Easy Website Updates To Improve Local SEO For Google Maps

Looking for quick tips for your website to improve your SEO? This episode is for you! Jesse is here bringing you a solo rundown of a few tips and tricks for your online presence to improve your SEO and to help you get found online.

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Jesse Dolan: Do you want to improve your local SEO for Google Maps? Because in this episode, we’re going to talk about easy website updates to improve your local SEO for Google Maps.

Welcome back to Local SEO Tactic, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. We’re going to be talking here today about easy website updates to improve your local SEO for Google Maps. We’re going to talk about some tips to do mainly on your website. We’re not going to be talking about the GBP or the GMB if you haven’t fully adapted yet to the new acronym. We’re going to be talking about things to do to your website itself that are going to make some ranking improvements and kind of synergize your GBP with your website.

Before I do that, I don’t usually get on a soapbox and ask on this show too much, but I want to reach out to everybody and ask you if you have not left us a review yet on the show, we would love to catch one of those from you. I was just doing a check before we jumped on to record here today seeing how many reviews we had, grabbing a couple to read for the show, and I noticed specifically on Apple Podcasts, that it’s been quite a while. Over the last year, I think we’ve only gotten a couple reviews. We have 106 total, but it’s been kind of quiet. I think we’re well into the 150s now for how many episodes we have and about four years into it.

We’ve had a lot of great feedback from all you out there. And I know there’s a lot of people that are listening. Every week we’re engaging with new people via email and messaging that are reaching out to us for questions, for tips and tricks, or to actually engage with us for us to do SEO on your business from our agency.

So I know you’re out there. If you haven’t left us a review yet, we’d love for you to do that. Go to LocalSEOtactics.com. Scroll down on the bottom, click the button for review and click the button for Apple Podcast. Specifically, I’m asking for reviews on Apple Podcasts if you can. If you don’t have an account on Apple Podcast, if you’re listening to us on some other portal, then great. A review anywhere would be awesome. I am going to read a review at the end of this and I’m going to ask you again, just to warn you. Hopefully it’s not too annoying, but I’d like to see if we can make a push. I know you guys are out there. You gals are out there and I’d love to hear from you and get a review if you’re so inclined.

All right. So soap box aside on that, let’s get back to the A topic here and why you’re here talking about website updates for local SEO improvements here. So if you have been a listener to this show, you know how important your GBP/GMB is to your local SEO and everything we’re going to talk about here is definitely predicated on the fact that you already have that. If you don’t have one of those, go back, check on some of our previous episodes, get yourself set up in the map pack, get a GBP profile set up. It’s totally free. Then come back to this, pause this right here, right? Or listen to it, whatever, take some notes and do these things after. But the things we’re going to talk about here, yeah, will definitely be good for your website in general and particularly the page that’s linking to your GBP.

But what we’re going to be talking about here are things that we do, tricks that we’ve done if you will, tactics that we use that increase the ranking of your GBP by things that you do to your web page.

I’m saying page, because we’re talking about a specific page on your website, not all web pages on your website. This is all going to be focused on what we call your GBP page. What do we mean by that? What we mean by that is in your Google Business Profile, you can link to your website. Now we’ve talked in previous episodes and we’re going to get into it in some future ones here, a little bit more on what page you should link to. Specifically, we want to be linking to an inner page. I forget it was another episode number, off the top of my head I don’t remember, but we talked about that you don’t want your homepage to be the thing ranking for your website. Your homepage is kind of your gateway. Same thing here. You don’t want your Google Business Profile linking to your homepage. You want to link that to an inner page and that page should be more focused around the location that you’re trying to rank for.

So you want your Google Business Profile to link to an inner page. That’s the page that we’re going to be talking about here today. That’s where you’re going to apply these tactics and do these things here that we’re going to talk about. So this is a list here that I’m going to walk through of some things to do. They’re in no particular order or importance, I guess if you will. Just, we took a look at our recipe for SEO, what we do for our clients and these are some of the things, not all the things, that’d be a much longer episode, but these are some of the things that I think can get overlooked sometimes. Things that we often see overlooked when we’re taking on a client and some things I think you can do out there to your pages and hopefully get some wins and get more visibility in the map pack.

Okay. So the first thing you’re going to want to do is make sure you’ve done some kind of keyword research, right? At some point. You kind of know what you want to be targeting, what you want to be going after. You want to make sure that your primary keyword, the number one thing you really want to be found for, make sure that’s in your page title of your GBP page. Now we talked about that, not a title, the text towards the top. Within WordPress, for example, which is kind of what we always reference, there’s going to be a particular spot for your page title. Make sure your primary keyword or keyword phrase is in that page title. Not that that’s the only thing that’s going to be there, but make sure it’s included within that text.

Additionally, you’re going to want to try to work in that same keyword or keyword phrase into the primary H1 on your page. Now we usually recommend only having one H1, but at the top of the page, you guys and gals have heard me talk before about the convention of a newspaper. Have your main headline, some content underneath it that supports that headline and cascade it down with sub headlines, sub content, things like that. Usually you’re only going to have one H1 in your page. Sometimes you might have two, if it’s a longer page and there’s a ton of information. This one we’re talking about, for sure the H1 that’s at the top of the page, make sure your primary keyword is also in there.

If it just doesn’t work for you to have it in your page title and your H1, that’s fine. Having it at least be in one or the other would be ideal. If I’m going to choose, I’m going to try to put it into my page title, because usually that’s what’s going to be seen in Google search as well. Your primary keyword is not something that you just want to rank for. It’s also something that should convert. If people are looking for this thing and you rank high for this thing, and this thing being your primary keyword, then them seeing it in the search results is going to be a conversion factor. Going to help your click through rate. So again, ideally put it in both your H1 and your page title. If you can only do one, I’d love to see it in a page title usually if I can choose because then you can do something a little bit alternative in the H1 that’s still related, but maybe just you need it to read slightly different on your page.

So that’s one thing, including your primary category there. Another thing to try to do is include the primary GBP category. Again, in your page title or your H1. Now we talked about the primary keyword. We’d love to see it in both, your title and your H1. Your primary GBP category, that can go in one or the other. Now what do we mean by primary GBP category? When you’re setting up your Google Business Profile, you’re setting your business categories. Are you a flower delivery shop? Are you an auto repair shop? What’s your categories? And you can pick multiple, but you only get to pick one as the primary category and that should be the one that really truly defines your business, your core product, your core service, the thing that you do and what you want to be found for. That’s going to have a very specific phrase and you’ll find that in your GBP profile.

I believe you could just go into either the home or the info tab. I should have it pulled up to show everybody here, but I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it should be readily accessible for you. Easy to see. You want to take that exact phrase that, that is, if it’s one word or two words or three words, whatever it is, and try to work that into either your page title or your H1. Along with the primary keyword that we talked about earlier. Okay. So that’s going to be a direct tie in to Google for that you really do provide this product or service that your GBP is optimized for as well. We have had some pretty good results by doing that.

Hey everyone, just a quick message about our free SEO audit tool on LocalSEOtactics.com and we’ll get right back to the show. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, go on out to LocalSEOtactics.com/freeSEOaudit, or look for the yellow button up in the top right corner. Click that and it’s going to take just a couple seconds. You enter in the page that you want to optimize what you’re looking for the audit to score against. Enter in that page, enter in the keyword you’re looking to get optimized for and enter in your email address. Click the button and it’s going to take a few seconds and then it’s going to send you off a PDF report via email. It’s a great report. It’s going to kind of give you an overall score of some vital SEO areas for that page and for your website at large, even though it’s auditing this page. That’s going to tell you some of the good things that are happening. Some of the bad things that are happening too.

It can give you basically a checklist of some things that you need to shore up and what you can do to improve your SEO for that page, for that keyword that you’re auditing. Now, you can use this as many times as you want. You can do multiple keywords, multiple pages, multiple keywords on the same page. You can even use this to check against your competitors, right? If you want to do a little reverse engineering, see how they’re scoring for a certain keyword, what they may be doing good that you’re not and some things to improve there. So lots of different ways to use it. Completely free. Again, go on to LocalSEOtactics.com/freeSEOaudit, or look for the yellow button in the top right corner of the website.

Another thing you’re going to want to do here is have all of your expected location information, I guess, is the best way to phrase it and contact information on the page. So if you’re a service area business, you’re not going to be having your address on the GBP page of your website. You’re going to hide that, right? You’re just going to say this is the area we serve, or maybe mention the actual city. If you’re a retail store, of course, you’re going to list your address. All businesses you’re going to have business hours, phone number, maybe an email address, directions if you’re a retail store or if people come to you. So just think about that contact information, that location information. What would be expected for your clients and your customers to see on that page? What are they going to be looking for? What’s useful? What’s valuable in that regard?

Make sure that’s included on your page. Again, there’s no particular spot to put this, just work it into your content. Make sure it looks good, make sure it’s in a spot where people would be looking for it, right? Some people like to put that all at the very bottom of your website in the footer. As long as it’s well laid out, and accessible and just kind of flows to the page, there’s nothing wrong with that. We just want to make sure that that location information, that contact information, all of it is on this GBP page. Also, that should match up with the information that’s on your GBP right? Whatever phone number is in your profile, make sure that’s the phone number in your web page. Hours of operation, make sure they match up with what’s on your webpage. If you are showing your address, make sure it’s the same address that’s in your profile and matching up with your webpage. So get all that location information and contact information on your page as well.

Now you’re also going to want to have a couple lists on this page. When I say lists, I mean actual ordered or un-ordered lists. Not just typing out this stuff in a sentence, but having a bullet pointed list on your webpage of a few different things here. The reason we want to do the bullet pointed list is because when we use it as a list, if you think of Google being a bot, being a program, an algorithm, it’s scraping, and it’s reading the information on your page and it’s processing it.

But when we do things like put items in a list, we’re making them more special. If that’s proper English or grammar, I don’t know, but we’re making these things more special than the regular text that’s on the page by putting it into a list. By putting into bullet points. So you’re going to want to put a bullet pointed list of the primary services that you provide on this GBP page.

How is that formatted? What does it look like? Is it one column, three columns? How many things are in there? Completely up to you and defined by what it is you’re providing for the products and services at this location. If you’re a multi-location business and you’re applying this having, you’re having multiple GBPs, multiple inner pages. Each GBP should only link to one page and vice versa. Only one GBP should be linking to each page in that regard. If you have different products and services at your different locations, make sure these lists are unique to those locations and they’re truly accurate.

Same thing here, if you are providing products and services, you’ll have a spot in your Google Business Profile to list those products and services. These things should match up. Not that it has to be explicitly identical, but the things you’re listing in your services and products for your GBP should be the things you’re listing in these bullet pointed lists on the page that, that GBP links to, to kind of sync that up.

So in addition to the products and services, I mentioned there’s a couple lists that we want. Another one of them is the cities and locations that you serve. If you are a service area business, or even if you’re a retail or a storefront business, if you go on site and serve clients at their locations, you’re going to want to make sure you mention those cities, those suburbs, those zip codes, those counties, those states. Whatever your territory and your region, your scope is, call that out on this webpage that your GBP links to. Again, you’re going to have a spot in your GBP profile where you can list your service area and make references to this within your Google profile. You’re going to want to sync that stuff together, be talking the same things there.

If you are a retail location and you don’t go out and serve clients at their location, that’s fine. Think about this on your webpage. Think about the communities that you serve. How far will people drive from their suburb or from their city to you? You probably have that already in your head. Make sure you put those references, those geographic locations into a list on your page. Now don’t go crazy here. One of the things with ranking your Google Business Profile is if you take, let’s say Minneapolis, Minnesota, again, we’re up in Minnesota. I always use Minneapolis. If you go to Google and you do a search for Minneapolis, Minnesota, Google’s going to show you what it considers Minneapolis. You’re not going to want to try to list cities that are too far away. You’re going to have a hard time ranking in cities other than Minneapolis if that’s where you’re located. We’re not going to be doing St. Cloud, which is a couple hours away. You’re not going to put suburbs of St. Cloud on the same page. You’re not targeting St. Cloud.

You really got to work in your own backyard and kind of work out from there from a geographic standpoint. So put your list of your services and products on your GBP page. I actually phrased that probably bad for everybody. On the page that your GBP links to, we refer to that internally here at Intrycks as the GBP page on your website. List your products and services on there in bullet points, list the cities, location, whatever it is, geographic references that you serve or go to, or the community at broad on your website as well. That’s going to draw now, not only the keywords for the products and services, but also the locations.

So as people are doing auto repair Minneapolis, radiator repair Minneapolis, all that’s coming together on your page. These keywords are all on your page there, and they’re in a natural listing, so to speak. They’re in bullet pointed list. You’re not just cramming these keywords in content and making it look artificial. This is a pretty natural way to go about it. Another thing you’re definitely going to want to do that we see a lot of people missing on this is you’re going to want to link to your Google Business Profile from this page on your website. So, whereas your GBP, again, like we said earlier here, you can link to your website, i.e. This web page, we’re talking here from the Google Business Profile, we want to do the other way. We want to link on this page, back to your Google Business Profile.

Couple ways to do that. You can embed the GBP on there, kind of have a map that’s showing. Even just literally putting a link check us out on Google, or leave us a review on our Google Business Profile. Whatever it is, you can go into your GBP dashboard and find the link that you can copy and paste right into your website to be able to do this. So you can get a little sophisticated with it if you want. Or you can just paste the link in there with some text and direct people.

Either way, we just want to link from your webpage to your GBP. That’s what we’re looking for here.

Last thing on here that we want to talk about is make sure you are putting reviews from your GBP, as in a copying and pasting them onto your webpage. There are different widgets and gidgets and plugins that you can get that’ll automatically pull those in and list them on the page. You can use that, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about here is actually taking the text, inputting it onto the page, creating an area that says reviews, testimonials.

What our happy clients have to say, whatever it is, pick three, five, seven, how every many you want. Just kind of depends on the design of your page, but put those on your webpage.

Now, here for privacy or how you work with your clients, it’s going to be up to you. Do you use their names? Do you link to their profiles? How much exposure do you want to give to them? Do you have to ask their permission? Things like that. What we’re wanting to do here is make sure we’re calling out a spot on the page four reviews. We’re actually using the actual text from the Google Business Profile from the actual reviews left, copying those, putting them on your webpage to again, kind of tie that content in with Google and have it all work really good together.

So like I said, there’s other things we’re going to build on with this later. I guess if I’m trying to impress one thing on you here, it’s that you should have an inner page in your website, not your homepage that your GBP is linking to and you want to do things in concert on your GBP and this webpage. The things you’re talking about, the things Google gives you to fill out the fields, the options, things like that in your GBP. You want to be talking and creating and listing those same things back on this webpage that you’re linking to. Link these things together and have them kind of be kind of married together.

What you’re going to see when you do this is yes, the actual webpage itself should start to get a little bit better ranking. But the overall goal here is we’re trying to power up your GBP page and have that thing start to rank for some of those services or products that you put in that list that weren’t there before. Your business category, the primary keyword that you now have in your H1 and your page title, things like that. You’ll start to see maybe quickly, depending on your geographic area and the competition, maybe more over time, but you should definitely see some ranking improvements doing a few of these little tricks here.

All right. Hopefully that helps you guys and gals out. Definitely something that’s not super hard to implement. We didn’t get too deep into anything too technical. This is really just a lot of on page content and log into your GBP. So hopefully that helps you out. If you want more discussions on this, we have Sue Ginsburg on. We’re talking all the time about questions that you all send in. If any of this is confusing, if you are stuck somewhere, please drop us a line and throw a question at us. We’ll talk about it on the show and help everybody else out as well. You can find that on our website, LocalSEOtactic.com. Scroll down to the bottom, click submit a question.

Again, like I said, on the front side, we do want to see if we can get more reviews, particularly in Apple Podcasts. I’d like to see some more in there if we can ask everybody out there for a favor. I’m going to read a review here. This is from D Gorsha, I hope I’m saying that right on the profile. This was off iTunes and as of right now, the time we’re recording, this is our most recent one. Review says, “This is my favorite SEO podcast. The team gives practical, timely expert advice in an easy to understand format. I never miss a new episode and I’ve gone back and listened to their entire library. You won’t be sorry, especially if you’re an SEO novice.”

That’s great and that library is pretty extensive now. So thanks for the commitment on the time and sorry about some of our first episodes. I know they are probably horrible compared to the quality and the content we’re putting out now. But no, really do appreciate the review. All jokes aside. This is what we’re trying to do is help you out. If you’re a novice in SEO, if you’re a business owner that’s trying to learn what’s happening with your SEO. Things like that. We get a lot of great reviews, people saying this is just good organic stuff. We’re not being too pitchy, not trying to sell a ton of stuff and just helping people out. I love hearing that and reading the stuff in through the reviews, because that is what we’re trying to elicit and provide. Just giving a lot of value and helping everybody out and see where it goes from there.

So thanks for tuning in everybody. Again, love to get a review from you. Go out to LocalSEOtactics.com. Scroll down to the bottom, click the button for reviews. It’s going to pop up on your screen. Apple Podcast, Google, Facebook, wherever you feel like leaving us a review, we’d love to get it. If we can ask today, at least on this episode, we’d love to get one from Apple Podcasts, and until next time, appreciate you tuning in and catch you the next episode. Take care.

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