Dental SEO Update: The Google My Business App Is GONE Forever!

The Google My Business mobile app, which up until this week has been the way to update your Google business listing on your phone, has been removed and tossed into the garbage. This is a BIG deal when it comes to local SEO for dentists. Many of the SEO tasks involve updating and posting content to your business listing.

If you want to make edits and updates to your Google listing, rather than opening up the mobile Google My Business app you can now go directly to Google Maps or Search, find your practice, and make edits directly.

If you open up the mobile app you’ll see a screen that says “The Google My Business app is no longer available“.

And below it will give you two links;

The first is Manage on Maps.

The second is Manage on Search.

If you click through on the Maps link your Google Maps app will open up (if you’ve downloaded it).

If you click on the Search link you’ll be taken directly to Google search where you can edit your listing. I’ll show you how to find and edit your listing in search in the video below.

We’ll never understand the evil robot’s intent. If we could it probably wouldn’t be as evil as we thought. Maybe just some early childhood trauma that needs to be worked out of its system.

But guess what? This update makes Google Maps SEO and other dental marketing efforts super simple.

Hello, everybody. It’s Adrian with My Social Practice. Have a super quick, cool update for any of you dental marketing geeks out there. If you’re not a marketing geek, like almost everybody else on the planet, this is going to be super boring, but very important, so listen up.

Many of you know, because you’re super sharp and you’re in the 21st century, that you can set or claim your Google listing for your dental practice, and that Google listing is what shows up in the Google map. The little pin that represents your practice in the Google map. That’s information that’s coming from your Google listing, not from your dental website.

So if you’re one of the unlucky dental practices who aren’t ranking well on the Google map, you need to start with a dental SEO campaign that focuses on ranking higher in the Google map.

Google allows you to set up a Google Business Profile for free. Once it’s set up, you can optimize it, you can do all sorts of cool stuff.

Now, here’s the update.

Up until this week, you could choose your primary category, edit, you could add photos, could change hours, you could change all the information that shows up on the Google map for your dental practice using an app called, “Google My Business,” and it’s gone. They’ve gotten rid of it, it’s no longer there, if you’ve downloaded the app and now open up your phone, to pull up the Google My Business app, and click on it, it’s going to give you a little message that says, “It’s gone forever, use Google Maps or Search to update your Google listing.”

You might have also gotten an email that looks kind of like this from Google, that says, “Hey, Google Maps is now the way to respond to your messages.” What they mean by that, is the listing in Google My Business had a messages tab so patients could message you, and you could respond to reviews through it. It’s all gone and they’ve given you a new way to do it, so I’m going to show you how this works.

For those of you who have logged into your Google listing before, I’ll just make a quick note that not much has changed from the desktop editing version. You get here by going to business dot Google.com, most of you’re aware of this.

If you are logged in to your personal Google account that is an admin or a manager on the listing, you can get into this right here and you can make changes to whatever you want. You can change your hours, you can change your service areas, you can change your categories, add services, and all sorts of stuff. That hasn’t changed. That’s from a desktop, business dot Google dot com. The only thing that I actually have noticed in here is that this little section, they’ve just added this little call out that basically says, “Hey, you can now manage your listing on Search or directly from Google Maps.” They give you a button here, you can click on that, it’ll take you right into the editing capabilities, which I’m going to show you here in just a second.

This hasn’t changed, what’s changed is how you access your listing from your mobile phone, which is now done directly in Google Maps.

If you have an Android phone, then you have Google Maps on your phone. You just need to make sure you’re logged into the correct Google account, at least the one that is an admin on your listing, and you should be able to edit your listing right from Google Maps, or you can search it, and you can find it.

For those of you who have an iPhone, you’ll need to download Google Maps, and then you can edit your listing.

Here’s what it looks like. Let me back up one page here. If I go to Google.com and I type in my business name, “My Social Practice,” type in the name of your dental practice, and hit enter. If you’re logged in to a Google account that’s the owner or manager of the listing, you’re going to see this section right here.

That section right there shows up at the top of the search. No one else can see this, except for the people who are owners and managers, and you can know that because it says it right here, “Only managers of this profile can see this. This is visible only to you.”

Your patients aren’t going to be seeing any of this, your dental team isn’t going to be seeing this if they’re not a manager on the listing.

You could know which Google account you’re logged into, because they give you a little icon up here, right on the top right-hand corner. That’s me when I was clean-cut and respectable.

You can see, that if you hover over it, it’ll give you the name and the email address of that particular account. Adrian at My Social Practice dot com is the email address that I use for business and it’s an admin on our listing, so I see it. I see all this information here.

I’m going to do other recorded trainings on how to edit and so forth, but let me just show you a couple of quick things. This edit profile button basically accesses all of the same information that you get when you log in to business.Google.com, okay?

Your business information, your hours, products, services, photos, logo, and cover photo. All of that is, basically, the information that’s in your listing when you log in on a desktop through business dot Google dot com. You can promote, so you can run ads right from here.

This is cool, “Get more reviews,”. If you’re looking to increase the number of dental reviews, you click on that, it gives you the link to your Google listing, so you can just copy that and send it to your patients via email or in a text, they can click on it, and then give you a review. You could add updates, which is like posting, you can create an offer.

You can get rid of these here. If you click on these buttons, you can click, “Dismiss,” and get rid of it. You could, actually, get rid of all this stuff, if you don’t want to see it. When you first open it up, you have access to make some edits. There’s also some search performance here. This will give you, anywhere, from a month to three months, 28 days to… Yeah, 90 days history of what your clicks are, how many people have clicked on your listing, how many impressions you’ve had, your average position, and so forth.

Okay? What does it look like if you’re not logged into the Google account that’s an owner or manager on the listing? I’ll show you.

This is me logged in to my personal Google account that’s not My Social Practice. You can see that, because I’ve got a different image up here and it’s at AT Lefler @ Gmail dot com, don’t spam me.

Notice, there’s nothing there, it’s just a regular search result. If it looks like this, you don’t see the editing capabilities, you are not logged into the correct account.

Anyway, this has been a quick update, stay tuned, we’re going to do some more training and education on what to do to edit and optimize your practice listing.

Because they’ve made this change and it’s so simple to go right to search and edit, a lot of the dental SEO tactics that we implement, when we do SEO for dental practices are easier to get to. For some of those, I’ve actually done trainings on how to start updating and optimizing your listing to help you rank higher. It’s just a lot simpler, much more intuitive way to go about it. I think it’s a super awesome update, I’m excited about it, and I hope that you guys stay tuned for more training.

Thank you, take care.

My Social Practice offers a fantastic dental SEO service that will help your practice grow and find new patients via Google maps. That’s right, you won’t have to do anything, we’ll do all of the down and dirty dental SEO work for you.

Just give us a quick call and we’ll take this off your plate.