Over the last six weeks. I’ve been watching my own Google My Business listing climb the rankings, and I feel like there are finally enough top three rankings for certain keywords that it was worthy to write this case study.
So keep reading as I’m going to give you the lowdown step-by-step of exactly what I did to achieve these rankings and how to optimize Google My Business.
Keep in mind I purchased the domain on August 16th!
Step 1: Complete The Listing
Optimizing your GMB is an important part of any digital marketing plan. The first thing that you need to do is complete your listing. You should fill this out completely and take advantage of any area that is available to you as some industries will have certain features that are not available to others. Things like:
- your hours
- your website
- your phone number
- the description.
Make sure that when you write the description you are letting Google know what your business does and what you’re trying to rank for. It helps to do a little bit of keyword research here.
Basically, you want to head to the info tab and make sure that everything is correct for your listing:
- your address
- your service areas
- any special hours you might have
- products available
- services offered
- any attributes that are available that apply you should select those as well
Also, you want to make sure that you choose the right category as this is one of the most important factors in ranking your GMB.
Finally, in the title of your business, you may want to add a descriptor separated from the main title of your business with a hyphen or a bar to drop even more hints to Google of what you are trying to rank for. I saw some great results with this around the third or fourth week.
Step 2: Add Photos
The next thing I did was add photos and it doesn’t even take a lot of photos.
I’ve got about 12 up right now. But the cool thing about photos is you can edit the Exif data. You want to make sure that your NAP information is in there, otherwise known as your name, address and phone number. And any keywords that you are trying to rank for as well and variations of those keywords.
You want to try to add photos on a regular basis, so try to do this once a month or so. Or if you’re competitors are adding them more frequently then you should aim to try to do them better.
Step 3: Add Posts
As you are adding photos you want to try to post on your GMB once a week as each post will stay live for about a week.
I didn’t quite do this weekly but I have about five posts up. I don’t think they are as important as some of the other items on this list.
However, these posts could be informational to your audience, they could be special offers that you have going on just something that will catch the attention of someone who’s searching for your type of business and makes them want to click on your listing.
Step 4: Q & A
As you are adding photos and posts, another thing that you can do is add your own questions and answers.
Google actually encourages this, think of it as building out your own FAQ like on your website but on your GMB listing.
To do this you need to head to the knowledge panel from search so you can see the question button and as you’re logged in with the email that manages the GMB, you can ask and answer your own questions and it’ll tell the users that the owner published them.
This is a great way to add even more context for Google about what your business does and what you’re trying to rank for. It’s also a great way to inform potential customers more about how your business operates and might help to establish a little more trust before they even give you a call or visit your website.
Step 5: Authority Map w/Syndicated Press Release
While I was working on the other three steps, I was also working on building out an authority map with batch geo in the background. Along with a syndicated press release. Some people may say press releases don’t work anymore, but as I’m about to show you I really feel like this is one of the main things that helped me rank quickly.
As you can see I got links from several high domain authority websites not only to my own website but also to my GMB listing. This press release gave me an instant boost in my UR ranking from Ahref’s. And my GMB rankings have started climbing as well.
Results: Multiple Top 3 Listing In the Local Pack
The results speak for themselves, as you can see from this screenshot there are several keywords that are in the top three local pack and organic listings for my website are climbing the SERPs as well.
Keep in mind proximity is also a huge factor in ranking so when I’m in the office, I’ll show up as number one or two but as I get further away, I might drop down to two or three and then if I get far enough away, I’ll be down to four, five or six.
There has been a huge jump in impressions and clicks to my website as well.
Conclusion
I’m pretty happy with this as it is a great start, especially considering that this was a brand new website as you can see. A little less than two months later, I’m already ranking for several keywords. In the next 6-8 weeks I hope to have even more top 3 rankings.
Just imagine what you could do with a website and GMB listing that has a couple of years of trust built up with Google.
I hope this case study inspired you to take action on your own listing. If any of these ideas help your rankings or impressions go up. Please feel free to let me know in the comments below how it worked out for you.