![Agency Ahead by Traject artwork](https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts123/v4/0a/b8/f7/0ab8f7e1-2901-a0b3-fe99-bf6a7584d8d0/mza_9261344215658334886.jpg/100x100bb.jpg)
Using Google My Business to Kickstart Your Local SEO Services with Mike Blumenthal
Agency Ahead by Traject
English - October 12, 2020 11:55 - 35 minutes - 49.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsMarketing Business Entrepreneurship marketing digital marketing agency software seo social media reputation customer experience local seo local search Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
It's pretty impossible to work in Local SEO for very long without hearing Mike Blumenthal's name. The "Godfather of Local," as the nickname itself might imply, has been one of the big-name experts in the industry for a very long time.
He's the co-founder of GatherUp, and he's had his own local search blog for a very long time. In fact, if you want to stay right on top of what's going on in Local, you could do worse than just making sure you subscribe to his weekly newsletter and podcast.
Yet today he's speaking less about the ins-and-outs of what's going on with Google My Business (GMB) lately and more about how agency owners can incorporate local SEO services into their service offerings, or how they can best approach building a pure local SEO business. If you're looking to get ahead in this niche, then don't miss today's episode.
The highlights:
[1:58] Helping companies understand the impacts of GMB.
[3:50] Where to go after an SMB understands the impact of GMB.
[6:42] Scaling up once your foot is in the door.
[10:30] Adding email as a service.
[12:20] Making decisions about which clients to go after.
[14:59] Building relationships with clients.
[17:30] Review management as a service.
[24:11] Using GatherUp's tagging features in a strategic way.
[27:03] Using Google Review Attributes.
[33:58] Mike's cause.
The insights:
Helping companies understand the impacts of Google My Business
In 2018, Mike chose a business that had a Facebook-only digital presence and was convinced that he could help to demonstrate to them that a Google presence could dramatically improve the number of incoming customers they were receiving.
They had zero budget. I showed them in a really clear way that a Google-focused presence for pre-sale was absolutely killing Facebook, 10 to 1, 15 to 1, in terms of leads generated and much less work, once the attributes were set up, on an ongoing basis."
Garrett asked what Mike's perspective was in terms of using that approach to sell that service to SMBs.
GMB has become, through the use of photography and immersive technologies and transaction technologies, a central point in finding customers for every business. But in the case of super-small businesses or businesses that have yet to heavily invest in digital, it provides a way to prove easily the benefits of digital marketing.
It can be done in a very low-cost way, spending an hour a two a month for an agency, and yet with very concrete key performance indicators that are beneficial and meaningful to the business.
You can easily track, with no extra expenditure, the number of calls they're getting, the number of driving directions they're getting, and if you have one of the transactional pieces in play like appointments or scheduling, you can track that as well. You can prove to the small business that it is succeeding for them."
You can move from 1 to 100 to 500 locations in this project, do it really cost-effectively. Then, as you've proven the worth of digital marketing, move them into a longer-term view where you can control more of the stack."
Scaling up once your foot is in the door
Once you've proven the value of your GMB services, Mike says you can then start moving clients into more sophisticated digital technology. Yet where should you go next?
You can take several hundred and you can post them regularly to the business in a relatively automatic way. Those photos could also inform your posts. There are a number of free or very low-cost paid tools that would allow you to schedule posts out to the business.
Both those things increase the convertibility of any GMB listing after you've done all the basics."
Once you've leveraged Google's products and features, Mike suggests moving on to reviews.
One of the goals for me in local is not just to get new customers, but to own that customer relationship after you've got them.
The best way to do that, in a low-cost way, is with email. It generates 7 to 10 times the return of Facebook and its returns equal or surpasses those of GMB."
He says while GMB may start out as the "home page" for many SMBs, marketers should focus on helping them grow long-term sustainable customer retention.
It can be used to help market to your customers after the fact."
Mike recommends David Mihm's Tidings program.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/229893482
The high-value sequence then is:
Start with GMB
Go to review management with GatherUp or Grade.us, using these programs to gather email addresses.
Leverage those email addresses with a low-cost program like Tidings, and providing ongoing marketing services with that customer base.
"Once you get that done, you can continue to demonstrate high KPIs, and then you can move into all sorts of other areas beyond that."
He notes that email should come well before advertising in that list of service offerings.
Whereas with email marketing, once you've acquired [the address] with Google, if you move it into the email marketing funnel then you own it. You own the relationship, and you're not having to pay to re-rent those same customers back every time.
It's also simpler, easier to understand, and easier to manage."
Making decisions about which clients to go after
Trying to decide which clients to go after is a challenge for most agencies.
To offer insight into the decision-making process, Mike mentioned a conversation he had with an agency in Lancaster, PA.
What does a business like that look like?
He says that's an example of looking for clients based on the value of the client, as opposed to the vertical. He says he finds those businesses, in the long haul, "More profitable and less aggravating."
He also does find some value in sticking to a vertical when you're just getting started, "because there is 80% overlap client to client."
In smaller towns and markets where there are only so many of a given vertical in the market, knowing something like GatherUp in-depth is the alternative.
Building relationships With clients
Once you have the clients, of course, you have to find ways to continue to prove your value to them.
Mike spoke of how certain aspects of digital marketing are becoming commodified by AI. One example was Google Adwords.
From there, you can begin leading these SMBs through their next steps.
"The next step to improve their retention. The next step to improve their revenue per customer. Improve their overall bottom line."He says that he sees a real need for agencies to move from "local SEO" to local consulting.
He says there's a quick test to see if an agency is doing that.
Helping a business improve is a much more powerful way to have a relationship with your clients."
Review management as a service
Now he thinks there are quicker ways to succeed.
GatherUp tries to encourage agencies to get the website up with segmented review content, for example.
Set things up like social sharing so that businesses can easily and quickly take their existing body of reviews and remarket them via Facebook, Twitter, or Google Post."
Mike says this creates an immediate value both for the agency and for the business.
Once businesses get excited about reviews and are attached to sharing them, "you can worry about integrating the review-asking process into their workflow."
He says one thing agencies must do is get a true understanding of how businesses interact with their customers. This minimizes the amount of work the business needs to do to keep something like GatherUp flowing. "To get the email address. To get the SMS."
He gives some examples of the different methods he's encountered.
He says that moving emails into the review process should happen with as little work as possible on the part of the SMBs. "Then you can start getting a massive number of reviews."
He's not just talking about Google reviews.
That data, both for web content and marketing, is valuable, but it's particularly valuable, then, to help the agency help that business take the next step to understand where they need to improve."
Those reviews give SMBs a meaningful and accurate reflection of the business.
He reiterates that he sees this all as a very logical flow.
Using GatherUp's tagging features in a strategic way
Mike explains how one restaurant even used this data to try to anticipate problems before they could arise.
So they would review this report every day, tagging reviews with words like 'stomach' or 'distress' or 'diarrhea' or any of those words that could indicate there were problems."
Fortunately, this restaurant did not find any problems, but it's good that they were looking!
They upgraded to national standards and their NPS returned. The tagging is just an incredibly powerful way for management, but it's also incredibly powerful for marketing in terms of generating fresh, great content."
For an interesting case study on how implementing Covid standards can make an impact on a multi-location business, see Mike's article: How One Business Made a Mess of Masking.
Mike also points out that fresh content is one of the biggest challenges for local websites.
It makes your job as an agency super easy. If you're generating content for the homeowner’s page, content for the auto insurance page, content for the commercial pages, then you can keep those key service pages updated.
If it's multi-location you can keep those multi-location pages updated with current content that relates specifically to the geography. It's a great service for agencies to help small businesses deal with the content problem."
Using Google review attributes
Google review attributes are a new feature of Google that also adds a sort of "tagging" and sorting feature to Google Reviews.
Mike describes them as the "ability to add more granular, structured detail to a review."
Google first tested the feature in 2010 with a product called Hot Pot. They'd been using them for hotels for awhile. They rolled them out "in a more structured way to home service businesses last fall, then again in the middle of Covid so nobody noticed it."
Mike notes if you give a business a review you're giving them 3-5 attributes that are either positive or negative based on whether your review is positive or negative.
Mike again stresses that Google Review Attributes provides lots of important management information, just as GatherUp's tagging tool does.
It also provides a focus for your content strategy for your website, because you get user intent from these."
He notes that if users are talking a lot about timeliness, and you know timeliness is something you can do well, then you can use that to stand out.
It provides Google with massive amounts of structured data to more accurately rank you and compare you to other businesses."
Mike says he really loves attributes because it offers the intersection of Google, competitive analysis, and the consumer, "all brought together with the benefits of attributes to improve the review experience from just a bunch of numbers to contextual comparisons between and betwixt different entities."
What’s your right now cause?
Mike wants to encourage agencies to perform "mission-related efforts" on behalf of struggling local businesses. "They're struggling to survive."
He notes GatherUp has an upcoming post about how to provide a low-cost digital service to a business for free if that business really needs it to keep their doors open.
It's not pure charity work, of course.
Connect with Mike Blumenthal
Want more from the Godfather of Local?
Website: GatherUp