Google My Business Allows You To Add “Delivery Available” or “Takeaway Available” to Your GMB Name

Hi, g’day folk. Ashley from Website Strategies here. This one is for café or restaurant owners who provide a delivery or takeaway service.

So, you can’t have diners in anymore but if you do provide a delivery or takeaway service then you can make this information, the fact that you provide that delivery or takeaway service, more prominent on Google, on your Google My Business Knowledge Panel.

Now, what your Google My Business Knowledge Panel is, is the large “brand feature” that appears when people search for your name, or for your type of service.

So, if we do a search for, say I want “Greek food”, I know I can’t go sit in your restaurant but if you delivered then we want to make that obvious right here:

So, if I’m looking for Greek food … Now, I don’t know these restaurants, I’ve just done a search. So this restaurant Spero here, if they were to provide a delivery service, (and I don’t know if they do or they don’t) but if they did, then Google will now allow you to add that information to your name right here.

So, you would have Spero “delivery available” or “takeaway available” after your name. Now, Google doesn’t usually allow this because under normal circumstances Google sees this as adding keywords into your name, and they don’t really allow it because it sort of affects their results, but these aren’t normal circumstances, and it has been confirmed that Google will allow you now to put that useful information right here in your Google My Business name, and that will appear in your Knowledge Panel.

Now, your Google Knowledge Panel is this large feature that appears if you do a search for your name. So if you look up Spero for instance here it is here. You get this large Knowledge Panel appear right here. This is exactly the same information that just appeared in the map here. It’s all linked. It’s all together. It all comes from the same source. It comes from your Google My Business page, or GMB account, and you can manage all of this information yourself. So ideally, you’d know how to access all this, and change your name.

So effectively, what you’re going to do is go into your Google My Business and change your name, and put after your name delivery available, or takeaway available, or curbside delivery, or whatever it might be that you’re doing in order to survive in these grim times. So if you can access your Google My Business panel you should be able to log in there, go to Google My Business, once you’re in Google My Business, so it’s Business.Google.com … This is mine:

I don’t own a restaurant but I’ll show you how to do it. Once you have logged into your Google My Business you have all of this information here.

And one of these panels here is info. Once you go in there you’ve got your business name here, which you can edit. You go in there and whatever your name will be there, and you can add in there afterwards “delivery available” or “takeaway available”, and apply that. That will update and what that will then do is for some period of time, minutes, or hours, hopefully that will appear here. Now, that will help you if you are a Greek restaurant and I’m looking for Greek food for instance.

I can’t go out and dine, but who delivers it in my area? These guys, if they had delivery available, that would make this stand out, so immediately you’d see which ones deliver, and then you’d go in there and you’d contact them, contact your business. So there’s a tip for just getting a bit more exposure around the fact that you deliver, and what you would also want to do of course if you do deliver is make sure this is really obvious on your website now as well.

So, if it says delivery there, people are going to go to your website. Sorry Spero to make an example of you here, but this is just for demonstration purposes. Once again, I don’t know these guys or anything. I’ve never even dined there. They look really good, but if these guys were to deliver I’d be putting that all over your website really prominent and really obvious, delivery’s available and whatever that involves, whatever area you may cover, and get that all updated as quickly as possible.

So update your website with the fact that you deliver now, or provide takeaway service, and get your Google My Business page modified as well so that becomes obvious when someone does a search for your type of food, that you appear, and it doesn’t matter what it might be. I might want Indian food, here they go. So these people need to start saying delivery available, if that’s what they do. Google will allow it I’d gather while the crisis is on and then it’ll change. You’ll have to take it off but they definitely stated at this point that you can do that, and it’ll make that obvious there.

If you’ve updated your website with delivery available of course, you may start to appear in here with delivery available as well if you update some of this information. That’s another story, but there it is. I hope that helps. Cheers. Bye.

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[VIDEO] SEO Advice: Meta Descriptions

Check out my latest video on Meta descriptions – why we have them and how to write them:

Modified transcript:

Oh, G’day there, Ashley from WebStrategies here. I just want to talk briefly about the importance of meta descriptions, what they are, and what they are used for. Meta descriptions are unique to each page on your website and you can usually manage these in your website admin or CMS. Google does use them in the Search Result Pages (SERPs) but they don’t appear in the page anywhere visually that you can see.

I’ll just give you an example. When someone does a search for my target phrase which is “SEO Sunshine Coast,” then we get search results in which I, or my website, appears. Now, the meta description, which I can control on that page, will appear in the results as the little descriptor underneath the title in the search results.

The search phrase is often obolded by Google within the title and the metadescription which gives it relevance obviously, and when people scroll down, if they see the phrase bolded, then this helps to draw their attention to your result.

Now I choose not to put the exact phrase in my metadescription like some people do. It’s not really required nowadays because Google has stated that how you write your meta description does not directly affect your rankings. It should really be written to help sell the click on your result in the SERRPs. So, if someone does a search for “SEO Sunshine Coast,” my result appears. It is important to get your keywords in this title tag, but the meta description tag helps sell the click on that title.

Usually the meta description tag should be around 150 characters, but Google on occasion can use a longer one. If it’s longer and Google doesn’t want to use it, you’ll get these ellipses at the end and your description will just disappear off the end. We don’t really want that so better to aim for the 150-character limit.

When writing your meta description think about people doing the search. Think about them scrolling down the results and finding your result, reading it, and then clicking on it. That’s what you’re thinking about when you write this meta description.

In order to actually manage the meta description on your page, if you’re using WordPress, it’s easy enough. Go into Edit for the page, scroll down, and ideally you’d have the Yoast SEO plugin installed, which makes it all a lot easier. Find the Yoast SEO plugin section for the page, and edit the snippet. You can write your meta description in there, and it gives you the green bar to indicate your length is about right. If you keep going longer, it will turn red because you’re too long, and if you go too short, it’ll do the same thing.

When you’re on a mobile, it’ll preview how your meta title and your meta description reads. For mobile it’ll pull up a little preview of the image so you can make sure you’ve got the right one showing. Usually that’ll be the feature image for the page, and if you’re on desktop, it’ll show you how that appears as well so that you can get it right.

Its a good idea to put a bit of thought into these meta descriptions to make sure they read well so that when someone does a search, they click on your result rather than someone else’s.

That’s it for now. Thank you very much.

 

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