Website hosting and small business marketing firm GoDaddy has done an integration with Google that largely automates the process of setting up and verifying a Google My Business (GMB) profile. GMB registration and submission is integrated with the company’s GoCentral website builder.
Business data from the website is uploaded to GMB and verification is compressed from weeks to days. GoDaddy’s Nissim Lehyani told me that none of the company’s other SMB website building competitors offer a similar capability.
The GMB integration is included with the Business Plus and Online Store hosting plans. Claiming and populating a GMB profile directly on Google is free.
Lehyani told me that a majority of eligible small businesses (service area businesses or those with a physical location) have not claimed their GMB profiles. This is striking but not surprising given that GMB still has a major awareness problem “on the street” — despite being a critical tool for search visibility.
Lehyani added that GoDaddy was “trying to reduce friction” around claiming and populating GMB listings. Another feature of the GoCentral-GMB integration, GoDaddy will provide stock photography if there’s no available hi-res imagery from the business itself. He said, however, the company doesn’t currently have a solution for attributes (but implied one was in the roadmap).
GoDaddy will also report on GMB-driven traffic and related actions: profile/listings views, calls, directions requests and website visits. The company said that during its beta test of the new integration there were just over 1,500 participating local businesses. They “were viewed over 1 million times and resulted in . . . over 7,000 phone calls . . . [d]irections to physical storefronts were requested more than 11,000 times.”
GoDaddy reports that it hosts more than 10 million websites globally and has 17 million total customers. The majority of these customers are small merchants and entrepreneurs. It says the global small business market is 420 million businesses with 28 million in the US market.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.