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It's great to have you here today.

A warm welcome back to the Get Fully Booked podcast.

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Thank you, Sarah Orchard.

So if I asked you where your holiday accommodation business appears when someone searches for somewhere to stay in your area, you'd probably say it's on Google and you'd be right.

But I think the bigger question for me is always how much attention are you actually giving that free bit of Google real estate that you can actually control?

Because if you run a holiday cottage, a glamping site, boutique accommodation, or a larger short term rental business, there is a completely free marketing tool sitting right there on Google that you may be seriously underestimating.

It's your Google Business profile and in this episode I'm going to explain why it matters, particularly as search is changing thanks to good old AI, what you actually need to keep updated and how often you need to do it.

But don't worry, this isn't going to be one of those episodes where I tell you that you need to spend three hours a week creating Google posts.

There are much more important things to be doing.

So firstly, let's start with the obvious one.

Your Google Business profile helps determine how your business appears in Google Search and Google Maps.

And you know that.

And for a location based business, that's pretty blooming important.

Imagine someone searches romantic cabin with hot tub in the Cotswolds or dog friendly holiday cottage near the lake district or even glamping cabin near me.

Your website might appear in the organic search results.

If you've done a good job with your SEO, do check out my previous episodes.

But your Google Business profile can also appear in the local results and on the maps and potentially putting your business right in front of someone who is actively looking for somewhere to stay.

Google itself says that local results are primarily influenced by relevance, distance and prominence.

So relevance is essentially how well does your business match what someone is searching for.

Distance, unsurprisingly, is how close you are and prominence is about how well known and for me, trustworthy Google considers your business to be.

So it takes into account things like reviews and links from other websites contributing to its view of your business.

So this isn't about stuffing your profile with keywords, it's about giving Google clear, accurate information about what you are, where you are and what you offer.

And that is why your category matters, your business description matters, the location that you've entered matters, your reviews matter, your photos, your website and how often you review and update.

All of this matters because all of it adds up to telling Google a story.

And because Google doesn't only look at the information you type into your business profile, it pulls information from lots of different sources, including your website, any third party data.

Also see social profiles that are public information contributed by users.

So think of Google, your Google business profile, as part of a much bigger sort of ecosystem of your business online.

But what if I told you that Google doesn't necessarily believe you?

This is a bit shocking and a bit of a reality check.

Google can actually change the information on your business profile.

Yep, you heard me right.

You can log in and think everything is lovely and up to date.

While Google may have received information from another source, that could be suggesting something totally different.

And Google says that it uses information from public websites, third parties and users, as well as its own interactions with a place to build and update local information.

I didn't know this until I did a bit more research, so I think that's quite a shocking fact.

But so you know, don't just set up your profile once and forget about it.

Because your job isn't simply to create the profile, it's to manage your presence on Google.

And that brings me nicely to my second point.

Search is definitely changing.

People aren't always typing a short phrase into Google anymore.

They're asking much more conversational questions, both in Google and also AI tools.

So you know, things that used to be a chat with a friend over a coffee or a mate in the pub now gets put into Google or AI to get an answer.

So someone might put something like where could I go for a romantic weekend within two hours of Bristol?

We're aged 36 and 34.

I want to stay for two nights only with my girlfriend and our three year old cockapoo.

So having walks from the door and a secure garden is really important.

If there was a good village pub nearby, that would be a bonus recommend.

The three best options for our stay.

You can see it's far more conversational.

It's not a short find me a holiday cottage in X location, maybe with a hot tub.

And Google's AI features are increasingly designed to answer those sorts of questions by pulling information together from multiple sources.

Talks about ChatGPT and Claude and the the large language models.

However, Google has Gemini and its AI overviews are doing the same thing.

So Google says that its AI overviews can provide an AI generated snapshot of information from a range of sources with links for people to explore further.

And I think here's the important bit for us as accommodation business owners, Google's local listings can also contain AI generated summaries, including summaries of reviews and specific topics.

So Google says its review summaries analyze reviews and highlight common sentiment and tips, with the summaries updated regularly based on recent reviews.

So your reviews aren't simply sitting there waiting for a human to read them.

Google can now use them to understand things like what do guests consistently love about your holiday cottage?

What are you particularly known for?

A bit like at the Hideout we get a lot of proposals and honeymoons and, you know, vow renewals.

What do people mention about the location?

What experiences do they go and see when they actually stay at your place?

And what are the common types of stays?

Like I said, celebrations, family get togethers.

And that makes the language your guests naturally use incredibly valuable.

For example, if five, 10 or 20 guests independently talk about your property being peaceful, secluded, romantic and surrounded by woodland, you're giving Google a lot more context about what makes your business distinctive.

Which is why I bang on about getting specific reviews rather than simply asking guests, please leave us a five star review.

You want them to talk about the experience in a lot more depth.

Do go and Check out episode 62 where I talk about how to get your reviews doing the selling for you.

I think you'll find that one really interesting.

Okay, and my final point is you say okay Sarah, this, this is fine, but this is another thing on my to do list.

So how often should I actually be updating all of this and what should I be updating?

Because surely once I've put it into Google once as a business profile, I'm done, I can just ignore it.

And I did promise I wasn't going to give you a massive to do list and it definitely doesn't need to be a very onerous task.

But I think think of it in terms of maybe three or four key things.

One is the essential information.

So always making sure that your things, like your business name is consistent with whatever you're using.

Field things like your domain name, obviously your brand name and then what you're using across socials.

Make sure you've got the right category because sometimes you may need to make a tweak to that if you've picked the wrong make sure Your address, website, phone number, all of that lovely business basic information is up to date and your business description that should be accurate at all times.

If something changes, you need to go and update it.

And Google specifically recommends keeping your business information complete and accurate because it helps it to understand what you do and match you back to relevant searches.

The second thing is your visual content.

So photos are I think massively underused on the Google business profile platform.

And I think that again we get lots of, we invest in content stays and we get lots of really good content and then we forget to go back and update.

And I'm guilty of this, I'm guilty of not going back and putting in some of our latest images onto our business profile because they're on our website and we're using them in socials and I think, you know, job done.

And sometimes the photos also get uploaded by your guests as well.

Maybe that's sometimes not the ones that you want and you can control which is your cover photo as well.

So that's something I frequently get asked about in the marketing clinic club, how to do that and often we'll just hop on and show people how to do that on their profile.

So if that's something that you're a bit stuck with, come and join the club.

That's the sort of stuff we do each week on help desk to get you through those sort of things that hold you back.

Think about things that someone needs to understand before they book and make sure that you know, the images reflect that.

So what does the property actually look like?

Try and give a, you know, context of the setting, try and put all of your key selling points like we've got sort of.

If you think about your website, you'd be thinking about all of your key key like hero shots of the things that you know, your key selling points.

You want to make sure that they're in the imagery.

What can guests do in the local area?

And Google does recommend that you have category specific imagery and photos do help customers to understand what you offer and that your business is genuine.

So I would add fresh, useful photos regularly, not because you need to hit some sort of magic number, but because your business does change.

Make sure you've got some seasonal images on there as well.

So don't just have images of summer only if you're open all year round.

If you've added a sauna recently or you've spent ages putting up doggy proof fenced garden, you know, make sure you show that maybe you've upgraded or decorated a room and you just forget to show people.

Or maybe you've got a new guest facility.

Give Google and your potential guests that updated information.

The third thing is your reviews, and for me, this is probably the biggest one, as Google creates its AI summaries highlighting common sentiment and tips based on reviews from the past year that have been updated regularly.

So my top tip is to keep asking for genuine reviews.

I know sometimes you can feel like you're flogging a dead horse, but as I said, do check out episode 62 where I've got some tips for you there.

I hope you've already caught that one.

But you know when you get a review, reply to it.

And I don't mean that canned reply that you do to everyone that says, thanks, Emma, we're so glad you enjoyed your stay.

You need to try and make it more specific, and if you're clever, you can actually weave in some of your key selling points of your property.

I've used AI like ChatGPT to help me with writing reviews.

And you've got to be a bit careful because chat can get a bit carried away and start replying to every single point that the person's put in the review.

But if the guest has mentioned something specific, like, it was really secluded and we loved being surrounded by the wildlife in the woodland, it would be stupid for me not to sort of respond to that and to actually say, yes, it's amazing how close the wildlife gets to the.

To the tree house.

And we're really glad you enjoyed that element of the experience because that's also something that future guests are going to see, because you're not replying just to that one guest.

You're potentially replying to all of those people that are researching and planning their next trip.

And finally, the fourth thing is posts.

Now, I've recently had a few club members and clients saying, oh, I've heard that you need to just do lots of posts, like a post every week on your Google business profile, because that really helps you with AI.

Well, actually, I'm gonna burst that bubble a little bit because I don't think you need to get obsessed with posting on your profile.

So Google says that the post or updates is meant for offers, events, and like, when you've added something new.

It's not a blog and I think people are sort of getting a bit carried away.

But, you know, Google will use the information that you put in there to form a picture of what's going on in business.

And I think it is interesting from an AI perspective that Google is increasingly Using information from business profiles and other sources to create its AI generated summaries.

So while it hasn't said specifically that posts are a direct AI ranking factor, if you add in fresh, specific information about your business, it certainly would give Google more context to work with.

So I don't think it's a bad thing.

But you know, don't treat it like it's a weekly blog that you need to do.

Don't keyword stuff, don't write for the robots.

You know, write useful information for humans because they're the ones reading it and just make it really clear what you offer and what makes you different.

So if, for example, you've got some late availability, it would be silly not to mention that if you've added a new sauna, for example, it would be silly not to maybe put that on as an update because Google will find it too.

Okay, lastly, how often should you update all of this?

So I think once a month.

Just spend 10, 15 minutes checking that your Google Business profile is up to date.

Is it accurate?

Has it got my latest photos?

How many reviews have I had?

Have I replied to them all?

Has Google fiddled with anything and changed what I'd written?

Are there any customer photos or updates that I need to comment on?

You know, do you need to update your cover photo so that you know that one is appearing and not some view of the toilets, which I have seen on some Google Business profiles before.

And then on a quarterly basis I probably would go a little bit deeper and look at your performance data.

So Google gives everyone with a Google Business profile that's been verified some business data about how many people discovered your profile, including searches, views, website clicks, calls and other interactions.

This gets emailed to you.

That's the email that you always delete because you don't know what it all means, what to do with it.

Yes, that email actually gives you clues about how people are actually finding your business.

And this is the really useful bit, don't just look at how many people viewed your profile, look at what they searched for.

For me, I always, whenever I go and look at that or I look at my Google search console is I go and look at the search terms, because those search terms give you ideas for your website and in terms of content, blog posts, maybe social content, and even the language that you use across your marketing and your messaging.

And it all helps with Geo too, so being found by AI.

Okay, so in summary, I think the big takeaway from all of this is you should be treating your Google Business profile as something important to your business.

Because it isn't just a directory listing that gets you onto the maps.

It's part of your search visibility, your reputation, your local SEO.

And increasingly now with AI, it's all about Geo and it's helping Google to understand your business so that you can be more visible in those AI generated summaries and search results.

And the beauty of all of this?

It doesn't cost you anything.

You don't need a fancy marketing strategy.

You don't need to post every day, not like on social media.

You don't need to become a Google expert like doing Google Ads.

You just need to make sure that Google has the clearest, most accurate and most useful information possible about your business.

Because the goal isn't simply to be found, is to be found by the right person who's looking for exactly what you offer.

And that is where the bookings start to flow.

So I hope this has given you a little nudge to go and dust off your Google business profile if it's feeling a little bit neglected.

And if you do, don't try to fix everything at once.

Start with the key business information, your photos and your reviews.

Those three things alone, you know, can make a real worthwhile difference on how your business is represented on Google.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.

Because each week I'm going to be sharing practical marketing ideas to help you get more of the right guests and more direct bookings and ultimately, get fully booked.

Thank you for listening and if you enjoyed this episode, you know what to do.

I'd love it if you could leave me a review because you know how much us hosts love those five star reviews.

Next week I've got a brilliant host guest interview linked to this very topic that I don't think you'll want to miss.

Until next time, happy marketing.

Thank you for listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

If you want to see if you are ready to ditch the likes of Airbnb and grow your direct bookings, put your business to the test with my free direct booking Roadmap quiz.

Head to my website get fully booked.com quiz and let's get you more direct bookings and more profit in your pocket.