How To Use Google Ads To Grow Your Google My Business Profile?
Some of you may be thinking, why would anyone pay for Google Ads when they can get phone calls from their Google My Business Profile for free?
Just because you have a Google My Business Page up and running, doesn’t mean you’re going to start getting phone calls right away. As discussed in the previous blog, you usually will not see any results at all until you can break into the top 5 or so rankings. Usually, it’s going to take you a good amount of reviews to get there. Let’s say it’s looking like it’ll take you about 100 reviews to break into the top 5 spots in your city. You’re a new notary, you’ve just made your Google My Business Page, and you’re currently at 0 reviews. Well, you somehow have to find those first 100 customers who are going to leave you a review, so that eventually you’ll start getting steady phone calls from your Google My Business listing. The way to immediately start getting phone calls until you can build up your Google My Business Page is Google Ads.
As discussed in the previous blog, Google saves the top 1-3 spots on virtually any search for paid ads. That’s why you see that tiny text that says sponsored ad next to the first couple of results. Those are all businesses that have Google Ad accounts and are running ads. The beauty of Google Ads is that you only pay per click. If your ad shows up at the top, but the searcher decides to keep scrolling down and not click on your ad, you do not pay for that view, or impression as we call it in the online advertising world. So as long as you do it right, you’re only going to be paying for people who actually want to call you. You’re going to be making a little less margin, than if the call came in organically through Google My Business, but the flip side is that if your Google My Business Page isn’t ranking in the spots yet, you’re not going to be getting any calls anyways.
This is why we tell all our Google Ad Management clients that the key to success is to start off by running Google Ads, and getting immediate phone calls coming in. You’re going to be paying about $3 or $4 per click, but if you’re only advertising the mobile notary side of your business, and you’re charging $50-$75+ total with your travel fee, it’s more than worth it to pay the $3 or $4. Then, what you’re going to do is you’re going to turn every paid appointment into a review at the end of the appointment, just like we discussed in the previous blog. As long as you’re turning every appointment into a review, there will come a day when you break into the top 3-5 spots amongst the Google My Business profiles in your area. Once that day comes, and you start getting multiple phone calls a day just from your Google My Business profile, you can very well turn off your Google Ads and have more than enough business coming in from your organic Google My Business profile. This process might not even take that long. In a medium-sized city, your top competition might only be in the 50-60 review range. If you get just 2 appointments a day from Google Ad phone calls, you’ll have already reached that range at the end of one month!
The beauty of Google Ads is that even if you currently have 0 reviews on your Google My Business Page, you can cut to the front of the line and show up as the top search result if done correctly. Normally, the Google My Business listings in your area that have hundreds of reviews will show up ahead of you organically. Remember, that’s the non-paid way to win the game on Google. But, when you pay to play through Google Ads, you can show up in front of those competitors with hundreds of reviews, for a relatively cheap price.
Of course, we have talked to many notaries who say they wouldn’t ever ever spend a dime on paid advertising. What’s funny is that many of them have spent money on business cards, lawn signs, car signs, flyers, and other things that won’t actually bring them the business (as we talked about in blog1,) because those things are physical and a lot easier to understand for them. Usually, it’s older folks who just can’t wrap their head around the idea of paying to advertise online. There are also folks we’ve talked to who are somewhat internet savvy, and have already spent $1000 on creating a website but aren’t willing to pay $3 for a click from Google. They don’t understand that a website means nothing if no one is being directed to it. It’s just sitting there, looking pretty for nobody, because nobody is actually seeing it. There are other folks who tell us how they already have a Google My Business Page (which has 0 or very few reviews) and therefore they don’t need Google Ads. What they don’t realize is that their Google My Business Page has no value, because it’s showing up on page 5 at the number 90 spot. Even if they barely have any phone calls coming in, they feel it’s better to sit there, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their Google My Business page to somehow magically take off and start sending them a bunch of customers from the sky.
Oftentimes, we’ll follow up with these notaries who don’t believe in Google Ads 6 months or so later, and they’ll tell me that the notary thing just didn’t work out for them. They had to return to their previous job because even though they had quit to pursue being a notary full-time, they just weren’t getting any phone calls. We hate to sound harsh, but we’re just telling you what we’ve seen from interacting with thousands of notaries and seeing the same patterns over and over. Since you’re reading this blog to grow your notary business, we are sure you would prefer that we speak with truth, even if it’s harsh, rather than sugarcoat things and have you ultimately not succeed in surviving and thriving as a notary. Our best advice is rather than spending a whole lotta money on stuff that’s not going to bring you an immediate return on investment, like flyers, a fancy website, or even an office that you have to pay rent for, put any money you have set aside to start your notary business on Google Ads.
As an extremely conservative example, let’s say you can only afford to spend $5 a day on Google Ads, that’s $35 a week. Within that first week, you should be able to set at least 2 or 3 appointments from all the phone calls that come in during that week. That gets you up to maybe $150 if you’re charging a total of $50-$75 per appointment including travel fee. That’s an IMMEDIATE RETURN ON INVESTMENT. From there, reinvest that $150 into more ads that could get you another 10 to 15 appointments. If you’re charging a total of $50-$75 per appointment including travel fee, you could end up with $500-$1000. Roll that money back into ads, and you could flip it into $3,000-$5,000. Then, and only then, consider spending on things that won’t bring you an immediate return on investment like an expensive website, or rent for an office space.
So now that we’ve discussed why Google Ads can be so crucial in the short term, to grow your Google My Business profile to a point where you may not even need the ads in the long term, we want to give you a warning as far as doing it yourself. When you set up your own Google Ads, Google will first force you to create what’s called a “Smart Campaign,” as mentioned in the previous section. we have many current Google Ad Management clients who had tried Google Ads on their own before they met us. Virtually every single one of them ran “Smart Campaigns.” These campaigns are terribly inefficient, and those notaries usually ended up spending about $40-$50 worth of ad spend before they acquire just one customer. That’s almost the entire cost of the mobile notary service itself, and completely unfeasible. This is why many people who try and run Google Ads on their own, call it quits after a few weeks, and stop their ads. On the other hand, when we create and manage ads for our clients, we usually acquire them customers at 1/10th the cost they were paying through the ads they set up on their own.
Google actually forces you to create a Smart Campaign, before you can enter your payment information and open your Google Ads account, hence why so many first-timers have this type of campaign running. They don’t even give you the option to build a campaign the manual way (like we do) during the account setup process. The reason why Google forces you to create an ad campaign before you can enter your payment information and open a Google Ads account, is because it’s no good to them just to collect your payment information if you don’t have any ads running so they can start charging you per click. A “Smart Campaign,” makes it so you only have to answer 5 or 6 super simple questions about your location, budget, etc. and then Google will automatically create a campaign for you that’s running within minutes. However, it actually gives you very little control over the deeper, more meaningful settings of your ad campaign. So what we do with every client is we remove the Smart Campaign that they’re forced to create as soon as the payment information is entered, and Google Ads allows you to access the main dashboard.
The initial dashboard they show you is an extremely simple, stripped-down version of the one that we see, and the one that any Google Ads pros would be looking at. You actually have to click on the settings icon and select the option for “Switch to Expert Mode,” in order to switch it to the dashboard that has all the options. These dashboards are incredibly different, night and day. The Expert Mode dashboard is the one that allows you to create campaigns manually with 50+ different settings. In our opinion, the reason why they don’t let you see the manual campaign creator at the beginning is that it’s a lot more complicated and would scare a lot of people off from completing the ad campaign creation process and putting in their payment information. So, in our opinion, Google developed the “Smart Campaign” as a way for you to be able to create your first campaign within minutes, even though it produces terrible results, just so that they could start showing some kind of an ad and charging your card. After all, they are a company whose main objective is to create profit, and they want as many people as possible to start running ads as easily as possible, even if the ads they’re creating aren’t going to bring you the best results.
Now, for those of you who still insist on setting up your ads on your own without the help of an expert, We’ll tell you why you’re still going to fall into traps even if you do switch your dashboard to Expert Mode and try it on your own.
We'll give you a few specific examples of the difference between me setting up the ads, and the average first-timer setting up ads on their own. The first thing is that Google recommends options for your campaign structures that are not in your best interest, rather they are in Google's best interest. For example, they will recommend that you only give them your daily budget and select your bidding style as "maximize clicks." This sounds good but actually gives them all the power to decide how you bid. If you tell them your daily budget is $10, they can very likely spend the entire $10 on a single click. When we create campaigns, we always set a maximum cost per click, for example, $3. So that you never pay more than $3 for one click. Now your $10 goes 3 times further.
Another thing they'll do is recommend you send people to your website, another terrible idea, in my opinion. As a notary, you only want to pay for phone calls, not for people to visit your website and never call, which is why we run most of our ads as Phone Call Only Ads.
Another thing is when it comes to selecting a match type on your keywords. There are three different match types, exact match, phrase match, and broad match. When they ask you to input your keywords, we enter most of my keywords as an exact match. In order to signal this, we have to put my keywords in brackets.
For example:
[Notary]
[Mobile notary]
[Notary near me]
This tells Google that we only want the ads to show when people type in that exact search term. If a customer were to type in "free notary," or "notary training classes," your ad wouldn't show.
But if you’re a first-timer, you’re not going to realize this. So most people unknowingly enter their keywords without brackets, which signals to Google that they are a "broad match." So you would end up paying for clicks and getting phone calls from people who are looking for a free notary or want to take a class and become a notary. The broad match option even lets them show the ad for related search terms that don’t even have the term “notary” in them. For example, we pulled up a “search term report” for clients who had tried it on their own, and saw that their ads were showing when people typed in “post office near me,” and “AAA office.” Then, they were getting a bunch of phone calls from people who were either looking for the post office or looking to buy car insurance through AAA. But somehow, the Google broad match keyword setting gave Google the right to show the ad to people searching for these search terms, because somehow it was broadly related. This is wasted money, but Google doesn't care, because they get to charge you for all of those clicks.
We just listed 3 things that happen virtually every time to notaries we talk to who try to create their Google ads on their own. Those are just 3 things out of probably 50-60 things that could go wrong for someone who is creating ads for the first time, and cause them to lose their money without getting results.
The good thing though, is that when Google ads are done the right way, they can have tremendously good results. To give you an idea of the range, we have a Google Ads Management client in Philadelphia, PA Lawrence of CSF Mobile Notary, who gets close to 200 phone calls a month from his Google Ads. That’s about 6 phone calls a day. we’re able to do this because we literally have run Google Ads for 100's of notaries across the country for the last few years, and have done nothing else, this is our only business. We've made all the mistakes and know all the right and wrong roads to get our notaries to their goals. But not all our clients want 200 phone calls a month. For example, we have a client in San Antonio, TX Johanna of San Antonio Notary Express, who gets closer to 30 phone calls a month. That’s because Johanna is a high school teacher, and only wants about one appointment a day after she finishes teaching, so she can make some extra money outside of her school teacher salary. We tailor the Google Ads to the needs of that particular client. You may notice that multiple notaries who we manage Google Ads for have the name “notary express,” attached to their city name. That’s because if they come to us early on in their journey and don’t really have a business name yet, we recommend that format as a good name.
The bottom line with us is that we will make your ad budget go 10 times further with our expertise. We earn our worth, because we make our clients money and only ask for a fee that represents a small percentage of all the money that can be generated through the ads. If we had to compare it to another service, we'd say it's like trying to get settlement money without a lawyer. Whether it's a divorce settlement or workplace accident settlement, everyone knows you gotta get a lawyer because you're going to make way more money with one than without one, and you usually just gotta pay them a small percentage of the money they are able to generate for you. They say you never lose money on a good lawyer.
We’re confident that we have the best Google Ad Management service for notaries because you guys are literally our only customers. We used to do digital marketing for many types of businesses, but for the last few years, our niche has been notaries only. We’re almost 100% sure that we’re the only one whose niche is notaries, so if anyone's going to know how to grow a notary business through online ads, it's us. We have many satisfied customers, all notaries, who renew every month because we’re bringing them much more revenue than they were prior to meeting us. So if you have made the decision to use the power of Google Ads to immediately start generating phone calls, and speed up the process of becoming a well-known, widely used notary in your city, send us an email at info@notarypublicmarketing.com.