Google My Business is a free way to list your business and create a profile on Google. It contains valuable information like your phone number, address, images of your business, videos, maps to find your location and gives happy clients a place to leave reviews.
But before you can utilize Google My Business you have to set up your profile.
Head over to the Google My Business Site.
(https://www.google.com/business/)
Once on the site click on “Manage Now”.
Tip: Be sure you are signed in with your Business Google Account, not an employees account or a personal account. This saves you the headache of trying to track down who owns the account in the future if you or your employee leaves the company.
Enter your business name.
Here you enter the name of your landscaping company. You’ll see different suggestions as you type. This helps prevent adding a duplicate profile. If you see your company pop up in the suggestions click on it.
Enter your address.
Enter your landscaping company address and location information if you actually have customers that visit your location. If you don’t see customers at your location, tick the box that says “I deliver goods and services to my customers.” and the box that says “Hide my address (it’s not a store)”.
Then enter your service area where you serve your landscaping customers.
You can set a radius around your location or select a specific area; city, zip code, county, state, etc.
Tip: Don’t make your service area too broad. Sure you’d go to the moon for enough money, but chances are 95% of your customers all live in one region, town, or county. Keep your service area sized appropriately. Don’t set it to “North America” because that doesn’t help Google or your customers know where you actually perform services.
Choose your business category.
This is one of the most important fields and helps determine what searches your business will show up for on Google searches.
You can change this later, but may require re-verification, start by checking out what your competitors have selected. If they’ve been around for a while the category they have selected may be based on testing out several categories and could save you some time testing yourself.
Add your phone number and website address.
You don’t have to do either, but not entering these makes it that much harder for your customers to reach you. So enter both if you have them.
Complete your setup and verify your business.
You’ll need to verify that you’re an actual business. Google typically does this in one of three ways.
Postcard – Google sends you a postcard with a code. This is the most common way Google uses to verify new businesses and typically takes 5 – 10 days to receive. Once you receive your code, log into your Google My Business account and click “verify”. Enter the code and you’re done.
Phone verification – Sometimes Google will give you the option to verify your listing with a code received by text message. Once you receive your code, enter the code in your Google My Business profile.
Email verification – Just like verification by phone, sometimes Google will send you an email with a verification code. Enter this code in your Google My Business profile and you should see a message saying your business has been verified.
There are other ways to verify but typically are only available if you’ve already verified your business website with Google Search Console.
Now What?
Now you’ve been verified you can optimize and complete your profile.
- Add photos, videos, logos. Outside your location, your staff working, products, services, before and afters, etc.
- Write a business description that’s easy to read and really grabs the attention of your ideal customers.
- Make posts to showcase promotions, offers, and services.
Add products and services. - Add your hours of operation and any special hours you may not be working such as holidays.
- Start asking for reviews from past Landscaping customers who loved your work.
As you can see Google My Business is one of the most robust and trusted listings available online. This powerful tool can be used to communicate your value and services right from the Google search page, so it’s worth doing some extra reading to learn more about what it can do for your landscaping business.
If you want to learn more Google has a tool to help you learn more about how to use their services like Google My Business in bite-sized lessons called Google Primer.