Tips and tricks. The free Google My Business feature makes a serious impact on the revenue of physical therapy providers, home care agencies, home health agencies, etc. It definitely deserves attention from time to time. You may have known this asset as your Google Local page or Google+ business page. Those are now merged into Google My Business. When you are searching for a business and see a profile of it appear in the right column or as a separate feature from the other search results, that’s the Google My Business page.

How does Google My Business affect your revenue? It holds the most seen and used reviews today; it affects where you appear in Google map results; it affects your ranking in organic search results; and it is often the first impression of your business when people find you on Google. To get control of it, you have to add or claim it.

Google My Business Tips And Tricks

• Show your service area. You are not limited to just showing your office address. The map can be an outline of your service area instead. In addition to providing a better description of your services, inputting your service area directly into Google has a positive impact on the SEO of home care agencies.
• Show your reviews on your website (or hide them). Displaying patient reviews on your website is a HIPAA violation in the vast majority of cases. Google My Business gives you a way to display reviews in a HIPAA compliant way. When you embed a Google map on your website, you have a choice of embedding just a map of the address or embedding the map from your Google My Business page. If you do the latter, your business name will appear on the map, along with a tally of your reviews and a link to the reviews. Since the reviews are on Google and not your website, HIPAA does not apply. Note, the review summary disappears on smaller devices, but there are some styling tricks that can bypass this.
• Use the new black-owned business badge or the woman-led business badge. News reports note that consumers of all backgrounds are giving favor to black-owned businesses at the moment. Reports from some of our clients support this assessment. Google has recently added a badge for black-owned businesses. Log in to your Google My Business page and add these attributes if applicable.
• Add your logo, photos, about information, 360-degree virtual tours, and even post specials, news, and recent events.
• Suggest keywords to people you ask for reviews. Google uses the text of reviews to determine results in both organic search results and map result rankings. Reviews are one of the very few ways to influence map result rankings. For instance, if someone types “back pain” in your review, your listing will be more likely to come up under searches for “Physical therapists who treat back pain.” Your responses to the reviews do not affect rankings in search results.
• Get more reviews and in a better way. When you are logged into your Google My Business page control panel, you see an option for “Request Reviews.” This button gives you a shortened link that you can share with people when asking for reviews. It’s the best way to link to Google reviews. This link takes users to the inside of your Google My Business page (with no extraneous search results on display) and it automatically pops up a review box for both users who are logged in and those who are not. To see an example, check out our review link. If you have found anything useful in this free article or have liked our services in the past, please give us a good review.