with just a handful of reviews some of the time, she’s now showing up first,

Colie: So what are you doing about that, Lydia? Are you asking your clients for more reviews?

Lydia: No, no, it’s okay. I have like 82 reviews and so, um, I’m not gonna worry too much. I, it’s all good. There’s plenty to go around. Plenty of business to go

Colie: to go around. But I mean, it is fascinating that the only other difference that you noticed was that she had claimed her Google My Business, which I’m sure that you were watching, because you’re just a data nerd like I am, and you’re like, oh, she claimed it, and now I see that. And now we’re oscillating back and forth between number one and number three.

Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. So it, it’s all, it’s all good. I think it’s cool to see people like doing the things I do a lot of reels, about Google business profiles and, so it’s kind of fun to see people like doing the things I recommend.

Colie: the things. Oh my gosh, really? I mean, you know, like with the podcast, I get so excited when someone’s like, Hey, I finally redid this. I listened to like four of your podcast episodes. And I’m like, thank you. I really appreciate that because when you listen to my podcast, you really should sit down and do the shit like I.

I tell you guys every episode, this is what you should do now that you’ve listened to the episode. So we are gonna have things for you to do after you have finished listening to Lydia. But now she’s gonna tell us number three.

Lydia: Yes, I am. Okay. And you mentioned this already and the number three, and again, you can take these in priority order. Number three is adding photos. And if you are so inclined a video to your profile, you can do a 92nd video Now. Google changes all the time, so that. Time limit may have already changed, but we are photographers, we have photos, we have lots of them.

So, um, and the video is really cool. Like it could be anything, it could be a little snippet of behind the scenes, it could be your face introducing yourself, like even better, right? Because we are. Selling a service that is really personal. We are asking people to be vulnerable in front of our cameras and they want to see our face.

I know you talk about this a lot, right? Like, uh, your thank you page should have a little video. Yeah. You know, the value of video. You totally do.

Colie: I do, and I feel like you should also do like face to camera and like for those of us that do pick time, and it’s so easy to make your slideshows with your photos. I feel like you should also bring that element in. So I mean, yes. I encourage you, Lydia encourages you to share your face, even if it’s only for like the first 10 seconds.

First 20 seconds of the video, and then you could use that remaining time to do behind the scenes where you’re not directly looking and talking to the camera, or you can use it to do like a slideshow of your images. Like there are so many tools out there now. No one has an excuse to not record video. I mean, my iPhone.

Sometimes I used to joke around because my husband was like, oh, but you, you know, you do video on your camera. What’s the difference between the phone? And I’m like, really? This? This day and age, like not much. If I didn’t think my clients would judge me by showing up and shooting their video on an iPhone, I’d probably be tempted to do it.

I mean, it’s that good. So record the video, get in the video, put it on your Google My Business.

Lydia: Put your best stuff out there for your photos and you can control your logo. You can add your logo in the photo section. You can also add your cover photos. That’s the one that’s going to show up most prominently. However, Google has its own ideas sometimes, so it might pull the photo from your Facebook profile.

You can’t always control the one. It’s going to show us the cover. You can sure try, but just know that sometimes Google just. It does what it wants. The overlords are finicky so add a bunch of photos that show the best of your work for all the different genres that you serve. And then when your clients are leaving, you reviews, if they attach photos to their reviews, those are gonna show up in the photos section as well.

Yours will be under a special tab called buy owner or from owner. And theirs will be, you know, like in the, from all section. You can’t control those. You can’t delete them. After they’re added, uh, the ones that clients put up there, but you can control and remove yours. So if your editing style changed, you can go back, take all that old stuff off, add a bunch of new stuff.

So,

Colie: Okay. Another example of what you should be doing for your blog post. I’m sorry. I feel like, I feel like this is just gonna be a Google in in general, but like one of the things that I tell people all the time is if your editing style changes significantly. Yes. If you know from looking at your Google Analytics or your Google console, which is, you know, all in the Google family, if you see that there’s a particular blog post that gets a ton of traffic and you look at that and you cringe and you’re a little scared for people to actually see that, do not unpublish it.

Go re-edit those images and put some up and you could do fewer. Because I remember when I first started teaching this, um, it was the days when you had like 40 images in a blog post. No one do that anymore. Please don’t do that. But like. When you redo these blog posts, you have the opportunity to pull all 40 of those old probably cringey photos down, re-edit your favorite 10, and then put them back in the blog post and then republish.

And if you’ve put, you know, like new keywords or new alt tags or alt text, or if you’ve changed the body of the blog post, resubmit it to console so that you know, Google Re, um. Realls it. Thank you. Lydia re recalls it so that it knows what the updates were and, okay. This has nothing to do with Google. I feel like we’re talking about their competitor, but have you started feeding your stuff into Bing so that you get found in chat?

GBT.

Lydia: Yes. So did you know I’m giving away this little secret? I haven’t talked about this yet. There is a thing called Bing Places. It is the Bing equivalent of Google

Colie: Of Google Business? Yeah.

Lydia: Yeah. Now, does anybody use it? Not sure. Um, maybe my mom, but I’m not, I dunno. But, you know, chat, GPT, sourcing from Bing is a thing.

However, uh, that’s changing. There’s more and more evidence that the bing sourcing relationship is not exclusive. So a lot of the SEO podcasts that I listen to, I’ve been talking about this a lot more lately, there’s even more proof that it’s not only Bing or it’s not always bing. So. For what it’s worth, and yes, I use Bing webmaster tools and I submit all of my pages to both search

Colie: I don’t do that. Kara, my amazing blog writer. I, she had done something on Elizabeth Gravy’s podcast and she was like, oh, you know, this is what you should do for Chad gt. This is me, Kara, what are you doing? She was like, don’t worry, I’m already submitting your stuff to Bing. And I was like, you submit it to Bing?

And she’s like, yeah, that’s what it’s using for this search results. And I was like. Why don’t we talk about this more? Why don’t people know this? And I also think it’s just like, it’s weird, like to me, Google is the standard. So I feel like you’re saying something by not choosing Google results and using like a competitor in quotes.

Like Bing, I don’t know.

Lydia: No, I think what they’re saying is they, maybe they couldn’t get Google to work with them

Colie: Oh, okay.

Lydia: that they couldn’t pay the price tag for that integration. I don’t know. But again, I think that chat, GBT understands that using a subpar search engine for some of their results is not the best way to keep people on their platform.

So I am not able to predict the future, and I’m not on the inside, but I, I do think that’s gonna change.

Colie: Awesome. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Lydia: Do you want a bonus? Fourth tip.

Colie: I do. I always like bonuses. Mm-hmm.

Lydia: Okay, so this one is not like the thing you can do today. This is the thing you can start doing today. So you know the whole thing about the tree. Best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago.

The second best time is today. So today, this is to start asking for reviews, right? Start today. Now what you don’t want to do. It’s to take a list of everybody who’s ever hired you and blast out an email with your Google Review link. Google hates that it will get you blacklisted, potentially unverified.

It can take all of those reviews that you get in one giant fell swoop and send them into the review ether is what I call it. It’s like a black hole where your clients can see that they left a review, but you can’t, and nobody else can either.

Colie: Hmm.

Lydia: Do not offer an incentive for leaving your review. It is against Google’s terms of service.

Like, just don’t do it. You can’t offer them to be in a drawing. You can’t offer to give them something of value. You just can’t. So these, this is the way to do it, is to just start asking for review. And you talk about this a lot in your offboarding process. Ask for a review after the the service has been delivered and set the stage.

I like to mention to my clients on the way back to the car after the shoot, Hey, just a heads up, I’m gonna be asking you for a review, and these are so important to getting my business found on Google, and so I can serve more amazing families just like yours. So I would be so grateful and that face-to-face.

Request has so much more power than the email only request. So set that stage so that when the email comes, they’re like, oh yeah, I told her I would do this. And then it happens a lot more often. So,

Colie: And I will say, you know, I like to give a good video moment. Like I feel like we don’t, we don’t talk about like if you don’t do it on the way to the car, which I think is brilliant, but you could also record like a short video when you are offboarding your clients to say how much you loved working with them and ask for that Google review.

I mean, guys, video, video, video.

Lydia: Yes. And I feel like I should absolutely mention that of late Google is loving when your reviews are from a diverse set of places. So I always include three spots for them to leave me a review. Google, yes, Yelp and Facebook. So Google does not want to see all of your reviews in one place.

It really does want to see you get a diverse set of reviews so you can just sort of alternate which link you send, or you can send all three. Sometimes people don’t wanna go create a Yelp account to leave a review. They don’t wanna have, or maybe they don’t have a Google account. Does anybody not have a Google account?

Colie: I don’t think so.

Lydia: Facebook? Maybe they have, right? So just give them options so that one of them is gonna be easier for them, and Google likes that. Anyway.

Colie: And I do feel like for the wedding photographers, it is also pulling in reviews from

Lydia: The not. Yes. So you do wanna figure out where are the sites that hold the reviews for what you do. And so the three I listed are just the ones that are best fit for my genres. But yeah.

Colie: And you know, I don’t give a shit about the Knot, but I recently did a HoneyBook build for a wedding photographer, and when I was asking for RU, he’s like, oh, here’s all mine on the knot. And I was like, oh my God, you have so many ru. And they were so good. Like I was literally running through them and I’m like, okay, I need a picture of this client and this client and this client so that we can put them into your booking file.

But I mean, yeah, the wedding photographers and the Knot like that is where they go and. Honestly, when we were doing his offboarding, he wasn’t even asking for a Google review. He was asking for the not review. So

Lydia: Makes sense. Yeah, I get it.

Colie: I mean, so Lydia, we, we talked about what’s important. We talked about the three things that you can do today.

We talked about a bonus. Um, is there anything else that, like the listening audience should really know about creating their Google business profile or like, you know what I actually think I should ask you. Because we’ve been talking about SEO this whole time, and you and I both know SEO is a long game.

So if someone sits down and they do their profile today, and let’s say that they don’t have any hiccups with the verification, this is assuming, you know when your profile is approved and finished and saved and uploaded and all of the good jazz, when are they going to start maybe seeing an uptick in where they land when someone is Googling their services locally?

Lydia: Yeah, that is a really good question. And when Google’s deciding who to serve up in the local pack, it’s looking at three different things. Distance, how far is your service area or your location from the person doing the searching relevance. So some of that information you just provided in, in steps one and two, your services and your primary category, but also prominence.

Prominence. One is, is the one that’s the most difficult to, kind of measure. So this is how many different places out on the web are talking about you. And this is where your reviews on Yelp and Facebook and these other and the not would factor in. So let’s say that you have no Google business profile, but you have, you’ve been in business for 15 years and you’re all over the place with your business name, which has never changed.

You create a Google business profile, you’re gonna see results right outta the gate for that. If you don’t have the rest of the pieces in line and you still haven’t built up a lot of prominence because you’re new, it’s probably gonna be a much slower build. One thing though, that you can do at a very minimum, is take that information that you gave Google in your business profile.

I mentioned name, address, and phone number consistency. Make sure that’s on your website. Make sure that it’s in the footer of every single page and so it can match up. Who you are and that’s gonna help your prominence. Again, just trustworthiness is a big part of prominence. So that is a very difficult question to answer just like it is for SEO.

It can be a short game if you’re established, or it can be a long game, um, that you’re just like SEO, you’re constantly tweaking and working on it. Mm-hmm.

Colie: And when you’re talking about adding that information to the footer, ’cause I wanna push you back to the beginning of this conversation where I’m like, I’m not putting my address anywhere. Um, is putting where I serve the same thing because like I just used to say, you know, serves Denver, Boulder, Erie, like, I don’t know, I, I don’t even remember the cities that I used to list, but I would have them in the footer.

So that’s good enough. Okay.

Lydia: Yeah. So I have like 12 cities in my service area. I did it by zip codes, and I think I have nine of those listed in the footer of my website. So serving, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and surrounding areas. And that is perfectly good enough. Have that phone number somewhere on your website, even if it’s just on the contact page.

Yes. You’ll get phone calls. Yes, you’re a big girl. You can handle it. You can handle it. If some Rando calls you, you’ll be fine. But

Colie: that what you wanna say? Because No, I, I stopped my Google voice, because literally all of the calls that I was getting from all of the spammers,

Lydia: The The

Colie: like, not people call. Yeah.

Lydia: I know it is real. However, like even through Google Voice, it labels it when it comes in as probable spam. So I ignore all of those, but the ones that aren’t spam, I answer. And you’d be shocked at how many great clients I get every year. People who still just wanna pick up the phone and talk to a human and find out if you’re the right person for that.

So.

Colie: Find out if you’re real.

Lydia: that’s, yes. That’s like going down a different rabbit hole of why a phone number is a good idea to put out there publicly. But if you have it out there on your Google business profile, which I think you should put it on your website somewhere too, your service area, the cities you serve, also on your website.

So there you go.

Colie: Awesome sauce. Lydia, I know that you have a freebie that helps people sort out these three important tasks and gives them a little bit more information about them. So tell me where they’re going to be able to find it.

Lydia: Yes. So you can find this kind of three things you should be doing to your Google business profile today at, um, Apollo and Ivy. So that’s the name of my, my photography business, Apollo, like the, the God, and a and d Ivy, like the plant.com/quick fix.

Colie: Okay.

Lydia: So all one word, no dashes or anything. So that is where you can find that freebie.

And I also have another Google business profile related one that is just focused on reviews, how to set the stage, how to ask, how to follow up, how to reply to them. So, um, that one’s out there too.

Colie: Okay guys, I’m gonna have both of those linked in the show notes. Okay, Lydia, thank you so much for joining me again, and you know, you don’t have to formally request to come back to the podcast again.

Whenever you figure out a topic that you wanna come talk about, uh, just send me a dm.

Lydia: I will do that. Thank you.

Colie: Okay. Alright everybody. I hope that after hearing Lydia talk about all the goodness that you can get from Google that you are feeling just a little motivated to go do some Google work today. Now, first step, you have to claim your listing. And so like that’s immediate. Start that process in case it takes a little longer.

And then I want you to go grab her freebie and do the three tasks that she has indicated are most important. All right, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.