When you bump into an old tourism industry colleague...
Several months ago, my wife and I happened to drop in at the recently renovated Visitor Information Centre for the Central Coast at The Entrance. And sure enough I happened to bump into Sue Ledingham from Central Coast Council. We've known each other casually from my time as a board member for Central Coast Tourism (now closed). A lot had changed since we last spoke.
The local council had now taken up the role of marketing, promotion and educational support for the tourism market operators in our area. So we got chatting about what she'd been working on, and what I continue to do, helping local businesses with optimising their Google Business Profiles, shooting virtual tours, providing professional business content (photo & video) and of course, local SEO. From that conversation came the idea of how I may be able to assist Sue and her team at an upcoming event. They hold regular breakfasts to help with networking, education, industry news updates, etc.
Planning a 10 minute keynote presentation
So we scheduled a meeting to find out more about what the Destination Central Coast team thought the local tourism operators would benefit most from. The final outcome was for me to do a short, punchy high level keynote presentation at an upcoming breakfast. Their top concern was how businesses struggle in the online reviews category. They have trouble asking for them, responding to them, handling negative reviews and everything else that goes with how reviews impact conversions.
I didn't want to leave out the other major factors beyond reviews, so the presentation I suggested was the one that followed. I think that you'll find the information evergreen, highly actionable and able to have direct impact on conversions (bookings and sales). You can watch the edited video below and also read the full transcript inclusively.
If anything in this presentation has you asking questions I can help you with, feel free to reach out for a chat. Initial consultations are free.
The Video
Transcript:
Nadia Pike - Tourism Business Development and Industry Officer for Central Coast Council
So that's it for me. Next, it is my pleasure to introduce Marc Charette from Work Pics 360to deliver a presentation on how you can maximise your Google Business Profile.
Marc Charette:
So I have a challenge. Nadia, I want you to hold me to it, please, because you've given me 10 minutes, right? Now in 10 minutes, I've got to change people's behaviour in the room. I've got to change the way you think about Google Business Profile, where it ranks in the importance of your daily activities in marketing.
I'm going to suggest to you that I don't want you to stop doing anything with your social media.
I don't want you to stop doing what you're doing with your website.
I don't want you to stop what you're doing with your print.
But I want you to think about how you can take the idea that this one little thing that Google owns and who here knows that Google is still the number one search engine in the world? It still is, right?
It's not going to go away. That's not going to change. So I've got to get you to think about how you're going to implement a different strategy to improve how you actually get found in local search because local SEO is not like SEO on a website. It's about making sure you're found in directories. And the most important directory in the world, what replaced Yellow Pages is Google Business Profile.
Who here has an iPhone? Can I see some hands? Who has an iPhone? All right. So all the people who have an iPhone, I want everyone else to raise their hands that didn't raise their hand. Okay.
So those are the people who natively had already the Google Maps on their phone. Everyone else, when you bought your phone, it came with Apple Maps.
Didn't come with Google Maps. Did you think of adding yourself to Apple Maps? Just a little hint. If your business is not on Apple Maps, you're missing out. If you're not on Bing Maps, you're missing out. That's local SEO.
But it's still true that the king, queen, top banana in local SEO is definitely your Google Business Profile. So we're going to go into this. And again, Nadia keep me on tack because I'm going to be… I got to move fast, right? Here we go.
There are three factors in local search. First you got to be found. That's the directory listing. Then you've got to be seen. And how are you seen? Photos, videos, and virtual tours. I'm going to give a shout out to Isaac at the back, who's a photographer. T
here's a lot of people in this room who've used commercial photographers and content creators. Don't underestimate the power of having somebody else holding the camera. Doing it yourself is good and you want that. But you also want to make sure that you have someone who can actually take that professional shot, that field of view that you can't see for yourself.
Because what happens is that whenever you're taking pictures of your own business or you're taking videos of your own business, you're showing what you think people want to see.
The job of us commercial folks is to think about what your customers want to see. That's a lot more important because that's the ones that are making the decisions to either come or not. It's up to you.
And the last step is, I got to go back, is to be trusted, which is your reviews. I got told that in this room that reviews is kind of a hot topic. Some people love them. Some people hate them.
They're a pain. I get it. But here's the most important thing about the reviews. They are the single most important conversion measure that you're NOT measuring right now.
If you think about this, if someone leaves you a really positive review, that says that you're doing something right. So therefore keep doing that. And you want lots of people doing that. And you must also respond to those reviews. And I'll get more into that afterwards. Because if you're not telling the rest of the world that I'm paying attention to the reviews, you know what? They're not paying attention to you.
So what I want to focus now on is quite simply this little infographic, which if you want to have it, it's actually on my website. You can download it too. But this is essentially the 11 core elements in a Google business profile. It just so happens though that in the hotel industry, cafe, restaurant industry, there's a few extra sections in there that are a little bit different.
But there's a few things that you must be aware of that you might not already know.
Did you know that this year they added SMS and WhatsApp?
You want to make sure you're activated in that way. Here's my recommendation as to which one you should use. If you're a sole operator, SMS. You've got staff, WhatsApp. Quite simply because WhatsApp you can split up amongst a lot of people. SMS, it's a little hard.
The other thing I want you to focus on over here too is the fact that social media links are now available. If you've not added your social media links, including your YouTube channel, which by the way, is not social media. It's the second largest search engine in the world.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. You want to make sure you have a YouTube channel and you're filling it up with content that looks good on you and tells your story. These are the elements. There's a few of them in here that are particularly dear to me. Photos, videos, and virtual tours.
For those of you who know me in this room, there's a few of you. you know that I specialize in virtual tours. That's what I do for the most part. The reason why I think it's a really important thing for you to also consider is what other tool do you have available to you where you allow the viewer to be the director of their own experience, where they can see it the way they want to see it and spend as much time as they want in every field of view that you actually have of your business.
The video, it's great because it tells the story and it's a picture worth a thousand words, right? That whole thing in a video is 25 frames per second.
That's a lot of telling story. But the virtual tour essentially is somewhat unlimited because you can just keep it running. Don't forget to make sure that you also have a virtual tour. Google is still the only platform that allows you to host 360 photos for free as a continuous virtual tour experience out there. That's the hosting side of it. Make sure that you actually have activated on an ongoing basis all of those sections.
Another one for you to think about is the products and services. Products ARE services. Services ARE products. Make sure you make all of your products and services across your whole Google business profile matched up with the products.
Make sure you have links that go back to the page on your website where the product is listed and make sure that you also have a proper description and professional photos. You can do all that in your Google Business Profile.
It's starting to sound like a website, right?
It's a little bit like one, except that Google owns it, which happens to be the world's largest search engine. It's important. If you want, download this over here. I'll give you the link. Just over here, if you want to actually download my full Google Business Profile, everything you want it to know about, it's on this link.
It's really an eBook. It's about 12,000 words long. There's a lot of information in there. I recommend if you're going to use this, if you're looking for something in particular, control F or command F for find and look for what you're looking for to take you to the right section of the page because it's really big. There's a lot in there.
When you're updating your Google Business Profile, what you basically have is this page over here, right? You want to make sure it's quite simply making sure that you're looking at it from the point of view of what does a customer see on this right panel? What's the first photo they see? Which by the way, did you know that you can't control what's out there? Google controls that.
How do you influence that? Because you can influence it. You know what you do? Taking more and more photos until the right one shows up. Keep changing it. Keep working it. You got to work that baby. You really do. All right.
The other thing is your reviews, your review count. The sweet spot in reviews, by the way, is not five star. It's between four point two and four point eight. That's the sweet spot for reviews. OK. If you're in between four point two and four point eight, you're doing very well because what that says is that you're authentic.
And the other thing about that is that remember that at the end of the day, what people are really doing when looking at reviews, which reviews do you think they're reading first? The bad ones, right? OK. Now, you know what's the most important to do? The scariest thing to do is respond to a bad review, right?
As a business, we've all thought, geez, I don't want to talk to people who don't feel like they want to say nice things about me. The way in which you respond to that review could be the game changer because now you're demonstrating how you handle difficult customers.
Now people are convinced that even bad experiences turn out good when someone like you is running the business and then they'll come and deal with you. Make sure you respond to every single review within 24 to 48 hours. It happens to be a search engine signal to Google.
If you take any longer than that to respond, you're missing out.
If there's something that got to leave you with it, if you're going to do one thing, respond to your reviews within 24 to 48 hours, respond to every review, be thankful, and look at it from the point of view of not what you want to say to that customer that left you that review, good or bad.
Look at it from the point of view of what other people will perceive about you in the way you respond because that's what they're looking for. They're looking for how do you handle how thankful are you when you get a good review? Those are the things you want to be looking for.
And here's the proof. Eighty nine percent of consumers read business reviews. That's you know those responses are important. Fifty seven percent of consumers only use businesses within with four or more stars.
So you really want to be over four. Make sure you're over four. Forty five percent of consumers say that they're more likely to visit a business that responds to their negative reviews. It's there. It's a known fact.
All right. Hope that's sinking in and I'm getting some behavioral change thinking going on in here. All right. What does that mean? I'm asking you to be more engaged with your Google Business Profile.
I'm asking you to make sure that you focus on this whether you set it up so that it's a daily or weekly activity. If you're really small business maybe every two weeks but God forbid you go over two weeks and not use your Google Business Profile and do something with it.
There's some things in your Google Business Profile that are static which means they don't change and you don't want them to change. And there's a lot of things you want that you want to keep changing.
So the things that don't change name address phone number Web site core data hours of operation. Well most of the time that doesn't change. But if you change your business hours believe you me you don't want to have somebody pulling on your door at nine o'clock when you changed your hours to 9 30 and you didn't put it on your Google Business Profile.
You want to see it. You want to see somebody give you a bad review that didn't even do business with you. That's a good way to do it.
OK.
So make sure you keep that updated all the time. So here's the thing with this is in the end what you really have to think about is how are you investing in your Google Business Profile.
What are you actually spending right now in your marketing budget. Even if you shifted a small amount and it's not to take away from the other things that you're doing it's actually to enhance them.
But focus on adding a certain part part of your budget in your marketing budget to managing your Google Business Profile.
I'm guaranteeing you it's going to have dividends paid out to you.
Thank you.