Tag Archives: Google my business

Using your Google Business Profile to attract more customers

Bakery owner showing Google Business profile outside The Daily Grind & Bakery

Many creative business owners, whether product or service based, spend hours on social media, yet overlook one of the most powerful free marketing tools available: Google Business Profile.

Whether you sell handmade products, run workshops, offer creative services, or work as an artist, maker, designer or craft business owner, a well-optimised Google Business Profile can help you get found by potential customers, build trust and generate enquiries.

The good news? You don’t need to be a marketing expert to make it work for your business and it’s a great way to drive traffic to your website.

What is Google Business Profile?

Google Business Profile is a free tool that allows businesses to manage how they appear in Google Search and Google Maps.

When someone searches for your business name, or for products and services you offer, your profile can display important information such as:

  • Business description
  • Contact details
  • Website link
  • Opening hours
  • Reviews
  • Photos
  • Updates and posts
  • Frequently asked questions

For creative businesses, this acts as an additional shop window, portfolio and marketing channel all in one.

Why it matters for local customers

Most people understand that Google Business Profile helps local businesses appear in local searches.

For example, someone might search for:

  • Handmade jewellery near me
  • Wellness coach in my area
  • Local artist commissions
  • Handmade gifts in (your town)

Having an active and complete profile increases your chances of appearing in these searches and helps potential customers discover your business.

Reviews, photos and recent posts also give people confidence that your business is active and trustworthy.

If someone is deciding between several businesses, a well-maintained profile can often be the factor that encourages them to contact you.

It also matters for non-local customers too!

One of the biggest misconceptions about Google Business Profile is that it’s only useful for businesses serving local customers.

Many creative businesses sell nationally or internationally through websites, online shops and social media. Even if customers never visit your premises, they often search online before buying.

When someone discovers your business through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or a recommendation, they frequently search your business name on Google. What they find can influence whether they decide to buy from you.

If you have a Google Business Profile, this will show up – and a professional profile helps reinforce that all-important trust by providing:

  • Genuine customer reviews
  • Recent updates
  • Business information
  • Photos of your work
  • Website links

Think of it as social proof that supports your wider online marketing efforts.

Keep your profile updated

An incomplete profile sends the message that a business may not be active.

Make sure your profile includes:

  • A clear business description
  • Accurate contact information
  • Current website links
  • Relevant services or products
  • High-quality images

Many creative businesses create beautiful products but fail to showcase them on their Google profile. Upload photographs regularly to demonstrate your work, your process and your personality.

Even though I don’t create products, I still update my Google profile once every week with images of my content and my blog post with the link.

What else can you post on Google Business Profile?

Google allows businesses to publish updates directly on their profile.

These posts can include:

  • New product launches
  • Workshop announcements
  • Seasonal collections
  • Behind-the-scenes content
  • Helpful tips and advice
  • Customer success stories

Think of these as mini blog posts that help keep your profile active and give potential customers more reasons to engage with your business. And each post gives you the option to add a link to your website, online shop, call you, or point to your social media pages.

Encourage reviews

Customer reviews remain one of the strongest social proof signals you can give to potential customers. Ask satisfied customers to leave honest reviews and make it easy for them by providing a direct review link.

When possible, encourage customers to mention specific products, services or experiences. For example:

“I purchased a handmade personalised gift and was delighted with the quality and service.”

These details help future customers understand what makes your business special.

Answer questions before customers ask them

Google Business Profile includes a Q&A section that is often overlooked.

Use this area to address common customer questions such as:

  • Do you accept commissions?
  • Do you ship internationally?
  • Can customers book workshops online?
  • How long do personalised orders take?

Providing answers in advance can remove barriers and encourage enquiries.

Treat your profile as part of your content marketing strategy

Don’t make the mistake of thinking of your Google Business Profile as a directory listing. Instead, think of it as another content marketing platform. By sharing updates, photos, customer stories and useful advice, you can build credibility, demonstrate expertise and stay visible to potential customers.

When combined with your website, email marketing and social media activity, Google Business Profile becomes a valuable part of your overall marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Many small business owners focus exclusively on social media while overlooking opportunities elsewhere.

Google Business Profile is free, relatively simple to maintain and can help both local and non-local customers discover, trust and choose your business.

A little time spent optimising and updating your profile can make a significant difference to your visibility and customer enquiries.

To help you get started, I’ve created a free Google Business Profile checklist, which walks you through the key steps to optimise your profile, improve visibility and make sure you’re not missing valuable opportunities to attract customers.

Download your free copy below, and start putting your profile to work for your business.

Download your Google Business Profile checklist

The Benefits of using Google My Business

In general, people across the world are relying more and more on Google to find answers to their questions, or to find out information about absolutely anything. Google My Business (GMB), is a free online tool for businesses to manage their online presence across the Google platform. This is especially good news for small businesses and start-ups to help them with their online visibility.

According to searchengineland.com more than 2 trillion users log onto Google search every year – more than 5 billion searches per day. That’s pretty mind-blowing in itself, but just think how many people your small business could be exposed to, simply by having the right keywords and being on Google My Business. Wow!

How to claim your Google My Business profile

You need to have a Google account (Gmail account), in order to be able to claim your Google My Business profile. If you sign into your Gmail account, then log into GMB, simply enter the name of your business into the field of the form and confirm that you are authorised to manage the business. There will then be several fields to complete in order to set up your account, such as your opening hours, about you section etc.

You have to choose a service category too, from the list provided and it’s important to make sure that your business name, address and phone number is up to date –if your business is on other search engines, such as Bing, you need to make sure that they are all have exactly the same details, so it’s easier for you to be found. By putting in your address, a map will pop up so anyone local to you will be able to easily find you. You can also add a link to your website.  

There is an area to add photos of your business – both external view, which is great if you have physical premises as it makes it again, much easier for people to know what they’re looking for if they decide to visit your business. You can also add photos of the interior, so you could add photos of employees, processes you carry out, and photos of your products. This is really important to make these as engaging as possible as it will encourage people to choose you over your competitors.

One of THE most important parts of GMB is the reviews section. Online reviews are obviously testimonials that you are the best at what you do. Encourage your existing customers to leave a review on your GMB page, by sending them a link to the page and ask them! Most will be happy to oblige. If you have an email list, or send out a regular email newsletter to your customers, this is a great item to add to that … and the reviews will really help your Google rankings. As all small businesses will know, good reviews are absolute gold in helping potential customers to choose to buy from you over your competitors. When I want to buy something, I always look at the reviews first.

Put the link to your GMB on your website and on your social media pages, so potential customers and existing customers know that you’re there.

GMB is cost-effective

Well, it’s free (!), so why wouldn’t you want to have it? For start-ups and small businesses, it really is a fabulous platform to get your business out there with no cost – we all know that every penny counts if you’ve just started, or if you’re a small business. GMB gives customers all the information they need to know about you, all in one place…but if you put a link to your website or to your Etsy shop, for example, you can also point them to your other resources, products or services.

You can post to your GMB

Just like social media platforms, you can also put posts on your GMB page. You can use this to promote your business, talk about offers or discounts, new products, updates, news, announcements etc. The possibilities are endless! I use my posts to highlight new blog posts, as well as news about my business or about marketing. I also share some of the posts I use on Instagram and Facebook.

Your post title should only use four or five words, and although you are allowed to use up to 1500 characters for the post, I always keep it to as few as I can – 100-200 at most. The reason for this is that under the post there is the option to use a Call to Action (CTA), which encourages your visitors to take a particular action, such as ‘Buy’, ‘Book online’, ‘Learn more’, ‘Call’ or ‘Visit’. For my blog, I use ‘Learn more’ and then a box appears so I can put in the URL of my blog post, so if visitors want to find out more about the blog I’ve written, they click on the URL box and it takes them to my full blog post and website.

Posts only stay in front of your customers for seven days, so you do need to update your posts regularly. If a customer clicks on posts, they will be able to see old ones, but they won’t be ‘live’ on the homepage of your page.

You can post an event, and this is the only exception to the rule of seven days. Once you input all the relevant details of the event, it will be displayed until the event is over.

A fairly new feature, which is good news for restaurants or cafes, is that GMB now has a menu editor, which includes titles, descriptions, prices, and you can break the menu into sections – starters, main, desserts etc.

Video

You can share video on GMB, and this is a fairly new feature. The video should be no more than 30 seconds and once uploaded, it can take up to 24 hours before the video content shows in local search results.

The maximum video file size is 100MB and minimum resolution should be 720p. 

Messaging feature

There is a message feature on GMB, which you have to switch on via your dashboard on your page. This means that customers can message you directly. There will be a message icon which they can click on to send a message and if you have an iOS device you can get these directly via an app. Otherwise, you will need to make sure you check your GMB page regularly. Please not that Google advise that you don’t encourage customers to share sensitive information via their messaging service. 

Conclusion

Google My Business (GMB), is a fabulous, free platform for you to advertise your business. The many features make it easy for your customers to find you and find out all they need to know about your business. It’s up to you to add as much or as little information about your business that you choose to. As with any platform, it’s a good idea to have a strategy around using the platform, factor in time to keep it up to date and keep track of any messages and changes that might affect your business or that platform. But, in today’s online world, where billions of people are searching Google every day, it totally makes sense to make use of this great tool.