At the time of this blog post, Products and Services are not created equal in the eyes of the Google My Business platform, which acts as your digital storefront on Google. Not everyone will have the opportunity to add both Products and Services to their listing, as both of these additional sections are still in beta testing. However, if you do have the option to add both of these sections to your listing you will find that while both are helpful to increasing conversions - products currently have more capability within the platform.

Why Are Products More Useful to List in GMB Compared to Services?

Products show in Google My Business listings that appear on desktop AND mobile devices. Whereas currently services only show in GMB listings on mobile. So if you’re going to put time and effort into making one of these two optimizations, my advice is to work through products first. Within the products section of your GMB listing also you also have the ability to add call to action buttons that link directly to your website.

Below is an example of how a fully optimized products section appears within a desktop Google Search.

Once a user clicks in to the products section on your Google My Business listing it expands to show the product description you’ve added as well as the CTA buttons and the other related products that you have listed in the same collection. If you’ve included information about the price of a product, that will show here as well. The photo below is an example of a product that was inputted with no price listed.

How Do I Load My Products Into My GMB Listing?

The process of loading product information into GMB is quite user friendly. If you’re given the option to add products you will find the products section on the left hand side of your GMB listing management page. Create a few products within a collection that would make good cross-selling opportunities.

Keep in mind when adding products that you must upload a picture with every product otherwise Google will not let you save it. One of the most beneficial parts of the products category is to be able to add CTA buttons that link directly to your page, so make sure to take advantage of this opportunity.

Optimizing the Services Section of Your Google My Business

Services within your Google My Business listing can be helpful in the mobile view. You cannot add CTA buttons to the services section but it is still a great place to describe what you do for your clients. Customers can click into each service to expand the full description as displayed in the photos below.

Even More Optimizations Exist with Google My Business!

At the end of the day, optimizing your Google My Business listing helps to increase the amount of real estate your company takes up on a given Google search results page. The more things you can do to your listing to help expand the space it takes up on the page the better!

Believe it or not, adding products and services is just one of many more further optimizations you can make to your company’s listing. If you would like advice from a Digital Marketing Specialist about what features of GMB to tackle next, or any if you have other questions about your web presence contact us and one of our team members will be in touch with you to talk strategy.