Google My Business is one of those mysteries that sometimes I still can’t figure out 100% in terms of the weird decisions Google makes in ranking your listing high or not. You can have an absolute piece of crap GMB with no content on there, and it can rank ahead of you. And you can add over 80 photos to the damn thing, and they’ll still push you down to the lower Top 10 spots.
I’m here to demystify the conundrum going on in this situation and give you some quick insights into what I’m doing to make GMB management less of a pain. This is why I don’t spend a crap ton of time trying to figure out what the engineers behind Google are thinking. I roll with it and keep up with the changes whenever something happens.
Kinda keeps you on your toes!
SEO has a ton of best practices, but when it comes to local listings and citations, it’s a bit of a weird ball game to me, but it’s a lot of fun.
What I Learned from Experience Can Help
If you want to have a successful local listing on Google, you must make sure you have as many relevant categories as possible. If you only have one specific one, Google is not going to care to rank you high enough.
It’s such an easy fix too. Just go into your profile and then find the categories section, and then add the rest of your categories. There, done!
Okay, but what else do you need an optimal local listing on Google for your business?
You gotta have actual images of the building you’re selling your stuff from. And no, not a virtual office. But a real building that Google can verify 100% is your address. If you are trying to use a virtual office on Google, tread lightly and know you will have to resort to using Service Areas instead to stay compliant with their terms of service and guidelines.
Other Ways to Keep Your GMB Fresh and Relevant and Ranking As High As Possible
What can help you at the beginning is making sure you’re posting a lot of content on a regular schedule. With GMB, you can start posting every day, but then after you get the results you want, just post every other week to keep the page relevant.
What you can also do is continually add more images to the page. Set the timer and add at least one or two images per day and in a few months, you’ll have hundreds of images! Look at your competitors and see how many images they have on their GMB, take the average of the top 3 spots and then try to aim for that number.
If you got an iPhone or Android phone, this is a piece of cake. Take photos of inside your store and the products and merchandise you sell. If you’re a general contractor or landscaper, maybe get a professional photographer to do images for you of your team and projects you’ve done and get to posting on GMB ASAP.
It’s like another gallery where you can showcase all your products and services. Take how this landscaping company in Alpharetta, GA did theirs!
You see how the photos are bright, clear, and easy to see. And high quality? This is what Google wants to see. It will help if you add pictures of your team onto your listing to help you rank higher. Again, it’s more common sense that extends well beyond local SEO to me.
Use your brain instead of following the herd when you’re figuring stuff like this out.
Case Study: Suwanee Appliance Garage and Google My Business
I keep harping on this site I made back in 2021, but it’s like the golden goose that keeps laying eggs in terms of performance. Every day I check on this site, it just continues to crush it in Google results, and now we’re ranking high for other desired keywords in this niche.
But that’s beside the point.
I’m here to discuss the progress made with the GMB for this site. Google was acting nuts with this, constantly pushing this listing up and down in search. I made sure to add over 70 different citations and analyzed where the competitors were getting theirs and making sure to be on all of them.
But that wasn’t working.
So what did I do instead?
I applied some of the simplest strategies I’ve talked about here, and here’s the result:
Ranking #4 for this keyword I targeted. Beautiful!
Sometimes if you’re having problems with GMB, a few simple changes can make all the difference. If you have an analytical eye for discrepancies and understand how to navigate through GMB, you should have a high performing page that can outrank many others, even if they have more reviews. A lot of reviews can be bought or manipulated, and you often have paid sponsors vying for top spots on Google My Business, so you can ignore those.
Conclusion
This post is on the shorter side today. I’m exhausted from all the job interviews I’ve had in the last two weeks, but I still had time to quickly get my thoughts out about this. Google My Business is a beast that can be tamed, and if you already understand the basics of SEO, it’s not that hard to get into, but there are quirks and nuances you must understand. Then you must learn to apply these tactics to your page. The only way to know is to keep testing and seeing what happens daily. That’s my advice to any business owner currently struggling with their GMB listing right now!
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