Whether your focus is on local SEO or you are taking on the titans of your industry, you should not be ignoring Google Maps as an SEO tool. Consider the following statistic: Google Maps has over 154 million users. It easily owns the lion’s share of the navigation tools market.
And people are using Google Maps in an exciting new way: by using it to search for businesses, products and services. In a very real way, it is essentially becoming a secondary form of the regular Google search engine.
As such, you should be utilizing it to improve your SEO. In the following post we will be going over some tips for using Google Maps to drive more traffic to your website. But first let’s discuss why this is important.
Is Google Maps Important for SEO?
The short answer is absolutely; but let’s dive deeper. Whenever you use the term “near me” at the end of your Google search, there are three businesses that Google will index at the top of the results page. This is known as the local 3 pack and the local 3 pack owns 47% of all clicks on related searches.
Basically, you want to be in the local 3 pack because it will dramatically increase your rankings and click-through rates. And this is aside from people actually using the Google Maps app to look for businesses – which is something they are doing with ever-increasing frequency.
So if you want your business to be visible online, you have to be visible on Google Maps. This is why it’s so important for SEO.
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
If you aren’t already using Google Business Profile, make sure you remedy that right away. Then, consider ways you can optimize your listing to rank higher. Simple things like adding subcategories can help you appear on more searches.
For example, say you own a photography business. You can add subcategories like “christenings”, “graduations”, or “passport photos” to your profile to show up in more searches.
Structured Content
Structured content has coded data behind it. It’s readable for humans; but it has an attached string signal to communicate with Google web crawlers. Structured content makes it much easier for the web crawlers to find your website, figure out what it’s offering and display it to the user.
Having structured content on your website is especially helpful for Google Maps rankings because you can embed your map location in a short, sweet, rich snippet – something that Google has prioritized throughout the years.
NAP Accuracy
Lastly, we have a very simple tip for improving your actual Google Map Rankings: making sure your NAP information is accurate. NAP stands for name, business and phone number.
If you have multiple sites for multiple business locations, a Google Business Profile and tons of landing pages, you have to make sure that your NAP is consistent across all these signal points.
Why? Because Google will not index confusing, misleading, inaccurate or unclear listings. So while this is a simple tip, it is essential to your SEO. It is also a signaling factor that has persisted throughout the years and isn’t likely to go away any time soon.
Launched Digital Solutions can help you improve your rankings using proven tactics and professional insights.