Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
SEO for people who don't like SEO. I run an SEO agency. My wife Meredith is a family photographer. Our podcast explains how I got Meredith's website to the top of Google and answers questions from photographers about SEO and website marketing.
Meredith's Husband | SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO
12 Must-Do Steps for your Google Business Profile
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Branded searches convert best. In this lesson, Meredith’s Husband walks local photographers through 12 must-do optimizations for a Google Business Profile—covering name consistency, photos, address vs. service area, products/prices, categories, descriptions, updates, reviews, social links, and image strategy—to boost first impressions and local “photographers near me” visibility.
Timestamps
[0:00] Introduction
[0:24] Why revisit Google Business Profile now
[2:05] Branded searches and conversion reality
[3:32] How GBP impacts local “near me” rankings
[5:01] Step 1 — Business name consistency
[6:00] Step 2 — Cover photo that actually crops well
[7:25] Step 3 — Service area vs. address (use a real address)
[10:15] Step 4 — Logo upload and preview
[11:10] Step 5 — Local phone number importance
[12:20] Step 6–7 — Products, prices, and categories
[15:05] Step 8 — “From the business” as a testimonial
[16:20] Step 9 — Monthly updates (why it helps)
[18:02] Step 10 — Reviews cadence and request method
[20:05] Step 11 — Attach social profiles (they’re back)
[21:30] Step 12 — Photos are the attention magnet
[23:15] Optional steps teaser + vote link
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Alright, we're gonna try something new today. So Meredith is in the midst of her busy season, and she's going to be shooting and editing through probably mid-December. And the amount of time that she has to spare between now and then is very small. So rather than our normal format of Meredith and I speaking, I'm going to share a lesson from some upcoming training that I have. And this lesson in particular is something I've shared before here on the podcast. In fact, we did a full episode about it, but it was over a year ago, and there have been some changes since then. So what I'm going to share is the lesson that I created as a result of doing that episode, really. And it's essentially an updated version of that episode with more current tips. It's also, this is one of the very first and most important things that a local business owner should do for Google. So if you haven't done this stuff, or even if you had, it's probably worth revisiting just to make sure you are following best practice. All right. I hope this helps. All right, in this video, I'm going to talk about how to optimize your Google business profile. So in the last video, there was some homework. You went to, hopefully, you went to Google Search Console and you looked up which keywords, which queries were most popular for your website. How are people most often actually getting to your website? One thing that you may have found is that people are searching for your name or your brand name. It's pretty common. And in fact, you may have found that that's the most popular query. It's the most popular way that people are finding your website. That is also common, whether the numbers are small or whether the numbers are big, because people could be looking for you by name for a number of reasons. Could be they maybe have worked with you in the past and they just are trying to get to your website. Could be they have seen your name on social media or heard your business name from a friend or heard about you somewhere else, and now they're interested. They need a photographer, they're thinking about hiring you. Could also be uh could be your mom. Could be it's like competitors looking to see exactly what you're offering. At least some of those people are going to be looking for you because they are interested in potentially hiring you, and they are doing at least some amount of research. Okay, these are going to be probably your best clients, the ones who do a little bit of research. They're not just contacting you blindly. They're trying to learn a little bit first, and they obviously have already heard about you. Okay, they they have your business name, they have your personal name, and they're searching for it. They are taking the next step. We want to make a really strong first impression or a really strong next impression on those people. Because not only do they are they likely to be good clients, they are also going to be much higher converting. And that means those people, they have a much better chance of actually contacting you than people who find your website by some other sort of search. And this may be obvious, but I have seen this. This is this is a super basic kind of fact in my industry is that what we call branded searches, somebody's searching for your name or your brand name, your company name, they they convert higher than anything else. I can see that from looking at Google Analytics. It's just a simple fact. And the difference is very noticeable. So we want to make a very the best first impression or next impression that we can on those people. That's number one, why we are doing this. Number two, the second reason why we are doing this is this improves the odds of your website appearing in local searches. So when people do a search for photographers near me, taking these steps is going to improve the odds that your website is going to show up for searches like that. Okay, so I have 12 steps, 12 things that we can do here. I think that I would call these the must-do items, and then four additional items that are optional. Number one, your business name. Whatever you put here in your business name, it's gonna need to be consistent. A few lessons from now, we're gonna talk about local business citations and creating business listings on other websites and directories. The business name always needs to be exactly consistent. If you that means if you use an LLC or an INC in your business name, you're gonna want to use it everywhere. And there's no benefit to that, by the way. By putting that in a including it in a business name, there's no benefit to SEO. So it's just your personal preference. But whatever you put here, you're we're gonna want to use it everywhere. And I make a habit of whenever I'm doing this, I copy and paste. I actually copy from my Google Business profile. I just copy and paste so that there I don't make any errors. I do the same thing with my URL. Uh good habit to get into if you can. You you also always want your URL to be perfectly consistent. Okay, so business name, just make sure that's something that's your complete business name and it's accurate. Number two, the cover photo. There is a, at least at the time I'm recording this, this changes occasionally with their Google setup. The cover photo is going to appear right at the top left of your Google business profile, probably next to the map. It is usually cropped into square dimensions. But what you want to do here is you want to put an image there and then you want to open up another browser window, preferably in incognito mode, so you are not logged into your Google account, and see what that image looks like. You don't want it to be cropped. If you upload an image with like four by five dimensions or something else and it's and it's cropped, that's not the first impression that we want to make. We want to make sure that whatever we put here is going to look good. Can be your logo if you want to use your logo, can be uh an image of a friendly smiling face if that's your type of photography. Whatever image you use here, you want it to be it. Remember, it's gonna be the very first impression, the first, the first image that people see after Googling your name. So this image should represent your business fairly well. Okay, that's number two, your cover photo. Number three, your service area versus address. So Google gives you the option here of choosing a service area where you would go to your clients' locations. And as a photographer, that pretty good chance that might be true. That's one option, a service area. And the other option is using an address. Now, what Google would say to you as a photography, especially if you go and visit clients at their location, is that you should choose a service area here. I'm gonna say that's really not in your best interest if you want your website to appear in local searches. The reason for that, think about what local searches look like. If you do a search for photographers near me, there's gonna be a little list of three to five businesses next to a map. And on that map, there are going to be pin markers, and those pin markers are at the address of those businesses. If you have a Google business profile that does not have an address, you will not have a pin. If you don't have a pin, you don't show up in local business listings. And I have seen this firsthand with some of my early students, they were using an address and Google Business, Google suggested that they use a service area instead, and they did, and their traffic, the leads that they were getting immediately went to zero. They were getting all of their leads through the through local searches. And so when they changed to a service area, all of a sudden they're no longer appearing there. So my advice here, if at all possible, and I realize sometimes it's just not possible, but if at all possible, use an address. If you work from home and don't want to use your home address, I get it. Neither do I, neither does Meredith. We want to find some sort of address that we can use. Do not, however, use a PO box, a post office box. That does not work. That will probably get your listing suspended. But do look for some sort of private solution. There are, depending on where you live, there might be like mailbox companies, you might be able to get a virtual office. Maybe you, maybe you have a studio, like maybe you actually have an address. If you have an actual address for your that's associated with your business, use that. That's perfect. There are some national chains that uh sell these sorts of this address service solution to small businesses. I don't know what's going to be available in your area, but that is often a good solution. Keep in mind when you're doing that, there is often there's gonna be a few uh hoops that you might need to jump through. You might need to validate your um, you know, you might need to send somebody your business certificate ID or something to prove that you're a business. And it's gonna seem like a hassle. It is, it is a hassle, but it's there for a reason. And the reason is that SEOs, especially representing local businesses, for years have tried to spam this system. And lesser quality SEOs have done things like try to fake a whole bunch of different addresses to improve odds of our clients getting displayed in local results. And so Google is trying to eliminate that or reduce that amount of spam, that behavior. And so getting a local address often is going to feel like a hassle. It's that way for a reason. It's absolutely worth it. Just know that when you're doing it, there's a reason you're doing it, and it might seem like a hassle. Hopefully that prevents some of your competitors from doing it, and you will then have the advantage. And the only other thing to think about is if you think about the geographic area that where you serve clients. Try, if you can, to get an address right in the middle. So if you're visualizing a map and you have a circle on that map and that's where you serve clients, a pin right in the middle of that circle would be probably what you want to do. That's what that's gonna give you the best odds of appearing in those local search results. Okay, so that's number three, service area versus address. Number four, your logo. So at the time I am recording this, you can still upload your logo to Google inside your Google business profile, but it's not being displayed on the front end. This not long ago, it was being displayed. Good rule of thumb here, upload your logo, use whatever dimensions that Google suggests. If they don't have a suggestion, again, these things change with Google, but upload your logo again, go to your incognito browser and take a look and see how it displays. Also, here, we don't want to have our logo cropped. So it might be square, it might be four by five, whatever it is, just make sure it's gonna look good to users on a browser. Okay, number five, uh your business info, your business phone number is important. And the reason it's important, you want to have a local area code. You don't want to have, like Meredith, for example, has a cell phone, but she moved from LA so and she still has that area code. If that's the case, you would not want to use that phone number. You want to have a local area code. It could be either a landline or a cell phone, but you want it to be local. One option, depending on where you live, this might not be easy. I know in New York City, it's kind of hard sometimes to get a local area code phone number, but uh Google Voice is one way to do this. Again, sometimes if you're doing that, if you put in the area code you want, they won't be available. They will suggest like a neighboring city or something. I would highly encourage you to look for some sort of solution where you can get a local area code if you don't already have one. Okay, so that's number five, your uh business phone number. Number six, products and prices. So Google will allow you to place in your business profile uh your products and services and the prices. Now they have gone back and forth. I think initially it was just products, and then they added products and services. But even if it's even if they have gone back or will go back to just products, you might think that as a photographer, you don't have a product, you have a service. That that's close enough. That's a product. Your session is technically a type of product. It's something that people purchase. I would say you probably have a session fee, you probably have some sort of other fee for however you deliver the photos, whether it's on a hard drive or in an album or whatever it is. Those are products. Products that you can include your prices so you can start to educate people here, and you can include images. You can include an image for every product. Again, remember, this is one of the only opportunities, probably the only opportunity where you can control exactly what image you are going to display on Google before people get to your website. Okay, you can't do that very often. In fact, you can pretty really never do that. So absolutely take this opportunity to do that. That's number six, your products and services with prices. Number seven, product categories. So in addition to the products and the services, you can also have categories. So for example, Meredith's a photographer, or she has a session fee, she has albums, wall art, digital files, those are all products. Product categories would be something like children's photography, pet photography, event photography. Again, we can include images. And here what's important is you don't put prices on a category, but the way you name the product categories, and this applies to the products and services also, but the way you name them is important because there's not a lot of space. You're not working with a lot of, so you can't have a really long product name or product category name. It's going to be truncated, meaning Google's going to cut it down to like, I don't know how many characters, but it's going to be, it's going to be relatively short. So enter something, then again, go out to your incognito browser, take a look, see where it's truncated, make sure that it still looks good and that it still sounds like something that's appealing after Google has shortened it. A lot of times what people might do is they'll say, like, you know, fabulous, such and such. And then what appears to users on the front end is just the fabulous or part of the word fabulous. What you want to do is you want to make sure that whatever it is, whether it's uh an album or pet photography, you want to make sure that those keywords are up near the beginning so that they don't get cut off. That's still going to look appealing to a person, to somebody reading it. And if nothing else, just confirm in their mind subconsciously that yeah, you have what they are looking for. Okay, so that's product categories and product naming number eight from the business. So there is a section there called from the business. I think on the back end of Google Business Profile, this is actually called business description. Again, Google changes things like this. So business description or from the business, from the busage, from the business. It's a message from you, probably about your business. Now, what people expect to see when they see a section like this, you know, a business description or from the business, people expect to see something, some sort of description like I've been in business 20 years and this is what I do, and et cetera, et cetera. I like to do something different to kind of stand out. And personally, what I do is I put a testimonial in this section and I try to choose a testimonial that has a really strong beginning. And the reason I do that is to sort of capture people's attention. Because like I said, people are expecting some sort of generic business description. If you put something different there, hopefully it captures their attention because it's just not what they're expecting. So that's what I like to do. Whatever you do there, I would encourage you to give it a strong, choose something with a strong beginning or create something with a strong beginning to capture people's attention. And definitely just make sure you have something there. Do not leave it blank. Okay. Number nine, updates. So you can create updates here for your Google business profile, just like you would do for Instagram or Facebook or other social media platforms. There's some debate here on whether or not this helps improve your odds of being displayed. My opinion is that, well, yeah, Google says this doesn't improve your odds of being displayed. And of course, Google is going to say that. Inside the industry, we all expect Google will say that. My feeling and my colleagues' feeling is that it absolutely cannot hurt, and it probably does help a little bit. So what I would, well, what I do personally is I take a thumbnail from a recent podcast episode and it has, you know, a thumbnail and some text there, and I use that. Another chance to display an image, another chance to send sort of marketing message about what, you know, for me, I'm educating people. What do what do I talk about? What are my topics? For you, it might be some images about weddings or whatever type of photography you do. Something else you could do here if you are active at all on Instagram or Facebook or other social media, look back over the last month or two or three and just take a few updates that were, you know, popular, your whatever, however popular they were amongst your updates, choose the ones that were most popular and post them on Google. And I would say you don't need to do this more than once a month. I don't think there's an advantage to being like really active here, but Google will over time remove updates. So if you put an update here and leave it for six months or 12 months, at some point it's going to be old and it's not going to display anymore. So I would say you want to do this, I don't know, I have one a month. And it can be just an image and a caption if that's all you want to do. Again, an opportunity to put your images in front of people who are already searching for you by name. Okay. I don't think you can go wrong in doing that. That's number nine, updates. Number 10, reviews. And this is number 10, but it's these are not an order of importance. This is super important, and that's reviews. You really, really, really want to have reviews for your business. I hope that's obvious. And the trend has been over the last few years, used to be that reviews were not very important in order to get into local rankings. Now I can't remember the last time I saw any sort of business in local rankings that didn't have reviews or that had poor reviews. So reviews are important for that. Reviews obviously important potential clients to see that you have good reviews. And the thing to be careful of here is to spread them out. Don't feel like you need to get a whole bunch of views all at once. In fact, that is a red flag to Google that it's not natural. That doesn't happen naturally for a business. You don't go from no reviews to all of a sudden getting a whole bunch of reviews. And when that does happen, sometimes Google will assume they are somehow spam or they're not legit and they will take them down. Okay, so you don't want to do that. So it is much better to spread your reviews out. Don't feel you need to go out and contact clients from years ago. In fact, I wouldn't bother trying to do that. Instead, put it something into your workflow where you can ask your current clients and clients moving forward. Choose some time. I like to ask for a review when I know a client is happy about something. Doesn't matter what it is. If they're in a good mood about something that I have done, that's when I ask them for a review. And something else that I think goes a long way in how successful your request for a review will be, don't use a template here. I say put it into your workflow, but don't have like a checkbox where you send somebody a template asking for a review. The success rate of those is so much lower. Just write a personal note. It can be simple, quick, can be along with some other good news that you are sharing with a client. Just make it personal. It doesn't need to be perfect. I have found that like even the smallest personal notes, especially when they're not perfect, they have a better chance of people helping you out. So make this something that you do probably, you know, now with whatever clients you're working with now, or maybe just very recently have worked with and moving forward. That's number 10, reviews. Number 11, your social media profiles. So this is something else Google has gone back and forth with that used to allow you to attach your social media profiles to your Google business profile. And then they said, oh, we're going to stop doing that. We're going to do it automatically. We're going to determine which social media profiles belong to you. And they did a terrible job of that. I don't know what they did, but there was all sorts of problems with people having the wrong social media profiles attributed to their business. A lot of times it was either a similar name or similar business name or the exact same business name, but in a different state. Whatever the case, it didn't go well. And so Google has gone back now to allowing you to enter your own social media profile profiles on your Google business profile. Absolutely do this. It helps demonstrate to Google your sort of ecosystem. All of your profiles will be linked together. This is something that's just good for all of SEO. Absolutely do this as long as you do have some social media profiles. And that can be Meta, Instagram, Facebook. It can be TikTok. Actually, we'll see what happens. Right now, TikTok is kind of up in the air with their future moving forward. It can also be YouTube. I think LinkedIn is an option there. If you don't use LinkedIn, I do recommend you get a LinkedIn page. I know as a photographer, you're a B2C, you're dealing with families or individuals. A lot of times you might think that a LinkedIn profile is not appropriate. It absolutely is. But please do it. Even if you don't use LinkedIn yourself, the people you hire, they they there's a good chance they do. And it just makes your business look more legit in the online world, especially to Google. Okay, so that's number 11. Social media profiles. Number 12. Number 12 is sort of a summary, but it's this is really important. Photos. Okay. People love photos. You're a photographer. You should have photos. I can tell you this for a fact from looking at heat, what we call heat maps. And a heat map is if you've ever seen like a an image of a website, and on that image is like colors kind of swirling around, that's a heat map. And what it does is it's meant to tell website owners, like marketers and developers, what areas of a website attract the most attention. Either by the way, people are looking at it or what they are clicking on, and it's images. Images always attract the most attention. So in creating your Google business profile here, just know these images are they're gonna be the first things that people glance at. Even if they only look at it for a tiny fraction of a second before then scanning text, they're gonna look at the images first. Like I said, this is the only opportunity you're going to have to choose very specifically which images you want to display on Google before people get to your site. You don't have that option. So your Google Business Profile is the opportunity for you to do this. Add images wherever you can. The more the better. And in fact, that's probably true for all the information here. Not just images, but anywhere you can add text, probably going to be beneficial to do so. All right, there are a few more optional things that you can add to your Google Business profile in that lesson, but it does go on for another 10 minutes or so. And I realize that this is already longer than our typical episode. So let me know if you like this format, if you want to hear the rest of those. I'll put a link below where you can cast a vote, and I'll either include those optional steps in an upcoming episode or just link to that entire lesson when it is launched on my website. But for now, I hope that helps.
