116: How to Get Found on Google by Local Clients

In this episode I break down how to use your Google Business Profile to finally show up for “service + near me” searches, without relying on social media or ads.

I explain why so many businesses stay invisible on Google even though they have a profile set up, and why this is rarely about competition or reviews. Most of the time, it comes down to missing structure, unclear categories, and a lack of alignment between your Google Business Profile and your website.

I share how to safely spy on competitors using a simple Chrome plugin, so you can spot opportunities you may be missing.

Throughout the episode, I focus on clarity over creativity, and show how small, intentional updates to your profile and website can lead to better local visibility, stronger trust signals, and more enquiries, without constant posting.

Key takeaways:

• Why you’re not showing up locally: It’s rarely because competitors are better. It’s usually because your Google Business Profile and website are missing key signals.
• The power of categories: How your primary and secondary categories influence what you show up for, and how to use them strategically.
• Spying the smart way: How to use competitor categories to guide your website structure and service pages.
• Website alignment matters: Why your homepage H1, subheadings, and service pages should reflect your Google Business Profile.
• Visibility without social media: How updates, photos, and services on your Google Business Profile can do more for local businesses than daily Instagram posting.

If you’ve felt hidden on Google, unsure what to optimise first, or tired of being told to “just keep posting”, this episode gives you a clear place to start and a more sustainable path to visibility.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 054: Boosting Local Visibility - Google Business Profile LIVE LOCAL VISIBILITY STRATEGY
• Episode 102: Social media is optional – how to build a business without constant posting

Don’t forget to subscribe to The Website Success Show for more practical guidance on improving your website, Google visibility, and conversions without overwhelm.

Chapters

• 1:35 The Power of Google Business Profiles
• 2:47 Getting Started with Your Profile
• 3:27 Using the GMB Everywhere Plugin
• 6:33 Understanding Categories and Search Volume
• 7:08 Choosing Your Primary Category
• 8:21 Optimizing Your Website with Categories
• 10:08 Creating Service Pages
• 12:47 Building Your Website Structure
• 13:48 Completing Your Profile
• 14:56 Adding Photos and Posts
• 16:30 The Role of Reviews
• 17:54 Taking Action

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Jules: Hi, it’s Jules here.

Welcome back to the Website Success Show, where I teach beauty, health, and wellness businesses how to get more visibility, more visitors, more bookings and sales through your existing website.

This podcast is for established businesses who already have a website, know it should be doing more for them and want to make better decisions about what to change next.

If you’re sick of being told to just keep posting with little to show for it.

Instead, you wanna connect with those clients who are out there searching for what you sell, then this is the place for you.

If you want to have visibility without the constant posting.

I’ve got something to share with you today, but don’t tell your competitors about it because most people aren’t actually doing this.

But if you’ve ever typed your own service and the location that you’re in into Google and wondered why you’re not showing up, it’s not because your competitors are better than you.

It’s because probably your Google Business Profile and your website are missing a few key pieces.

So with my content and programmes, I focus on solving four core problems for my clients.

The first is visibility, and this is what we’re gonna talk about today, how to show up in your location for what you do.

The Power of Google Business Profiles

I am really passionate about Google Business Profiles.

It was how I got into SEO when I first started, and I have so many conversations with business owners who aren’t using them or who have them, don’t really know what to do with them, and I’m kind of just ignoring them really.

But they are so powerful.

Even more so now as we move into more of the world of AI search, they are so, so powerful and so important for visibility and for actually showing up in the searches that you want to.

The big thing with all of this is that it really ties in with your website as well.

So the things that you’re talking about on your Google Business Profile, the categories you’re selecting, I’m gonna go into this, the things that you can actually do to really help your business, that can then translate to your website as well.

And this can help you to understand what you should be putting on your website to help people to actually find you when they’re searching for what you do.

So let's break this down into some simple things that you can do as a business owner to help you to actually show up in local searches.

Getting Started with Your Profile

If you haven’t already claimed and optimised your Google Business Profile, now is the time to do it.

If you’ve been ignoring this, if you’ve been putting it off.

If you’ve been putting off verifying your profile, which is sometimes where we can have problems and some business owners can find that this is where they get stuck.

If you’ve been putting it off, please go and do that first.

And then making sure that the primary category that you’ve selected for your Google Business Profile is the closest match to what you actually want to rank for.

Now, I’ve got a little tool that I’m gonna share with you that you can actually then go and spy on your competitors and find out what categories they’re using and use these search terms in here use these categories to actually then know what to put on your website to show up.

Using the GMB Everywhere Plugin

So we have a little Google Chrome plugin.

So this is something you can go onto your Google Chrome browser, go to extensions, go to the Chrome Store and install a plugin called GMB Everywhere.

Google My Business Everywhere from back in the day when Google Business Profiles used to be called Google My Business.

So once you’ve actually got the GMB Everywhere plugin installed, then you can go to Google Maps and type in something that relates to what you do.

So I’ve just popped in here as an example, Spa Bedford.

When you do that, you’ll then hopefully you might see your business come up here somewhere in the list.

Ideally, what we are aiming for is to be the top of the list, because that then means if I come over to a normal Google search, that means that we are then showing up in this local three-pack here, which is what we want to be showing up for.

If people have to click on the more places to see your business listing, then you’re essentially invisible.

So I’m coming back to the maps again, and you can see the categories here that the GMB Everywhere plugin has found related to what you do and related to your competitors most importantly.

So we can see in here, we can spy on Champneys Henlow and see what they’ve got selected as their primary business category, which is Spa and Health Club.

Makes sense.

But then you can also see here the other ones that they’ve got selected for their business.

So if I come down to ones that aren’t such big spas, Vintage Thai Spa, they’ve got Massage Spa, Beauty Salon, Thai Massage Therapist, then we’ve got aesthetic service on the Hideaway.

So what you can then do is click on the find more button and that will then open up GMB Everywhere.

You’ll need to just sign up for a free account and you get a certain amount of searches each month that are free.

I’ve never really found that I’ve needed to upgrade with this.

I have other tools that I use as well as an SEO professional, but I’ve found this is really, really helpful.

So then what you’ll see once you’ve actually signed up for an account is you’ll see this page here.

So it’s the category finder.

What this then does is shows you what based on which profile you click through from, it will show you what they have selected as their categories.

Now this is a really good thing that you can do to actually try and find additional things that your website and your business could be showing up for on Google.

So if you are a, let's have a little look down here.

If you are a beauty salon and yet you haven’t got that selected as something within your Google Business Profile.

Within your profile, you have the option to have one primary category and then up to 10 additional categories as well.

And this is something where a lot of businesses miss out on opportunities for that.

And these are things that you could then be showing up for with your Google Business Profile.

So if Beauty Salon is relevant for your business, then that’s really good to make sure you’ve got that set as either your primary category or as an additional category here.

Understanding Categories and Search Volume

One of the good things that this plugin does as well is it tells you how many searches there are each month.

This is worldwide.

So you know, bear that in mind really.

It might not necessarily be people in your local area searching in terms of the numbers, but it gives you an idea of the different volume of people that are actually searching.

So there are searches for day spa 201,000 versus 1.2 million searches for beauty salon.

So that gives you an idea.

If you’re unsure between two categories, they’re both equally relevant for your business, then probably in this case you would choose the bigger one as your primary category.

Choosing Your Primary Category

One little point to note here is changing your primary category can trigger a re-verification from Google.

So do bear that in mind because ideally nobody wants to have to re-verify their profile.

So unless it really is something that’s glaringly obvious that you should change your primary category, I’d suggest maybe thinking twice about it anyway.

So what you can then do is if I click on Beauty Salon here, it adds it up to the top here.

But what that then does is shows relevant services.

And this is the things that you can actually put on and make sure you’ve got in your website in this kind of language.

So if you do, for example, I can see hot stone massage there, and if you are calling that hot stone therapy on your website, then that’s not helping Google to understand that this is the exact same thing.

Google is smart enough to know that both things are the same.

But you would certainly help to improve your chances of showing up for that service if you actually have that as a heading on your website of Hot Stone Massage.

So what you can do with these things is go in, definitely spy on your competitors, look for ideas that can help you then to come up with what you should actually be using in terms of the language on your website.

Optimising Your Website with Categories

And these categories and the subcategories that you choose are the things that should be your headings on your homepage.

So whatever you choose as your primary category here for your business should ideally be on your homepage, in your page title, your page description, and your H1 heading, if you can.

If it makes sense, if it would sound natural to a human.

So for example, if you’d chosen your primary category as Beauty Salon, then you could have award-winning beauty salon in your location, beauty salon and spa in your location.

So you can be a little bit creative with it, but by adding that in there.

I’ve got lots of other episodes, podcast episodes about the hierarchy of your pages and where you need to pop your headings, but this is essentially the first thing that people see as soon as they come into your homepage, and it’s gonna send a lot stronger signal to Google if that says Beauty salon in your location versus relax and switch off or something like that, which is something that, yes, we want to use that emotional language.

We want to be talking about the benefits of what we do, but the most important thing is to be really clear.

And we can add those emotional hooks and the things that are actually gonna help people to understand the benefits of what we do a little bit further down.

Even within that hero section, we could add that in as a subheading or just a part of that paragraph text about what we do.

But the most important thing, especially if you are trying to show up on Google, you’re trying to get more clients to come through to your salon and find you through Google, then making sure that you use that primary category here, and this applies not just to salons.

This applies across all sorts of industries, across all sorts of types of business as well.

And this is really valuable.

Creating Service Pages

So then once you’ve decided on that, you’ve got your primary category there.

You’ve used that as your H1 heading on your homepage.

These related categories could then be subheadings within your homepage.

So if you offer hair removal as well, waxing hair removal services or hair removal service, you could actually then have that as one of your H2 headings on the page so that that could be services we offer.

And then you have a H2 heading of hair removal services, and that then clicks through to a page that’s dedicated to that particular category.

By doing that and having those additional pages that relate to the other categories, then it sends really strong signals to Google about what your website and your business is about.

And you can then link those categories within your Google Business Profile directly to that page, which sends a really strong signal to Google about the links there; it’s all about building that trust around this page really.

Then what you can do is look at related services here as well.

So you can actually add services into your Google Business Profile.

You can tell Google that you do these particular services.

You can add information in there about that.

You can then link those parts of your Google Business Profile directly over to that page on your website for that as well.

So what you could do is you could have a page that if you were that beauty salon and you have one page that’s all about waxing and hair removal service within that waxing and hair removal service page, you could then have the, hold on, let me just click on this one, add that in at the top, and then that’s gonna give me down the bottom it’s gonna give me some services that Google relates with or relates to the category of waxing hair removal services.

So having that individual page for waxing hair removal service that would be the H1 heading, and then you’d have subheadings within that page as well about eyebrow waxing, Brazilian waxing, bikini waxing, those kind of things would then become the H2 headings on that page.

This might sound a little bit confusing to begin with, but you can see how having that hierarchy within your website.

So Google knows your homepage is all about this and the most important part of your homepage in terms of Google's eyes telling Google this page is about this because you’ve got your H1 heading in there and then the subheadings of that lead to the other pages and so on and so forth.

So it is something that it gives your website a clear structure.

It also gives you clear structure as well about what services you need to talk about, what different services you need on your website.

Building Your Website Structure

And it’s not something that will happen overnight.

It’s something that it does take time.

You can definitely use AI to help you with creating these pages, but it’s something that will take time and these pages develop over time.

So start with your homepage.

Start with that most important, like with one services page for everything to begin with.

Then gradually introduce more of those other services pages, those individual services pages relating to the other categories.

And this is gonna be much more effective for local businesses than something like blogging or those kind of things that aren’t really gonna help bring those right people in who are actually looking for what you sell.

So do that.

That’s definitely a way of spying on your competitors and making sure that your profile is set up in the best possible way.

You also wanna go through your profile and make sure that you are actually filling out all of the sections that you can.

So this is one of the big things that I see a lot of profiles.

Completing Your Profile

Google even gives you a profile strength when you log in and you update your profile.

When you’re logged into the backend, you can see the strength of your profile there.

So it tells you basically how much you’ve completed, how much of your profile you’ve filled in.

And so by doing that and going in and filling it up, getting it as close to a hundred per cent as you can, then you are basically making the most of what’s there.

Adding in those services that you do add, making sure your contact details are correct, making sure that you add in things like what attributes you have.

So if you are accessible, if you have parking, those kind of things.

By making those updates there, it might seem like that’s a small thing, but it all adds up.

It all helps to make sure that you are actually making the most of your Google profiles.

Adding Photos and Posts

Adding photos into your profile can help as well.

Ideally, you want at least 20 or 30 good photos that represent your business, represent what you do, represent those services that you’re actually offering.

And then ideally, once you’ve got those initial ones added, then adding one extra photo each week can make a big difference.

Adding posts to your profile as well.

If you’re posting on social media and you are not posting to your Google Business Profile, you are missing out massively.

It doesn’t even have to be a big thing of actually having to create posts.

I definitely would suggest thinking about it and thinking about a strategy when you are creating posts for your Google profile and not just posting like I was at this random networking event or something like that.

But if you’ve got events, if you’ve got offers going on in your salon, if you’ve got new products coming in or new services that you are introducing, adding these as posts in your Google profile is a really strong way to send signals to Google that this business is still active.

This is what we are doing.

This is, these are the things that we want you to show us up for on Google, and really powerful, and it’s something that, you know, as I say, your competitors probably aren’t doing that.

So it is not about doing more.

This is definitely not about just adding something extra to your plate in terms of like, oh, you’ve gotta now post to Google as well.

This is gonna do a lot more for your local business than posting on Instagram every day.

And that’s the thing that I see is so many business owners are told you’ve just got to keep posting.

You’ve got to keep posting with your Google profile.

It’s certainly not that you have to do it daily.

I think, you know, if you set yourself up with a plan for 52 posts for the year, and you were posting once a week to your Google profile and you’ve got your website set up properly and you’ve got your profile set up as much as you can.

That’s gonna massively help with your marketing.

It really will make a big, big difference.

The Role of Reviews

Now reviews are important on your Google profile as well.

This helps to increase the trust and to show that other people trust and believe in your business and like your business.

But reviews aren’t the only thing that actually help.

Even if you haven’t got as many reviews as your competitors down the road or the big salons.

So if we looked at the Bedford Hotel and Thermal Spa, they’ve got 2,224 reviews.

But if your business and what you do and your services are more appropriate for the search results, then there’s no reason why you can’t beat those in that local map pack.

There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t.

I’ve got a couple of episodes that you can listen to.

I’ll pop a link in the show notes to some of the audit episodes I’ve done for Google Business Profiles for some of my guests.

Episode 54 was a really good one to listen to; that was with Mallory who is a mental health professional.

So have a listen to that and you can see my walkthrough of what they can do to improve their profiles as well.

Taking Action

If you feel like your business is hidden on Google, if you feel like you’re not showing up locally and you want more local customers, then this is a really powerful place to start and it doesn’t need to take you a long time.

These are things that you can make changes to your Google profile and actually then show up for those things the next day, straight away, really, and the changes that you can then make to your website, you can make over time.

Regardless of whether that’s you doing the changes or getting your web developer or a member of your team to do that for you.

Actually, just thinking about this and starting to get the strategy in place for the things that you want to show up for is the first step to visibility and the first step to stepping away from that constant posting on social media.

And as I said, this can work for all types of businesses.

So whether you are a spa, a salon, a luxury resort, dentists, aesthetics clinics, if you’re a mental health practitioner, private practitioners, private doctors, coaches, training academies, really any businesses, even if you’re a plumber or a carpenter.

Any local businesses can really benefit from this.

And even if you’re not a local business, if you’re an online business, if you’re an online only business, you can still go in and spy on your competitors who maybe have a similar or a related business.

They have got a Google profile.

Even if you haven’t got one yourself, you can still go in and steal these words, these categories, that Google is classing around what you do; I guarantee you’ll find something that can be helpful and can give you an idea of what Google’s actually relating to what you do.

And if you are done with the constant posting, go and have a listen to episode 102, which is all about social media is optional, how to build a business without constant posting.

It’s one of those things that I’m seeing more and more people talking about this, looking for alternative ways, looking for effective ways really to actually market their business.

So that’s all for today.

I hope this has been helpful, and I’ll see you soon. Bye.