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Recipe To Ranking Your Google MyBusiness Listing Better

Regarding how we improve the ranking for your Google MyBusiness listing (GMB), we have written down our way for optimizing each factor listed in below.

Google My Business Signals – 25.12% Important

Google MyBusiness signals are things like: Searcher-Business Distance – the closer the user is to a business listing, the higher the business listing will rank

Keyword in GMB Business Title – if your business listing title contains the search phrase that the person is using, then you will show up higher

Location Keyword in GMB Business Title – if a person searches for “Vancouver plumber”, and your listing has this phrase, then you listing will show up highr.

Google MyBusiness Listing Category – if a person is searching for a plumber, but your business category is HVAC, then your Google MyBusiness listing will not show up as high.

Even though the address of your office address strongly determines the proximity of the searcher, but there are still ways around it.

For example, in the reviews, we can ask your clients to use specific keywords such as “Burnaby painters,” “Coquitlam painters,” etc. so that you can rank for those keywords as well even though your office address is in Vancouver.

Here’s are two optimized Google MyBusiness review examples to help our client’s Coquitlam business listing to expand into Burnaby (a nearby city):

We can also upload more Google posts that are more Geo targetted, for example, we upload images that are taken in locations and write a post description with a good keyword density for a specific locational keyword.

Here’s an example of an optimized Google MyBusiness post to help our client’s Coquitlam business listing to expand into Burnaby (a nearby city):

To Do: Each month, we will do the following things to optimize this factor for better ranking. If we do more than the recommended amount, Google may flag your listing and suspend it.

  • 6 optimized reviews a month
  • 8 optimized posts a month

Link Signals – 16.53% Important

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP.

So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility. In this case, the backlinks will be pointing to the Google MyBusiness listing instead of a webpage. To gain backlinks for your listing, we will reach out to website owners whose websites are in a relevant niche as yours. Usually, they will ask for a fee in exchange for a do-follow link (read this article to see the difference between do-follow link / no-follow link). The more reputable their website, the higher the fee. To gauge how reputable a website is, we rely on this metric: Moz Domain Authority Score.

This score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. It is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the number of total links, into a single DA score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking strength” of a website over time. To Do: Each month, we will do the following things to optimize this factor for better ranking. If we do more than the recommended amount, Google may flag your listing and suspend it.

  • 3 do-follow backlinks a month – Based on the domain authority your competition has, we will have to get a different level of links.

Here’s how a do-follow backlink looks like for your Google MyBusiness listing on a different website:

In this example, this Vancouver mortgage broker website with domain authority of 23 is giving All Painting Ltd. Google MyBusiness listing a backlink.

Review Signals – 15.44% Important

This is pretty self-explanatory. We help you get more reviews at a more consistent pace with explicit keyword instruction for your clients to follow.

Here’s are two optimized Google MyBusiness review examples to help our client’s Coquitlam business listing to expand into Burnaby (a nearby city):

To Do: Each month, we will do the following things to optimize this factor for better ranking. If we do more than the recommended amount, Google may flag your listing and suspend it.

  • 6 optimized reviews a month

On-Page Signals – 13.82% Important

On-page signals mean how relevant your website is compared to the user’s search phrase. The more relevant your page is, the higher you will rank. Besides looking at the content on your Google MyBusiness listing, Google also looks at your website to determine whether your website is relevant to the user’s search or not. Googles, or any search engines, do not hire humans to read page by page to see if the content on your site is relevant. They send robots to do that, and robots follow a set of algorithms to determine if a page is relevant or not. As a marketing agency, we use tools like CORA to help us determine if the landing page is more relevant than your competitors’ pages in the eyes of search engines. With CORA’s intensive analysis, we know how to strategically write the content so that it has an ideal ratio of keywords to make the robot thinks that our page is relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/dcXV1W0PafM?feature=oembedThe latest CORA version measures up to 880 SEO factors and correlates which ones appear to influence rankings the most for your keywords. Cora then tells you exactly how much of each factor you need to be competitive on page 1 of Google. Here’s an example of how following the CORA recommendations can impact a web page ranking instantly. This example is our client, Solution Appliance, a Vancouver appliance repair company.

Before implementing CORA recommendations
Screen Shot 2019-11-17 at 6.34.58 PM
After implementing CORA recommendations
Screen Shot 2019-11-17 at 6.32.47 PM
The ranking quickly climbed to #22 from #58. Of course, it was still quite far away from top #3, but as mentioned many times, there are other factors you need to work on as well to get the site rank high.

Citation Signals – 10.82% Important

There is a ton of places you can grab citations from beyond business directories like Yelp, Four Square, BBB, Home Stars, Houzz, etc.. A citation is any mention of your business on the web; it is any combination of your company name, phone number, address, zip or postal code, and website address. The more citations you have, the better because citations help search engines, like Google and Bing, verify that your business exists. When multiple credible sources have the same accurate information about your business, it signals to search engines that your business is legitimate. Listing your business on the prominent national and local sites helps your business create authority, establish trust, and will improve your business’ ability to rank in local search results. To Do: Each month, we will do the following things to optimize this factor for better ranking. If we do more than the recommended amount, Google may flag your listing and suspend it.

  • 15 new citations per month

Behavioral Signals – 9.56% Important

We can improve the behavioral signal on your GMB listing by posting more often with interesting content, for example, industry updates, pictures from a recent project that you’ve just completed. Of course, the GMB posts’ description will be written in a way that improves the Google MyBusiness signals mentioned in factor 1 as well. Here’s an example of an optimized Google MyBusiness post to help our client’s Coquitlam business listing to expand into Burnaby (a nearby city):

To Do: Each month, we will do the following things to optimize this factor for better ranking. If we do more than the recommended amount, Google may flag your listing and suspend it.

  • 8 optimized posts a month

Social Signals – 8.7% Important

Social signals refer to a webpage’s collective shares, likes and overall social media visibility as perceived by search engines. These activities contribute to a page’s organic search ranking and are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks. Since GMB is not that easy to be shared on social media and considering Google’s own social media platform, Google+, is gone, we won’t have to worry too much about it is hard for anyone to get social signals in the To Do: Nothing to do.

When Will You See Results?

By following the recipe, the best way to estimate how long it will take for your listing to show in the top 3 is by dividing the competition index by 0.1. The competition index is given to you via our keyword analysis service.

Competition Index

In this case, if you divide 0.4 by 0.1, you will have an integer of 4, which means four months. We also need to give an extra month to the campaign for setup time and Google’s own processing time.

Pricing

Each month, we will charge $600 per keyword group. A keyword group is different variants of the same query, for example, Vancouver painter, Vancouver painting company, Vancouver painting contractor, Vancouver painting service, painter near me.

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