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“Google My Business A to Z” – The Complete Course Pre-Release Announcement

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Learn Google My Business from the Experts

If you follow us here at Horizon Web Marketing you know that our passion is for training business people to untangle the world of digital marketing. We conduct workshops and webinars, we even have our own training channel, the Horizon Web Marketing Academy.

So we’re excited to be putting the final touches on one of our most ambitious projects ever: the Google My Business Complete Course. It’s a deep dive into Google’s primary tool for local business people. But even though it’s a “deep dive,” we never go over your head with our training. Lead SEO trainer Ross Barefoot puts everything into plain business English.

The course is broken down into easily-digested modules and you get a full PDF ebook with the course contents so you can refer back whenever you need. Not only that, we give you lifetime access to the course.

Now we haven’t set a price yet, but we will soon. If you want to be notified as soon as we price and release this complete course, please fill out the form to the right and we will make sure you get all the details promptly.

The full information on the course, including the course contents, is listed below, so read on to see why we’re so excited!

Class Release Notification GMB

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Are you in business? Then “Google My Business” is important to your success.

As a business person, you already know that Google is important. For all of the press coverage Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, and other platforms receive, a Google search is still the most likely way a new customer will find you online.

 

 

image of knowledge panel with indicator for Google My Business

 

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

But most businesses still don’t know how to effectively engage with “Google My Business,” the free management tool that Google has developed to allow businesses to communicate their critical business information to Google. If you’re not familiar with Google My Business (let’s just call it GMB for short), it is a special database that feeds business information into the results that searchers will see about you on Google Maps and in the Google “Knowledge Panel” (see next image).

Drawing of complicated knots to illustrate the complexity of Google My BusinessUnraveling Google My Business is Hard

Although many business owners have explored their GMB account (and more probably have not), very few are not intimidated by it.

First, GMB changes almost weekly, with new features, removed features, changed features. It’s Google’s usual pattern: constant change.

Second, GMB changes from one business to another, so it’s very hard to know how it will appear to any given business, at least when it comes to details of their account.

Finally, it’s not always intuitive. We understand Google does the best they can to make it intuitive and to inform their users, but as with any incredibly powerful software tool, it’s very hard to know what the platform is capable of, and how to access subtle but critical features.

All of this is not to mention the fact that Google has rules and policies surrounding what data you enter and even how you enter it.

Our newly redesigned GMB course is meant to address and remove all of those obstacles for you, the mystified business owner.

We Walk You Through All the Google My Business Features

Our course covers the complete list of GMB features and does it in plain business English with plenty of illustrations and explanations. Just look at the list of modules:

  • Business visibility and Google: what it looks like
  • Factors for good visibility: what will help your listing show
  • A tour of GMB: what’s in the box
  • Typical business action items, overview: here’s your beginning to-do list
  • How to find your business listing: sometimes it’s a treasure hunt
  • Claiming your listing: hey Google, that business belongs to me!
  • Setting up a new business: just getting started? Here’s how!
  • Verifying your listing: prove it’s yours, and not someone else’s
  • Optimizing your business name: keywords, stuffing, and (almost) unwritten rules
  • Determining your business categories: one list to rule them all
  • The importance of how you enter your location: what’s in a (street) name
  • Hours, more hours, and even more hours: And you thought you worked enough hours already!
  • The subtle importance of how you represent your phone number: after all, it’s your lifeline
  • Location links: lots of ways to bring your customers back home
  • Attributes: Google giveth, and Google taketh away
  • Your Business Description: Time to really use those keywords
  • Posts: Microblogging is back in again (take that, Twitter!)
  • Q&A: create your own powerful FAQs, just for GMB
  • Insights and Analytics: who, what, when, how many…understand your audience
  • Reviews: the two edge sword and how to keep it from cutting you
  • Using the GMB Mobile App: sometimes nothing else will get the job done
  • Photos and Videos: leveraging visual assets for a visual age
  • Business-Specific Offerings: Services, Products, Bookings, Menu
  • Tips Multi-Location Businesses
  • GMB Websites: A great tool, but hardly a “website”
  • Users and Access: It takes a team to make GMB succeed; here’s how to manage it
  • Duplicate Listings: Sometimes more is actually less
  • Getting Support from Google: the secrets of the temple
  • Dealing With Spam: the mosquitos of the GMB world

 

picture of keys illustrate adding users

How to Add a User to Google Analytics (and 6 more “add user” how to’s)

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picture of keys illustrate adding users

Adding a user to Google Analytics is easy!

  1. Log in to Google Analytics with your usual login credentials
  2. Click on the “gear” icon or the word “Admin” in the lower left of the screen
  3. At the Account level (the far left column of choices), click on  “User Management”
  4. In the pop-up overlay, click on the blue circle with a white “plus” sign in the top right corner
  5. Enter the email address of the person you want to add (it has to be an email that can log into a Google account, whether or not it’s a gmail account)
  6. Specify the level of privileges you want to assign to the user in the lower part of the screen that appears
  7. Click “Add” (blue button at the top right of the screen)

This is just one of the how to’s that we need to walk new clients through when we start serving their digital marketing program. So, to make it easier to see the instructions that are relevant, we created a playlist of 7 videos that will show you how to add a user to:

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Ads
  • Google My Business
  • Google Merchant Center
  • WordPress Dashboard
  • YouTube Channel

If you’ve just started in digital marketing delegation, whether to an agency or employees, you’ll have to share access to critical properties. NEVER pass around your credentials to do that. These videos show you a better way.

(Do you need a video that we haven’t made yet? Tell us in the comments!)

To Our Agency Friends: Feel Free to User these Resources for Your New Clients

Below the embedded playlist below, there’s a link to the playlist itself. These videos are meant to be useful to our clients, but if they add value to your operation, we certainly don’t mind you sharing them.

Care to share?

Here’s a shareable link to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9rAOPzj1j1VfqFqbs8Ov7qO7LlVdW1HB

Just need to access a specific “How to Grant Access” video?

Here are some direct links you can use:

Or, copy the code below and you can embed the full playlist on your own website customer service page.


<iframe 
src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PL9rAOPzj1j1VfqFqbs8Ov7qO7LlVdW1HB&rel=0" 
width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">
</iframe>

Screen capture of Google Webmaster Tools, 2006

How to Verify and Get Started with Google Search Console

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If you’ve watched my videos for very long, or taken any SEO Training workshops with me, you probably won’t be surprised to find out that I’m a big fan of Google’s free Search Console.Search Console is great for viewing how Google is interacting with your site (primarily crawling and indexing it), which, as you can see from their comments above, was the original focus of the tool.

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Our YouTube SEO How-to Series has Begun – See Part 1 for Free

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In this first part of what is expected to be a 3-part series we discuss the importance of YouTube for business marketing because of its critical role both as a stand-alone search engine, and as a provider of results to Google’s main search engine.

Read more

Google Analytics How To Video: Give Another Company Access to Your Account the Safe Way

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When we start doing SEO and digital marketing for a new client we always need to request access to their Google Analytics accounts. In most cases where companies have used SEO and marketing agencies or consultants in the past, they have shared their Google login credentials as a way to let that entity into their account. So how does that sound to you? Well, if you have even a moderately cautious nature you probably hesitate to give the keys to your Google Analytics account to just anyone, much less a company you’re just beginning a relationship with.

And you don’t have to. Any professional digital marketing agency should be more than satisfied with the solution illustrated in this video. Use it and keep your analytics account secure!

Transcript

Hi. This is Ross with Horizon Web Marketing and this is a quick tutorial video to show you how to add a user to your Google Analytics account in order to give them access to the account. So here you’ll see, this is a demo of Google Analytics account and I’m assuming at this point that you know how to log yourself into Google Analytics.

And if you do [log into Google Analytics] you normally are given this dashboard or one that looks similar to it. And now you have an opportunity to add a user and we often will make a request of clients that we work with that they give us access to their Google Analytics account so that we can either manage it or do diagnostics on their site.

So you go down to the lower left there where it says Admin. Click on that and you’ll be given this panel here and Google allows you to change things that have to do with your account, your property or your view. Now you don’t need to understand what those three things are in order to do this process.

All you need to do is go to the account level which is normally where we need to have access. Click on User Management. It will show you what users are already granted access to this particular account. And then you’ll notice up here at the top right there’s a little blue or a white plus and a blue circle. You click on that and then we’re going to click on Add New Users.

Then you need to be able to do an email address that is a valid email address. So in this case I’m going to say Ross@HorizonWebMarketing. Then you have the chance to leave this by default. It’s checked and that is to notify new users by email. But if the person you’re adding doesn’t need to get an email you can just go ahead and un-tick that.

And then you also have a chance here to be able to enable certain levels of permissions. Now normally when we ask for access to account we want to have all permissions at least above the line here. Now to give full permissions you also need to tick this box here that says Manage Users and normally is you want somebody to be able to add other users to your Google Analytics account you’re going to have tick that box.
With respect to, for example giving access to a SEO Agency typically they’re going to want to have access these three and if you tick the top box here it’s going to by default, enable the other two. So at this point we are done with our job and now that new user is going to appear. And here I am, Ross@HorizonWebMarketing and then you’ll be able to see what the various levels of permissions are under the permissions column.

And once you’re done all you have to do is exit out. You can go back to the home screen of your Google Analytics property and you’re done. I hope this has been useful.