With more and more people using Google Maps to search for businesses, services, and products, ensuring your business is ranking highly in the local pack is one of the best ways to attract clients and achieve business growth. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to optimize your Google Maps rankings, from optimizing your GMB profile to focusing on building local citations and acquiring reviews.
The primary factors that influence a business’s Google Maps ranking are relevance, distance, and prominence. The relevance factor is based on how closely a business matches the user’s query, which is why it’s important to fill out a business’s Google My Business profile completely and accurately. Moreover, if you can provide additional relevant information to your potential customers (e.g. the types of products/services your company offers), this will help boost your rankings even more.
To ensure that your Google Maps rankings remain consistent, it’s crucial to monitor them on a regular basis. This can be done manually by performing manual searches in Incognito mode on the Google SERP or by utilizing a dedicated rank tracking tool that focuses exclusively on local results. In either case, you’ll want to focus on monitoring your results for both the ‘normal’ Google SERP and the Google 3-pack as this will provide the most accurate picture of your progress over time.
While many local SEO experts will tell you that the most important factor to rank high in Google Maps is optimizing a business’s GMB profile, this is only partially true. There are other factors that play a key role in Google’s local ranking algorithm, including a business’s online reputation, a large number of positive Google reviews, and a robust social media presence.
Another important factor to consider when attempting to improve your Google Maps ranking is to publish information about your business on a variety of business directories and online aggregators. This will not only help improve the information in your GMB profile, but it can also boost your rankings by increasing your visibility on other platforms.
Lastly, it’s important to focus on acquiring and displaying customer reviews on your Google My Business profile and to be active in responding to those reviews. While this is only one of the many things that contribute to a business’s Google Maps ranking, it can have a significant impact and is an area in which businesses often fall short.
With so many different factors influencing Google Maps rankings, it’s essential for local businesses to take the time to fully optimize their business listings and regularly monitor them for consistency and accuracy. By doing so, they can ensure that they’re maximizing the chances of showing up in the Google 3-pack and attracting new clients on a regular basis.