Google My Business: explained

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What is Google My Business?

Google My Business, previously known as ‘Google for Business’, is a free online tool designed for businesses and organizations to help manage their online presence across Google. The tool allows you to verify and edit your clinical businesses information, enabling your patients to easily find you and to find the story behind your clinic. Google My Business gives your clinic a way of managing how information is displayed on Google, including the search engine and Google Maps, whilst also allowing your clinic to interact with your patients and vice versa, for example with reviews.

Google My Business features

Manage your information – Google My Business enables a clinic to manage and edit the information that patients see when they search for a clinic or for a particular product/service. It is vital to ensure that this information benefits the patient and that it includes information such as the clinic’s opening times, a website link and the location. When a patient sees your clinic on Google Maps or Google’s search engine, they want to be able to access all the information they need or they may choose to go elsewhere. An example of this is if a patient searches for a local clinic, then they will want to know the location of the clinic to see if it is easily accessible. Furthermore, when a patient sees your clinic on Google Maps or Google’s search engine, the information that is displayed is the first impression that they get of your business. If helpful information and photos aren’t available, your patients may get a bad first impression of the clinic.

Interact with customers – Another feature of Google My Business is that it enables clinics to interact with patients, and vice versa. Whether it’s responding to customers reviews or posting pictures of what the clinic does, interacting with patients is crucial and can be the difference between someone choosing your clinic over a competitor. Including images of the clinic’s daily operations is proven to benefit the business – Google states that: “Businesses that add photos to their listings receive 42% more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t.” A clinic using Google My Business should definitely consider uploading interesting images of their team at work, for example.

Understand and expand your presence – Google My Business also enables clinics to see insights on where the traffic to their website came from; this could be from social media or organic search results for example (also see Google Analytics). There is also information available regarding how many people rang your clinic via the phone number displayed on local search results in Search and Maps. A clinic can utilize this information because it tells them where their customers are coming from and how they are contacting them: this allows the business to build an idea of their target audience and then target marketing campaigns to that specific target audience. Google My Business also integrates with Google AdWords to allow a clinic to track their online advertising campaigns.