Have we talked recently about how 100% of my clients are trying to find local clients in their backyard? That means whether you're an online business owner and have never tried or are curious about trying to figure out, how do I get clients in my own backyard?

Or you're an actual business who depends on people coming into your storefront or getting business from you in your community in order to survive, then you're gonna want to hear how to supercharge your local marketing efforts with a free tool that I'm sure you've heard about by now. We're talking Google My Business today.

Today we are totally nerding out on Google My Business. Okay, so let me just give you some background. Google My Business is a free tool, of course, put out by Google to help local businesses get found in search. As we all know, the explosion of Google as a traffic source has exponentially increased year after year after year.

This year in particular and at the end of last year there was a huge surge for the key phrase popping up when you're doing an organic search for _ near me. Like hair salons near me, restaurants near me yada yada yada near me. Those near me searches have exploded. And it's making a huge impact. Google is taking notice of it so much that they're really amping out the effort they put into your Google My Business listings.

So let me break it down for you just in case you're not aware of what Google My Business is. If you're ever on Google, you'll know that how it aggregates data and websites when you search for something in a Google bar is way different than it was just even six months ago. Before organic searches, blog posts, and things were keyword rich and heavy, and that's how you were noticed on Google.

Now, you still type in something and keywords still matter. However, Google is populating the first I don't know five to seven things with Google My Business listings. You are actually going to see a map and local listings near you before you're going to see any of those other rich keyword blog posts and things that are traditionally what we think about when we think about Google and organic searching.

So why is that important for you? Well, it's kinda free traffic? So you definitely want to take advantage of getting to the top of Google per se, for things that matter to you. And you can do it really easy first by claiming your Google My Business listing. I'm not going to go into detail on the specifics of how to start with that, because I just didn't have enough time to dive into that. So we'll cover that another day. Or you can literally Google that yourself, find and set up and claim your listing.

PreWork: Claim Your Listing

But the first thing do is check and see if you've claimed your listing, if it is not a claimed listing, when you Google yourself and look at the listing it will ask do you own this business? Or do you want to claim this website? So do that first.

Now, why I get so excited about it is because we've been working on this tool six to nine months with some of my local clients and they're seeing a phenomenal results. Like people coming in to their site through organic search, organic calls to the businesses, people asking for directions, a huge spike in traffic just overall and it really works in conjunction with the visibility things you're already doing. But in a local market, it just supercharges it.

So one thing about Google My Business is obviously it's really, location and geo area specific. So for the most part, it's really going to be targeting about a 20 mile radius from wherever you are setting your address to be in your Google My Business listing. So that's really good to know.

Now a few stats if I have not already impressed upon why you need to make sure you have Google My Business setup if you're a local business or want