Does Google My Business Affect Your Ecommerce Store?

Google My business is very useful for many types of businesses, but is it the same for an eCommerce store?

Video transcript:

Dave: So, we have a question from the client. So, if we’re going to set up, I guess with Google, I’m not familiar with it, but you can set up your own store, and people can buy stuff through Google My Business. Looking at it a little bit, obviously, their concern is SEO. Is it going to take clicks away and all that stuff? My response from reading a little bit of it was that the problem is when somebody sees your products in your listing, there is only room for so much when they look at your Google My Business or they see them in search results. They see those four products. I had heard and read that Google rotates between your different products. So, the products that display, like those four, whatever they do, are not always the same.

David: Interesting.

Tricia: Yeah. No. Go ahead and finish your question.

Dave: So, yeah. So, does it affect SEO? And is it a good idea to have the same products on the store, or should there be a subset, maybe the most popular ones? What do you guys think?

Tricia: I like connecting and having all of them. It’s been a couple of weeks since I looked at it, but I want to say if you’re in there, like whatever type of store you have, I can search for something in there, from what I remember, in the Google My Business. So like, if I’m looking for something and that product came up from your Google Business Profile, I could then go in there and search for something, and it would pull it. If I remember correctly. But I’m not sure what kind of system your client has, but if it’s one of the ones that integrate with Google, there are some that just connect to the point of sale right there, and you don’t have to really do anything except for click a button and say connect. And it’ll connect right there, and your sales will be reflected. So then, let’s say you have ten of an item, it’ll connect, and when somebody buys one when they go to the Google Business Profile, it’ll then reflect nine. It’s all connected.

David: Are we talking about the Google shopping feed?

Tricia: I think yeah. When you’ve got products, there’s a place in there where Google says add your products. It will connect with certain… I know Pointy is one of them. I can’t remember the list of all of them. I’ve got one client that’s using it, and I would say connect the whole thing. It does rotate what is showing, but I’m not sure what Google is using regarding what they’re showing. I would think that it may be related to their search. But it can only increase sales if you’ve got products and they’re right there. It’s like, oh, here I can buy it right now. I don’t have to go through five more steps.

Dave: Yeah. It’s a WooCommerce store, and we’ve got a lot of customizations there for what displays in various countries and what they can actually do, depending upon things that are in stock or out of stock, and there are some customizations on where they can pick up what they purchase and things like that. So, we don’t have any experience with it. I don’t know if this is going to cause us integration issues and problems, or should we just put four products on or five that are always available and…

Tricia: Yeah. Because if you don’t connect it, you can simply go in and manually add a product, and where they click the link would go to your website.

Dave: Do you know if it connects to your WooCommerce store so that they keep synched? Do you know?

Tricia: Well, if you connect them, they do. If you just say look, let’s say you want to do four products, you add four products, but you’re not connecting it to your website. You’re saying I’m going to manually add these four products, and here’s the link. And the link you’re going to put is to your WooCommerce store, to that item in the store, so they can read the specs and purchase on your store. So, they’re not going to actually buy it on the Google Business Profile. The link that says buy is going to go to your website.

Dave: Okay. But they will see it, though then when searching for the company name and there’s the Google My Business page displayed, they’ll see it?

Tricia: Yes. And sometimes, what Google displays on mobile and desktop are different. I know products display on desktop, and I can’t remember whether they come up on mobile or not. But they will come up if somebody is searching. They can come up in a search. Not that they always will, but they can.  

Dave: Then that’s the other question. There’s the functionality of the store, and how does that ultimately affect SEO because if they get what they want from the Google search, they never go to the site itself?

Tricia: So, for the product, though, if you are not connecting them and you’re entering four products by hand,

Dave: Okay.

Tricia: They see the product, you’ve got your information, and then you’ve got a button to click. That button to click takes them to the website. They don’t buy it there; it goes to the website.

Dave: Maybe that’s the best answer for them at the moment.

Dave: Yeah. You might want to just pick products that you want to highlight, or top sellers, money makers, whatever, and put those in. Make sure when you do that, you use UTM trackers so you know those sales came from your profile. And then you’ll kind of know what’s going on with it, you know?

Dave: Okay. That’s right. That’s good advice on the UTMs.

Tricia: Yeah.

Dave: Okay.

David: Yeah. And I would add that remember how Google My Business profiles work. They really mostly show up because people have searched for your brand name.

Tricia: Yeah.

David: Right? So, it’s only going to help people who are already familiar with the store. Going to mostly help those, I should say.

Tricia: It also…

David: Okay, disagree with me.

Tricia: I mean, if you’re searching for the business name, like you’ve already researched and you search for the business name, then yeah. But if you’re searching for something like a plumber near me, and you come up in the three pack, then you’re going to click there, and you’ll see whatever.

David: Right Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yes. I’m going to retract my statement. You’re right. But within a store, it might be a little different because with the store, unless you… So, like plumber near me is one thing, right? But if it’s an ecommerce store, unless you’re looking for, I want to purchase widgets near me, and you are near them by address location, then that business will show up. But if it’s totally ecommerce, and there’s not really a brick-and-mortar store that someone could walk into to make a purchase, especially if it’s national…

Tricia: So, I have something to… Go ahead and finish up, but I have something to add to that.

David: …then I’d question the real value outside of brand searches.

Tricia: The other thing is it’s… I don’t know. Dave really didn’t mention this… If it is a full ecommerce store that has no storefront or brick-and-mortar for them to go into, it may not be eligible for Google Business Profile.

Dave: Well, they already have it. Yeah. They do have a brick-and-mortar. People can go in and order their stuff.

Tricia: Okay. That’s good. That’s perfect, then. When we talk about ecommerce, if it’s solely ecommerce and doesn’t have that brick-and-mortar, then they may have an issue. But that’s fine then since they do. So, I was looking up one that I know has products. I’m on my mobile phone. I looked it up because I knew this one had products on there. I did the brand search, but I could just as easily have been doing a search for a product that they had. Look at their Google Business Profile, and they’ve got different products. And it says, “in stock,” and at the top, it says, “See what’s in store” and “search this store.” So, they can search for anything in it. That’s if you connected it.

Dave: Okay.

Tricia: Which is different than simply putting it in by hand.

Dave: Okay.

David: Okay.

Tricia: Did that help?

Dave: It helps the biggest question that I’ve got. And I don’t want to take the entire call with this question. Right? But the biggest question that I’ve got is because some of the unique things that we have and how things appear based upon which country you’re in… All that kind of stuff.

Tricia: It sounds like you want to just pick four and put them in by hand, and then when they click it, it goes to the website.

Dave: That’s what we’re advising at the moment, and I think we should start with that.

Tricia: I think that’s a good starting point. See how things go. And then if they want to revisit it and see they’re not getting lots of sales from it, then say, okay, let’s look and see if we want to do something else.

Dave: Okay. So, you guys gave me a couple of really good tips. You can use this, David if you want from your marketing perspective. I had totally forgotten about the fact of adding a UTM tracker and how important that’s going to be for this. Right? Totally forgot about doing that. And then the other thing that just clicked in my mind, David, when you talked about brand search. I’m like, oh my gosh. So, the company is Verdyn Tarps, verdyntarps.dot com. And I just thought I don’t even know if they’ve got v-e-r-d-u-n tarps.com. So, in other words, I don’t know if they have a misspelling domain reserved that they forward. I don’t even know that. Because what I’m thinking of is there’s the opportunity that somebody has when you’re doing the brand search somebody comes in and says, hey, I just saw that that store Verdyn Tarps. I can’t quite remember how to spell it.

Tricia: Yeah.

Dave: You know?

David: Yeah. And I’d be very curious to know how Google My Business listing shows up in another country, that if you’re going to have a brick-and-mortar in the United States and someone searches from Europe, is that even going to show up?

Dave: For this company, we don’t care about that.

David: Okay.

Dave: Because they’ve got two stores in the northern part of the US. Michigan is one and Indiana is another location, and they have two locations in Canada.

David: Okay.

Tricia: Will they sell worldwide, or where did they sell to?

Dave: Their customers are US and Canada. That’s it.

David: That’s easier.

Tricia: Yeah. That is.  

Dave: I don’t mean to take up the whole call.

David: No. That’s fine.

Dave: Only if it benefits everybody else…

David: No, that’s not how this works. You ask your question. And we’ll talk about it until you’re satisfied with your answer.

Dave: I am right now. I think there’s another aspect of seeing what the Google shop or store is capable of by connecting with WooCommerce and their limitations. Because maybe the only solution for this client is the manual, throw the four popular products up that link over to the site, and all that kind of stuff like you said.

David: Right. I wonder if you rotated those out for like a special deal, something special, like featured items that either you only offer or products on a discount that you want to liquidate because again, most of the people are going to find you from brand name search, so this is a way of showcasing and flexing your muscles. We offer this. Here’s our unique product. Here’s our really good deal. It takes advantage of that kind of phenomenon.

Tricia: If you have a special limited-time price on something, definitely do that. I can’t remember what it’s called, but they have several categories. One is What’s New, but there’s one that’s a deal that you can do. If they’ve got something, it’s a certain price for a certain time period, make sure you do that deal because that kind of flags it in Google.

Dave: Okay. So, one that I’m going to do is I’ll talk to them about it in the next call that we have with them. We do a once-a-month call. I’m going to make sure I understand what their management capabilities are for this. Do they want to hassle with this? Do they not? Or do they want to just have four products that are always available, or do they want to do this sale because there is that manual management that they’d have to do? Okay,