The Website Link on Your Google Listing

The busiest link nobody chose

On many small business sites, the Google My Business listing is one of the largest single sources of visits. The link sits on the listing as a Website button, beside Call and Directions.

Most of those links were filled in once, years ago, by whoever claimed the listing. They usually hold the bare home page address, sometimes still starting with http.

Two things follow. Analytics cannot separate those visits from ordinary search visits, and the visitor lands on a page written for everybody.

Neither is a disaster, and both take minutes to fix.

Where those visits show up now

When somebody taps Website on a listing in Google search, the visit usually arrives in Analytics as organic search from Google, like any other search result.

From the Google Maps app, it often arrives with no referring site at all, and is filed under direct.

So listing visits are in your reports, but mixed into two larger groups, with no way to pull them out afterwards.

Insights, on the Google My Business dashboard, counts how many people tapped the website link. It cannot say what they did next: which pages they read, whether they sent the form, whether they came back.

What a listing visitor wants

Somebody who taps Website from a listing has already seen your name, your rating, your hours and a pin on a map. They are close to deciding, and often close by.

• Confirmation that this is the place they saw on the map.
• Today's hours, stated plainly, including any change this week.
• Prices or a menu, for anything sold by the visit.
• How to book or order, without hunting for it.
• Parking and the entrance, for anyone arriving in person.
• The phone number, as text that can be tapped.

The first matters more than it looks. A business with several locations that sends every listing to one home page makes visitors work out which branch they saw, and which hours apply to it.

Choosing the page

For a business with one location, the home page is usually right, provided it leads with what a listing visitor needs rather than a slideshow and a mission statement.

For a business with two or more locations, each listing should link to that location's own page: its address, hours, phone number, parking and anything particular to it.

Avoid pages that move or expire: a seasonal promotion, a campaign page, a booking system on another domain. The listing link should outlast all of them.

Tagging the link

Campaign tags are short additions to a link that tell Analytics where a visit came from. A listing needs three of them: source, medium and campaign name.

Use google as the source and organic as the medium, so the visits stay in the organic search channel where they belong, with a campaign name such as gmb-listing to find them by.

The finished link looks like yourbusiness.ca/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gmb-listing. Visitors see the same page; Analytics sees where they came from.

With several locations, keep those three the same on every listing and add a content tag naming the location, so the listings can be compared.

A worked example

An indoor climbing gym with two locations, one in an older industrial area and one in a newer suburb, had a listing for each. Both website links pointed at the home page.

The home page opened with a video of the bouldering walls and a membership offer. Hours for both gyms sat side by side in the footer, with different holiday closures.

First-time visitors, checking when they could come and what a day pass cost, had to work out which gym was which before they could answer either question.

Each listing now links to its own location page: that gym's hours, day pass and shoe rental prices, what a first visit involves, parking, and the phone number at the top.

Both links carry the same source, medium and campaign tags, with the location in the content tag. The owners can see how many listing visits each gym receives, and how many reach the booking page.

Test it on a phone

Most people who tap that link are on a phone, so test it there. Search for the business by name, open the listing and tap Website.

The page should open directly, over HTTPS, without a chain of redirects, and its first screen should answer the questions above.

Keep the real-time report in Analytics open while you do it. The visit should appear within seconds, with google as the source and organic as the medium.

If it arrives as direct or as a referral instead, the tags were typed wrongly, or a redirect along the way dropped them.

Other links on the listing

Depending on the category, a listing may also have a link for appointments, a menu or ordering. Tag each the same way, with its own content value.

Posts on the listing can carry a button with a link too. Tag those with the post's subject, so a September offer can be told apart from a June one.

And check the website field now and then. Google can change listing details using information from other sources, and the dashboard usually flags those changes for the owner to review.

The counter-case

Some businesses will learn little from tagging.

Where nearly everyone calls straight from the listing, the call count in Insights says more than Analytics will, and the website link carries only a handful of visits a month.

A single-location business whose home page already leads with hours, prices and booking needs the tags and nothing else; the page is already the right one.

But every business should know which page its listing opens, whether that page works on a phone, and whether Analytics can see the visits it sends.

Before the long weekend

1. Open your listing and copy the website link.
2. Decide which page a listing visitor needs.
3. Give each location its own page and link.
4. Add source, medium and campaign tags to the link.
5. Tap Website on a phone to test it.
6. Watch the real-time report while you tap.
7. Tag appointment, menu and post links the same way.

Step two is the one that changes what visitors see. Tags make the visits measurable; the right page is what makes them worth measuring.

The naming rules behind those tags are covered in campaign tags on the links you share.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.