Here is an overview of four pillars for ranking on Google Maps and what are discussed in details step by step. So the four pillars and Google Maps SEO tips are pretty quick and simple.
- Optimization
- Reviews
- Citations
- Backlinks
It’s that quick that simple, those are the four main ranking factors.
You get these under your belt; you’re going to be ranking in the top eight positions at least. Hopefully what we’re trying to do is really get you into the top three positions. When you’re in the top three you can show up then in Google organic results as well which is a huge benefactor to you. Your business and your profits are bottom line.
1: Optimization
So when you talk about optimization there of course will be also optimization within your Web site as well. We’ll go over a little bit about that but the main optimization I’m talking about is your Google Plus page. That needs to be optimized for your keywords and I’m going to show you how to get inside of that what we’re going to be doing is keyword research.
If you don’t know what a key word is it’s a word that someone searches inside the Google search engine. To particularly find something about your business that you may do. If you are a loan agency you would probably put lawn care or cut my grass or you know and if you’re in the Atlanta area your Lawn Care Atlanta, Grass cutting Atlanta. You know all those types of key phrases that people type in or normally relate to your industry nature service that you do. So whatever it is there’s always local terms.
There are even people to search up local terms for webinars in Atlanta and I get to come up for keywords. Like that by giving a simple optimization for those local relevancy terms, that’s what this is all about. So we’re going to optimize our page for those key phrases and keywords. We’re going to determine kind of the competition what’s best how we’re going to rank and what to go after.
2: Reviews
The Google reviews are the number one ranking factors you see a kind of put in as a subtopic of additional networks. Additional networks beyond being Yelp Yahoo all different types of networks are out there. I’ll go through a list of the main ones that you should probably be on and when you get Google reviews that’s the main ranking factor. The additional I mean I would say it’s an 80/20 rule 80 percent of your ranking factor inside of reviews come from Google reviews.
The other 20 percent from the whole plethora of other networks that you can be on so again the main idea is focus here. Get this do this and then you’re good.
3: Citations
Matching NAP citations, now what does that mean? And NAP is name address phone. That’s what NAP stands for, Name address phone. Those citations need to match up exactly with the way that Google Plus page is optimized. If there is a period you need a period every matching business listing network.
That’s what a citation is like Yelp would be one Yahoo, Yellow Pages. All of those are business listings or business directories that have name address phone citations. So those need to match in every way whether it’s you know there’s numbers involved. It is paraphrased or shortened instead of spelling out highway it’s H W Y period, it needs to be exactly the same, so those need to match everywhere.
Here you can find top local business directory listing sites
4: Backlinks
The final secret juice is backlinks to your Google Plus and Web site, i know you may be thinking what I do for back links. Do I buy them? I don’t often suggest that you do that. If you do they need to be done in proper amounts and if you do choose to buy them. I will give you an actual few vendors that I would suggest using if you’re going to do them yourself.
I’m going to give you a few tips on how to get your own free back links. I can do a mix of the two but of course ultimately I provide my own back inside my own service my own SEO Company. But I do buy from other providers to kind of get a larger footprint as it’s called so that way I’m not easily as tracked for my back link building efforts.
Once you do that, you factor in all of these four key areas. Then you’re going to see that your rankings in your maps locations raise drastically also because of number four the backlinks to your Google Plus and your website. You will and should see a slight raise in your Google organic listings as well.
So a number of things that you do inside your Google Maps will naturally benefit your other parts of your ranking factors. Inside Yahoo, Inside Bing, inside Google organic even Google images there’s a lot of amazing things. That you can rank for because you do Google maps correctly. I’m going to show you a little bit about that and dive deeper into each step following this.