Google Maps is an extremely useful tool for reeling in more traffic to your website, because if you do your SEO right for GMs, you’ll be ranking much higher on the search engine results pages.

Being a local business owner, have you tapped into the power of Google Maps SEO to bring in consistent traffic to your website? Have you been able to achieve higher rankings and promote your business better through Google Maps? If you’re not already doing all this, you’ll be choking on your competitor’s dust soon.

In 2018 especially, ranking high on Google Maps has become critical to getting high search engine rankings and increased website traffic. Here are a few ranking factors to consider:

VERIFY YOUR ‘GOOGLE MY BUSINESS’ INFORMATION
You need to tell Google what it needs to know about your business, so that it can display all the required business listing information correctly. Your listing needs to be 100% accurate and complete – here’s what you need to look into:

Contact info and business website; mention all contact information which includes your physical address, business telephone numbers and the website URL. In addition, Google is quick to discredit businesses which have several phone numbers or locations for just one business. Weed out all duplicate information and ensure that the contact and address info is accurate.

Business hours; when people are trying to find you on the web, Google Maps tells them if your business is currently open or closed, or if it’s going to open or close soon. By adding business hours, you are encouraging more people to use your services, thereby increasing traffic and also influencing your Google Maps ranking positively.

CATEGORISE YOUR BUSINESS
When you’re creating a Google Maps listing, you can choose your primary industry category or keyword which accurately describes your business.

You can actually add as many as five categories, and by all means, you should take advantage of this. Naturally, your primary category is going to be how your business is generally classified – e.g. realtor, restaurant or manufacturing. The remaining five categories can be completed using local SEO keywords which will play the role of additional descriptors; for instance – Edinburgh realtor or London restaurant.

ALWAYS USE A LOCAL TELEPHONE NUMBER
Fact: Google does not have much of an affinity for toll-free numbers as these are often used for spamming purposes by some parties, unfortunately. On the other hand, local numbers let Google know that you are a real, brick-and-mortar business in the area.

So use a local telephone number along with an area code to match your respective location. However, if you must have a toll-free number, then mention one on your website.

GET GOOGLE REVIEWS
Reviews add an additional layer of trustworthiness to a business – Google will always rank businesses with good reviews higher on Google Maps.

Simply copy your Google review link, then go to Google map listing and click on “more information”; copy the link you find there; share it over all your social media channels so that people can start giving you reviews.

It would be wise to initially ask trusted and loyal customers to write reviews for you – those positive reviews can instantly add fire to your Google Map rankings.

FINAL THOUGHTS
The suggestions above are just the tip of the iceberg.

To learn much, much more about SEO ranking factors for Google Maps and how they can boost search engine rankings as well as website traffic, get in touch with one of our digital marketing consultants.