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In this episode, Jim and Tyson will talk about Google My Business and will go through a list of great tips that will help you improve your SEO!

Hacking’s hack: Use the word “Lawyer” whenever describing your business on the web (for SEO purposes)! People search for that word instead of “Attorney”

Tyson’s tip: https://www.yourprimer.com/
Primer is a fast, easy way to learn new business and digital marketing skills. You can take our interactive lessons whenever you have 5 minutes free.

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Transcripts: Google My Business – Everything You Need to Know!

Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. You’re back on the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m one of your hosts Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’m your other host facing matrix. AJ.

Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson had a great weekend. This weekend got to go to my cousin’s wedding. It was blast. fun watching people run around crazily and celebrating fun wedding. My cousin had four kids and each of the kids gave a toast to their mom. It was pretty terrific.

Tyson Mutrux
Oh, very awesome. That’s yeah, I went to Jason Oh, Shirley’s house had a nice cool barbecue. He has a awesome pool that I went to. And you were supposed to be there. But she bailed because of a wedding, which I guess is understandable.

Jim Hacking
He was excited about all the fireworks. How did the firework show go?

Tyson Mutrux
It was incredible. It was by far, the best firework show I’ve seen put off by an individual, but it was also really good. Anyways, I would put it up against any professional fireworks show I’ve been through just because of the atmosphere that I’m sitting in his backyard. There’s a pool right there. Very comfortable. It was awesome. I mean, he bought fuses that he timed it out feet per second and all that where he did he did all the math, or all of the fireworks went off on the right time. And there was no delay between them. It was really awesome. So do you want to set up your own firework show and call Jason mostly because he really knows what he’s doing? And he, I mean, he’s done this for years now. So he’s sort of got it figured out. So it was a blast, man. It was great, I believe

Jim Hacking
because he did his Halloween party. Right? You missed that one. So hopefully we can catch the ones that we’ve missed this coming year. Because Jason does it up, right.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And he says gonna mix it up this year. So I’m gonna have to check it out.

Jim Hacking
All right. Well, I’m excited about this week’s topic. My man Tyson has been digging in deep to Google, he’s been talking to the experts. He’s been talking to Google themselves. And so we thought that instead of you just telling me all of your new Google secrets that you shared on that

Tyson Mutrux
show? Yeah, so it’s really interesting. And I’ll tell how this came about and how we started dig into it. And then where I’ve gotten the information from, I can’t mention one of the names I was telling you just because of his relationship to some other attorneys. And I’m not going to get into but I will tell you, he revealed. But it’s all started with a phone call that I made to Google My Business. And so I was noticing, we open the two new offices with two new addresses. And neither one of them were showing up for personal injury attorney, which was really annoying me and I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, that’s the only keyword that we really are not really only keyword. But that’s the only attorney business that we cared about showing up on lesson one we have listed on our Google My Business pages. And so we were like, What is going on? So I called. And if you have G Suite, don’t call their main line, there’s a separate Google My Business like they called G Suite in G C suite, then forwarded me to the Google My Business People. So I’m just saving you about five minutes of call time. So make sure you call Google My Business directly. And so they gave me some very simple tips. If you think these are very simple, they are very, very simple. But most of the people listening this aren’t doing the right. I wasn’t doing them, right. Jimmy wasn’t doing them right. All the big dogs are not doing them, right. Trust me, whenever I go over this, you’ll realize, okay, I’m not doing this. Right. So the first one is name, address, phone number nap. I know some people really know that. But I didn’t realize how important it is that your name, address and phone number are identical. everywhere. I mean, even a misplaced period, misplaced comma that will throw off your rating in Google your ranking Google or business. And I’m not talking about searching example optimization for your your website. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is your Google My Business. Let us be called Google Local. Google Places has had a variety of names, but now it’s called Google and business. And we’re talking about on the maps. So make sure that they are identical. And so that comes directly from Google. But the experts that I talked to don’t I can’t mention his name. He gave me a couple extra things. He’s telling me that they are finding recently that Google My Business pages without a suite number. So if you can get away with not putting the sweet numbers of just the address, you’re gonna get a big bump in Google My Business so you can cut that part off of it somehow. And make sure it’s consistent among all the platforms among all the services with your address, then that is key. For example, the Ark Clayton office, we’re in a suite in our city office, it’s just a building address, there’s no suite number, that there’s a difference there. So if you cut off like suite 502, or whatever it may be, just cut it off. And I think a lot of listeners can do that, Jimmy, I think you could cut off your suite number, because you’ve got multiple people in your building, but everyone who’s CLR, it’s small enough of a building that you could get away with it. So if you could chop off that sweet number, you’re gonna get a boost from it. But then when it comes to also name, make sure that you’ve got on your name, make sure it’s the exact so if you have LLC, make sure the LLC everywhere. If it’s PC, make sure his PC of where if you don’t have any at the end of it, like for example, ours is matrix Spinney PC, to chuck that chop off the PC on Google, make sure it’s the same everywhere you go. They also said, don’t make any major edits, if you make any major edits to your Google My Business page, you may the drop off for a couple days or you it may take some time for you to get back up in your rankings. So just make sure that you go through, make all your major edits at one time to make sure you are consistent. And then certainly love, but update it, update the small things keep, make sure that it’s all accurate. But don’t make the big edits. And I’ll get to really how you can update yours consistently. In a second,

Jim Hacking
I wanted to touch on that point, you said about the making sure that you are consistent across the web spectrum that on all websites that you have the consistent name and everything. And I was surprised when I started working with a company in St. Louis called Digital strike about six months ago, or maybe nine months ago. And we’ve been working towards getting my listings consistent over the whole web sphere. And we started six months ago. And there are a possibility of 53 different websites, that list and we’ve been working on this. And it’s sort of like a constantly moving target. But we’ve gotten to 94% coverage. So right now, our footprint and our digital description of our law firm is consistent in 50 of the 53 listings. And there’s websites on here that you’ve never heard of, but they all contribute to the accuracy and the weight that Google gives to your web presence. So there’s companies that you have heard of like Bing and Apple Maps, and there’s something called this votes and City Search. And obviously Facebook, find the company get save Google, obviously info group, my Sheriff, there’s all these weird little things. So we’re always tweaking it. And always making sure that because sometimes other people can do things that affect your description on the website. So it’s always something that’s being monitored and being watched. And it is really important.

Tyson Mutrux
So in the expert I was talking to, he said, it’s like a plus minus system. So and I may get this sort of wrong, but you get the gist, by way of describe it, is they’ll set up their crawlers. And if the address matches or name, address, phone number match, you get a plus one, if it does not match, you get a minus one. And that’s how you sort of get your score. So if you’re if you’re the crawler goes out and gets a bunch of different name, address or phone numbers that are hitting it a bunch of minuses, and then Google’s gonna push it down a little bit. So that’s a great point. And there are multiple services that you can pay, they’ll basically do all the work for you. I just hired bright local.com. But there are multiple services you can hire. Some are really expensive, some are really cheap, you can pay people manually to do it. So just look it up. You can Google it. I think the other one, the main ones, I can’t remember the Alexa or Lexus or not Lexus, but it’s like Alexa or something like that, where they’ll do the same thing at Bright local will do. They’re just more expensive. So just Google it, you can find mobile services that actually get you to do that. So that’s another another tip. When were the main reason why our Google My Business pages, the new ones were not showing up, then let me tell you within 10 minutes of them of this phone call and me making the edits. So they told me to make it was showing up already. I mean, it made a huge difference in this. It’s been going up every single day, but have a Google Plus page that is linked to it. So a couple things with this. I didn’t realize that the two new Google My Business pages did not have Google Plus pages. I just assumed incorrectly that it would already have a Plus page attached to it. Or my original address, has it in the setup properly. Everything else the two new ones did not. Something I learned from this expert though is that do you have multiple locations you can come Find your Google Plus pages into one page. So you don’t have to maintain three separate ones, you can just maintain one. So you can just know that you can combine if you have multiple addresses, you can combine those into one Google Plus page. So Google

Jim Hacking
Plus is the redheaded stepchild of the social media world, a lot of people don’t use Google Plus, there are people though that do use it. And I think it does help with the Google juice, I got out of the habit of using Google Plus, I know, one of the guys that were a fan of Gerry Oginski, he puts all this stuff on all the social media platforms, including Google Plus. And I think Google Plus is making a little bit of a resurgence, I think that people are starting to use it more. I don’t think people use it nearly obviously, to the extent that they do for Facebook. But anything that’s backed by such a powerful company, and powerful search engine, is going to stick around for a long time, I think

Tyson Mutrux
that leads to the next thing that Google told me is, make sure you update that daily. So make sure you go through, you update Google Plus every single day, add a post Share Link, whatever it may be, because that is now affecting your Google My Business rankings. So even though we may not want to make sure you definitely go and do it, that’s why it’s important. We’re that piece of information that the expert gave me that combine them instead of me, going to each and every one of them and putting a post, I can do it on one. Now, that makes that makes a really, really big difference. Somebody else that this seems very, very minor, and I understand that. But this is one where I think it can be overlooked. Whenever I talked to the lady at Google, she said, sign into Google My Business account daily, every single day. And I said really, she says yes, sign in every single day. So whether you use your dashboard, on your desktop, or if you use your your app, nature every single day, go through, click a couple buttons. And then you can sign up, which I thought was so bizarre. But it’s that simple. Go in and just sign in, click a couple buttons, because Google wants to know that you are active, and you’re actively doing things. Even if you’re not even posting anything, you’re just going in there to make sure things are accurate. So make sure that you do that. Now the expert I talked to you about that part of it, he said, Well, Google probably just wants you to log in so that you’ll do buy more ads, things like that, which could be true. But listen, if Google’s telling me to do it, I’m going to do it. So I want to make sure that I’m doing everything right. Okay. And the last thing that I want to cover with Google My Business is this is something that is brand new, and if you’ve not logged into your Google My Business account recently, that you’re not going to know about, and it’s called posts. So and it’s really easy to do. If you have Facebook, if you have Twitter, if you have Google Plus LinkedIn, you know, you know how to post things. There’s a very similar service or feature now in Google My Business called post. And all you do is you go there, and you post things, links, whatever maybe offers, whatever you might have, we have specials going on, you’ll post in there. And where this is important, and I talked to the expert about this, as well says gonna start coming up at near helping your your Google juice help you with the search rankings. But when your Google My Business page shows up, now, there’s a slider underneath it, where you can go through the different links and posts that you’ve made. It’s really cool. And this is something you can try over the next couple of days. And you’ll see what I’m talking about, add a couple post to your Google My Business account. And then as you add, once you’ve you’ve pulled up your Google My Business page, just pull it up. And underneath, there’s a slider. If you’re on your phone, you can just slide it just like the ads that are on Facebook, sort of you can swipe those to the right little left you can there’s a slider there, it’s very similar with that speech, or that’s a different purpose. But there’s that feature there. And that’s going to start affecting your rankings as well for Google My Business. So make sure you go there and you add post, super easy to do. You can snap a photograph, you can put in you know, 300 words of text about whatever you might have. It’s and you can you can link to videos on your website, you can link to blog posts on your website, whatever you want to do. But make sure you’re doing that daily. That’s not something that was mentioned on my cold Google because that actually that conversation with Google to place prior to them rolling out Google posts about Google My Business posts about a week and a half ago. So it’s a new feature. So it’s a new feature. Google wants you to use it. So make sure that you go in there and you make some edits to that.

Jim Hacking
So this is sort of like our Facebook business pages. And it sort of, it’ll show up when someone’s looking at our Google Business Listing. It’ll show up posts underneath He’s sort of the description of the firm and all that.

Tyson Mutrux
Right. So if you search Neutrik, cine Columbia, Jimmy,

Jim Hacking
okay. Yeah. So.

Tyson Mutrux
So in the bottom of it, at least on your phone, a note comes on the bottom, you’ll see the sliders. Yep. So it’s an additional feature that you can see on the Google My Business page.

Jim Hacking
Like I see a fourth of July posting, and it looks like you made two days ago.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, correct.

Jim Hacking
Oh, cool. Oh, so that gives you a lot more real estate on the search results when your business comes up.

Tyson Mutrux
Exactly. And so if you’ve got something that’s catchy that you put on there, I’m sort of offering you can make the battle. And I’ve got an idea for a couple of things that I’m going to put on there that are in the lead magnet. So I’m gonna use it for lead magnets, that I think will will help draw people in.

Jim Hacking
You might want to make an edit on here looks like there’s a mistake. On one of your reviews. It says he’s extremely knowledgeable and a very well respected attorney in the field. I don’t know if you can.

Tyson Mutrux
I’ll, I’ll make sure I’ll report that they should people know that they should remove the review. I mean, they’re referring to Chris theny. You know, that’s probably what it is. That’s it’s probably Chris, so we can leave it, we can leave it at the bay. I bet you’ll want to wrap it up and do your hack of the week.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, it’s interesting that I had my hack in my mind already, before we started talking to anybody that actually came up during the show. So I was having lunch with our buddy and former guests of the pod, Gary Burger. And we were talking about something that we both sort of stumbled upon. So last year, I did a survey, I’ve told you this before, but everything I’ve talked about it on the show, we did a survey of our clients, and we had some some sort of open ended questions to try to find out the kind of language that they use when talking about either their immigration experience or hiring a lawyer and all that stuff. And one of the things we found that, you know, we had 50 People respond to the survey and about 30 of them, used the word lawyer to describe our occupation. Do you know how many people use the word attorney? Certainly anybody. I mean, if you look at Google this, they search lawyers much more than they search attorney. So I haven’t met anybody who was zero. And Gary said that his SEO guys are telling them the same thing. So my hack of the week is to use lawyer whenever you can, and not attorney. So I switched on my YouTube videos. Now I always say I’m an immigration lawyer, Jim hacking practicing law throughout the United States. And it’s interesting, because when you started the show, you talked about one of your vanity keywords and search was a personal injury attorney. And I think that lawyers were at that,

Tyson Mutrux
I guess what I meant by that? And you’re absolutely right. So I need to change the way I say things, too. So I’m glad you pointed that out. But really what I meant was, there’s a category that you can choose this, like what you do for your profession. So yours would be immigration, I think they put lawyer, so you don’t have an option of actually typing in what the word is. They you start to type in personal injury and then lawyer pops up for you. That’s what I’ve been just choosing the category. But you’re absolutely right. And I said attorney, so I need to need to change that wording. It’s just like, if you’re in jury selection, I say jury selection, I don’t say aboard here. And so just you need to speak like a client speak, because that’s what they that’s how they talk if you want to be sort of jumping into the conversation. That’s a good academic. I like that. All right. So my tip of the week is very similar to what we were talking about today, it goes in with what we’re talking about today. It’s called Google primer. It’s an app that you can download. And there are tips. There there are there’s a variety of tips, little bitty, I’d say mini mini courses, not even really a course that stretches heavy of a word, but gives you tips on on different things with regards to Google’s to Google’s to Google, get tools and tips for increasing sales, take your email marketing to the next level, keeping your brain healthy. These are just a few of the topics that are discussed. There’s more of them segment your customers to reach the right ones. Um, there’s a bunch of them. So I was just sort of clicking through yesterday, you basically just tap on it, and it will go to the next one, it gives you a lot of information, tap on it, tap on and tap on it, and keeps showing through with more and more information. And then it sort of quizzes you throughout the you know, you’re sort of you’re paying attention and getting the key information and absorbing it. So it’s really a small app, it’s sort of fun. You could sit there while you’re at dinner or waiting in line or sitting in court or whatever it may be. So it’s a good little tool to the bolster knowledge. Jimmy I get nothing else man. We’ll wrap it up.

Jim Hacking
That’ll do it. We do want to thank all of our friends, Larry Weinstein, John Fisher and everyone else Price who did vote for us on the ABA podcast, best podcast and so we’ll have a link in the show notes to anybody who wants to join in the fun and just give us a little shout out on the ABA listing competition for best lawyer podcast.

Tyson Mutrux
Right and we’ll Normal as well and a warm, warm, warm and posted something that’s more than that he voted for us as well. So, and thank you everyone for rating and reviewing us on iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts. If you’ve not read this yet, please do. So that’s how we move up in the rankings. So we get more and more listeners reach more and more people. So, again, this is free doesn’t cost you anything. So we don’t advertise on here. So just spread the word. Good. Appreciate it. Jenny. I’m all done baby.