The Exact Changes We Made to Unfilter a 'Stuck' GMB Listing

In this post, I want to outline a few challenges that were facing a locksmith client of ours and how we overcame them. We all know the locksmith space can be especially tedious from a GMB perspective. Verification aside, even legitimate listings can suspend any time and cause you to have to re-verify with Google and go through their painful support process. Even after the hundreds of listings, we have done this still makes us nervous, just a bit.

Issue numero uno is the situation we had with this client specifically. He had two verified GMBs in the city that were filtered. HIs organic visibility was low as well. This turned into a three-part mission.

Pull the GMBs out of the filter that was keeping the listings in limbo and not eligible to show up in the three pack
Once the GMBs were not being filtered we needed to rank them for commercial queries that were going to generate profitable calls.
Last, but certainly not least, we need to increase their organic visibility.

Here are our results after approximately two months

GMB #1

GMB #2

We are all excited about the progress that we have made within the first two months of this campaign. The client is also extremely happy because these rankings translated into a really impressive increase in phone calls.

I understand this could be confusing because at this point you are seeing two different rank trackers for GMBs and also two different trackers for the SEO as well. At the maturation of this campaign, there could potentially be four and let me explain how we fixed this campaign up and how this strategy is completely destroying local markets, right now.

Identifying and Fixing Underlying Issues

Local Cannibalization

There were a few problems with the campaign that needed our attention. Remember at the beginning of the post I said that we were dealing with filtering issues? Well, we solved this and these problems are plaguing more service-based businesses than you would believe.

As Google increases its crusade to always serve the best, most relevant content to its users, we are seeing that by catering to its hyperlocal proximity is rewarding us with rankings and phone calls alike.

When we took over this client the pages on the site looked like this:

domain.com/locksmith-north-cityname

domain.com/locksmith-south-cityname

domain.com/locksmith-east-cityname

domain.com/locksmith-west-cityname

The city was broken into four sections, north, south, east, and west. Each of these had their own GMB which was linked to its respective page. Google hated this setup.

We consolidated the linking to the main city page. Yes, we pointed all of the location-specific GMBs to one page instead of having them linked to the pages from above. We did keep and optimize the existing city pages but we linked them back to the main city page. The on-page was done in the most meticulous way because we want to keep the juice from those other pages and the geo-relevance it carries but we want to fix the cannibalization issues not create new ones.

In cases like this, we need to take every precaution so Google knows each of these pages are necessary and serving a very important purpose, even after linking them to main city page and re-routing the GMBs. If we do not indicate that these pages being broken up are conducive with a better user experience for their users then we are going to start having cannibalization issues and our rankings could potentially suffer because of this.

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The Technical Details of the GMB Listings

Live and Die by the Radii

Okay, that was corny, but your service area radius can completely filter your rankings if they are not done correctly.

Because there was multiple service based GMBs in the city the service radii from the different listings were overlapping. This might not seem like a big deal but we have found it to cause issues with filtering more often than naught. We mitigated this by manually inputting the zip codes that each listing served.

We have found this to be an important ingredient for the antidote that helps unstick GMBs.

This has been haunting a lot of businesses especially with the ease of GMB verifications. A lot of service-based businesses want to hyper-target suburbs with lead gen GMBs and they end up creating clusters of GMB with overlapping service areas. We see this more often than one would think.

GMB Multi Location Nomenclature 101

I am going to include two helpful points in this section. One can be somewhat subjective because it is near impossible to measure. The other’s effectiveness is simple to quantify and it is even celebrated as a known ranking technique.

Anytime we deal with multi-location GMBs we add the geo to the business name. We are not necessarily being spammy about it as there are a lot of situations in which it would make sense to differentiate offices from one another. It can help make for an ideal user experience.

I changed the name as a joke, but if I did run a multi-location male modeling service then I would want callers and web users to understand what location they are calling. Also, having the keyword, city, or a combination of those things in the name of the GMB definitely provides a rank boost. How big of a ranking factor it truly is can be a point of contention among local SEOs, but there is a lot of data out there, including our own internal testing that shows this makes a bigger difference than one might think.

The other factor at play here is one we can pull from Google patents itself. Patents are a great place to extract theory and then test or correlate results you experienced to potential points in the documents that Google filed.

Here is a Google Patent that describes some of the protocol that is or could be used in different local queries. The line I want to direct everyone’s attention to is the one that reads,

“If multiple listings having a same business name are identified, a total number of listings having the same business name may be identified (block 530). Next, a webscore for each listing may be determined the manner set forth above in FIG. 4 (block 540). An adjusted webscore may then be determined based on the number of listings having the same business name (block 540). In one implementation consistent with principles of the invention, the webscore for each business listing may be 1/x of the raw webscore determined in block 540, where x is the number of business listings having the same business name. For example, for a given local search, McDonald’s may have 10 listings within the broad geographic area associated with the search. Each McDonald’s listing may have a webscore of 2,200,000. In accordance with the present embodiment, this raw webscore for each listing may be reduced to 2,200,000/10=220,000.”

This alludes to the fact that if you have multiple locations with the identical brand name then you could be diluting your webscore. Under this theory, very large brands would tend to be less affected because the totality of brand mentions to be shared amongst all the locations would be quite large, whereas smaller brands, especially ones with locations having very limited optimization and branding would quickly pull down the average webscore. The document does go on to explain that additional metrics can be used but that is important enough for me to want to share in this situation.

Big Brand, Baby!

We are preparing aftercare plans for our campaigns, an all-around knowledge base to help people bolster their campaigns. This will be laid out in much more detail there or even in a future entity building post, but taking the necessary steps to establish yourself as a real brand in the eyes of Google is the key to long term success in the SERPs.

This includes things like Wikipedia pages, Dun and Bradstreet listings, Better Business Bureau profiles, etc. GPS and In-Dash navigation system submissions which not only get you backlinks but having your business data accessible to GPS software like TomTom, Magellan, etc. increases the probability of you providing a better customer journey.

Do not forget schema and potentially taking your schema to the next level and adding objects like EIN#, founders, c-level executives, etc. These are the type of optimization activities that will pop knowledge graphs, increase brand authority, and help push local rankings.

We threw everything we could at this client minus a Wikipedia page. The team followed our GMB ranking guide to the word as far as the links we built and the optimization we did, with the addition of a few new tactics and the removal of a few as well. Stay tuned for our updated guide, coming soon.

Optimize that Darn GMB

This might seem like a lackluster conclusion as the un-filtering is what many of you probably came to check out. It is cool stuff and I hope it helps but one of the biggest mistakes I see marketers making far too often is looking for the magic bean that will sprout the beanstalk they hope will propel their rankings up the SERPs.

Sometimes in the search for hacks and magic buttons, we forget the basics. Making sure your descriptions are built out, the categories are correct, the GMB is complete, etc. is imperative. Always start with the basics and work up from there.

This includes things like GMB posting, setting yourself up to get some reviews (keyword rich reviews are moving some needles at the moment), adding and optimizing images, etc.