In this week’s video, I share an easier method for checking competitors’ Google My Business categories with the awesome GMB Spy Chrome extension. I was at Digital Dealer in Tampa a few weeks ago, and grabbed the creator of GMB Spy, George Nenni, for a quick chat about the extension and how to use it. Watch for all the details!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, we’re actually on site at the Digital Dealer Conference in Tampa, and I’ve got a special treat. We’re going to talk about how to check out categories in Google My Business.

OK, several months back, maybe even a year ago, I did a video that shows you how to check your competitors’ categories in Google My Business by going in and looking at the code and searching for certain things… But now there’s a much easier way to do it.

There’s a plugin called GMB Spy that was actually created by my buddy George here. So George Nenni runs Generations Digital and he created this plugin, so tell us about the plugin. How it works. Why it’s important.

Sure. Thank you Greg. So I think it was around January 2020, I read an article that showed, in fact, that you could search through the HTML and you can find the Google My Business categories. I was super anxious to try the technique, so I did… But you had to look for double tildes or some special string, and I went through it all and found the categories. But I thought to myself, that took a long time, that was really clumsy.
I’m a big fan of Chrome extensions, uh, primarily because you can go to a page and then fire an extension to have it tell you certain things, so I thought it was a perfect application for Chrome extensions.

And so we got a little development team together, and we put a prototype out there, and it was extremely well received. The most surprising thing for me was really what impact categories have. When we launched the tool, we thought categories were somewhat important, but really Greg and the SEO community really opened our eyes to the incredible power of categories, and so we love using the tool too.

So where can they download this tool?

If you go to the Chrome store, you can just Google Chrome Store, and go to the Chrome Store, and then you can search for GMB Spy and it will take you right there. You can of course just go to Google and just search for GMB Spy, and it will take you to that page on the Chrome Store.

Plus, it’s got a really killer logo, so if for nothing else, you want to get it for that.

So that’s actually all the time we’ve got for today, ‘cause we’re on site. I’ve gotta get back to the booth. So as always, you know what that means:

Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
Thank You.