All You Need to Know About Ranking for Google Maps in 2019

Google maps provide local businesses with a significant opportunity to market to the local area and the people within it.

By ensuring your Google maps marketing is on point, you will create added visibility for your business and in turn more sales. Here are some great tips to do so for 2019.

1) Business Listings

If you want to rank high in Google My Business, then it’s really just a matter of Google being able to verify that your business is actually real. It can do this by determining how frequently your NAP is listed or cited online. Your NAP is the name of your business, its address, and its phone number. It’s almost exactly identical to how backlinks work in terms of search engine optimization. The more of them you have, the better off your search rankings should be.

Submitting your business to business directories, both local and national, is the simplest way to get listings and citations. Effective maps marketing can really be hugely beneficial in creating visibility and driving sales in the local area.

2) Consistent NAP

The way in which your business NAP gets listed in these various directories has to be current and consistent with what’s listed on the Contact page of your website, as well as what you list in Google My Business. Google’s website crawlers get really confused if your NAP is different on numerous business directories. Fortunately, there is a way to make sure you have a consistent business NAP all across the web.

In order to be sure that you have a consistent NAP, just run a search looking for your business. Click on every listing to see what they look like. If you find any website with incorrect information, just contact them about having it changed. A number of our clients have had to do this in order to get updated phone numbers and addresses. We have some of the best local SEO software there is, so we’re able to track the business listings of our clients in order to see their NAP.

3) NAP on Your Website

You’ll also need to list out your business name, address, and your phone number as well on your own website. I’ve heard other SEO companies claim that it’s great to do this for the header or footer your website uses so the NAP shows up on every page. If you’re able to do this, then do so, because it’s great for the general user experience. Personally, I think it’s okay to just list this on your Contact page. I’ll even give you a few bonus points if you’re able to do it using a Schema mark-up.

Do you have all this down so far? Good! There’s one additional thing that your contact page needs.

4) An Embedded Google Map

If you visit our Contact page, one of the things that you’ll find is an embedded Google map. It’s great practice to have the Google My Business listing your company has embedded right there on your Contact page. That way, Google will be sure that you’re actually located at the specific address you’ve listed because you confirmed it using your Places listing.

It’s easy to do this embedding. Just look for your business name when you’re in Google Maps. Once you find it, then click on three lines which are beside your business name. Look for this in the search bar near the top left. Then, you should be able to click on something called “Share or Embed Map”.

Once that’s selected, you can click on the provided embed map option seen near the top of the new pop-up box. Then, you can copy the iframe code so you can just paste it into your website’s Contact page.

There is one last thing that helps you improve your Google My Business ranking, and it might just be the most important factor of all.

5) Reviews

You have to get everyone you can to review your page. This blog post, as well as this one, both cover easy ways that you can score more Google reviews.

Consider it. When Google sees any page that has 20 reviews or more, it will want to show that page in its mapped listings over any page that has no reviews. This aligns perfectly with Google’s search approach. It means giving the user the search result and corresponding business that is the most relevant.

Ranking Evaluations

Once you change everything above but still have low rankings, then you might need to get more business citations. There are two ways that you can do this.

Find out the competitors who are currently ranked higher than your citations. Search for their companies, and if they’re in any directories that you’re not in, get added and join them.

Take advantage of Google My Business services that we offer, and a citation-building service comes with it.

Just like with SEO, Google makes use of business citations as a way to offer its users highly relevant companies that rank in Google Places. Use the instructions laid out here to improve your rankings. If you still need ranking help, visit our packages page to see what’s available.

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The post All You Need to Know About Ranking for Google Maps in 2019 appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

source https://tweakyourbiz.com/marketing/google/business-ranking