For retailers, having your Google Places entries appear on the first page for relevant searches is critical to your businesses success. When someone wants to go shopping, you want to be the place they drive to, and that’s what maps are all about. But each category has hundreds of retailers listed, and Google only displays 7 on the first page. How do you beat out the competition?
Relevance is based on having an optimized listing for the key words that most closely match your business. Just like with SEO, rigorous keyword research is critical to determine which search terms you want to rank for. Optimizing your maps list for those terms however is a different science all together, because a Places listing has a very constrained format with which to work. You need to know the way Google serves maps, and that takes study and continuous learning as Google changes these on a regular basis.
Popularity in the maps section is not based on in-bound links from authority sites. Instead it is based on two different factors: customer reviews (hopefully good ones!) and citations in other local search directories. Google wants to serve up businesses that are getting good reviews and are being talked about locally
WSI’s R&D department has been studying maps for the last 18 months and has developed a powerful new service to move local businesses’ Places listings up in the rankings. To learn how to leverage the this service in your business, please Contact Us or call 719-633-1963