Local SEO Video: Google My Business Bookings Option

Get New Customers with Google My Business Booking URLs

Here is a Local SEO video that I created a few months ago to help local businesses, such as; dentists, doctors, therapists, and etc. get more new customers with Google My Business’s Booking option. This feature is pretty cool because customers who are searching for your business locally, can book an appointment directly from your Google My Business profile.

This is convenient for them and you can watch the appointment requests come in! To utilize this feature to the max, you need to develop your brand online through digital marketing strategies. Your Google My Business profile shows up when your brand is searched for.

For example, if someone searches in Google for “organic clicks, llc charlotte seo company” our Google My Business profile shows up (see image below). All businesses need more customers searching for their brand as if you were Nike or Amazon for example.

Here is the video and transcribed version, enjoy!

Local SEO Video Transcription

Video Transcript Start

What’s up everyone?

My name is Lamar. I’m the founder of ‘Organic Clicks’. We’re a local SEO company based out of Charlotte North Carolina. Today is local episode 10 and we’re going to discuss how to increase conversions with the Google my business booking feature.

So recently, Google announced that they’re going to add a booking or appointment or some kind of order sales option for businesses to interact with your customers directly from Google. And this is in my opinion, they’re trying to keep up with Yelp. They’re just ultimately changing to make sure local businesses continue to win within Google.

And if you look at the image on the right here, this is one of our clients, Day Break Massage. And if you search for Day Break Massage within Google, searching for the brand itself. You’ll see the results of course all relevant to Day Break. But then on the right, you’ll see Day Break Massages Google my business profile. And within that Google my business profile, you’ll see an appointments option.

And this is where we’ve added this new… you know just the URL to allow customers to book an appointment directly from their profile. There’s gonna be all types of business URLs that you can add here to interact with your customers directly and just overall increase sales or appointments; so forth.

So there’s the booking appointment option. There’s place an order if you’re a restaurant or reserve a table, view menus; so forth. And one caveat to all of this is that if you’re already connected to a online booking software that Google is partnered with. (And we’ll discuss that later).

Google will automatically add this information into your Google my business profile. And the issue with that is if you want something different, you may not be able to edit it. So that’s something you’ll have to discuss with Google if you do see that in case you’re not using that online booking software anymore. But we’ll touch base on that here shortly.

So how did this feature increase conversions?

Great question. So here’s an image of our Google Analytics for one of our clients. And you’ll notice that we… so we added the booking feature on the… or the booking URL on the 25^th of October and we let this run for two weeks before we decide to test or at least look at the insights. And from the 26^th of October to the 8^th of November, that’s when the booking URL was added or the timeframe that it was running.

And then looking at the previous two weeks, so October 12^th through the 25^th is prior to not having that feature. And we saw some pretty good correlations here. We’re not giving all the credit to Google my Business, but there were some positive correlations and we definitely think this had some impact.

So if you look at the red box here at the top one where it says “book an appointment” then “goal” and then the other one that says “book appointment conversion”. So the conversion rate, this is for all marketing channels.

So that’s overall for paid, organic search social media direct traffic. And overall conversion went up and that two week time frame almost 38 percent and then patients that actually submitted a booking appointment went out 41 percent.

So those are really good conversions and ultimately, sales for that business. I mean in a two week time frame. And now to really connect the dots or the correlation with local search organic traffic. We look at the organic search channel which is Google and or mostly Google. And booking appointments went up in Google almost 34 percent and then the conversions went up in Google and almost 26 percent.

So yeah, there’s you know that could be organic search versus local. There’s all different variations of what could have caused all this. But we do see the positive correlation when we did add the booking appointment feature that we didn’t see before. So ultimately, this client was very happy.

And I think if you have a business and you allow customers to request or schedule their appointment with you, this is a great option.

All right, so how do you add the booking appointment option? It’s very simple. If you don’t have Google my business as a local business, you’re missing out on a ton of opportunity. Go to that URL that you see there and go add one today.

And then really it’s just once you’re logged into your Google my business profile, you found your listing, you click in it, and then you’ll see these features on the right here. Obviously, you wanna have a website, but the appointment URL feature is where you add your appointment book, your appointment option for your customer.

For Day Break specifically, we put that long URL there. That won’t show up on the actual profile if you saw in one of the beginning slides. It’ll show a root domain or subdomain which is clean click for user experience. And the cool thing is once you edit this and you save it, this will update pretty much automatically or within five minutes.

The menu URL option is not for all businesses, but there’s some you know, it doesn’t have to be restaurant specific. This is massage client and they have a menu option for all their different massages, so they do have the mini URL. One thing to think about too is I think Google’s announced that like ten percent of businesses currently do not have a appointment option.

And those are private schools, paint companies; so forth. But I think this is more of a slower roll out for them. They’re not like a speedy mindset to roll this out completely, but they are slowly progressing. And to my understanding, that it will launch out to all businesses at some point.

But and the final thoughts I’m gonna show you how to or at least tell you how to add this option if you don’t see it in Google my business profile. So if you have a Google my business profile and the booking option is based on categories.

So, Google has tied a booking appointment URL to your GMB profile’s categories. And with that said and say if you’re like a car wash and you don’t have the booking appointment feature… you don’t see that feature, you can add for example a category for massage therapy and what is funny is that at some point in your URL the GMB appointment option will show up and then you remove that massage category and then you’ll still have it.

Cool thing about that is it also is gonna let Google know that you want it if you don’t see it.

Last thing is booking tab. So in Google my business profile, you may see this, you may not, but there’s a booking option. So if you click on the booking option, you’ll see some providers. And this is what I was mentioning before in terms of the third party links.

So a lot of these are just online booking providers and Yocale is one of them. And Yocale allows a patient or customer to book directly from wherever they land on their custom URL. So for example, if you have Yocale in your Google my business profile, they wouldn’t have to go anywhere else. They can stay right there in Google my business profile.

Your schedule will pop up and it will show what you have available and they can look directly from your Google my business profile and not have to go anywhere else. And that is just… As people, we want everything to be convenient and quick and this allows that.

So, least you know these providers are pretty cheap as well. I know Yocale is free starting out and then there’s obviously if you want more, there’s different various options for you or a business.
So, I’m a little bit under the weather. But to close on this is it really can increase conversions and I would love to hear if this is helped anybody else. But if you have a… If you’re a local business, I would say there’s nothing harmful in adding this feature to be able to get your customers to take action.

Well I hope this was helpful. I hope to just add value to you know, if you’re marketing person or if you’re a local business. But other than that, that’s it. I hope you guys have a great weekend and I look forward to seeing you next week.

Video Transcript End

If you are looking for a SEO company in Charlotte, don’t hesitate to contact us at https://organiclicks.com/contact/ or call 704-288-4645!

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