How To Rank Your Google Places/My Business Page

by Jordan J. Caron | on March 13th, 2013

Are you wondering how to rank your Google Maps/Places/My Business page? Great, we get asked this question a lot.

This post is step one, it will help you just to get ranked. Once you are ranked, you will likely need to improve your rankings. If you feel your page is already properly optimized, read this post on five ways to improve your Places page rankings.

That will give you five simple tips on how to out rank your competition. If you don’t have a My Business page setup or are not the manager/owner of the page, this post is for you so read on.

Another Way to Rank

SEO is the process of getting your website listed in the search results.

But there is another way to rank in the search results.

There’s always another way in fact.

You see, last week I wrote a post on how to rank high in Google. That was shortsighted. Depending on what business or industry you’re in, there might be another way to have your website and business rank high.

Start by Googling your business, but don’t Google your business name. Instead, pretend you’re a new customer searching for one or all of your products and services.

Do you see search results that look like this?

Google My Business Pages

In the above image you see two organic search results, and then a map with 7 businesses listed and Google Map icons. These map-type results are known as Google Places or My Business Pages.

As of December 2015, these types of search results are showing up for just about every local search term. By that I mean if you search a product or service and your city name, you’ll see Google Places/My Business pages with the map showing where they’re located. These search results are the exact same if someone were to search for businesses via Google maps.

This is part of Google’s latest algorithm Pigeon which is focused on user proximity. In many ways, Pigeon provides an easier way to rank at the top of Google. Instead of investing in local SEO to rank your website, you can follow the steps in this post and rank your My Business page.

And I’m going to tell you what it takes to get your business listed and ranked in the “A” position in a couple of paragraphs.

Benefits of Optimizing your Google Places Page

No matter what, I think it’s important now and in the future to claim and optimize your Google Places Page. On top of jumping to the top of the search rankings, it’ll also help potential clients:

• Visually see your location
• Find your contact details fast
• See your business hours
• Learn what others have to say about you (blog post coming up on how to get more reviews)
• Quickly find directions to your location
• See what your store looks like (since you can add photos and even videos)

Some of the other benefits of properly optimizing your page are:

• Links your website to your local page
• Increases your business’s exposure and search traffic
• You have full control over your business details and can edit them

Now that you know the benefits, let me show you how to claim, optimize and rank your Google Places page!

How to Rank a Google Places Page

Over the remainder of this blog post, you will learn how to rank your Google Places page.

Here is what you will need to do:

1. Find out if your business is listed already
2. Create your listing if it isn’t listed
3. Claim your listing if it is listed
4. Optimize your Places page
5. Get your business listed in directories
6. Get people to review your business

Is Your Business Already Listed?

If you already have a My Business Page and have access to it, jump down to the optimize section.

If you don’t know, the first step is to see if your business page is listed. Sign into your Google account. If you don’t have one, sign up for one as you should have Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and now Google My Business setup under your Google account.

Once you have signed up and logged in, go to Google My Business. From there you should see a button titled “Get Your Page”.

The following page will have this image.

Select the proper definition of your business. No matter what you select you will be asked to search to see if your business is already listed. If this is the case, go to the claiming your listing section.

Search for your business name in the box and click on the blue magnifying glass. If it is listed, it’ll show up and you’ll have to claim the listing which you can learn how to do here.

Create a New Listing

If your page wasn’t listed, you’ll have to set one up. After the search you’ll see this screen.

Click on the “Add Your Business” link and this page will appear. Enter all your business details, making sure they are consistent with what is listed across the web. Name, address and phone number are now very important since Google’s Pigeon algorithm hit worldwide in December of 2014.

Once you are done you will be asked to confirm that you are authorized to act on behalf of the company. Click continue and you will be prompted to select yes to verify the listing. This will come in the form of a postcard from Google containing a pin # to confirm you are the owner. That takes around 2 weeks. In the meantime, you can still optimize the page so jump to the optimize section!

Claiming Your Listing

If your business showed up when you searched, click on the business name.

The next screen will ask you to confirm if you are the authorized owner. Click the box and hit yes. The next page is where you will be asked to continue and verify you are the owner. Google will send a postcard to the address. The postcard will contain a pin # and instructions on how to verify you’re the owner. You can still optimize your page for better rankings in the meantime.

Time to Optimize

Your Google My Business dashboard will look like this.

Hit the red edit button to properly optimize all the areas. I can’t stress enough the importance of consistent name, address and phone number when it comes to your business listings.

Business Name – Make sure it’s correct, current and your legal name. Do not try and add any keywords. Doing so will cause Google to flag your page since it doesn’t match up with sites like YellowPages.ca.

Address – Confirm that this is the same as what is on your website’s contact page. If you don’t have your address listed, you should for a ton of reasons outside of this one!

Contact Info – Make sure it’s the same phone number as listed on your website and in other directories like Yelp and YellowPages. Add your website and main email address as well.

Category – You can add up to five services you provide. This is where you will want to determine your five most popular services. You might only have one or two, but add those in.

Business Hours – Keep in mind people don’t have to visit your website to find out your hours. They can see that on your page or when they search your business name, so fill them out properly.

Photos – Add as many photos as you can. They could be of your store front or of your friendly staff. Make the visitor feel comfortable with you before they’ve even set foot in your store. Be sure to name your photos for some of your keywords/search terms. If you are a plumber use “city name+state/province+plumber.jpg”.

Introduction – Write 250 words of unique content that is different from on your website. It’s been recommended by various local SEO’s that I connect with that you should avoid keyword stuffing or placing any keywords in your about section. List all of your popular services that people might search for in an easy to read way and put links to important pages on your site, your Better Business Bureau or perhaps Yelp pages for reviews.

Once this is done, hit the blue “Done Editing” button.

All Done But Now What?

In many cases, simply creating or claiming and optimizing your Google My Business page might get you ranked, but at the bottom of the Places listings. You want to be ranking at the top don’t you? Of course you do!

Read our article on five ways to improve your Google Places ranking. That will really improve your Places page rankings.

So I’ve covered a lot in this post on how to rank your Google My Business page. If you have any questions, you can contact us below and/or visit our Google My Business packages page. We have created a few packages and services aimed at helping you improve your rankings.

Until then, optimize!

Learning SEO is easier than learning long division

by Jordan J. Caron | on April 25th, 2012

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could finally explain to you how search engine optimization really works?

Of course it would!

If you’ve tried to learn SEO on your own you’ve probably contemplated picking a second language instead. I’ve been there before.

There are thousands of blogs that talk about SEO but most of them are hard to understand. All too often bloggers use jargon to show off their knowledge.

In the end small business owners like you get even more confused and intimidated by SEO.

That’s not going to be the case anymore because I’m going to explain SEO to you in human speak.

I can’t do long division anymore but I can do SEO. That should say something about how easy it truly is.

I’ll be going over the three main factors to SEO but this post is all about the stepping stone to a solid SEO strategy.

I’m going to explain why this factor is so important and then I’ll show you how to do it on your own.

Keyword Research acts as a GPS System

The basis of any SEO strategy starts with doing keyword research. You need to know what keywords (better known as search terms) are getting searched and how often. You’ll also need to know what search results come up when you search these terms.

It’s like going for a drive to somewhere you’ve never been and using a GPS system. A GPS system helps get you from point A to B the fastest and safest way possible. Keyword research does the same thing for your SEO strategy. It lets you know what route to go and which route to stay away from based on data.

Google is the king of search and they provide great resources to help you understand SEO. One of these resources is the Keyword tool which gives you estimates on how often keywords are getting searched.

They provide this tool for free once you sign up for an Adwords account. Google Adwords is the advertising portion of search results and I will discuss Adwords later on but not right now.

Now that I’ve explained why keyword research is so important, I’m going to explain how to do it.

But before I do that do me a favor and share this post on Twitter for me.

Learning SEO is easier than learning long division – Click to Tweet

How do dial in your SEO destination

When you sign up and log into your Adwords account you want to head to the Keyword Tool under the Tools and Analysis table.

That will bring you here…

Where it says word or phrase is where we’ll begin. Start by thinking of search terms you think people are typing in when looking for your business or service. If you’re a local business you can focus on a smaller amount of keywords compared to an online store.

Depending on what industry or service you provide you might be able to use a few different variations of keywords. Think of the different terms people might use when describing your product or service.

For this example I’m going to use a hairdresser which can provide different services. Someone might search for a hair dressers services using descriptive terms like:

• Hairdresser
• Salon(s)
• Haircut
• Hair color

You then want to add those descriptive terms to the city you work in to come up with some keyword/search terms:

• City+ descriptive term
• City+state+ descriptive term

Now you take that combination of keywords and punch into the Google keyword tool to see how often they get searched. Be sure to check the “only show search terms closely related to my search term” box to narrow down results.

The global monthly searches column is obviously for the world while local is for the country you are located in. That’s why the global and local searches are the same when the BC is added onto the keyword. The approximate CPC is for Adwords which we’re not worrying about this moment.

These search terms that are getting searched are quite a bit. What’s nice is that when we click the “only show search terms closely related to my search term” box we get some suggestions from Google.

What can be misleading is reversing the search terms. In the last two screen shots you will see that Google claims “hairdresser Victoria” and “Victoria hairdresser” each receive 1600 search results a month. I truly believe that 1600 number is a combination of both terms.

To save these search terms to an excel spreadsheet simply start clicking the boxes beside each search terms that you want to target. This comes in handy for later use!

This is the first part of keyword research. The second part comes when you do competitive research for your search terms.

Start searching your terms to see what results come up.

Make sure you use a browser that is geared towards your location. So google.ca for Canadians and Google.com for Americans as both offer geo targeted results.

I suggest using Google chrome because, well, I’m a Google fan boy and sucking up to the most powerful search engine is never a bad thing! It’s all about earning that Google cred.

Note that I have my browser location set to Victoria. The other thing to note is that these results look different from normal search results.

This is what is known as Google Places results. I’ve discussed how to rank your Google Places pages already.

So from this I would suggest the hairdresser set up and optimize their Google Places page for the keyword Victoria Salon. I would also suggest not trying to rank for this search term on a webpage or blog post. Why? It takes too much time and too many resources to rank above Places pages.

What I found in searching for the renaming search terms in this example is that all of them display Google Places results instead of regular website results.

This is encouraging for the hair dresser looking to get into the SEO game. Instead of trying to get their webpage to come up for all these terms they could solely focus on optimizing their Google Places listing for all those keywords.

So by doing keyword research this hairdresser:

• Determined what search terms are getting searched and how often
• Discovered that their targeted search terms brought up Google Places pages
• Learned the importance of having a properly optimized Google Places Page
• Saved time and money by not trying to rank their website for search terms that brought Google Places pages

As you can see without doing proper research this hairdresser would have been like a tourist without a GPS system. Completely lost, wasting time and resources with no master plan.

I’d love to get some feedback from you.

Was this post easy for you to understand?

Is there anything with SEO that you don’t understand but would like me to discuss in future posts?