The GBP Loop Framework Book Review | James Dooley ft Mike Martin, Peter Jones & Paul Truscott (James Dooley Interviews Mike Martin)

James Dooley: The GBP Loop Framework book review. Today I'm joined with Mike Martin, the founder of GBPly, and also the co-founders of Mapimal, Peter Jones and Paul Truscott. So, Peter, I'm going to throw you in the deep end and first and foremost, why did we decide to create the book called the GBP Loop book review? It's not called that, but... Uh, it's just... Just discuss the, um, topic of Google Business Profiles, the importance of optimising the profile completely, uh, covering everything that a business does, you know, like filling in all the services, having images for every service, um, making that profile as complete and thorough about the business, um, and mirroring what the website says about the business, um, and then explaining the importance of sending that information out across the web in form of citations on different platforms. Um, so like your Yelps or your, uh, FreeIndex, um, anywhere where you can get your business mentioned on a third-party website, um, and covering more about the business and building, building the profile out so that the Google's, um, Google's bots and the AI engines all understand more and more about your business than anyone else's in your niche, in your location.

Peter Jones: Yeah, for sure. And Paul, with regards to, uh, the GBP Loop Framework book then, one of the chapters in there talked about Decision Engine Optimisation and how if we keep building up the Praise and building up the reviews, how at the 11th hour if someone was comparing brand A versus brand B, how that could make a difference between them choosing your company because of the amount of reviews and the positive testimonials of what you're getting. Can you expand a little bit more about that chapter on why Decision Engine Optimisation is sometimes overlooked by people looking to do local SEO?

Paul Truscott: I think it's well overlooked, James, and I think the key thing is that in the past, people have got used to customers coming to a Google Maps map pack and making an instant decision about who they're going to call based on reviews, review count, uh, what other, uh, people in the reviews... It shows little snippets of what other people are actually saying. And then you would just use, especially if it's fairly low ticket, you would just use that information to make a quick decision because doing your own research basically for something that might be costing you 100, 200 bucks, people just can't be bothered. The difference now though, we've got AI, it isn't difficult to do that research, right? It takes a couple of minutes. So, people will jump on to ChatGPT or they'll jump on to, uh, Google's AI Mode or they'll see the AI Overview and they'll start asking questions within that or Ask Maps. There are so many places you can do this now to ask other questions about who, who Google recommends or who ChatGPT recommends. If you don't make sure that you've done a good job with the way that you've set your profile up, the way you've set your, um, your, uh, website up, and all of the, uh, other online attributes that you've got going for you or potentially against you depending on how you've done it, if you don't do that all right, then that customer's going to make a decision that will not favour you. So, Decision Engine Optimisation, very, very critical now because it's so, so easy. Whereas before it was difficult to, to do that research, it's so easy now and people are trusting what they're told. Rightly or wrongly, they're trusting what they're told by AI.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. And then Mike, obviously, the founder of GBPly out there, an amazing Google Business Profile dashboard that allows agencies to manage multiple Google Business Profiles. You've been in the industry for a long time when it comes to local lead generation and it looks like you've gone all in on Google Business Profiles. The amount of more leads that it seems to get now from the Google Maps and also the, the Maps being pulled into places like the AI Overview and ChatGPT. It seems a masterstroke of what you've done to double down on the Google Business Profiles. The GBP Loop, obviously we've put the five Ps in and we got this idea from you about consistency and recency, um, of consistently updating the profile like it is a social media profile. Can you explain a little bit from when it used to be Google My Business, so a GMB? I know it's moved to a Google Business Profile. How it has become a little bit more like a social media profile where you need to consistently keep updating it.

Mike Martin: Yeah, I, I'll, I'll refer you back to a call... Conversation me and Paul had a few days ago because he said to me, "I noticed a few years ago that it started to change because a lot of the, the, the, the tricks stopped working as well that we used to do back in the day." And I was like, it was around 2022, November 2022. And he's, he's like, "Yeah, yeah, probably around then." I was like, "Do you remember what happened?" And, and he's like, "Go on." And I explained, it's like Google My Business was a static listing pretty much and they went to Google Business Profiles and it kind of almost became like... Probably, I don't know if it's bigger than LinkedIn, but I'm, I'm assuming Google Business Profiles is bigger than LinkedIn. It's probably the biggest business social media platform on the planet. And the actions work better with daily manual actions and keeping the profile complete. It's just like building a YouTube channel. If you go and you build a YouTube channel and you talk about the same thing every day and you post a video every single day, you're going to grow an audience even if it's only a tiny audience of 5,000 people in the world. Eventually they'll find you. And it's the same with your Google Business Profile. SEO belongs on the website and daily manual actions belongs on, on, on the Google Business Profile. And the reason we created the GBP Loop was very simple. We work with hundreds of agencies, thousands of Google Business Profiles, and when we first released GBP Loop, we were noticing that a lot of people were spending five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 hours a month, right, for, for a single client to manage them. And they're doing all sorts of different things. There was no consistency. There was no setup. And we started to do a lot of testing and figure out what works, what doesn't work, why it works. And we came up with the GBP Loop because we were looking at it like, okay, how can we make this consistently work faster for an organisation so that they can then scale and streamline their operations and grow quickly? Because for us, as, as a software tool, if they can scale, every member of staff, instead of having 10 clients, can have 100 clients. They're making more money. They're buying more, more of us. We're all making loads more money together. And we, we created the GBP Loop, which enables people to manage Google Business Profiles in probably 30 to 60 minutes a month per client, if not less, than instead of five to 10 hours per month per client. And everything is set out. It's like looking... Like you introduced me years ago to SOPs. I didn't know what it was when you first said it to me. I was like, SOPs? And I looked at it. And SOP's like a checklist. But this is not a checklist. It's a loop that just keeps going back. So if you focus every month, Profile Completeness and Mirroring, James Dooley's Propagation, right? Pictures, Posts and Praise. And then you go back and consistently keep doing the same thing. You make sure your profile's complete. Make sure it's mirrored across the web. See if there's any additional citations you can create, collect anywhere else. Pictures, Posts and Praise. And it's all inside the new book. Absolutely all of it. You're going to love it. So anyone who wants to grab a copy of the book, the book is called the GBP Loop Framework. It's a... It's a follow-on from Mike Martin's book, who initially invented the concept of the GBP Loop. It has that consistency, that recency. It's got the five Ps all put in there, which is the Profile, the Propagation, the Pictures, the Posts, and also the Praise. Having that, making certain on the Praise, you're getting that review velocity, replying back to it. It's all in the book. It's got Decision Engine Optimisation. And it's co-authored by Peter Jones, also known as the king of local lead generation. Paul Truscott, the king of Google Maps. Mike Martin, the founder of GBPly, an absolute legend now when it comes to Google Business Profiles, testing things out every single day. Make sure you go and get a copy of it. And guys, thank you very much. Thank you.