What are tips for ranking on Google Maps?
-
I have another thread going where everyone is saying to keep both the Places profile as well as the Google Plus Local profile I have for my company. I have another person telling me that it has a negative effect to have both accounts at the same time so I'm assuming thats why the listing never comes up on places unless you zoom all the way into the map to the address of the storefront.
With that being said, can anyone provide some good tips for ranking first page on google maps?
Goole Plus Local - https://plus.google.com/114370561649922317296/about?gl=us&hl=en
Google Places - https://plus.google.com/103220086647895058915/about?gl=us&hl=en
-
Hi Jonathon, David Mihm's study has stood the test of time, and in many ways is still relevant today
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
Best,
Todd -
Hi Jonathan,
Would you like to link to your other thread? I'd be interested to see it. In the meantime, Google's Local algo has several hundred factors involved. Some of the most important of these are:
1. The business having a physical location in the city it's trying to rank for
2. The consistency of NAP across the Internet
3. Compliance with all Google Places Quality Guidelines (i.e. a lack of guideline violations)
4. The authority of the website
5. Proper choice of categories
6. The quality and quantity of citations
7. The number of Google-based reviews of the business
This is a start. For more information on this subject, I highly recommend that you study the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors report. *Note, several big changes have happened since this was published but most of the data is still completely accurate:
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dramatic drop in SEO rankings after recovering from hacking
A few months ago my client's website was hacked which created over 20,000+ spammy links on the site. I dealt with removing the malware and got google to remove the malware warning shortly within a week of the hacking. Then started the long process to do 301 redirects and disavowing links under Webmaster tools over these few months. The hacking only caused a slight drop in rankings at the time. Now just as of last week the site had a dramatic drop in rankings. When doing a keyword search I noticed the homepage doesn't even get listed on Google Maps and for Google Search instead the inner pages like the Contact Us page show up instead of the homepage. Does anyone have any insight to the sudden drop happening now and why the inner pages are ranking higher than the homepage now?
Algorithm Updates | | FPK0 -
Google Open Graph
Hi I wanted to find out what makes Google select a site to show the answer to a question you type in search? For example, typing What is COSHH, brings up this site http://rospaworkplacesafety.com/2013/01/08/what-is-coshh-about-coshh/ and this answer top of Google SERPs. COSHH stands for 'Control of Substances Hazardous to Health' and under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, employers need to either prevent or reduce their workers' exposure to substances that are hazardous to their health.8 Jan 2013 Is it their open graph mark up only? Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Why Is The Wrong Page Ranking?
In the past two weeks, I've seen some movement in ranking for "Tampa Personal Injury Attorney." The problem is that this page: http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury/ is the one that's ranking and not this page: http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ which is the one I've been working on. Also, the former page has made it to page 4 (not great) but better than 7, which is what the latter page was. In addition, the latter page now doesn't rank at all (or at least not in the first 16 pages). Finally, according to Moz, the latter page (the one that no longer ranks) is my second best page after my homepage. I just don't understand this at all. Is this a fluke? Should I just try to work on the page that's ranking higher over the page I've put the time into? Thanks, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
When did Google include display results per page into their ranking algorithm?
It looks like the change took place approx. 1-2 weeks ago. Example: A search for "business credit cards" with search settings at "never show instant results" and "50 results per page", the SERP has a total of 5 different domains in the top 10 (4 domains have multiple results). With the slider set at "10 results per page", there are 9 different domains with only 1 having multiple results. I haven't seen any mention of this change, did I just miss it? Are they becoming that blatant about forcing as many page views as possible for the sake of serving more ads?
Algorithm Updates | | BrianCC0 -
My google ranking is coming up but not so much with yahoo and bing. Could someone give me some advice?
I know that no question is supposed to be a dumb questions so I am going to go for it... Our keyword ranking on google for one of our companies capitol collision is getting better all the time but the same can't be said for yahoo or bing. Could you please offer some advice on how to improve this as well? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | allstatetransmission0 -
Lesser visited, but highly ranked landing paged dropped in rank on Google. Time for a content update?
I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week. This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell. The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side. Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one. This is a first for me. Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms. Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up? I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.
Algorithm Updates | | Ticket_King0 -
Working in the world of Google Farmer Update
So I know have seen how my websites have taken a nose dive from the google farmer update most likely with traffic significantly hit. Example site is callcatalog.com. What recommendations are there to deal with the new world order? How can we look at optimizing, changing, modifying our process to improve rankings and traffic?
Algorithm Updates | | seo_ploom0