"Google Business Profile is where your store's introduction is made"

What would the impact of having 100 extra potential customers walk into your store each month be? People who are interested in the games and products you have to sell. How would that affect your cash flow and bottom line? What about 500? 1000?

Unless you live in an extremely isolated community, it's possible.

I have yet to talk to a game store owner that doesn't want more customers coming into their store every month. But accomplishing that goal isn't always easy. There are so many ways to reach out and spread the word within your local community, but in today's episode Bill Hibbler and I explore one of the most effective ways to get your store in front of more people.

Google search has been the default way most people use the internet to find what they're looking for. We go online and search for things like "Magic cards" or "warhammer store" or "sports card store" and we see what pops up. Sometimes we see places like Amazon and Target near the top of the search results, sometimes it's the local hobby store. We end up clicking on the website to get more info.

The results aren't random. The reason the #1 result on Google is there is because they put in the work to rank that high. That's SEO (search engine optimization) and it has a big time commitment in order to pay off and start generating the traffic you're looking for.

That's not what we're talking about in this episode.

SEO is great. It's effective, powerful, and can change your business, so I recommend putting some effort into it.

But if you want to see results in weeks instead of months, listen closely to how Bill breaks down a simple strategy for leveraging something you've probably set up once and forgotten about: your store's Google Business Profile.

By optimizing your Google Business Profile and making a single page on your website, your Google Map rankings can see huge improvements in a very short amount of time. Instead of people in your surrounding local area finding big box stores when they search for the products you sell, your store can show up at the top of the Map Pack and grab that traffic for your business instead.

We talk about:

1. Setting up your Google Business Profile correctly so you get the most out of it
2. How Google tells you what it's looking for in terms of information
3. The one webpage you need to get the most from your GBP
4. How to calculate the lifetime value of a customer so you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategies
5. The simple strategy that reframes your store into a local destination

There is a ton of great info in this episode, and to quote Bill one more time "When they pay more attention to your site, it's gonna get more people to pay attention to your store."

Useful Links

1. location.gamestoremarketing.com
2. gamestoremarketing.com
3. Google Business Profile
4. Canva
5. GAMA Expo