Using Google Maps to get leads

 This episode is sponsored by Website for photographers. Website 4 photographers help photographers get more leads from their websites. You can get in touch here

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This week Sam is talking about using Google Business and Google maps for your business. Google maps is great for photographers, as most photographers want local clients. Google maps is the app we all know where you can find your nearest hairdresser, or photographer. Google maps gets it's information from Google business, or Google my business as it used to be known. Google business is a system that is free to use and easy to setup. It gives your business a pin on Google maps, information on Google maps and information about your business appears on the right hand side during a desktop Google search. For photographers that work all over the country Google maps isn’t that useful. But, for those wanting local clients it is very valuable and can get you a lot of local leads.
If you get your Google maps account setup correctly it can delivery a lot of leads.
Location

For most photographers the location for your business is their house. For a few it is a studio, but most are home based. If your home is in a large urban area, like Marcus here in Bristol, then your location really helps as you have lots of potential leads nearby. If you live out in the sticks it is more challenging for Google maps to deliver good results for you. If your location is in the middle of no where one option is to pay for a local virtual address in a local urban area. You can often pay co-working spaces or accountants for a virtual address service.
Name
If your business name has photographer in the name that really helps. Fancy names are a nice idea in theory, but if your business has photographer, or something like brand photographer in the name that will really help you getting found on maps.

 

Category
Google business gives you a choice primary and secondary categories and you need to think carefully before choosing these. If you are a general photographer then your main category is photographer. You can then add other sub-categories for the types of photography you offer.  But if you are a wedding photographer you may want wedding photographer as your main category. The key is plan this carefully. Also some types of photography, such as brand photography are not categories that exist.

Review
These are really important. Get customers to leave reviews for you on Google. This is very important for Google maps and SEO in general. Lots of reviews and recent reviews are really important.  Keep pestering your customers to give them reviews. Do not simply ask once and forget about it. Keep asking until they leave you one. If you search for ‘photographers’ in your area in Google maps, most of the photographers there will have lots of reviews.

 

Services
This is important. Get all of your services onto Google business. List as many as you can. And for every service use all the space that is available in the description. You can break your services down into sub services to add more.
Photographs
Adding photographs in Google maps as a photographer is essential. Add as many as you like.
Description

You get to add a large description of your business. Use all the space you have available. Think carefully about what you say.
Posts
You can post on Google maps. It seems odd and gets almost no interaction. But, it means when people find you on Google maps they can see recent content from you. It also helps you getting found.

Look at your competition

Look at the other photographers locally, see what their Google business account is like. Then work on your to make it better than theirs

Google search
Remember your entry in Google maps will show up in a standard Google search as well as Google maps search.