How to create websites with Google My Business

Hi everyone, my name is Saúl Triviño and today I’m going to look in depth at a couple of features that are really useful but little known, and even less used, by most Google My Business users: the website and posts.

One feature of Google My Business that doesn’t get much use is the option to create a (very simple) website for businesses that don’t have the resources to build their own site with their own domain and hosting.

This mainly helps with the local SEO of your business and with getting onto Google Maps (a white hat SEO technique; if you don’t know what that is, I recommend reading this post on the types of SEO).

The main thing is to fill in as many fields as we can in the “Info” tab, as much of the information entered here will be shown on this website (business name, category, location, opening hours, phone number).

It’s also important to add the products or services we offer, or the menu if our business is a restaurant, as well as photos: our logo, a cover image and photos of the inside and outside of the premises.

How to create a page in Google My Business

To enable our website, all we have to do is click on the “Website” section of our Google My Business listing.

Once there, a submenu appears for creating our website.

In it, we can set up several things:

• In the “Themes” section, we can choose from 10 preset themes (with different colours and fonts).
• In the next section, “Edit”, we can:
• Choose the website’s main button (Call now, Contact us, Get quote, Book, Send an SMS or Send a WhatsApp message). For restaurants, it also lets you show the options Find a table, Place an order and View menu.
• Add a title, a description, a heading and a short piece of formatted text (bold, italics, underline, etc.) in the body.
• In the “Photos” section we can add new images for our page (bear in mind that this website will already load the images we’ve uploaded to the “Photos” section of the main menu.
• Finally, in the “More” section we can publish the page, see tips for attracting customers and set the site’s language.

The website also shows our business’s ratings (reviews) and the posts we publish. We’re going to explain this last section in a bit more detail, as most Google My Business users aren’t very familiar with it.

Posts in Google My Business

In the “Posts” section we can create a kind of post within Google My Business, a bit like a blog.

These posts can be:

• COVID-19 update, to tell your customers about any changes to your business related to COVID-19, with a field for the text you want to display and the (optional) possibility of adding a button with the options book, order online, buy, learn more, sign up or call now, with the option of adding a link to your button (or the phone number in the case of call now).
• Offer, where you can add a photo or video, the offer title, a start date and an end date (with the option of also setting a start and end time) and an optional section for adding details of the offer.
• What’s new, where you can add an image or video, write a post and (optionally) add a button with the fields mentioned in the first point and the same option of adding a link to the button (this would be the closest thing to creating a post in Google My Business, although it could also be used to share a post from your website’s blog as if it were just another social network).
• Event, with the options to add a photo or video, a title, a start and end date (including times) and optional details such as information about the event, plus a button with the same options seen above.
• Product, with the options to add a photo or video, name, category, price, description and a button with the same options seen above.

With every option we can open a preview or publish our post straight away. And once it’s published, we can edit or delete it, share it, see its views and clicks and view the post in Google Search

Examples of websites created with Google My Business

These 2 features that Google My Business offers can be put to good use to give our business greater visibility.

Finally, if in doubt, we can always turn to the Google help pages on creating your free website.

Here are a couple of example links, a website belonging to a restaurant and my own, where you can see different options depending on the type of business:

https://el-rincon-de-adi.negocio.site/?m=true

https://saul-trivino-consultor-seo-asturias.negocio.site/?m=true

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