How To Rank Higher On Google Maps: 3X Customer Calls

Did you know that 76% of people who perform a local search contact a business within 24 hours? Not only is that crazy, what’s more insane is 28% of those searches result in a sale.

With 154.4 million people using this search tool, learning how to rank higher on Google Maps can be the most profitable investment you make all year.

It’s time to start increasing your local presence to get hot customers putting your inventory out of stock.

What Is Google Maps?

Google Maps is a service offered by Google that’s primarily used to give directions to users.

By simply typing in the name of the business they are looking for, or a type of business like “gas station” or “restaurant”, people get turn-by-turn directions to their destination.

Google Maps is more than a navigation tool, however. Big business can be won from ranking at the top of these results. It’s high competition for this very reason.

With its own algorithm that determines search result rankings, Google will showcase a 3-pack of three local companies that match the search.

Let’s learn more about the 3-Pack.

What Is The Maps 3-Pack?

After a keyword is searched on Google, three local businesses will show up in the Maps section, and are named the 3-Pack. The rest of the results only appear when a user clicks “More places”, which is shown below.

Just three companies is an insanely small number when you think about how many businesses exist.

With Google giving special treatment to these three companies, it’s clear that they’re being shown off as the three best options in the searcher’s local area.

And when you realize that every search is a potential prospect, then these top three businesses are getting the super majority of calls and sales by ranking first, second, or third on Google Maps.

Because the competition is fierce, your online presence has to be flawless to have a chance of ranking in the Google Maps 3-Pack.

How Does Google Maps Differ From Search?

For one, a Google search produces 10 organic results and only three map results, if any map results (sometimes the 3-Pack doesn’t show at all), per search.

That’s more than three times the amount of search results compared to map results.

Because of this, business owners need to put a little extra effort into ranking first in Google Maps.

Then there’s the fact that Google Maps considers your business location when displaying results more so than Google Search.

Local customers are only going to see businesses in a near vicinity of them in Maps. Whereas Search offers a variety of options – mostly based on content relevance and backlinks – although some businesses could be a few hours or time zones away from you.

Another difference is the Google Maps listings show the number and ratings of customer reviews, and Search does not.

While there are subtle differences, optimizing your site is largely the same for both. So the good news is, each advancement you make in Google Maps only helps you in Google Search, and vice versa.

What A Top Ranking Does For Business Growth

Businesses who invest their resources into ranking high on Google Maps never regret it.

The payoff looks like this. Before you were desperately waiting for the phone to ring. Now you’re having a hard time answering every call because you’re getting bombarded with new sales opportunities.

You’re used to getting hassled on prices. Then you’re getting asked how much inventory do you have because the customer wants to buy 50 products before the weekend.

This in turn allows you to grow your business by leaps and bounds after having the cash flow to:

• Invest in a better POS system
• Hire more employees
• Expand to another location
• Pay yourself more profits
• Advertise to accumulate even more market share
• Redecorate your space

Now you can see why we spend so much time improving our ranks on search engines. The results are too good to pass up on.

Let’s talk about how to rank higher on Google Maps.

Rank Higher In Google Maps

Do the following to help your business climb to the top in your local city’s search rankings.

1. Create A Google My Business Page

Before you can even think about Google Maps, you need to complete a Google My Business Page.

At this point, having a Google My Business profile really isn’t optional. Because nothing is more frustrating than when you search for a business name and a profile does not show up.

This forces potential customers to dig for information and you’ve pissed them off.

Instead, creating a Google My Business profile will help you create the easiest experience for your consumers.

Google also likes it when you use their services. Creating a Google My Business page is only smart in your efforts to rank higher in search. It will also provide Google Maps with the information they need to know about your business.

To do this effectively, you need to make sure that your profile is completed with the most updated information about your business. We have created a guide to make sure that you fully complete your profile.

According to Google, here is what you need to do when you create your profile:

• Enter complete data: businesses with the most relevant results have a better chance at getting in the 3-pack. Having accurate and updated information will benefit your business and get you the rank you want.
• Verify location(s): Claiming your business on Google will give you the power to manage it. Claiming your business essentially means that you take ownership of your Google My Business profile.
• Manage and respond to reviews: interacting with customers, both negative and positive, will improve your business visibility.

2. Build Citations

For your business to thrive in any sense, you need to always be expanding your reach.

People can’t engage with you if they don’t know you exist.

Building citations will help expand the reach of your business and increase your ranking on Google Maps.

A citation is essentially a record that gets shared around the internet of your business name, address, phone number and URL.

Besides your Google listing, citations are another way that Google is able to verify your location.

To gain authority, distribute your citation to as many places as possible. Here’s a local business directories list to get started.

Also make sure that the places you distribute your citations to actually make sense for your business.

Directories that are specific to your area or niche are good examples to focus on. Don’t be weird and get your software company a citation on a local manual labor site. (Click here for better ways to advertise your SaaS startup.)

3. Check Your Google My Business Category

When you create a Google My Business profile, you are given an option to select a category that best describes your business.

You have the option to choose a primary category and multiple additional categories. Do both!

Your primary category should be the one that best represents your business.

If you’re struggling to find the best category to choose, some research can help. Google search the business names of your local competition one by one, then look on the right panel to see what category they’ve selected.

Once choosing your primary category, then add additional categories that represent what your business does to a lesser degree.

Google Maps will weigh your categories when pulling for search results. Best to give yourself all the opportunities you can.

4. Optimize Your Homepage

If you don’t have a website, then you’re not serving your customers as well as competitor’s with one. Google sees that and won’t rank you as high.

Also, the algorithm sees how you typically rank with local searches on Google Search and uses that to determine where you should rank on Google Maps.

To help your website generate traffic from both fronts, focus on this:

• Title Tag: When you publish your website, your homepage has a meta tag that defines the home page. This tag should include your business name, your location and your business category. Including these elements will increase your chances of ranking high on Google Maps.
• Description: Your homepage also has a meta description (like what there is for blog posts) that describes your homepage. This description should include the same information that was included in your title tag.
• The content of your homepage: Your homepage should also include your business name, location and category. Not only does this help with your ranking on Google Maps but it also serves as information for people who are unfamiliar with your business

To rank in the 3-Pack and have customers love your brand, you need to optimize your website. If you aren’t sure how to do this, our website designers can help.

5. Increase Social Signals

Google sees social signals as an indicator that your business has a wide reach and is well known by others. Social signals are the likes, shares, comments, etc. your website generates.

When people know who you are and engage with your business online, Google sees your business as one they should be recommending to their users.

On top of this, you should add links to your website home page or new content on your social media profiles. This will return more traffic and increase your social signals. website.

Any ad you run is also considered when Google looks at your social signals. Start running ads and use CTA psychology to drive new hits to your site.

6. Guest Posts

Backlinks from other sites are the number one ranking factor for any rankings, local or global.

Writing a guest post, still to this day, is a surefire way to acquire backlinks from other sites to your company site. Guest posts are still one of our top tips for how to get backlinks.

Pro tip: Do some research on websites that are relevant to your industry and your location. Reach out to this website to pitch a topic that is beneficial to them—you have to provide value or they’ll see right through your attempt— and if accepted, write fantastic copy that encourages engagement.

When you write the post, you control the backlinks and can add a regional qualifier, like a city name, to your main keyword phrase. That’s like steroids to your Google Maps rankings!

Read this to truly get the secret on how to rank on Google for specific keywords.

7. Get More Reviews

Getting in the 3-Pack is only half the battle.

Staying there and being the most appealing of the three businesses is what really matters.

You can be in the top three but if no one chooses to look at your business, then it doesn’t really matter that you were there in the first place.

Since Google Maps considers click through rates as a ranking factor, if clicks are going to the other two in the 3-Pack, you’re going to soon lose your spot.

To combat that and be more appealing to searchers, increase the total and quality of your Google reviews. Each business in the 3-Pack will have a name, hours of operation, address. But the reviews will vary and are your opportunity to separate from the group.

Reviews are so important that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Get these going and your rankings will improve. This is one of the tactics to guarantee first page Google results.

8. Add Photos To Your Map Listing

Surprising to many business owners, Google believes you do not have a complete GMB profile if you don’t have pictures uploaded.

For your customers, it’s hard to trust the validity of a business if there are no pictures for any reference.

Not only do you need pictures, you should get your photos professionally done.

Posting low-quality photos on your Google My Business is almost as bad as having no photos at all. Low-quality photos do you no justice.

When you get the photos done, have the photographer take pictures of what your business looks like during normal operating hours.

The more authentic the pictures are to what the experience for the customer will actually be like, the better.

Users can scroll through the pictures on your profile to determine if they want to choose to go to your business or another business.

Make your photos so good that the user doesn’t want to even consider the other 2 businesses that came up in the search.

9. Embed Your Google Map On Your Website

Next, put your Google My Business in your website footer or contact page. This is an easy task so there is no reason to not embed your map on your website.

Doing this improves your local SEO and helps users find your business, especially important if you’re a retail or B2C business.

Before you embed your Google Maps make sure that your profile is complete on Google My Business. You’ll want your address to be the same on Google My Business as it is on your website for consistency.

To embed your Google Map on your website:

1. Search for your business in Google Maps.
2. With your page up, click the share option and embed a map.
3. Paste the link to where you want the map to be on your website—for most, we recommend the contact page.

10. Check For Google Map Criteria

Google Map has three criteria that they that they use to determine local rankings.

The first criteria is relevance.

Having complete and detailed business information on your profile is vital.

Google uses this information to match you with as many relevant searches as possible.

Having complete information that is consistent everywhere you have information about your business will limit any guessing that Google has to do to figure out when to display your business with a search.

The second factor is distance.

This is not something you have a lot of control over because you can’t completely uproot a business to fit a specific search.

Google considers how far you are from what is searched because they want to provide results that are accessible to the user.

If you don’t have an accurate location, then you might not show up in any searches at all or the searches you show up in will not actually be relevant.

The final criteria is prominence.

How well known your business is effects where you’re ranked.

Remember when we talked about how reviews matter? This is where that comes in.

Businesses with no reviews are not going to get a high ranking because Google won’t see them as a prominent business.

Keeping up with your reach and SEO efforts is going to be what helps you increase your prominence and improves your ranking.

Check these three criteria if you aren’t ranking where you think you should be.

Conclusion

Google Maps is a tricky beast to conquer. But we promise the work is worth the reward.

We have found success with these suggestions for our customers and ourselves. That’s why we’re confident you too will succeed when you stick to it.

If you don’t have the time to execute this, consider working with our SEO experts who will happily improve your Google rankings for you.

What have you found is most successful in improving your local search rankings?