I enjoy helping small business owners with their Google My Business listing. When hired, I’ll help them setup and optimize their listing. As part of my service, I’ll sit down with them and explain a few things that they need to do each month to keep their listing optimized and moving towards the top of the search results. One of those weekly assignments is reviewing their Info tab. Why?
One of the items listed in the Info tab is your list of services. This includes a Primary category and unlimited secondary categories. YOU choose the categories that best represent YOUR business. However, this list can change from time to time by from two other sources:
- The general public … which includes customers and anyone visiting your profile. Basically, anyone can look at your profile and make suggestions. Not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps someone thinks there’s another service that you offer that you overlooked and forgot. Hooray! Thanks for the suggestion. They can make the suggestion to Google. It shows up in orange in Google My Business so it stands out to you. Here’s the important part: If you don’t accept it yourself or remove it, Google will automatically accept it for you. Yes, you can always remove it later but if it’s wrong or inaccurate, how long do you want that to be visible to others?
- Google … from time to time they will modify their listing of available services. You can’t type in your own service using your own words. You have to select from the list that they have to offer. Depending on your industry, this can be pretty limited. Occasionally, they’ll modify their list and if there’s a service that is similar to what you already offer, they’ll automatically add it to your list of services. Wait. What? Automatically? Yes! Here’s what happened to me:
I check my Info tab in Google My Business every Monday morning. It’s part of my routine. When I recently checked in to GMB, I noticed that there were not one or two new services added but there was SEVERAL new categories. WOW! Some of them were actually pretty cool. Before, the only thing related to what I do was “website design” … but now they’ve added “Website Building” and “Website Design Package” amongst others. That’s pretty awesome. However, they also added “cleaning services” and “software development” which don’t have anything to do with my business at all.
So what do I do now? I scroll to the bottom and click on the “view updates” button. I then click on the trash icon off to the right to remove the ones that don’t apply and then click Save. Tah-dah!
Moral of the story: Be sure to check the Info tab in your Google My Business profile on a regular (weekly) basis to make sure that it’s current and up to date.
