Hyper Competitive Ranking In The Google Maps 3 Pack
Initially, this was going to be a higher level post that outlined a few product level things that we did to gain three pack rankings in an incredibly competitive SERP. Just now, as I began to type, I decided that you guys probably wanted some more substance, some more meat, and potatoes, if you will. I do not blog as often as I should, but when I do I like the content to be well received. Thus, I decided to really pull the curtain back and shed light on the finer details.
I do not want to get into ultra specific detail about some of the more preliminary tasks you need to complete to get your campaign started. Do not take this as meaning these things are unimportant, but there is already a bunch of great content pertaining to things likeย choosing your GMB categoriesย and determining if your listing is being filtered.ย I am also going to assume you took the liberty to at least peruse some of our GMB content on the site. If not check out hisย GMB Ranking Guide.
Highlights And Summary Of The Local SEO Case Study
- Niche: Personal Injury
- Search Volume for Main Term: 3900/mo
- Competition Level: High
- CPC: $116
- Achievement: GMB Ranking in Less than 6 Months
On-Page Optimization And Link Building Plan
LOCAL ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION
We put together a magnificent on page optimization guide on the Web20 blog that you can check out for a super deep dive, but in this post, I want to simply cover some of the main points that people forget about when optimizing their page.
This is the actual list we made a note of in the initial company workbook that houses all of the preliminary strategy and information for the campaign.
Local On Page Optimization |
Cora SEO Page Tuning: |
Page Title: |
Meta Description: |
H1: |
H2: |
H2/H3 GMB Categories: |
H3: |
Picture Alt Text: |
YouTube Video Embed (only if video is supplied) |
My Map Embed: |
Address Section: |
Hours and Local Phone Number: |
City, County, Region: |
Written Driving Directions: |
Local Outbound Links: |
Authority Directories |
Reviews: |
Inner Linking: |
Google+ Badge: |
JSON LD Schema: |
This is all pretty straightforward so I did not want to convolute the list with unnecessary notes that a lot of you wonโt need. If you do need some clarification on this table you can comment on this post or just tag us in the Local SEO Community Facebook group.
LOCAL LINK BUILDING STRATEGY
The second piece of this puzzle is setting up the linking strategy to get the most bang for your buck vis a vis GMB rankings. This is not your grandpappyโs link building. Check out the link scheme we laid out for this specific campaign.
You can see when we are linking to Yelp, Google sites, GMB posts, etc. to give you an idea of how we are using links to both directly link to our GMB and its many components and situations where we are creating a semantic web of association using links to show a relation between a series of branded and high authority properties.
Using this type of initial worksheet you can start the actual link building when you are ready. This is not rocket science and should not be treated as so. Do not overthink some of this stuff. Your sheet does not have to look the same as mine as long as you understand the underlying mechanics of what pushes rankings. Links and great on-page.
We are building links to different properties associated with our brand and we are working hard to not over optimize anything.
Optimizing Your GMB
GMB INFO
We always like to double check that the listing information is 100% correct. This includes checking the name to ensure accuracy with the commonly referred business name, checking the address for accuracy, checking the phone number, making sure that the website is the listed homepage or location page, checking hours, adding an appointment URL if available, and adding services if available.
GMB DESCRIPTION
Throwing a description together for the GMB is the first step. This is an opportune time to really express the principles of the company and slide in some โtop of siloโ keywords but not in a spammy way. You want to write this well. We make this around 750 characters.
GMB PHOTOS
We spent about twenty minutes going through the clientโs photos and optimizing them. If your GMB does not have any photos then pull some original photos off of their site and upload them. We like to have a nicely built out photo gallery on the GMB. We name the photo files variations of the targeted keywords and like to optimize the photo properties, including subject, tags, and comments. And for photo author, we use the location page URL of the website.
GMB POSTS
GMB WEBSITE
Watch How We Set Up A GMB Website
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Creating A Citation Building Blueprint
Citations and directory listings are foundational brand mentions that help establish entity recognition with Google. The more quality brand mentions that we can procure for a campaign the better the brandโs online prominence becomes, and online prominence is a key ranking factor for the local SERPs.
CITATION ANALYSIS
The second thing I always like to do when starting a campaign is a quick citation analysis where I reverse engineer potential link and citation opportunities from my clientโs competition.
We compiled a list of over 260 link opportunities from this activity and consolidated all of them into a sheet to be added to the citation building schedule. If you want to learn how to make your citations really count and outclass a majority of your competition then check out this post I made outlining theย Death of Local Citations.
In that post, I outline the importance and strategy behind getting your citations indexed, determining if a platform will even make for a quality citation, and even some beginner stuff like unstructured citations and creating a citation building plan. Itโs a solid read.
With that knowledge and the preliminary work done, we want to compile a list of the existing citations for the client as well as a workbook that lays out which citations we are going to build over the length of the campaign.
NATIONAL BUSINESS LISTINGS
You will notice a trend in this post as I post screenshots of our workbooks for this campaign. Almost all of the spreadsheets you see will begin with a sheet that outlines the company information, links to photos and logos, and other pertinent information to help the implementation teams focus on rapidly deploying properties while we focus on setups and quality control.
Below, I want to actually go through the specific citations built so you guys can get a deeper look at the campaign we ran.
The most important part of the essential citations is ensuring they get indexed by Google. We create a bunch of content so that each citation has a decent chunk of uniqueness. For higher competition queries we do 100% unique content and in many cases build a few tiers of links to the live accounts to try and influence the indexing rate.
GPS LISTINGS
GPS listings/citations are overlooked by way too many SEOs. They not only provide a citation for our backlinking efforts but they also serve as a resource for a lot of other technology that uses GPS companies to aggregate data.
That is something to consider when building any citation. As technology advances, engineers do not want to develop new search engines and databases of businesses because so many already exist. Why develop a new Yelp, YP, etc. when it has already been done? Instead, they will stand on the shoulders of giants and integrate with a platform and have their technology serve as a utility to parse, serve, or locate that data better or in a more unique way than the original platform. Think voice search, AI, behavioral results, etc.
Having your business listed as many places as possible is a way to hedge your bets that when the next voice search technology uses Yelps search results that you are there and optimized to be delivered.
SUPPORTING CITATIONS
I will break up that rant with a snapshot of a small group of supporting citations we built for month two of the campaign, and as we progress there will be more of these lists being built.
Building, Optimizing, And Boosting Social Foundations
This might seem extremely elementary, but make sure your social accounts are in place and optimized. It is easy to skip stuff like this because we are always looking for the tactics that give us the biggest noticeable gain in rankings.
As you can see from this report workbook itโs the same general idea. While this post is specific to ranking a GMB, the processes between organic rankings and GMB are symbiotic in nature. We want to have our foundational SEO complete and that includes pillowing links like these. People that neglect this type of branded link building (which also serves as entity recognition for the semantic web) and only rely on one or two link types are setting up a large footprint for their site in the long term. Just my opinion.
SOCIAL BOOSTING POWER-UP
Once that is done I like to make a sheet with all of the live links from these efforts and determine which URLs I will amplify with a second tier of links. SPOILER ALERT: Most of the time I choose web 2.0โs like WordPress and Blogspot. I also always include a Google Site. They are so powerful and can be used not only as a link source but as a high-quality parasite in the serps as well.
I like to use plenty of keyword variations to not over optimize for exact match terms, but at the same time I do want to influence what Google thinks this URL is about that contains my clientโs website links, GMB links, and embeds, etc. There is not a magic number we look for when doing our campaigns. You can point 5,10,20,100, etc. Just try and be somewhat responsible with your link building velocities. For this specific campaign, we pointed 20 links back to our wrappers for some of that tiered linking goodness.
Maps Citations
I like to build citations directly for the GMB listing as well, not just for the website. We are using Google maps to create unstructured citations to the actual GMB instead of to the site.
As you can see its a simple placement linking to the actual GMB itself. We have a snippet of content and very basic images. The idea is not to create a tier one link with a large amount of time invested in building it. We build between 150-200 of these โmaps citationsโ and collect the data in a spreadsheet.
For this specific campaign, we ended up building 172 live maps citations. I now have the ability to build additional tiers behind these citations and push additional links and authority through to the GMB listing if I wish to do so.
Geo-Relevant Networks Of POWER!
The next strategy I want to talk about is one of my favorites. A few years ago I talked about doing a better job of localizing links that you build for local campaigns. This was a simple idea back then, simply adding some local themed content to web 2.0s with the NAP of the client site somewhere on the page.
These days the concept has evolved into something a lot more sophisticated and even more powerful. We are now building complete Geo-Networks out for our local campaigns and the results have been awesome.
If you want more information on the geo-network phenomenon then check out this post I made called โNIche Relevance is Deadโ. I know it is a bit clickbait-ish but I wanted to cause an urgency for SEOโs to stop only focusing on niche relevance and understand there are other metrics that can make a link more powerful in the eyes of Google, and one of them is geographical relevance.
For this specific campaign, we created a faux legal association in the area that our client site is in. We set up a workbook to keep track of the details we made for the association and then we started creating accounts under the fictitious brand name that we just invented.
Driving directions are a simple way to procure an unstructured citation, which of course comes with a link to the Google maps places listing, and another item to boost the geo-relevance for your GMB campaign.
A lot of people also do not take into consideration the proximity factor when performing their optimization. Google wants to serve results based on the actual location of the user performing the search. No more of this โcenter of the cityโ being the best guidelines, necessarily.
We are getting into the world of local SEO theory at this point but I wanted to test the potential to manipulate the proximity factor by adding driving directions and other items that connect places from around an area to my clientโs site and GMB. While we lack empirical data I do believe we are onto something.
Just to recap what the process looks like for the geo-network:
Create a local faux association or brand
Create a bunch of social accounts and web2.0s that represent that fictitious brand
Add local specific content to continue with the local theme
Add some links and driving directions that link to your site and GMB
Boost tiers as you desire
Okay, now that we wrapped that up, letโs continue on.
More Maps Stuff, My Maps Stuff
I saved this one for further down because a lot of people use these and it is by no means a โnewโ strategy to use for organic or GMB rankings. Without further ado, we want to build out an authoritative-looking My Map and optimize the heck out of it.
Creating a well-optimized My Map is a fairly simple process. I like to ensure they have a decent chunk of content, at least 500 words, and make sure to add in your LSI keywords, and in this case the different areas of law they practice.
Once the content is done we are of course going to add our NAP. That is one thing I stress a lot for local link building, always take every opportunity that you can to create an unstructured citation. The more we do that the more it shows Google that a real entity exists at that address.
Our team adds 5-10 driving directions from around the city to our clientโs address, again, for the proximity effect, it might have on rankings when people search from various parts of the city.
Once done with the MyMap we start embedding it in a bunch of 2.0s. We then also add those embeds into a reporting spreadsheet as well and link build to those for a third tier. If we are going to spend the time to add a second tier I more times than not will add a third just to increase indexation rather than just to push more link juice, although that doesnโt hurt.
Brand Pillowing Links
I used to use these a lot more in campaigns but I have dialed back their use a bit and concentrated on powering up the ones I do build and making sure they are indexed. Here are the ones we built for this campaign.
We are sending links to different properties and URLs. There are multiple Maps and GMB Posts that we are pushing some juice to as well as the GMB website that we created earlier.
Again, like all of the local link building we are doing, I want to add as many local elements as possible to each of these platforms as possible when building backlinks on them. NAP, embeds, etc. We also want to make sure the page is built out with unique content (we do 500 words for each page) logo, images, videos, etc.
Once this is done we compile all of the URLs into a sheet so we can run them through indexing and keep for tiered link building as well. We then built around 1100 links broken into three tiers and to power up our brand links.
Press Releases
There has been so much chatter about these recently in the groups that I am a part of. Then again, there has always been a lot of talk about PRs, for the past handful of years. People always want to know โif they workโ. The short answer, in the local SERPs, they can still do a lot of damage.
You can use a press release as a standalone strategy to rank low and mid comp GMBs at the moment. Is it going to work every time? Nah. Should you be using press releases as a standalone SEO strategy? No, probably not.
Having said that, we have some really great content about linking from and structuring your press release for maximum benefit. Stuff like positioning your keyword in the title with the brand to build co-occurrence, embedding maps, etc. Here is a killer guide for usingย press releases as part of your SEO strategy.
We did indeed run a press release in the infancy of this campaign and linked out to the client site and embedded a map.ย
See How Our Affordable Local Press Release Compares
The End Of Our Odyssey, The Beginning Of Your GMB Epic
Thanks for taking the time to read through this post. I apologize about the blurring and pixelation but the anonymity of our clients is essential to us. I am not going to recap because this was a monster case study, but I really wanted to peel back the curtains and show you guys what a successful campaign looks like here at Web20.
A few parting wordsโฆ
Do not overcomplicate this stuff. It is not rocket science. Do not stress every single detail of this post and think that without it you will not rank. I implore you to incorporate as much of this as possible for optimum success but do not think if you build your anchor text differently or skip some of this stuff that you are doomed to never rank. It just is not going to work like that.
Create holistic campaigns. One of the biggest mistakes I see is people doing one thing at a time and hoping that it is the golden ticket to their rankings. SEO in general just does not work like that anymore. Do your on-page, optimize your GMB, and then hit the ground running instead of heading for the hills. Create a consistent schedule for implementation and create benchmarks in periods of 60-90+ days.
You can still get quick wins, but productize and scale your process instead of doing one link or one tactic at a time and then spending the next 2-3 weeks watching the rank tracker.
Thanks again for reading and please let me know here or in the LCT Facebook group if you have any questions.
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