[00:00:00] James Breese: Strength Matters, media, video, print, podcasts. Today's topic
[00:00:06] Josh Kennedy: is what is Apple Business Connect? And up until about, I don't know, uh, a week ago I had no idea what Apple Business Connect was. Uh, neither did Andrew either. Um, and I wanted to call this, uh, how to put yourself on the map, which I think would've been a good title.
[00:00:21] Josh Kennedy: But James said no. Uh, Andrew. You did? I thought that was a good podcast title. Andrew, you'd never heard of Apple Business Connect either, had
[00:00:30] Andrew Wallis: you? Embarrassingly, no I hadn't. You know, as a lover of all Apple products and services, I thought I was across the board, but no, I'd not heard of it until James had kindly rectified that for both of us.
[00:00:45] Josh Kennedy: Exactly, exactly. So if you're wondering out there, why on earth should I care about Apple Business Connect and what is it, James, fire
[00:00:52] James Breese: away. Awesome. There you go. Thanks guys. No pressure on me today. So very simple. We've been hammering on about Google [00:01:00] business profiles and being the Google business maps for such a long time.
[00:01:03] James Breese: Right. And saying how important this is because the vast majority of users in the world use Google. They use Google maps to get from A to B, but they also use defined places of interest nearby too. Now, what's the other massive, gigantic map service in the world? It's Apple Maps. So Apple have released, in the last few years, Apple Business Connect.
[00:01:25] James Breese: So in the same way you go to Google Maps and search coffee shop near me, you see reviews and listings. You've got Apple Maps, which does exactly the same thing. It's slightly different to Google. You can optimise it a bit more. You can do more wonderful photos, offerings. It's a great, great service to use.
[00:01:41] James Breese: But it's essentially the same as Google Maps, but on Apple. However... No one is optimizing fitness training or personal training on Apple Maps. Nobody, nobody, and I've known, you guys don't even know about it. And it was just something that we needed to start sharing and talking about because not only is that an opportunity for you to [00:02:00] get in front of more customers and potentially more clients when no one else is doing it.
[00:02:04] James Breese: But it's also a chance to get you good quality SEO traffic to add the consistency to boost your rankings on the Google Spaces anyway, so it's a really useful tool to boost rankings But create more visibility to showcase your business with the world and that's essentially it's just making sure you're visible and present on apple's ecosystem Now apple has some 2 billion registered iphone users and if just a fraction of those people in your area Are literally using your their iphone near them and using apple maps.
[00:02:32] James Breese: They're going to find you It's as simple as that and all you need to do is very simply go to apple business connect Or Google Apple Business Connect. On Google, funny enough, Googling it, to get there in the first place. Google Apple Business Connect, to get into it. Set it up, literally set it up in the same way.
[00:02:49] James Breese: It's an even simpler process than Google. You follow the process, you enter your business details, you add some photos, and you set it up like that. Now, there's a caveat to this. You must have a [00:03:00] premises where people can visit. It's not like you can have any old place. Like, for example, I can't merge the Strength Matters on Apple Business Connect because it's not a premises that allows people to come and visit.
[00:03:10] James Breese: So therefore, you will get rejected. But if you do a gym, a studio, do in person workshops, or whatever it is, and people can come and visit, You can set it up that way, and it's a lot quicker. It then gets verified by a real human on the other side to make sure you're a legit business, and then you get approved.
[00:03:26] James Breese: And hey presto, you've got a link linking to your website from Apple, SEO goes up, more people can find you, and hopefully more clients will come to you to do business with you, as long as you have a good booking system and a good website to share your core message.
[00:03:43] Josh Kennedy: Outside of the fitness industry, James, do you know if this is a widely used service or is it growing in its,
[00:03:48] James Breese: uh, Growing slowly.
[00:03:50] James Breese: I think, again, we're talking about professional service businesses. I think we're still, a lot of, a lot of local businesses are quite amateur in what they do. They're not thinking at this high level [00:04:00] technical stuff. I'm learning a lot from the top businesses out there who are like multi million dollar companies and expanding because they have to be this competitive to get this right.
[00:04:08] James Breese: Where as most local businesses, they haven't got it. Where as this is just simple things you can do and add to your niche, add to your outreach basically to get more people to do it. So yeah, not many people are doing it. However, you should be because Apple Maps is getting better. In fact, I just changed back to Apple Maps from Google Maps because I find it working better now.
[00:04:29] James Breese: Because I
[00:04:29] Josh Kennedy: much prefer Google Maps at the
[00:04:31] James Breese: moment. Yeah, well it's, it's, I find that the two of them, it's, I'm finding like Google Maps is being less accurate around Wales, particularly the valleys and stuff like that. It's like, it's taken me paths where it's not the quickest way, and I know there's quicker ways, whereas Apple defaults to the quickest path automatically, and has a better interface on my Apple CarPlay, so.
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[00:05:29] Josh Kennedy: There we go. And does it have features, obviously, like with you get reviews and they come up on the listing and, and everything. Does that have that
[00:05:39] James Breese: as well? Oh, I'm on. I'm on it now. I'm looking at it now so it links to TripAdvisor from what I'm seeing here.
[00:05:44] James Breese: So
[00:05:44] Josh Kennedy: yeah, what sort of data and insights
[00:05:46] James Breese: can get, well, let me have a look. Now I'm on my, on my phone, so I'm gonna type in personal. Uh, trainer. I'm looking now, give me... Personal trainer, nearby. [00:06:00] So, 100 percent recommended. People recommend, there's likes going on here. There's a couple of places on it, but it's linking to TripAdvisor actually.
[00:06:08] James Breese: Or Yelp. So Google, the Apple review seems to link to Yelp and TripAdvisor more than anything. But you can get recommended. So if you go to a location, you put the pictures, you can click overall rating, thumbs up, classes, thumbs up or thumbs down, staff, thumbs up. So, it's hard for you guys to see it, but you have an overall classes, staff and facilities rating, rating procedure.
[00:06:31] James Breese: So... It looks good. It looks clearer and simpler for sure compared to Google, which is typical Apple ecosystem, but it's a different rating system and but it's another way for people to find you and again just looking into Whereas millions of personal trainers appear in Cardiff for personal training near me.
[00:06:47] James Breese: I have literally got None, only gyms in front of me right now There you go.
[00:06:52] Josh Kennedy: Wow. So it's, uh, yeah, not, not much competition on the Apple Maps space at the moment, which is good. So as you say, James, if it's easy to set [00:07:00] up and you're already on Google, why not, uh, why not leverage Apple Maps? Why not? Indeed. Um, that is it for today.
[00:07:09] Josh Kennedy: If you want to find out what's holding you back from growing your fitness business and get yourself a free website audit, go to strengthmatters. com forward slash audit.