Unfair advantages in Google Business Profiles (Google My Business).

00:00:00
Let’s take a moment to talk about Google business profiles and tactics people are leveraging to potentially gain an advantage on Google business profiles or Google maps, Google My Business, all these different names that Google has gone by. And the myth is that you have a lot of control over your Google business profile rankings and visibility. And this myth has been perpetuated from the old days of SEO when this was more commonplace where you could manipulate things in order to get an unfair

00:00:35
advantage on um Google rankings. And what we see today is that largely Google has learned from those mistakes. They’ve seen how that has negatively affected their users and how as a result of negatively affecting their users, they have moved to platforms like Yelp for finding local businesses and as a result, Google has lost a lot of advertiser dollars. So, they’ve learned from that and they’ve removed a lot of the ability for businesses, for local service providers to manipulate their

00:01:06
rankings to gain an unfair advantage and visibility. And so when it comes to Google business, I see a lot of people doing some tactics to try to gain this system. And the problem is that in the short term that it works, that they do get an unfair advantage. But then the other problem is that Google learns from this and in the next patch they just fix it and all the advantage that you gained just goes to waste and all the resources and investment that you’ve made to gain that advantage is also going to waste. not

00:01:38
just the actual gains that you’ve made. And so when that happens, this this was opportunity cost, time and resources and energy that you could have spent to actually develop a better practice, which would reward you, ironically, with better visibility than any than any tactic that you could have focused on. So here are some common ones. If you’re notice if you if you notice that you’re doing this or if if your provider does any of these things, I would seriously question it and challenge them to or challenge you to

00:02:10
focus on the more timeless stuff instead of flavor of the month hacks. So, one is altering your Google business profile name. So, let’s say your business is Lakewood um dentistry and orthodontics. This is a client that we just got that um they were concerned with this kind of stuff. And if that’s your name, you might be tempted to change that name to write uh Lakewood or Best Dentist in Lakewood or Lakewood Dentist um and Lakewood Orthodontics or something like that. Something that captures the Google

00:02:44
searches better. And that is wrong. That doesn’t work. And the reason is that Google no longer takes into account the name of the practice as much as it used to because of abuses like this. And so what it focuses more on is the category that you identify your profile as. So are you a dentist? Are you a cosmetic dentist? Are you an orthodontist? These things matter more than the actual name. And what happens when you do engage with manipulating your name in order to manipulate the search results, your

00:03:14
visibility a little bit, is not only do you get very minimal results if any, people can also very easily report it. One of the first things I do when I get a client is I look in their area and see who is trying to unfairly gain this Google business profile section. And so what we’ll do is we’ll report the name um that it doesn’t match their actual business name and in a day or two Google fixes it. This is one of the things that Google is very adamant about uh fixing because they know how much it affects

00:03:45
their users and when it affects their users negatively then that they’re it’s affecting their ad revenue negatively. Right? So, you might struggle to get a review removed that you know is fraudulent, but you’re not the user. You’re not the people that are going to be that Google is going to be making money from ads from, right? Unless you’re an advertiser. Now, if you’re an advertiser, now you get special benefits. But, all right, next point. Your next one is going to be creating

00:04:12
multiple profiles. Um, actually before and then the next one I want to talk about is to um geo tagging. But okay, let’s talk about profiles. So there is an office that is um dentist of blank and recently they created a second um Google business profile called orthodontist of blank. Same business, same staff, same employees. They created a separate website but the same address, same phone number, same everything. All right. So, this is an a different example of a fraudulent practice on Google. And what they

00:04:51
attempt to gain is multiple listings, right? So, you search for dentist near me or orthodontist near me. And the idea is that they would have an unfair advantage that they would be having um their eggs in two baskets. Now, what’s happening is their reviews are being sent to two different areas and all this stuff. And what they fail to see is that it’s so easy to identify and report this kind of behavior. So if I had a client who is going to be competing in that area with them, like I guarantee you that they’re

00:05:25
going to be one of the first people that we report and they’re going to get removed and their other regular Google account is going to be penalized, right? So, not only are the gains that they seek to make going to be wiped out, it’s actually going to hurt them in the long run, which is way more important than the minimal amounts of gain that you’re going to get by having two profiles. All right, next one. Geotagging. So the idea that if you post more on your profile or this entire concept of freshness and if

00:05:56
you post more on your profile that Google is going to suddenly start um giving you preferential preferential preferenti preferent preferential treatment you know what I mean um largely is also diminishing returns preferential treatment. All right. Anyway, the idea that you if you post regularly, if you have this freshness that somehow Google is going to smile upon you is largely a myth. What they care about is are these Google profiles, do they have sufficient information for their users, the main

00:06:33
people they care about, to make accurate judgments to get a complete picture. It’s not about how many posts you can spam. In fact, that actually detracts from the clarity of what you’re about, right? Because every time you make a post, you’re forced to think of something new or you have AI generate some content so it waters down the actual authenticity of that practice. So what we find is that freshness used to be an indicator that Google cared about and now as everyone starts pumping

00:07:01
out more content and content and Google realizes that okay, this is just actually worsening the entire ecosystem, freshness stops becoming a factor. And to tie in with freshness is the idea of geotagging. So this is some people will say that the photos you upload on Google, Google will do a scan to see what the meta text is, the data underneath that image and see where that image came from. And if we manipulate that image and say that it came from this city, because some images don’t say that, then you’ll have an advantage as

00:07:31
well. Well, that’s largely been proven to be a myth, too, because what you can do for $9 is geotag all these images. You can buy stock photos, geo tag those images and put it on your website. And what happens there is now you just get a you create conditions where geo tagging is no longer a viable signal. Right? So what I’m trying to get you to do is understand what is going to be a lasting competitive advantage versus a small hack that is just going to get wiped out as everyone else starts to adopt it.

00:08:02
Right? Another one is going to be that Google scans images for keywords. So if your image has things written on it and that whatever is written on it aligns with searches people are making that you’re going to get a small advantage. And like like everything else, yeah, you are going to get a small advantage for a short term. But like you can copy and paste images onto any AI tool and it will tell you that these are images or this is tech that text that has been overlaid. Like Google’s technology is so far advanced

00:08:37
that it’s able to see these things and it’s not going to get you a competitive advantage. All right. So I think that’s it. There’s nothing else that comes to mind right now on how people are getting oh incentivized reviews. All right. So let’s talk about reviews. So, the three main categories that you’re looking at for ranking, distance, your category, like what you categorize yourself as, and reviews, right? Or proximity from the user and distance interchangeable. How close are you to the searcher? That

00:09:08
is something that’s outside of your control. You can’t change your office location, right? You shouldn’t or maybe you want to if you want to associate like maybe like Beverly Hills, you want to change the entire um but you see it’s like a different strategy idea. And then and then category which is what kind of practice are you? That’s largely inner like you can’t change that either. Just say who you are and be authentic and own it, right? Stop trying to like adjust categories,

00:09:37
trying to minmax optimize this kind of stuff. That’s not what it’s about. Like it’s it’s designed Google’s the Google system is designed to be imperfect so that you can be imperfect and still show up okay. And finally is reviews. All right, and this is what everyone obsesses. If we get enough reviews, we’re gonna, you know, manipulate the rankings and get higher. And this doesn’t happen all the time. If you search for dentist near me, sure, most of the ones that you see are going to be

00:10:06
of decent reviews, but the one that has thousands of reviews that is two cities over won’t show up at all. So the number your visibility the visibility that you can get through reviews is severely limited. You don’t get leverage the more reviews you get right you don’t get visibility leverage and let’s talk about now trust leverage. So the trust of having reviews let’s say one office has 200 reviews. Let’s say one office has a thousand reviews. If everything was the same, sure we would

00:10:37
trust the thousand reviews a little bit more. But there’s two things I want you to consider. One is the idea of review inflation that people today understand that reviews are being heavily incentivized and when dental offices show up with all these reviews, perfect reviews, um people start to wonder what’s actually going on, right? So that’s one thing that you you have to consider is does it actually erode trust? Because studies show that sometimes um five stars, 200 reviews is less trustworthy than 4.7 stars, 200

00:11:08
reviews, right? people trust imperfection a lot of times more. Another one is going to be the idea of diminishing returns. Um if there’s or or I think we already covered that you’re going to get um throttle visibility sorry but with trust the idea is um positioning differentiation right so think of it like restaurants and I know dentists and restaurants are not the same but the mechanisms for choosing are similar. If I want a dentist who All right, let if I want to go to a restaurant, I will choose the one that

00:11:43
has thousand stars probably over the one that has 200 stars if everything is the same. But what if that restaurant is a Chinese restaurant with 1,000 stars and the restaurant with 200 reviews is a Thai restaurant? And what if I want Thai? You see what I’m saying? Like it preferences are going to matter much more once a certain baseline of trust has been built. And so what matter what’s more important and what gets you a better competitive advantage, what isolates you from the rest of the competition isn’t going to

00:12:13
be more reviews because everyone else is getting more reviews and it’s easy to get. It’s easy to incentivize, right? And I I I would discourage incentivization, too, because every so often Google does a wipe and people’s reviews get eliminated um if it’s been incentivized. But the idea is positioning and differentiation to show up differently to show up trustworthy yet as a different type of dental office. So if you want this kind of dentistry, we’re about that. If you want this kind of

00:12:43
dentistry, they’re about that. Right? And once you do that, then the number of reviews stops mattering so much. You can stop focusing on trying to inflate the numbers and hyperfixating on your presentation and focus more on your way of being. What exactly what type of practice are you? All right, so that’s it for common tactics for how people try to get an advantage by manipulating Google reviews. And the thesis of this conversation today is that you have to try to identify what is going to be

00:13:20
actually valuable to the user in terms of helping them make a decision versus what are just tactics that we’re using to hack the system in order to get a temporary unfair advantage. Because any resource that goes into those temporary hacks are likely to get wiped out. it’s it’s just not going to last. And that’s taking away from your ability to invest in the other thing which are timeless asset building things like trust, things like positioning, where you are in the minds of people. These are things that

00:13:56
you can build that are separate from the Google business profile ecosystem, but will also continue to give you results on Google business profile because now people will be searching you out. People will be engaging with your office more. people will be making taking actions and Google sees these things as true signals and when they notice that happening on your profile on your website or whatever then you get the advantages the visibilities and all this benefits that people try to hack their way into right

00:14:27
so focus more on the things that actually matter um if you look if you want to do more marketing like this this applies to everything this applies to advertising this applies to your website this applies to so much more than what we consider advertising or marketing to be that um it’s just black and white when you know the difference. All right, so if you want to know what the difference is, if you want to see what true marketing is like, how to actually market a dental practice, I’ll put a

00:14:54
course in the description. It’s a free course. You’ll find it very valuable. Go check it out. All right. See you.