The Exact Changes We Made To Unfilter A 'Stuck' GMB Listing
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
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.
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.