Google My Business is a free tool provided by Google to help businesses and organisations manage their online presence across Google, including search and maps. If you don’t already have one it is easy to get started.
Before you create a Google My Business listing make sure you fit the following eligibility criteria:
- The business must have a physical location or staff must travel to serve customers where they are
- The listing must accurately represent your business as it is in the real world
- The address must be completely accurate
- Only the least amount of categories to describe the business are permitted
So what’s new with Google My Business?
Recently, Search Engine Land reported that Google My Business added a branded search segment to their insight report under ‘how customers search for your business’. If you are wondering what on earth Google My Business insights are, let alone the intricacies of the reports, think of insights as analytics for your local business listing on Google. You can see this for yourself by logging in to Google My Business and navigating on the left hand side to ‘Insights’. You would be forgiven for thinking that ‘branded searches’ referred to people searching for your business name but you would be mistaken.
But what does this mean? How is it calculated?
The first segment of the graph ‘direct’ refers to the number of searches for your business name or address where your listing was found. If your direct traffics appears suspiciously low then make sure your listing is showing up when you google your business name. If it doesn’t then there are a number of possible explanations and you may be better off consulting a reputable SEO agency if you are not an experienced search specialist yourself.
The second piece of the pie ‘discovery’ covers any searches on Google search or maps for products, services and categories where your business listing is shown. So, if you own a flower shop and a searcher discovers your business listing by searching for ‘tulip bouquets near me’, then this would be classed as discovery.
As for the third and most recent segment, well, there is often a lot of online chatter about new Google features and updates, so it is best to start with what Google says, straight from the horse’s mouth. Here Google elaborates on this new piece of the pie chart with the following:
“Branded searches: A customer searched for a brand related to your business (e.g. a customer looking for fast food searched for “McDonald's” and found your fast food restaurant listing). This category will only appear if your listing has appeared at least once for a branded search.”
It should be noted that branded searches are considered by Google to be specific to brands that do not have the same name as your business. Google also considers these brand names to be any business name with 10 or more Google My Business listings. For example if you own a local business called ‘Nick’s shoe shop’ a search for ‘Nick’s’, ‘Nick’s shoes’ and other close variations wouldn’t be counted as branded searches by Google. Whereas, searches for ‘Nike Vapormax’ would be considered a branded search. Confused? Bright Local does a great job of illustrating this with the following table.
If that doesn’t quite clarify it for you Joy Hawkins was able to get the following confirmation from Google, as posted on the Local Search Forum.
“branded searches are searches for brands that you sell (even if it's a part of your business name) that returns a list of results.”
So there you have it, while not quite as clear as one might expect Google’s new insights report offers yet more transparency and continues the trend towards making more data available.