Google My Business has innovated a number of new features that should make many location issues disappear for business owners. These features have excited Google marketing companies in Ontario like us, and we are pleased to share what we know with you. The 360 Business Local team has assembled a brief overview of some of the new features along with Google’s best practice recommendations.
Read on to learn 4 best practice tips for the polished My Business platform that have Google marketing companies in Ontario buzzing!
- Update your business hours often. Business hours are much more complicated these days than the standard 9-to-5 formula companies have leaned on for the past few decades. With the rise of globalization and eCommerce, things have changed; online stores never really close their doors, and many businesses have to keep dynamic hours to accommodate multinational companies. Google allows you to update your store hours easily so that you can apply those updates 24 hours in advance, ensuring that your stores’ hours match what you show your customers on the website at all times, and that no customers are left wanting.
- Resolve Google updates without issue. As the world’s biggest online juggernaut, Google is reinventing how we use the web every day. Cutting edge companies like this release updates often, and this can throw some business owners curve-balls as they have to stay on top of changes to their internal systems and spreadsheets. Now Google makes it easy to keep up with their evolution, making it easy to resolve these updates through your dashboard, or in bulk via spreadsheet uploads.
- Enliven your locations! If your locations show a status other than “Live” in the status column, best practice dictates that you take action to respond to alerts and updates. If all of your locations are not published on Google (or to ensure that they are), visit Google My Business Locations. From here, choose the account with the locations you’d like to edit, then click the three-dash menu icon to select “All Locations.” From here, you can check the “Status” column for the latest status of your location. If it is unverified, suffering from formatting errors, or otherwise not published, you’ll need take some extra steps, all of which the 360 Business Local team can guide you through!
- Use a Business Account (BA). Using a BA streamlines your ability to share locations with colleagues, partners, and vendors such as agencies, without having to share your sensitive Google Account password. Additionally, you can add account managers to prevent the loss of access in the event of an employee leaving the company. Once you are comfortable with this process, you can start integrating the use of Business Account roles, which will allow you to give the right permissions to the right people. Though each location can only have a single owner, you can assign up to 50 managers or communication managers to have privileged access. Managers can do almost everything that the owner can, aside from deleting the account or managing access. Communications Managers essentially have the same access level as managers, but cannot edit the profile, start a Hangout on Air, or manage YouTube videos.