Google Maps SEO: 12 Strategies to Get Found Locally

Learn 14 essential SEO KPIs every expert tracks to measure, improve, and grow your website’s search performance. Look into keyword SERP analysis to determine what competitors are ranking for the same terms. Pay attention to important keyword metrics such as CTR (Click-Through Rate) and average position to gauge performance more effectively. To effectively monitor your SEO performance, utilizing the right tools is crucial. This includes free options like Google Search Console and Analytics, which provide valuable insights.

A mobile-friendly website with fast loading times provides a better user experience and is favored by search engines. Use responsive design, compress images, and minimize code to improve site speed and usability on mobile devices. Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a powerful SEO tool that helps search engines understand the content of your website more effectively. By adding schema markup to your website’s HTML, you provide search engines with explicit clues about what your data means.

How do YOU improve satisfaction?

They usually know what they want and are looking for a place to buy it. These list elements make your content more readable, scannable, and easier to find key details. For example, a few years back I published a post about a strategy called “The Skyscraper Technique”. For example, this internal link is linking to my page about “on-page SEO”. All you need to do is keep these two image SEO best practices in mind.

Optimize Photos and Videos for Google Maps

But their perceived importance for “map pack” rankings has stayed roughly the same. You can learn more about this process in our local keyword research guide below. To expand this list, use the service keywords as “seeds” to find more services people are searching for. BrightLocal’s 2021 study shows that 7% of SEOs think citations are the most important ranking factor. A NAP citation mentions your business’s name, address, and phone number online. They usually appear on business directories and social media profiles.

• Your listing should include your address, contact information, and hours of operation.
• A well-structured site can improve time on page and increase conversion rates.
• Understanding your organic traffic relative to these volumes helps highlight successes and areas needing improvement.
• I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest …
• This helps you evaluate how effectively it is ranking in terms of SEO and search engine ranking factors.
• High-quality content is well-researched, original, and valuable to readers.

There are still ways you can optimize for proximity and give your local SEO a healthy boost. Picture this – when you conduct a search on Google, let’s say for the “best coffee shop near me,” a few specific results stand out. Firstly, you’ll notice a group of three businesses displayed prominently at the top, complete with their contact details and pinpointed locations on a mini Google Maps window. This is what we call the ‘Local Pack.’ It’s like a fast track pass for local businesses to get noticed instantly by users who are searching for services or products in their vicinity. Internal linking refers to linking one page on your website to another.

Whether you’re creating new content or optimizing existing content, use this guide to avoid common SEO mistakes. This was a major improvement to our overall ranking systems made in August 2013. Our ranking systems have continued to evolve since then, just as they had been evolving before.

In addition, we looked at some grey areas and debunked some fake ranking factors. If the domain has many backlinks, and a number of those are from authoritative sites like news media, government, or universities, it’s likely to have a good domain authority score. All software tools that provide domain authority scores use proprietary formulas. The backlink profile of the domain is prominent in these calculations. Social media shares, comments, and interactions are not Google ranking factors either. Regardless of how it’s measured, Google analysts John Mueller and Greg Illyes have stated bounce rate is not a ranking factor.

It’s much harder to stop visitors from clicking the back button on your website when they don’t find what they were looking for. Satisfaction is very difficult to game; perhaps that’s why search engines place so much emphasis on it. On the web, over-optimization like this doesn’t appear naturally, unless an SEO deliberately puts it there. As this can influence rankings, Google typically takes steps to demote pages with over-optimized keywords.

It’s worth noting that as more people search by voice, content optimization includes optimizing for questions and natural language searches. That means some LSI keywords will be longer because people speak differently than they type. While we’re on the subject of mobile, mobile-friendliness is another major SEO ranking factor. More people use mobile devices than desktops to access the web, and that’s one reason there’ve been changes in how Google ranks search results. So before we get into the actual SEO ranking factors, let’s start by answering some basic questions most people have about SEO.

SEO involves researching search queries, creating helpful content, and optimizing the user experience to improve organic search rankings. As we have seen, back-end performance and TTFB directly correlate to search engine ranking. Front-end performance and metrics like “document loaded” and “fully rendered” show no correlation with search BHS Links engine rank.