How To Rank In Google Maps in 2019 — FAST Method

if you want your business to rank fast in Google Maps I'm gonna break down the four areas you need to get right if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I'll show you all my best tips and tactics and secrets to get their best let's dive in hey guys West McDowell here for the deep end and if you're not already subscribed to this channel go ahead and click the subscribe button and a little bell icon so you never miss a video you need to succeed online okay so today we're gonna be talking all about all the little things you can do to make your business rank higher in Google Maps now there's a lot to cover here so but basically before we get into the how I'm going to talk about the why so the there's a few major benefits to ranking in that Google 3-pack in maps or sometimes known as the snack pack so basically the first benefit is if people are searching for your category online then you want to be found in those listings or let's say your business kind of relies on word-of-mouth people talk about you but before people are actually ever gonna call you they're gonna google you and it's one thing to show up for your business name in the organic listings but it looks even better if you show up in that right column also showing your reviews and little snippets about your business your hours your phone number all that good stuff it just makes you look all the more credible so those are all the benefits to showing up there now now let's talk about the ranking factors because there's several things actually quite a few things but I'm gonna simplify it a bit and talk about the four main ranking factors that go into where your business shows up and the first is probably the most important and that's proximity so meaning if you're a pizza restaurant and you're searching from a block away you're likely to be found if you're searching from two miles away generally the restaurants closer to the searcher are going to show up first there are ways to kind of get around that if you can build up your other factors to such a degree but proximity is pretty much the number one factor right now and the second is how closely the business category you assign yourself matches with the keywords your searchers using next we have just good old-fashioned organic Oh signals like links and good on-page signals on your website as well and last but not least we have citations and we'll get to what exactly a citation is a little in a little bit but you want a good volume and you want good quality in your citations okay so today we're gonna be talking about the four key areas that we're gonna try to optimize in order to get your business to the top of the Google Maps and the first one is really going to be perfect to Google my business optimization and if you've not seen my last video all about how to properly set up your Google my business listing you are definitely going to want to click right up here to access that video that's kind of pre required viewing before you even get to this so go back and watch that if you haven't already the next area is getting good quality and a good volume of citations and the third is solid on-page content for your website and we're gonna finish it up with building quality links to your website so good old fashioned SEO so now we're gonna talk a little more in depth about each of the key areas starting with the perfect Google my business optimization so I assume by now you've watched that first video but right now there's a few extra things a few above-and-beyond measures that I want to show you to really round that out okay so then once you've finished with the overall setup from the last video you're going to want to come back to your Google my business dashboard so you'll just log in so what you're gonna do then is just down the right sidebar you're gonna go down to info so then I want you to pay attention to the category name you've given yourself so in this case for an old client of mine it's car rental agency but there are so many categories available to you that you don't want to just limit yourself to only one because there's probably more than one that will actually fit what you do so in this case what I'm gonna do is go ahead and click there and you can change the primary category but what I'm actually gonna do is add additional categories so I'm just gonna click that and then I'm going to type in car service so what I've already done is I've already done the Reese search to find out what the other categories could be so you can easily Google Google my business categories and you'll find a list of all of them and it's pretty long so just find the ones that most apply to you I'd recommend using up to five and I'm going to go ahead and add one more here so I'm pretty happy with all of these so it's car rental agency is number one and we have car service and car leasing service so I'm just going to click apply and that way now you've got all of your categories set up so with that in mind we're going to move on down here and we're going to go down to the photos section so in the last video I had you you know add photos as as needed the more the better and what worked what I promised in that last video and what we're delivering on now is I'm going to show you kind of a pro tip for making these photos even more powerful and that has to do with geo tagging your photos which sounds very complicated but it's not it's basically adding a bit of code to every photo that puts it in a very specific place so what Google can do then with that place is really adds an extra dimension of okay this is a car service and it's this is exactly where it's located which makes you show up a bit more prominently in those map listings when you do it right okay so the easy way to do this is just go to this address here GOI MGR comm and you've got a map and you've got a place to drag photos so I'm just gonna go ahead and drag a photo from my desktop right in here and it's uploading it and it says no geo tags found so that's to be expected but now what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to link it up to their address so I'm just going to type in the name of the business and it's popped up right here so if your business is brand new you may not be found here yet and you may just have to type in the physical address which is fine so I'm just gonna go ahead and click that and now it's got the little map pin putting it in the right place it's got the latitude longitude don't worry about that go down here and in description I'm just gonna type in car rental service los angeles' I just add it using the keywords and the city you want to be found in and then you're gonna click the right EXIF tags so what that's doing is it's adding those tags to it then you just click download and you download that image and yeah just so you download that image and then you're gonna go back to photos and you're gonna add it right here just upload it and it's got all the info on it that you need alright and to finish out the perfect optimization of your Google my business profile you want plenty of reviews at least five five-star reviews and that I do have a video about that as well so if you have not watched that you can click right up here to watch it but let's get right on with it and talk about citations so a citation is basically any mention of your business anywhere on the internet doesn't have to have a link but it's basically usually consist of what they call the nap name address and phone number and the thing about the nap that's so frustrating I guess is that it has to be super consistent across every where it's seen online the more consistency you have the better and when I talk consistency I mean something as simple as spelling out the word road versus the abbreviation Rd or the California abbreviation versus spelling California all-out so it really has to be as consistent across every website as possible okay so when we're talking about getting these citations for your site the first thing you need to do is make sure that you don't have any bad citations out there so what you want to start with is the citation audit so you're gonna go to moz.com slash local slash slash search it'll bring you to this page so just type in your business name and it should pop up here if not because you're a new business you likely don't have any citations yet anyway so this step may be irrelevant for you but anyway we're gonna go ahead and click that and what it's doing is it's finding all the citations out there and it's giving you a score so for this one we've got a 50% score and this is a free tool by the way at least to look at all this stuff so basically what we're seeing is 50% complete profiles and here we're getting a lot of little messages saying that there are a lot of places like super pages or local ease or factual these are major places to have citations and it's saying either it's missing or they're just unable to find those so anytime you see anything like this you're gonna want to go to those sources and actually make sure you have a citation there and build one but we've got we've got three here that are pretty decent but they have room for improvement so it'll kind of tell you what to do and then let's go back up here to incomplete and it'll show us so it looks like we've got on Facebook it's incomplete we're missing two photos we should add two more photos this one is for insider pages missing a photo and we should add another category so it's pretty good at telling you exactly what you need to do so then it's just up to you to kind of go to those sources and update the information and then we've got three percent of the listings are inconsistent so missing a phone number missing a website same here here looks like the address may be listed out in a different way looks like I'm looking at you know everywhere else is five five zero two panca Canyon Boulevard this is starting with a sweet number which is an inconsistency and this is also spells out California versus everywhere else we have the standard CA abbreviation so you can really see how important this consistency really is to the process and it looks like we have no duplicates we're getting a thumbs up here so that is good so once you've fixed any of those inconsistencies and added all the right profiles to the right places that were suggested to you then you're gonna want to find new citation opportunities and what I recommend doing is going to white spark a-slash best citations by category / us if you happen to be in the United States and this what this is gonna do is it's gonna tell you by business category all the places that you should be having citations on the web so for accountants for advertising for agricultural services and obviously it goes all the way down and just it just lists out for you all the best places to be listed some of them are going to be kind of generic for almost all businesses and some are going to be specific like for apartments Zillow which is a real estate comes up Trulia a real estate comes up so you know a lot of them are specifically tailored for your industry the next thing you're going to want to do is the same thing but the best citations by City so here it's the same website you're doing white sparks EA slash best citations by City / US and gun if you're here so one thing to note here it's going to be a lot of the same places Yelp will probably come up for most of them Yellow Pages will always come up but look at this example so this one's for Boston so then we get you know Boston City Vodacom so that happens to be a local citation opportunity for you so go to your city and see if there's any overlap and see what ones are specifically for your city because it really helps to not only have citations in your industry but in your local area that helps tie you to your locality which will help you rank in those Maps okay so now that you have found all those opportunities for your industry in your city you're going to want to really focus on the the core structured citations that are out there I'm talking about things like Facebook Yelp Yellow Pages super pages factual all the things that are axiom is a big one a lot of these are going to be aggregators and they're gonna feed other web sites that will basically pick up on those details and kind of spread them around to other smaller sites so you really want to be found on those for sure okay and the third thing I want to talk about is just good organic on content for your website so all the thing I'll mention zuv the city and your category and things that really line up with what you've put in your Google my business profile it just shows Google that you're not spamming them and you're really about what you say you're about so you can put all these things on your homepage if you want to sometimes it can look spammy to someone coming to look at it so what I what I usually recommend is in your footer somewhere have a link where the text of the link just says business category in city state so might be accountant in Skokie Illinois for example and then that link would point to the page that I'm going to show you right now okay so I've just put together this mock page for a recent client of mine so once you've linked to the page on your footer for the rest of the site this is the kind of page that I definitely recommend that you have included on your site now just to this is much more for Google than it is for any one of your customers it's mostly so Google can get the right information so basically this is just a location page and here's how I want you to structure it it doesn't have to be exactly like this but should have all the information so what we've got here is it's this is called the the h1 tag the main header tag is going to be listed as the category and the city and state so accountant in Skokie Illinois I'm just gonna have a little bit of basic information I've got some bullet points here of the difference remember when we put in those different additional categories and Google my business that is what we're putting here so I have bookkeeping Skokie Illinois certified public accountant Skokie Illinois tax consultant tax preparation so you're basically just giving all these little indicators that coincide with what you've already set up in Google my business and then from there we have the phone number and the address is listed exactly in your profile remember how important that nap the name address phone number and of course I would definitely recommend going a step above and have your phone number an address included on every page of your website but this particular page we're gonna have everything in it all at once so we're gonna have the phone number and the address and coming down now we have an embedded Google map so this is not meant to just be an image this is going to be embedded which is another key signal for Google to to pull from and below that we have the hours of operation as listed in Google my business so we have every day of the week so what we're really trying to do is word everything exactly the way they do in Google my business so that's why we list out every single day rather than say Monday through Friday 8:30 to 5:00 we're gonna have every day because that's how they do it and we want it to match very closely and under that we have a click here for driving directions and that is going to be a hyperlink to a predefined map on Google Maps again just another strong signal for Google to pull from and then going back up here what I've done is I've lit I've linked to every single one of the major citation sites a review sites so you would link to your Facebook page your YouTube page if you have that Yelp Foursquare any of the other big ones that apply to your industry link to those here as well and right under that we have proudly serving again we're tying you to a specific location so if you serve several different cities or neighborhoods you're gonna list those here and you're gonna link each one to the official website of that either city or neighborhoods so Chicago would be you know the city of Chicago's official website the city of Evanston's official website and then last but not least this one's actually pretty powerful is if you make a youtube video I mean again this is not necessarily doesn't have to be seen by people it's mostly just a signal to Google so you can even go on fiverr.com and pay as little as five or ten dollars to have someone actually just say whatever you want them to say in front of the camera if you're not comfortable doing it but here's the thing you need to name it again the the category and the city and state and then I would go even a step further and put in the address and that's all the title of that video and then just embed it right here and because Google owns YouTube that's very closely tied and all of these things working together really work hard to cement you into your locality which is gonna help you show up on those maps okay so once you have a page like that on your site you're gonna want to make sure that your entire site is mobile-friendly over half of searches these days are done on mobile especially with map related listings so Google is really not going to show it on not gonna show any website that doesn't load quickly so and it's actually really easy to test just Google PageSpeed insights or I will include the link in the description below for where you can go from there you just put in your URL and it will do all the hard work for you and give you a grade basically and it'll also come up with improvements that you can hand to your designer developer that they can make to make it run even faster okay so the last piece of work you have to do is to build quality links to your site um it used to be that getting shown in the map listings was completely separate from ranking in what we call the organic listings underneath these days it's a little more closely tied so you're definitely still gonna want some of those links the good news is you will have gotten quite a few links from those citations that you built so but you're probably gonna want even more now you definitely have a choice when it comes to getting these links to your site it is something you can do on your own writing guest posts on blogs and then having them link back to your site however it's time consuming and maybe not the best use of your time if it's something you want help with we can certainly help you out just go to the deep-end design.com slash get started okay guys these have been my best tips for getting your business optimized to show up in the map listings so you've heard for me but now it's your turn I want to know if there's any tips that maybe I've missed that you have used or if there are any key takeaways that you learn today that you definitely plan on implementing on your own site if so please leave those in the comments below I cannot wait to to see what you have to say and if you haven't subscribed by now you're definitely going to want to click Subscribe right in this circle logo right down here just click there and you're also going to want to access my free mini-course how to guarantee website ROI and you can get that by clicking this box right over here all right guys I'm West McDowell for the deep end and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Wes McDowell

Views: 184,498

Keywords: how to rank in google maps, how to rank in google maps 2018, how to rank in google snack pack, rank in google maps 2018, rank in google maps fast, how to rank higher in google maps, how to rank higher on google maps, how to rank higher on google maps 2018, rank in google snack pack, rank higher in google maps, google maps, how to, google maps ranking, google maps secrets, google maps seo, google my business seo, google my business seo 2018, google snack pack

Id: vuuMY7_eoJc

Length: 20min 35sec (1235 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 11 2018