How to Monitor Your Google My Business (GMB) in the Page-oscope

If you are a local business, it is important to keep a close eye on your Google My Business page accessed from Google Maps or in the Google Local Pack results. This is the detailed landing page that Google links to from map rankings in a mobile search result. The landing page had business information including address, phone number, images, star ratings, reviews, and other things, depending on what kind of business you run. It can be easy to lose track of what is happening on these pages because they are not on your website, but they are critical for driving foot traffic and calls for your business. This tutorial will walk you through the steps you need to take to automatically record what your GMB listing looks like on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis so that you can compare the results over time, or know when certain things (like a review or feature in the listing) went live. This tutorial will focus on the paid versions of the MobileMoxie tools, and specifically the Page-oscope. If you don’t have an account yet, you can use the free mobile simulator for a few tests, or you can sign up for a 7 day free trial for unlimited mobile website testing.

1. To get started, find the g.co URL for your GMB landing page. To do this, on a phone or in the SERPerator, search for the business in maps, and click on the correct listing. Once it is open, look for the triangular share link in the upper right-hand corner. When you click that, you should get the g.co, g.page, or goo.gl/maps/ URL for the business (For now, maps.app.goo.gl URLs won’t work, but we are trying to fix this). Copy that down, and then go to the MobileMoxie Page-oscope dashboard. (Click the tab at the top of the page for the Page-oscope, and then click on the center ‘Dashboard’ button below that.

2. Click the ‘Add URL’ button in the far left box at the top of the page, and paste the g.co URL for your Google My Business landing page into the blank. If you have more than one business, you can click the ‘+’ button below that, to add multiple locations one at a time, or you can click on the ‘Upload a CSV of URLs’ button to upload a CSV. If you choose to upload a CSV, you can download a sample file and edit it, to ensure that everything is formatted and ingested properly.

3. Next, click the ‘Add’ button and the modal will close. After that, you just need to add a country and a phone. Simply add all the countries that you will be testing in. If you upload multiple locations in multiple countries, you may need to add more than one, but most people just need to add the main country that the business is in. Then you can choose the phone. Any phone here is fine, and you can choose more than one if you want to compare how the listing looks on iOS and Android, or how the listing looks on small screens vs. big screens.

4. Once you have added the test, it will run, and you will see the data on the lower part of the screen as soon as it is available. It will look something like this, and once you have more than one test, you will be able to use a drop-down above the phone to change the date of the test that you are looking at.

5. The default setting is for it to capture a screenshot each month, but if you would prefer to change that to daily or weekly screen captures, simply click on the GMB URL in the left-most column, then click on the pencil icon. It will bring up an edit modal where you will see a drop-down where you can choose between daily, weekly, and monthly. You can also choose what day of the month or week that you would like it to run. Once you have made whatever changes you want, click on ‘Save’ on the right, then ‘Done’ to close the modal.

6. If you ever want to edit anything about your reports, you simply click on Saved Tests at the top, then click on the calendar icon next to the test.

We hope you found this tutorial valuable. Remember, this is the view that MobileMoxie subscribers get in the tools. If you are thinking about registering for the tools, you can start with a 7-day free trial, to get unlimited free mobile views of your website for 7 days, or if you only need to do a little testing, you can use our free mobile website test.