How Can I Get My Business Found In Google Maps?
Posted by Jim Mueller on Sat, Aug 14, 2010 @ 11:46 AM
Hi! Today, I want to talk about how do you get ranks in Google Maps? So let's go to Google Maps on a local search so I did a search for dentist. Google is smart enough to know that that's probably a local intent search. I don't really want to find a dentist in another city. It knows my IP address so it matches up with Denver. So here is the Google Maps, we call it the seven packs, so seven results and this usually show up in position number four on the Google search results. And basically, Google maps and who shows up here in what order has a whole different algorithm and rules than the regular organic SEO results, the top ten.
So one of the big factors is web citation and a web citation is an equivalent of a link in a regular, organic SEO world. A web citation is an equivalent of a link for local rankings. An example of a web citation is anywhere your company name, address and phone numbers are found on a credible source in the internet. I'll show you an example. Here's yellowpages.com. There's literally hundreds of these directories Local.com, other Google places, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, City Search, it goes on and on. So we search for a dentist here in yellowpages.com and we find these listings. I'll go down here to one of non-paid ones. When I click on that, you see the dentist's name which is his company name, the address and the phone number that they're considered a web citation from a credible source yellowpage.com. You can also put a lot more information about your services.
You can get reviews on your service. Reviews are a big help as well so if you notice back on the search result, you'll notice that these are reviews over here. When I click on those, it will take me to the reviews. So the number of reviews you have also contributes to the rankings here. One other thing to notice with regards to these directories, quantity definitely helps. The more places you'd be found, the more web citation Google finds, the better. But Google will score you on the accuracy of these web citations with regard to your address and phone number and information. Also the consistency from directory to directory, the more consistent they see the information, the higher your score and you also need to renew some of these on an annual basis.
The other factor is how close is your company zip code address to the zip code that is being searched for. And lastly, putting your address on your website is important, especially your home page. Put your address and your phone numbers maybe in the footer or somewhere else in the page and it's good to have that on any page if you want it ranks locally for that phrase. This is by far not a comprehensive, by no means not a comprehensive list of things in their algorithm but these are some of the big ones that you can focus on and should help you get found on Google Maps.