Jason Moss:
Hey everyone, Jason Moss here and today I want to talk to my small business owners, okay? Because with all this coven 19 and the Corona virus that’s going on, there’s been a lot of changes to your business in general. But also like a Google my business in GMB, how people are finding you. You might be closed right now, you might still be open only to maybe deliveries or carry out or you’re doing everything virtual depending of course on what your business actually is. So I want to show you the different updates that Google is giving us in the different tools. All right? Because you might find them helpful. All right? So if you log into your Google my business area you’ll come to your dashboard, something like this. So to get there, of course, you gotta be signed into your Gmail account or your Google account that is tied to your GMB.
Jason Moss:
And so you go to up to business.google.com put that in your browser. And then this will pop up. You might have to click sign in, something like that. Okay? And if you do not have a GMB for your small business, what is going on? Reach out to me. I can help you get that put up. Okay. Cause you definitely need a GMV anyways. So once you are in here, okay, you will see that there is some limited functionality. This has been going on a couple of weeks. Like you can’t leave reviews right now. You can’t respond to reviews. The reviews can still be left and you can still respond, but they’re not, they’re not putting it out there yet. They’re not showing it. Okay. And they’re holding that for a lot of different reasons. A lot of businesses were getting bad reviews because they’re Google.
Jason Moss:
My business said they were open and they really weren’t. And you know, it’s a whole cluster right now. Okay. So they’re giving us some other options here. The first option is they give you a link here. Resource link, okay. When you click on that, it comes over here and it gives you a couple of different things that you can do. So of course, if your hours have changed, update your hours. Okay. if you are temporarily closed. Okay. They have a special thing for that. I’m going to show you that in a second. Okay. And they give you different options here, different resources that you can read about. Okay? So the first thing that they gave us as an update was the temporary like closed feature. Okay? So if you come over to your info tab and you will notice that if you scroll on down, they now have this button here, Mark as temporarily closed, okay?
Jason Moss:
That used to not be there. It used to only be these two. Okay? So now you can Mark as temporarily closed and it’s going to show in Google maps a red banner that says this business is temporarily closed. Now this is not going to hurt your rankings. Google has said that it is a temporary thing. It does not affect your rankings. It doesn’t move you out of the snack pack. It doesn’t do any of that. It just shows customers that you’re temporary temporarily closed and not to contact you. Okay? So that is the first option you want to do. Okay? So if you’re not doing any kind of delivery or carry out or you’re not doing any kind of a zoom meetings or whatever your business might be, some of those probably don’t even apply to you. If you aren’t completely temporary clothes, you should select that and let people know, okay, now if you are like a restaurant that is still doing carry out or delivery only, that type of thing, don’t click that.
Jason Moss:
Okay? Don’t, don’t select temporarily closed cause you still open. You’re just delivery only if you’re a restaurant, you’re, you actually have different options inside of here. I don’t have a restaurant GMB that I can sign into to show you those options, but it’ll be self-explanatory once you sign in. Okay? The other option is whenever you go over to post, Google wants you to you know, let people know about your updates to your business. So now that you see this coven 19, update up at the top. So when you click on it says, let you know changes to your business. Let people know. All right, update your status. Now, I don’t know exactly why they didn’t give you an option for pictures here because this is just a text option. They still do give you the buttons. So that is good. I actually don’t recommend it.
Jason Moss:
I’m telling people to use the the, what’s new, so this is, this is an update, but it’s going to give you the option for photos. So of course you can write right in your post. Okay. You can select like a, a button, like a call now or whatever it might be. You can select a photo and then preview it. I’ve already done the post here and you can see this is my post now. So I put in a picture I found on the internet, put in my posts that were still open where we are conducting everything virtually by meetings. You know, zoom meetings, things like that, using the good old mobile phone. That still works of course. You know, that we’re still helping businesses figure all this out. Okay. So that is my post. And once you do that, of course when you, when someone is searching for your business, let’s say they look at you all right, you’re going to see you have your Google post down here, okay?
Jason Moss:
Showing up, people can click on it, they can read the full post, that type of thing. And then if they’re finding you in the maps you know, but if they’re searching for, you know, restaurants, things like that. Okay. Businesses that are open and they click on you and the maps, all right, they’re going to see your post in here as well. Okay? So that is a couple of different things that have been updated with Google my business. As more things come out, I will let you know. But hopefully this helps. If it does, leave me a thumbs up, drop a comment below. If you have any further questions, I’m happy to help with that and consider subscribing so you can see the next videos that are coming out. I will see you guys in the next video. Guys. Have a great day and be safe out there.
Hi Jason,
Thank you so much for your great help and explanations ! Do appreciate it. 🙂
Need to ask you if GMB business owners will have the option of choosing “By appointment only” for business hours ? This will be very helpful in giving time flexibility to business owners.
Really look forward to hear from you soon !
Hey Clarisse. Not sure if Google will make that a feature or not. I can see how it would be helpful but at the same time it could discourage phone calls.