054: Boosting Local Visibility - A Google Business Profile AUDIT for licensed mental health therapist Mallory Grimste

In this episode, Jules helps Mallory Grimste, a licensed mental health therapist, optimise her Google Business Profile to attract more local referrals and steady her client flow. Mallory shares her journey as a therapist for teens and young adults and highlights how her profile has been underutilised despite its potential to support her business.

Jules walks Mallory through actionable steps to enhance her profile, including:

• Adding regular updates to showcase her services and online programmes.
• Leveraging secondary categories to increase her profile's visibility in local searches.
• Exploring creative ways to gather reviews while adhering to confidentiality guidelines.
• Using tools like Pleper and GMB Everywhere to find relevant categories and insights.
• Updating service areas to reflect her expanded licensing in Connecticut and New York.

Jules also shares quick wins for maintaining an active profile with minimal time investment and tips on linking content across platforms to strengthen SEO. If you're looking to improve your local visibility and make the most of your Google Business Profile, this episode is packed with practical advice!

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Episode 011: Unlock the Power of Opt-In Pages: A Webpage Walkthrough
• Google Business Profile Checklist: Download this free guide to ensure your profile is set up for success.
• Google Business Profile Mini Intensive: Work with Jules to optimise your profile in a hands-on session.
• Mallory Grimste's Website: Explore Mallory’s therapy services, self-care resources, and online programmes.

Don’t forget to subscribe for more actionable tips on SEO, CRO, and building a website that works for you!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Mallory's Google Business Profile
• 1:07 Mallory's Business and Current Challenges
• 3:06 Optimising Google Business Profile
• 4:32 Leveraging Social Media and Updates
• 6:36 Using Google Profile for Local SEO
• 9:13 Practical Tips for Google
• 12:28 Advanced Google Profile Strategies
• 13:51 Expanding Service Areas and Getting Reviews
• 17:30 Leveraging Photos and Content
• 23:41 Service Areas and Final Tips
• 25:19 Conclusion and Shoutouts

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Introduction to Mallory's Google Business Profile

Jules White: So hi, today we're diving into a Google business profile for my lovely friend Mallory.

Mallory's a fantastic mental health therapist for teens and young adults, and regular listeners of the show might recognise Mallory's name because back in episode 11, I did a webpage walkthrough for Mallory for the power of opt-in pages.

And if you haven't listened to that episode and you're trying to get email lists going, signups and definitely go back and have a listen, um, cause there were some great tips in there on how to improve your opt-in pages.

So hopefully by the end of this episode, we'll have identified some quick wins for Mallory's profile. So welcome Mallory. It's great to have you here.

Mallory Grimste: Thank you, I'm happy to be here too, so before

Jules White: we start. Bye for now. Bye.

Mallory's Business and Current Challenges

Jules White: If we were to meet in six months' time and you were telling me about some of the amazing things happening in your business, how would your Google business profile be helping with that?

Mallory Grimste: I think being able to have a little bit more consistency with referrals coming in. I had a period of time like years ago where it was a lot more consistent and to be totally honest, I cannot remember the last time that I touched the Google business profile, so that's probably part of it. So I'm, I'm eager to help study that out a little bit.

Jules White: Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about your business and how your, I was going to ask how your profile currently sits within your marketing activities, but I think you've answered it. Kind of answered that anyway, that it doesn't really.

But do you, do you also, yeah, if you're seeing that coming through to your Google analytics, if you're ever looking at the analytics from your profile and you're seeing anything coming through there, and I think often we don't even realise what's actually coming through and how it is helping, but to start off by just telling us a little bit about your business and what you do.

Mallory Grimste: Sure. So, uh, like you mentioned, I'm a licensed mental health therapist. I'm physically based in Woodbridge, Connecticut. So I'm licensed to provide therapy to people in New York and Connecticut.

So the way it works in the United States and like, worldwide, really, it's location-based on where the client is, not necessarily where the therapist is, which, they're working on that, but we're not there yet, um, so I provide mental health counselling as DBT informed or dialectical behaviour therapy for teens and young adults that are struggling with a variety of issues, but I do particularly well with people that are struggling with self-harm, suicidal thinking, anxiety, panic attacks, and depression.

Jules White: Fantastic. So yeah, it's such an amazing service. And I know from just seeing how you are just so appreciative of what you do and just knowing you as a person, I just think it's fantastic what you do.
It's amazing, really.

Optimizing Google Business Profile

Jules White: So is there anything in particular that's holding you back from using your profile?

Mallory Grimste: Honestly, just lack of time. And, you know, being a business owner, I also have some digital self-help programmes that I've been building now as an ancillary service to support the counselling work that I do, because when I am full up with clients, in my appointments that I'm limited by that, right?

So it's just another way to help other people. And then I have the YouTube channel as you're aware of, and I believe your listeners are probably aware of it. They've listened along the way. So it's a lot of moving parts and it's just me. I do have an administrative assistant who is fabulous, but we can only do so much over time.

And the Google stuff has kind of gone lower and lower down the list, even though it needs to creep back up.

Jules White: Yeah, definitely. And I think often as, as if we are businesses where we're thinking about more of an international or national audience where you've got online courses and things, we can. We can often ignore the fact that there are people in our local audience who could still be our online customers as well.

I think that's often the case. We don't, we kind of think, oh, okay, I need to expand to everywhere and actually forget the fact that even that local SEO can still help with our online businesses as well. Really. I'm definitely guilty of that myself of forgetting about how many amazing businesses there are locally to me as well, really.

And the same for you, how many people locally to you need your help?

Leveraging Social Media and Updates

Jules White: You do things on social media. I know I see you on Instagram, you pop up on my feed there. You are using social media for your business, aren't you? Sorry, I'm, because I, if you can use social media, then using your Google profile is so easy, and it's something it doesn't need to take a lot of time to do that, really.

And if that's the only thing that you do is just literally when you're creating stuff for social media, just have a little bit of thought for your Google profile and how you can add those updates there as well. Then that alone can just show Google that your profile is active, your business is active, and that can be a definite, a quick win that you could implement.

And the way that you would do that on your profile is adding that in as an update. So there's two places if you're looking at your profile. So if this is obviously I'm not logged into your profile here, but if you were looking at your profile on desktop, or if you I'd say actually get the app on your phone to get Google Maps on your phone and use it there because it's really easy to do it on your phone as well.

But on your desktop, you would see a section that says things like edit profile, ask for reviews and one of those things that you'll see there is add updates and if you click through onto that, you can actually add in events. You can add offers in your business and you can add a general update.

And one of the things that I've started doing is actually adding my podcast episodes in there. So I will just every week, whenever I release a podcast, because part of, obviously the goal with the podcast is growing it without social media. So I just go through and just create a graphic that I then add into my Google profile as an update with a link back to my website.

And that's the big thing is if you can create those links between your website and your Google profile, that all helps Google to understand that your business is the same place. And you, you've already, I saw you've already got your social media linked here, which is great. This is really good.

Make sure these profiles are all up to date and they are current. If you ever change anything, just make sure that that's all okay and up to date. And then if you are adding content there, then making sure you're including those links between there as well.

Using Google Profile for Local SEO

Jules White: So do you ever do anything locally? Do you ever do any local events or are you involved with anything in your local community?

Mallory Grimste: I haven't been in a while. I have in the past, but I found that like doing more online programmes, it's a little bit more impactful.

Jules White: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So even that, even if you're doing things online, if you're involved in events and you want to add that into your profile, you could do that as well.

But if you've got things like when you are doing promotions on your online programme, doing that, adding that into your Google profile as well, as an offer, as an update, whichever of those is the most appropriate.

And I'd say go in and have a look at each of those, because they each give you slightly different options for what you then add in, in terms of, like within offer, I think it shows, discount and things like that that you can add into it. So have a little
explore, have a look at those.

And if you can do that regularly, then that can really make a difference as well. And then what that does is that will show here on your profile. So it's actually probably a good way to do it. It's going to my own profile.

If you ever want to work out how to find your Google profile, if you haven't logged in for a while, one of the quickest ways to do it is make sure you're logged into the Google account that is associated with the profile, and then just type my business into the search bar, and then that should then show if you've got a profile associated with your account.

So then when you click it and you Oh, you're so smart. Yeah, they know they want to make it easy for us, really. So then when you add updates, so you'll see here on my profile, you can see these little tabs and essentially what that is, is just something that's a bit more noticeable on a Google search results page.

The more that we can take up, the more space we can take up in this bar here on the side. Building out our profile, the better, really, because it's everything that's helping to catch people's attention on the search results pages can be really good.

And actually, if you then add information in here that's got the particular keywords that people are searching for, then that can help that to show up.
Google might then pick up on that and be more likely to show you in the search results.

But you can click on these and then people will go into them. Sorry, that just took me straight through to my website, which is always good. But actually, if we click on it. Let's have a look.

We're going to expand it. Then you can see you have a little description. You don't have a lot of room in here, but then you can click the things that if you want to do something here about booking an appointment with you or going through to your online course, then you would link to that specific page on your website here. And that could be really helpful.

Practical Tips for Google Profile Management

Jules White: So I do all of this through FAA create account. Because you can schedule from social media in there. So if you have, if you use something like Social B, or Smarter Queue or any of those social media schedulers, if you have a look in there, a lot of those do actually have the Google profile option as well, really.

But other than that, there's not a way to schedule, I wish they had it in the backend of Google profile directly that you could schedule upcoming posts, but you're not able to do that in there, but that's I do it as I say through FEA create and I find that's really helpful for me. So coming back to your profile.

One of the biggest things that you could look at in terms of getting more visibility local is looking at the categories you have selected for your profile and this is something that often happens when I come in with, with looking at this with clients, there's usually other categories. Sometimes not.

I was working with an interior designer yesterday, and that was the only category that was relevant for her business. But usually there are a few more that we can kind of look for really.

So the way that I am looking at that, I've got a couple of little Google Chrome plugins that are really good for helping with Google profiles.

This one on the side here is a site that I use or a Chrome plugin that I use called Pleper. It's a really random name. I don't know why it's called that, but it's P L E P E R.

And if you add that in, it and then if you type in something relevant to your business in the search bar in Google Maps, then it shows you all of the categories that other people that are showing up for that same search.

It shows you all of the other categories that could apply to your business. So it would certainly be worth you going through and having a look at these other ones and seeing if any of those apply to your business. Add those in as secondary categories.

And the way that you would do that if you were in your profile, you would just go into edit profile and then go into the business categories. And the primary category that you select is the most important one for your business.

And so say if you had your primary category set as counsellor, then this check count on the side here is showing how often, like what percentage of the searches that are showing up within the maps there are actually, you've got that as a primary category.

So select the one that is the top basically and make sure that that's your primary category. But it's worth adding in, I think you can add up to 10 categories.

And if any of them apply to your business, then it's definitely worth adding those in because it just means that if somebody is searching with that particular search term, you're more likely then to show up there.

As you add different categories, that then allows it to unlock different services within that.

So Google has certain services that it associates with those particular categories and they don't always line up like the fact that I think mine is internet marketing is my primary category. So Google keeps suggesting that I do website hosting, which I don't do.

I don't have any desire to do that. But Google keeps putting it onto my profile. So you do have to keep an eye on it. And if Google is suggesting services that you don't offer, just go in and keep telling it no, no, no, and just delete them when it adds them on.

Um, but it's worth doing that because then it does just unlock different search terms that might then be associated with your profile as well.

Advanced Google Profile Strategies

Jules White: So, yeah, I definitely say do I have another little Google Chrome plugin called GMB everywhere. And that's another one that I recommend. These are all free Chrome plugins, but they're ones that I use every day, really, in my business.

So if we actually changed this to therapists, Connecticut, Connecticut, I should be able to spell.

Mallory Grimste: I always do Connecti- cut

Jules White: Oh yeah, I love that. But yeah, you can have a look at those competitors who are directly around you and look at what else they've got on their profile as categories and definitely select those if you can.

The one thing I would say about primary categories, I think, let me have a look at yours. What did you have on yours?

Okay. So yeah, that's good. You've got the primary category that's probably going to be the best one for your business, but if it wasn't, and if you were thinking about changing your primary category, it's something to be aware of that sometimes when you change your primary category, it can trigger a reverification, which is not always easy.

Anybody, especially if you've got a service area business, I would be thinking really seriously about whether you should change your primary category because if you change it and then you have to reverify.

It's not a case of getting a card in the post now. We have to film videos and basically show Google that we are a genuine business.

So it's always worth just weighing up the pros and cons of doing that. But I think you already have that selected as the primary category. So just adding in those other categories shouldn't cause you any problems like that.

Expanding Service Areas and Getting Reviews

Jules White: And so then the other big thing that you can do to help your profile is getting more reviews, and I know this isn't easy in your industry. It's not necessarily the easiest thing to do just purely because

Mallory Grimste: We're not allowed to ask.

Jules White: Yeah, you're not allowed to ask and also just the confidentiality from a client point of view. So what I would suggest with you is think of creative ways that you can get around that.

So think of other professionals that you've worked with.

Think of even people who are in your network who have worked with you or who understand what you do, basically. Then asking those kind of people if they can recommend you. So it's not, it doesn't necessarily have to be clients that are giving you recommendations.

So a bit like where on LinkedIn, where you can get recommendations from other professionals. If you can also do that with your Google profile, then I think that could be really helpful.

If you can get more than 10 reviews on your profile, that's a point that actually then helps to give your profile a real boost.

So if you've got more than 10 reviews, then that can make a difference and that can really help you. So that's something I would think about. So think about who else in your network, who else in your world could potentially be somebody whose opinion would be good on a review.

And how can you ask them to give you some reviews, really? So.

Mallory Grimste: And that should be spread out, right? Like, not all stuffed in a row.

Jules White: Yeah, I'm glad you said that because yes, that is a very good point. What we want is the trickle. We want a trickle of reviews coming in. Whereas if you haven't had a review for three, four years and then suddenly you get 10, Google is likely to think that that's spam.

People pay for reviews and so Google is very on the ball about that kind of stuff. And that actually leads into another thing about reviews is making sure that if you do have a review come into your profile, take a screenshot of it.

And that way, if you do then ever have an issue with your reviews being taken away, because Google can be a bit snippy about them, and like suddenly I've seen it so many times where people are like, all of my reviews have gone, where have they gone?

Or even some of my reviews have gone. If you've got photo evidence of that, that you've had those, then it helps if you never get them back. At least you have got that record that somebody did say that about you.

So ideally you want it where you can see your whole profile and the review, but also it makes it a little bit easier then to try and go to Google and actually try and get those reviews back as well really.

So, but it's one of the things that when we're thinking about local businesses, thinking about Google showing us on the maps, the most important things are that primary category, having reviews and the proximity as well to where people are to you.

So that's I think probably the things to kind of understand with the Google profiles, but that doesn't mean that people wouldn't see you outside of your local area, but especially in your industry where we saw even just from looking at the map there, how much competition there is.

We want to be really focusing our profile on making sure that we're standing out for the things that people are searching for specifically. So with your niche, making sure that you are talking about that on your profile and just thinking about it creatively really.

Jules White: I was just literally recording an episode of the podcast this morning about how we can use AI to help us with writing frequently asked questions for both our website and our Google profiles. And that's something you could do is actually just making sure that you've got some great FAQs.

You can add them as both the business owner and you can answer them as well and actually add those into your profile as well. So it's something that there's lots of potential there.

Leveraging Photos and Content

I'm just going to have a little look at your photos as well.

Mallory Grimste: So I definitely need to update those.

Jules White: So what would be good here is these kind of pictures of you talking to people. So it's showing you working, even if you're not showing who the client is, those kinds of pictures are probably the ones that could be really helpful.

And even the pictures of you on your website. Just add those in as well.

So yeah, looking here. We can see all these images that Google is associating with you and your business. So actually having these ones onto your Google profile can be really helpful. So whether that is then adding that in as updates, which there's probably more use in actually doing that for you.

So adding in your most popular YouTube videos and adding those in as an update to your Google profile.

Mallory Grimste: I was just going to ask about that because I'm listening to you from previously and I'm not, like batch creating like ongoing new content because I've such a backlog and I really need to optimise it. So I slowly, slowly, I've been implementing that one, I guess.

Jules White: Yeah, and it's not always easy. And I think you have got so much amazing content there. And your YouTube channel, what, I can't remember how many, you hit a big milestone not so long ago on your YouTube channel, didn't you?

Mallory Grimste: Yeah, 6,000.

Jules White: That's just amazing. I love that. So yeah, anything you can do with that content. I've talked about creating a database.

So I've started doing that with my podcast episodes now; every week I add that into a Google Doc like the transcript of the podcast, the name and the description so that I can then ask ChatGPT to recommend how I can link my content together to talk, tell me when I've talked about this before.

And that can be so powerful. Even if you did that with just one piece of content at a time. So as you're adding it into your Google profile, just thinking about, okay, where's the transcript for that?

Paste that into my Google Docs. That is my database or wherever you want to have a database.

You ideally just want something that you can then load into AI and have it search for you really. So that can be really helpful.

Definitely. And then, yeah, just add those into your Google profile as well. How does that feel for a few things to kind of get started?

Mallory Grimste: Yeah, that feels great. I just have a few questions if that's okay. So when we're posting updates, I don't think I've posted an update in several years. How regularly should we be making an update or checking on it, services? Yeah, categories for us that don't apply, like, and it's been years.

Jules White: Yeah, absolutely. And to answer that, actually, probably just a reminder of why this is so important. This is something that will show up when people are actually searching for what you do. Yeah.

So we, with our social media, we often rely on interrupting people's scrolls, whereas actually thinking about these things of how can, how can I like your best YouTube content, your best blog posts, those sorts of things, that written content that can then help Google understand this is associated with your business.

So if you can do that weekly, if you're creating content anyway for social media, and you can just make that an extra step in that process of creating the social media content, that step alone can make a massive difference, really.

And it's something that you're then building out that then is linking back to your website.

Hopefully more people are then coming back through to your website and just linking everything together online. And it's all about building up that authority, which is going to become even more important with AI overviews and with AI answering all these questions for us without people actually having to click through to our website.

The more we can build up that bank of authority across the internet that shows that we know what we're talking about and why we are that trusted person that Google should be sort of showing up in the AI overviews really.

So yeah, in answer to your question as often as you can really.

Mallory Grimste: Yeah, that makes perfect sense of like, you know, just kind of building it into that regular routine.

Jules White: Yeah, absolutely. It takes me probably about, I don't know, less than five minutes for me to create the artwork for my latest show and add it into my Google business profile.

So it's something that, especially if you've got scheduling software that you use, then you can do a few, you could be thinking, okay, what are my five top episodes?
You've already got the artwork because you've got that, you've probably created it elsewhere, adding that in.

And then just literally, it's just scheduled to go out over the next five weeks or something like that. That was what I did when I first started adding my, I already had a few podcasts out there and I was adding them in.

Actually, I did it daily, I think, to catch up so that now I just add them weekly, because I'm releasing two episodes a week at the moment. Just adding those twice a week.

I have had a back catalogue, so I've had a lot of my lives from my Facebook group from the last year that I've been catching up with those and now these audit episodes as well.

I'm really excited to do more of these. And actually that will then be, that Monday episode will be these audit episodes. Really.

Mallory Grimste: I'm very much looking forward to that.

Jules White: And so any other questions? You said you had a couple of questions. Anything else?

Mallory Grimste: That was the main one. Taking notes as you're going. I think the other thing is just for me to actually start implementing.

Jules White: Note to self!

The other thing you could do with the photos, one thing you could do in there is add your logo in there and you can mark it as your logo. So that is something that could be a quick, it's not going to make a drastic difference, but it's all the things that build your profile out to be more complete.

So that's probably the thing. Yeah. Going through, make sure that all of the sections that you can fill in yourself.

So whether you want to add in the things about like identifies as female, female owned, your inclusion policy, those kind of things in there, you can actually mark that kind of stuff, whether you've got accessibility in the building, those kind of things, you can add that in there as well.

So, the more that you can do with what's available there in your profile, the better, really.

Mallory Grimste: Great. You know, I did have one more question. So when I first did this, I was only licensed in the state of Connecticut, but over the past few years, I did get my licence for New York as well, because I had so much crossover.
So would that change anything in the sense of like using the Google profile because I know I have it for my physical location, even though I can do telehealth in both locations.

Service Areas and Final Tips

Jules White: Yeah. So I would, I don't know if you've actually set service areas in your business, but that would be something, it doesn't look like you have. Um, but what you could do is if you go into your profile, let me show you in mine.

So if you go into edit profile and then go into location, and then you can actually add your service area in there as well. And then you can set that to the area that, like, is it states or is it, so it's the states that you would cover then.

So for me, what I did with mine is I added the north, south, east, west, the furthest point that would then give me a geographical area because I don't have a pin in the map.

But yeah, you could do it that way. You could add in service areas as well for the places you cover. And that is helpful. That in itself would be helpful in terms of you showing up in those areas too.

Mallory Grimste: Great. Thank you.

Jules White: You're very welcome. So I think the most important things are just making sure you add in those extra categories and then building out those updates and doing that service area thing.

I think those are the three things that if you take those steps, then that will really help you to just use your profile to get some more steady stream of clients coming in locally as well, really.

Mallory's Programs and Contact Information

Jules White: So before we finish, I'd love you to give yourself a shout out and just let everyone know, how, most importantly, how they can connect with you and find out more about you.

Mallory Grimste: Yeah, thank you so much. So my name is Mallory Grimste. I'm a licensed clinical social worker, so licensed psychotherapist in Connecticut and New York.

I work primarily with teenagers and young adults that are struggling with issues around self-harm, suicidal thinking, anxiety, depression, all the fun stuff, right?

And I'm also building out some online supportive programmes, so you don't have to be physically located in those areas because it's not psychotherapy. The two main ones that I have right now are the self-care bundle, which is a digital resource library full of my most popular self-care resources.

Walkthroughs that I have on YouTube, but they have some additional things like workbooks and audio and things like that and it's ad-free, not like on YouTube. Um, and then the other programme I have, formerly known as the Coping Skills Crash Course, we are transitioning to, it's grown into such a bigger programme.

We're transitioning to be called The Calm Code, we're just rebranding and renaming that. So we're in the middle of that transition, but that is a 12-month programme that you get access to 5 core modules on how to use coping skills and implement them for navigating difficult emotions.

Then we're also adding in different challenges and workshops throughout the year and live help with me. So that's the way to work with me without being a psychotherapy client, without it being psychotherapy.

Jules White: That's fantastic. And where can we find that?

Mallory Grimste: Oh yeah, that would be great. We're talking about findability. So my main website is probably the best way to find all of that. It's just my name. So it's mallorygrimste.com. I'm also on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook. I will be on Google more now.

Jules White: You can Google Mallory and you'll find her now.

Mallory Grimste: I shouldn't have started with that.

Jules White: Fantastic. That's amazing. Thank you. I will link to everything in the show notes as well.

So if this episode has made you think about your local visibility and you'd like to explore optimising your profile, visit my website to get a Google business profile checklist.

Or alternatively, book a mini intensive and in a short session we can actually optimise your profile together. So thank you so much for listening. 

Thanks Mallory for being here and I'll see you soon. 

Bye! Thank you.