5 Best Google My Business Plugins for WordPress
If there’s one thing Google is good at, it’s creating products and services that integrate into our lives and businesses seemingly seamlessly. Sure, there were some duds along the way, Google+ being the most famous one. For the most part, however, Google’s appeal has always been in creating things people wanted to use.
Some of Google’s services work especially well with websites. AdSense lets you monetize your website. Google Translate lets your visitors translate it. Google My Business is a service that helps businesses stand out on Google Maps and in search results. It’s a must-have for local SEO, and with a plugin or two, it can integrate with your website in other ways, too.
The plugins we’ll show you are:
There’s no better content than user-generated content, right? Especially if that content comes in a form that’s flattering to you and your business, which reviews occasionally might do. Bad ones aside, it pays off to show off the reviews you get on your Google My Business page, and that’s exactly what the Widget for Google Reviews does for you.
The premise is very simple – the plugin lets you use a widget to display Google My Business reviews on your website. It pulls all of the reviews to your WordPress database, promises instant load times, supports pagination, and displays up to five reviews per location.
That’s what you get with the free version, at least. The paid Business version lets you combine Google My Business reviews with Facebook and Yelp reviews, allows you to apply a minimum rating filter, and lets you choose from a variety of sorting options. The Business version also lets users leave Google reviews directly on your website.
It’s common for businesses of all sorts to have blogs these days. Some might do it for the love of the written word. Others might do it for branding. Then again, for plenty, it might boil down to the good old SEO juice that comes from the content. Thanks to the Post to Google My Business, your website content can become your Google My Business content in seconds.
Thanks to the Post to Google My Business plugin, you can create Google My Business posts right from the comfort of your WordPress website’s back end. The plugin is Gutenberg-compatible, and the posts are automatically published to GMB. Finally, if you have a multisite, you should know this plugin supports it.
The Premium version of the plugin packs a ton of time-saving features that can help you build up your content game on Google My Business. For starters, it lets you schedule posts for automatic publishing, use any post type from WordPress to create a Google My Business post, choose a location per post or post to multiple locations, and do plenty more.
Reviews are so important to businesses that you can’t have enough review plugins to connect your WordPress website with your Google My Business page – just don’t have them all activated at once. Reviews and Ratings – Google My Business is a plugin that uses both shortcode and a widget to display Google reviews on your WordPress website, among other interesting things.
For example, the plugin will let you customize what the columns look like. They’ll be fully responsive, that’s for sure, and they’ll have your pick from no less than 96 designs and themes. This plugin is all about customization, even letting you set a customer review length range for review display – besides the somewhat standard rating range.
It doesn’t stop there. This plugin will also let you choose icons to replace Google’s icons, give you a live preview in the Settings, and let you selectively hide reviews. It will do all that, and more, while remaining free to use. You will have to provide your Google Billing Account, though, and you will have the ability to limit your API requests per day to stay in your free allowance.
There’s something heartwarming in the announcement that a business is open. It might be because businesses were forced to close for too long, and people have grown to miss them as places where they would stop by and see familiar faces. Well, with We’re Open!, you can proudly announce that your business is open – and when.
This plugin lets you add opening hours to your website in a variety of formats using a widget or shortcode. It has great options like setting up three groups of openings per day – in case you have two lunch breaks – and it has a separate Covid-19 option to set the date of temporary closure if need be.
The plugin is free, and it lets you customize it to your heart’s content. Most importantly, however, is that you can integrate it with Google My Business and use the hours you’ve set there on your website. That way you don’t have to do it twice.
Whether you have an online store, a small business, a big business, or just a blog – you’ll want to give Revive Old Posts a try. This plugin lets you post your content to Twitter and Facebook seamlessly, and if you give the Pro version a go – it’ll do it for Google My Business, too!
The trick with this plugin is that the only way it can be used as a GMB plugin is if you purchase the Pro version. This will also give you support for posting on other websites, including LinkedIn, Tumblr, and VKontakte. You’ll be able to share on up to 50 accounts, and you’ll be able to choose the delay between social media post shares.
The things you get with the free version are okay, too, but they won’t include sharing of RSS feeds, or the support for custom WordPress post types, or sharing images and video from your media library directly to social networks. So for all it’s worth, you should consider this a premium plugin if you plan to get the most of it – or to get it to work with Google My Business, at all!
Let’s Wrap It Up
The ability to connect your WordPress website with so many different networks and services is one of the things that make it a great hub for any kind of business endeavor. So when you want to make sure that the people in the vicinity of your store can find out that you’re there without taking their eyes off the smartphone screen, you create a Google My Business page. And then, you connect it to your website so that you don’t have to post or set things up twice. It’s as easy as that.
