(00:01) Hello everybody hello everyone. This is our office hour number two uh I think we briefly discussed uh why we are hosting these uh webinars on a weekly basis we skipped last week because of some logistical challenges and ill health but primarily we want to keep in touch with everybody uh get the word out about what are the changes that you should be aware of because we with a ton of agencies we work with a lot of resellers who are optimizing on behalf of their clients who are optimizing their own web presence so I think it's a
(00:40) good way of us keeping in touch with you as well as if you have any specific questions or concerns or topics that you would like to you would like us to cover cover in these sessions please do let us know so let's kick off uh new developments in what we have noticed uh in in Google recently right so there was this uh there were a few examples shared online the other week about uh social posts uh showing up on uh on your knowledge panel on when you search for your branded search teror uh on Google it is showing up on
(01:22) your Google my business profiles um so anything that you have posted on Facebook as well as in Instagram LinkedIn or Instagram or or YouTube for that matter uh businesses have noticed that these are showing up prominently under information uh section on your Google my business profiles uh especially for primarily for businesses who have actually added their social media profile links on the from the GBP dashboard you can add those links from uh from from your signup dashboard as well if you don't know how to do it just reach out
(02:04) to our support team and we will guide you how to do it okay uh for some businesses as you can see on my right hand side uh so for some businesses we have noticed Facebook posts showing up on the goog with my business profile and for some of the businesses what I'm noticing is that that the social media links showing up and even for some what I've noticed is that Facebook reviews have started showing up on the Google my business profile as it used to happen a while ago so Google started doing this uh tried doing this before as well
(02:44) where they automatically tried scraping a Brands social media profile links and adding them to the knowledge panel but that failed miserably because they Associated the wrong Facebook link with the wrong uh business on Google so they messed up then they remov that option completely but over the last one month they have started rolling this out uh again uh so what does this mean is is is is this going to stay or is this going to go away we don't know could be like the this could be one of those tender different experiments that Google keeps
(03:32) running every now and then if it takes off uh they might stay they might coexist with Google's own uh posts uh but there are talks about that Google might remove their own post but we don't know for sure so the both the functionalities are here to stay for the time being if there are any updates or changes uh we will uh let you know uh secondly what we noticed earlier was there was some updates to the Google's helpful content uh guidelines documentation uh there were a lot of questions that I came across from our customers in
(04:19) the past couple of weeks uh since we talked about the helpful content update uh guidelines uh during the last webinar so the typical questions ran from from that what happens if I'm if I'm hit with hu if if there's a way uh I find out that my ranking has completely tanked my website Vis visibility has completely tanked will removing those unhelpful content help so as for Google's own documentation they mentioned that our systems work primarily at the page level to show the most helpful content at this set having
(04:58) relatively high amounts of helpful content may cause other content of the site to perform less well in search to a varing degree removing UNH helpful content might contribute to your other Pages performing better so just like most Google guidelines it's is kind of vague but there is an indication that if you actually remove the unhelpful content that was primarily created to Brand better and not with the users in mind either try removing them completely or rewrite them by adding your own perspective about the business or that
(05:37) industry to make it more helpful to your users there were a lot of chatter recently about four web vitals uh updates uh Google did launch a few different updates that you can see on Google's uh documentation uh there were talks about code vital web vitals being a major ranking Factor so when going through the documentation uh we realize that what Google is saying Google is in short what Google is saying is that uh they use code web vitals indicators in the ranking signals but your website does not really need to be perfect to rank well okay if
(06:24) there are other important elements that you can control by for example writing better content fixing usability issues uh for your users work on them first before trying [Music] to fix core web vital course okay you don't have to get a perect score to rank well or to get your clients better visibility on Google so if you have any further questions followup questions just you can go ahead and ask me on this chat or just shoot us an email at uh our marketing email address and we'll be more than happy to respond uh you can send over the
(07:07) questions to the chat if you don't want to send it uh publicly you can also directly uh DM me on the chat uh I'd be happy to take it okay so we run another exercise uh over the last couple of weeks we try to check uh the businesses that are on our platform and we went through several of them where we found that are basic uh setup is missing from a lot of websites right for example I've I've spoken to people who have not even added Google analytics and Google search console tools to the website so it's important that you add
(07:52) them uh while trying to Market your website that way you can understand who's visiting your website what keywords are they using uh what problems they are facing while go through the website what is your most popular content you get more information of your from your about your own audience that way you can always modify uh pick and choose run experiments if you do not have these data at your fingertips then it would be very difficult for you to optimize for your user okay uh I've seen a ton of websites
(08:30) where it's like a single page website that has been built just for the brand which is the name of the business and of the business uh if you're trying to rank locally uh on page uh factors still play a huge role in determining who ranks well or who is not ranking well okay there there was a recent study that I can send across that tried to correlate on page factors with helpful content updates as well uh take a look at it maybe it will give you some ideas how to optimize websites but basic things we suggest is adding this free
(09:11) Analytics tool to your website uh make sure they're verified validated uh create pages with all the product and services that you sell or your customer sell maybe maybe if you can write enough if you have the budget create a separate page for each product and each service that you sell then Interlink them uh on your website to it so that it makes sense to the user okay it also sends positive signals to Google about what your website is about okay there's a high possibility and CH for you to rank better and show up in
(09:48) relevant search results so that your customers can find you or your customers customers are able to find the website okay I come across this website as we onboard few listings on a daily basis I come across several websites I would say at least 30 to 40% of them have do not do basic optimization we okay we we have a free checklist on our website if you want to take a look uh we will link it uh from this deck so that you can know and know what what things to prioritize okay now the last update that I want to discussed
(10:30) this week is Google suspensions uh unfortunately we came across several instances in the last one month where businesses are saying that their listings are being randomly suspended okay there are times that it may seem that these are happening on the random basis on a random basis but that's that's not true all the time okay uh some of them are autogenerated basically Google's algorithm identifies issues due to which they decide to suspend listing from Google search results there are times it's because of
(11:13) uh manual penalty uh either somebody reported your issue for Mal practices or spamming and Google takes action on that well uh one of our clients he had like four or five of his 100 plus uh stor uh suspended uh on the same day but when we try to dig into it further we realized that it could just be a mistake from Go's end okay they just wanted enough information about those new stores all five of them were new stores that were added within the last couple of weeks and it is a possibility that that Google did not
(12:00) have enough information background information about those addresses about those locations due to which they suspended them so do not panic uh when your listings get suspended you usually Google will usually follow up with the with an email uh to the uh they will primarily email you at the email address associated with the the primary email address associated with the listing they will also usually mention the vient violation type uh that will kind of give you a general indication of the reason your listings got
(12:36) suspended uh as mentioned Google can also give you manual suspension if it reviews your listing and finds something wonky going on with your listing uh suspension can also happen after you make certain changes to your listing for instance uh uh you change your primary category uh in Google way too often you change your primary information like name address phone numbers way too often uh you do multiple edits within a short span of time uh if you all of a sudden if you convert your storefront business into a service
(13:17) area business or vice versa okay they can all lead to suspension because Google might think or the or the spam filters might think that there's something something going on with the system okay uh so there are two major types of suspension that we have come across and as for Google's documentation as well one is a hard suspension one is a soft suspension so first you need to check uh what type of suspension has been applied to your listing uh hard suspension is usually when you search for your company
(13:56) name City uh uh on Google and your business is going to show up in the knowledge panel you know what what you see uh a can you guys see my screen yes Neil okay so say for example you search for this business and if it doesn't even show up on the right panel then you know it's a heart suspension okay and if if it does show up but your Google my business uh dashboard shows that it's suspended then that it means that your listing is still live you just do not have access to it okay then then it's probably a soft
(14:45) suspension so some of the reasons that we have seen uh why a listing may get suspended apart from the one that I've already mentioned uh this primary reason I've seen is uh keyword stuffing in your business name uh your business name is say I get architect LLC and all of a sudden on F day you speak to somebody or read a brief about some SEO article on some some website and that mentions that it's a good idea to stop the city name or the state name into your name okay that could get you suspended
(15:23) Okay Google wants real like real world names uh you should be able to prove via document ation that the business is owned by you and that's the register name of the business uh Google does not allow usage of PO box or UPS Store addresses on their address especially in the first line of the address so if you have recently edited your Google's uh the address that is mentioned on Google and switched it to a p box UPS Store that could lead to suspension uh if Google figures out that your Google your your listing is created
(16:02) for the sake of lead generation only and you're trying to fake a business by using a viral office or a co-working space address and you do not have any legal documentations to uh start a business from there that could be a potential problem if you have a service area business and displaying a physical address where people cannot actually visit you that's one of the reasons why online only businesses uh can get suspended then there are highrisk categories as as identified by Google AG locksmith rehab centers uh personal injury lawyers
(16:43) plumbers uh so if you're you're working in these categories or working with customers with these categories make sure that you have all the check boxes ticked off to make sure you have the proper documentation and content in place uh to make them look l legitimate businesses uh and that they are legitimate businesses uh if it's a residential address and you have one or more than one businesses running out of it that could be a potential problem having a duplicate listing same business same address and
(17:18) two different profiles could lead to suspension at times though not not very often because Google has gotten better at identifying duplicates and uh if another business shares your same address especially a residential address it it could lead to suspension uh you have a bunch of uh edits as I mentioned if you do frequent edits to your primary information your business name your business address your your hours uh your website or your primary category uh within a span of hours or minutes or days it could potentially to a
(18:01) suspension uh Google hates beat and switch tactics so I have seen people adding a website link that redirects to a social media page or to a different offering allog together that could be a potential cause for suspension if you're changing your listing from a storefront to a service area or from a service area to storefront often or or temporarily that could lead to a suspension uh having multiple gbps in the area uh with that as service areas overlapping for the theme business that's a problem child your
(18:43) address or hours do not match what is available on your website and your major citations that could cause this pensions uh if you one of those business owners who have uh don't have to write this down by the way we will be sending out the notes at the end of the meeting and there will be a detail por sign up that you can that we will link to so that you can understand these uh sorry uh if your business is not available uh 247 but you just uh wanted to keep in keep updated with the lat make use of the latest algorithm
(19:24) changes and Mark your business as such that it's operational 247 s it is not so that could be a potential reason for suspension as well if you are managing multiple accounts with the same uh same ID uh and you not multiple multilocation businesses getting one of the managerial account suspended could least to multiple suspensions within the same account so just a word of advice uh try and not manage all of your Google my business listings especially if you're an agency with the same account okay if if your I I personally
(20:11) recommend segregating the servicing your businesses into separate accounts uh you cated multiple listings for the same business at the same address that could be potential of uh potential reason for suspension any other violation of terms or service uh so what should I do when my listing gets suspended valid question right first thing that you must not do as soon as your listing gets suspended is opening a new account and try to recreate the same listing immediately thinking oh my God my client is going to sh at me or if
(20:51) it's my own business I'm going to be D straights if I don't get my listing up and running again Google has already flagged that address Google has already flagged that information that is associated with the listing if you're creating another listing in all prob probability is going to get suspended again okay so first figure out what kind of suspensions has been applied to you is it a hard suspension or a soft suspension uh if it's a soft suspension uh many of times you can just uh contact
(21:26) support and get it up and running or Google might require you to submit additional information to get it validated most often than not if it's a soft suspension and your access has been suspended there are times you can even go in create a claim that same listing from a different ID okay do not try to reclaim it with the same ID won't be able to do that so just log to Google with a different ID if it's a soft suspension see if you see the clean this listing option and just clean it go through the ver
(22:05) verification process that should fix the problem at times now if it's a heart suspension and uh you want to submit for address so there are means and methods of doing it uh first go through the guidelines that Google provides and see that you are in no way uh breing any of those guidelines okay check for few things that I would recommend checking it key and stuffing in names uh you do not have unrelated products and services listed uh that you do not provide at the location check your primary and secondary categories on Google you make
(22:52) sure that you do not have unrelated categories you can use uh you can either log into your Google my business profile account and make the changes if you do not have access and you're helping a client either ask for Access or you can use something like uh gmbb everywhere to check the categories and information ensure that you do not have Google a duplicate listing with the same uh business name address and phone number uh listed somewhere that is active check hours check all relevant information okay then before you apply for
(23:34) reinstatement make sure you have the evidence list prepared Google may ask for the official business registration that shows your officially and registered and established business Google May request the business license uh which proves that you are authorized or the business owner is authorized to operate the business they may ask for a tax certificate uh that shows the tax ID and they validate or it may also request a utility bill uh and the utility bill needs to be associated with the same address okay you should have potentially one or
(24:23) more of these documents if you're running a valid business and then uh use the suspens appeal tool so all you need to do is basically go in here check for documentation okay then go to the business appeal stol it will ask you to make sure you're logged in with the account that you're going to work with and confirm and just go through the steps you can check back in after a few days uh to see the status as approved or not approved if approved all in good uh if it is not approved then you need to recheck your information to make sure
(25:08) that you have the necessary information handy to prove to Google that it's a valid business if you're still facing problems applying this or you're not sure uh what kind of suspension it is uh feel free to reach out to us uh just shoot us an email or a message give us a call and we can help you check uh for any issues okay as mentioned I will be sending out the notes of the call uh and if you or any of your clients are facing this issue we are more than happy to help okay helpful tools of the week uh so these are some some of the
(25:54) couple of other tools that you can add to your Arsenal uh this is something that I use fairly often uh you can use the free version of it or paid version of it for example it's a simple keyword research tool that basically gives you information about what people are searching for in Google right and for example I'm an architect and I want to research what people are looking for on Google so that I can create content uh sorry I'm using the free version of it so these are the some of the topics that it can throw up that
(26:45) you can take a look at and make a list of the valid ones that's applicable to your business these are some of the topics that you can write about the the best part about the tool is it brings all necessary information in one place it gives you the keywords it provides you the search volume information and how many searches are happening for the keyword uh what's the trend like and what's the average cost for click uh on Google ads right how much will it cost you to bid on these keywords and rank
(27:23) that on Google ads and it also shows you the competition otherwise what we usually end up doing is we make a list of keywords then we go into Google ad planner plug in the information to get such search information Trends information Etc uh I use this primarily as a keyword research tool so you can you can basically search for any topics and make a list of relevant uh subjects that are important to your clients or your own website and do that or if you're researching say you're want to write about how to
(28:03) articles right so you just type in how to associate along with keyword it will tell you what are people searching for uh how to be an architect designer how to become architecture how to check architecture in Lance etc etc some of them are relevant to this search some of them are not relevant to search it's a brilliant tool uh try and give it a shot you can try out the free version we are no way associated with any of these free tools that we suggest so feel free to use them uh another tool that I still use quite often uh even though Neil
(28:45) Patel purchased this one several years ago so what does this do so when you're going to Google and and search for Architects and you get a bunch of suggestions from Google whenever you're trying to search something right it basically scrapes that information and provides you an easy way of finding related topics uh that you can write about so it can tell you the search volume there your difficulty P difficulty cost per click Etc plus it will okay still loading it will show you bunch of related keywords uh
(29:37) that you can probably consider using and to top it all it can also give you based on the Sur it can also suggest content that is ranking well uh so that you can get some ideas about what is ranking well what kind of topics uh content people are creating around that given keyword uh how many backlinks does it have how many shares it has on social media like Facebook Pinterest and uh redit they do have a 7day free trial I believe and you can find the plans and pricing over there fairly useful tool uh if you're doing a lot of content
(30:23) and keyword research and optimization for your own website or on behalf of your customers okay I think that's all from me for the day uh do we have any questions uh like I said you can send the questions over the chat you can also directly DM me you'll see my name over there just select it and send it to me if you want uh I there are a few questions Neil uh that I see over here just a second uh yeah two questions are kind of similar so I think I'm just going to Club them together they are more relevant to the first few things we
(31:10) spoke about uh yeah so the question goes I'm just going to quote it uh will Google give preference to businesses that have linked their social to their Google profiles should a business prioritize social uh you know alongside other channels so what do you think what do I think okay I have not seen any proof that that tells me that Google is going to prioritize any business in sear results just because they have added the social media links but social in all is is playing uh is playing its own role as it used to right uh it depends if you want
(31:52) to get into it not based on the resources and what what category of business you are in if you think that your customers are on social media and it makes sense to amplify your content and presence on social you should be doing it okay I think in personal opinion uh we have the more things change the more things remain the same I think we have gone to a stage now with all the updates and interlinking of social local together is we going to a stage uh where you have to be omnipresent you have to be everywhere but but I do not mean that you just go
(32:30) in after this call and create like 10 new social media accounts uh take a take stock of what you can do uh take stock of your customers and where they are and then take a call okay don't don't just start social because you have to create a profile uh having an empty Channel with no content at all and is is basically worse than having no profile at all okay CU there are chances that you will show up as I showed you the other day earlier today right the social content is showing up fairly prominently uh Google have started
(33:13) pulling in reviews from your social channels such as Facebook there there seems to be a closer integration going on so something is changing makes sense uh I think a lot of businesses that start with so they uh think it's a checkbox activity or they can just you know spray and pray on 10 different channels and it's going to work out uh like you pointed out it's generally not the best strategy to go ahead with but again it's still a relevant Channel especially if you want to engage your customers at every stage
(33:47) of their Journey uh signup also has a handy social tool that you can use by the way and in it it integrates seamlessly with your uh profiles your local profiles uh so yeah check it out uh I'm going to move on to the next question okay this one is related to the Google profile suspensions let me just look at it yeah so I'm going to quote it so when a profile is suspended for no apparent reason is it always reinstated and if not what is the average waiting time before I should take any action onl so it depends on the wording of request
(34:27) Google is uh getting you need to understand something local listings uh is owned by Google you might validate that you are the business owner but the end of the day the listings are own by Google is their Channel and they're providing it to you for free right uh so in my experience uh couple of weeks ago uh when those five listings got suspended it took about a week for Google to turn that around okay all five were reinstated because they were new new locations we provided we were able to provide them with enough information all five was of
(35:08) suspensions uh due to which we had our listings back within within five days five to six days I think six working days it took okay I know as a business owner is difficult to grasp that uh there are times it's not quite apparent to us that uh why my listing is suspended or it's it gets most difficult when you have a paying client calling you every hour asking you why the why the hell am I paying you but you do need to explain to them that Google follows his own schedule uh you cannot force them into doing something so have
(35:49) patience you have to play Within Google's rooms they don't need to play by hours uh makes sense I think that answers the question perfectly uh one more question that is there just a second let me read it uh if you have business in different categories with the same name can you have different Google profiles for each category if not like how should you go about it business different bus businesses with the same name yes yes and no yes if you are an automotive dealer uh your you can be a Volvo dealer you can be a Mazda dealer you can be a Honda
(36:42) dealer uh from the same location similar sounding names except with exception for the brand but just because you're a single location business and say for example you're a news carard dealer you are a car dealer uh certain businesses are allowed to create uh separate listings provided they they are separate entities for example automotive dealers are allowed to create a separate listing for uh for the car dealership versus the fixed and variable operations but not all businesses are allowed that just because
(37:22) say for example you're s you're you're selling jewelry you're selling men's jewelry is selling women's jewelry uh you cannot create two separate profiles for uh two different segments of the same business okay uh so there are rules in place uh go to the guidelines there are specific sets of rules for automotive there are specific setes of rules for healthcare businesses as an example if there are multi-p specialty hospital and you can create separate listings for your for each of the Departments uh if you are a if you into
(38:00) Healthcare you can create separate listings for each of your practitioners or doctors uh even lawyers are allowed to do that to certain extent but not every business is given the same privilege um uh there are no more questions uh again we'll wa for a couple of minutes more so if you have any questions you can send them over to the chat or just raise your hands you can come up on video we love to see you as well and yeah Neil let's wait for a couple of minutes and after that we can uh go ahead with the
(38:36) quiz uh as we discussed you have all the freedom to choose what we're going to talk about in these office hours if there any specific concerns that you want us to address uh we would be happy to take it up next week and that's what we would decide so you can just type in your answers I'll roll out the question pretty soon till then let's see see if we have any more questions anyone else who's curious about what we spoke today doesn't look like anyone has any more questions to great right so let me
(39:18) just launch the quiz you can just answer it I'll take a note of all the answers and based on that we'll decide the content for next week's office hour here you go we can make it a point to make this a static poll as well recording event so send it out along with the deck and invite to all participants we will be doing that as well uh like one one of the forms will go out with the email too so you can select these topics there as well okay thank you everyone I think I've got in a
(40:23) few all right okay thank you everyone for joining us today excited to see you next week uh again something or the other keeps happening with Google I'm sure there'll be more exciting updates to talk about uh have a good week ahead I know the week is just starting so I hope it's starting well for you and yeah good day thanks everyone bye-bye thank you so much thank you yeah
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