GMB Spy helps identifying Google My Business Categories

What's your background?

I worked for 24 years for a large corporation at the executive level, managing teams around automotive digital marketing. I left in August 2017 to start my own consulting business, and along the way Google My Business (GMB) became a big part of what we consulted around.

We published a book ("A car dealers guide to go by business", available on Amazon) in February to help dealerships with GMB best practices. Along with many others in the digital marketing and SEO space, we focused on tuning GMB categories. We found the process of searching the HTML to find competitor categories too cumbersome. We created the GMBspy Chrome extension to speed up that process. Once we experienced how easy it was to use, and the strong benefit, we decided to share it with the rest of the SEO community.

What does your extension do exactly?

The GMB Spy Chrome extension allows someone who is viewing Google maps, or Google search to instantly view the categories for any GMB property.

Which browsers do you support?

At this point only Chrome.

What motivated you to get started?

I have always been fascinated by Chrome extensions, and felt this was the perfect application. You could simply visit the GMB page, and then fire the extension to search and display the categories.

What is your approach to get the word out?

The promotion plan is to use social media like LinkedIn, Twitter as well as automotive and SEO forums/blogs.

Do you plan to monetize your extension?

There are no current plans to monetize, the extension is very simple and we did not feel it provided enough value to charge people. We expect the primary benefit would be that it would help promote our core consulting, reporting, and training business.

What are some of the challenges you've encountered in building the extension?

We had an initial challenge with having the extension work in both google.com/maps, as well as google.com/search. We overcame that, and now are tackling some international issues with URL structure.

What do you do, besides building extensions?

We consult and train car dealers around digital marketing success.

What have you learned through building your extension?

That the development cycle is fairly short, and the potential traction is definitely there for the right extension.

What's your favorite part about building extensions?

Their simplicity, ease of use, and short development cycle.

What goals do you have for the future?

Our goals are to continue to build out functionality around the GMBspy extension, publish our second book in 2021, and continue to grow our consulting and reporting business.

Where can readers go to learn more about you and your projects?

Follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, as well as our website at www.GenerationsDigital.com.