How Google My Business Optimization Works

Now Available! Local On-Page Website Optimization

Improve Local Search Rankings and Increase Online Visibility with our Expert-Level Local Maps and GMB Optimization Strategies

60 Day Basic Local Optimization Service

The 60 Day Campaign is suitable for low competition niches in small cities or as part of a larger search engine optimization effort. It is designed as a solid entry-level service that will completely optimize your GMB listing using best practices, establish basic branding and citation directory presence, and do very minimal local link building and brand mentions.

Set Up Keyword Tracking and Campaign Reporting

We track up to 5 main local keywords and 25 LSI, Longtail, and Buyer Intent Variations every month. You’ll get a private progress report to see the local rankings. We track the overall progress of our monthly campaign tasks using a private project workbook. We use a dedicated Drive folder to store all of the monthly deliverables and reports and creatives. As each month comes to an end we will send you a monthly summary of your campaign at a glance.

Proprietary Local Link Strategy

We set-up a custom local link strategy designed to build complete brand prominence. Targets of our efforts include your website linked to the GMB listing, various Google brand properties, various social brand properties, and various local listings. The exact strategy will not be shared with you if you are not already a client, please don’t ask.

Baseline Local Visibility Report

This report scans Google’s index and rates your brand’s online visibility based on the results of the Google index crawl. It checks for consistent brand information, notes any places the brand is not mentioned, and gives a brief comparison against the top 2 competitors for your local niche.

Competitor Citation Audit

This is an in-depth look at all of the citations your brand has as compared to the top 2 competitors. It helps us select which secondary citations to build and helps eliminate duplicate citations.

Social Essential Optimization

We optimize your brand’s top 15 social and brand profiles and create any that are missing. Optimization includes ensuring correct business details, adding a website link, keyword optimized descriptions and tags, uploading logos, photos, and videos, and interlinking existing accounts.

Social Fortress Optimization

We continue creating and optimizing your brand’s social profiles including 25+ more must have accounts for your digital brand. These help form the basis of a strong branded network and will help increase your brand’s online prominence.

US Big 4 Data Aggregators or Canada Infogroup Data Aggregator

This includes submitting the local brand info to the big data aggregators like Factual, Acxiom, Localeze, and Infogroup. Data Aggregator service is only available for USA and Canadian companies.

Essential Business Citations

Top 45 Business Directories that every business should be listed in, includes all of the top national sites, including Yelp, 2 Find Local, Angie’s List, City Insider, and Chamber of Commerce. These citations include unique content added to each listing to get improved indexing.

Secondary Citation Creation

We create 40 additional citations based on your location and niche to further round out your brand’s digital presence. These are manually built business listings with complete details filled out with careful attention paid to your company NAP and information. NAP’s must be uniform across the web.

Write and Syndicate a Premium Local Press Release

This is a quality news release distributed to over 300 news and media outlets like Google News, CBS, Fox, ABC, CW, NBC affiliated broadcasting websites and more, including Associated Press journalists and thru AP Datafeatures services your press releases are distributed to major media outlets including Wall Street Journal, NEW YORK TIMES. WASHINGTON POST, USA TODAY, LOS ANGELES TIMES, and CHICAGO SUN TIMES. Includes a map embed and custom links just for local SEO.

Write 5 Custom G+ Description and Articles

Our G+ articles and descriptions are written by our native team of English writers. Each article is approximately 300 words long and include your company NAP details and information. They are used as posts on the G+ Brand Page and the About Me description (pre-Oct 2017).

GMB Categories Research and Listing Optimization

We thoroughly research your competitors’ categories that are ranking for our targeted keywords, selecting the top ones most likely to help us increase your local relevance. Further listing optimization includes correct NAP details, address settings, map pin placement, hours, and labels.

GMB Photo Optimization

We make sure each GMB has 20+ properly prepared photos added to the GMB listing. We no longer geo-tag the photos inside of GMB as this option is no longer available, but we can still link your photos to your GMB maps listing.

Product/Service Posts

We create a few GMB posts highlighting your top products or services of your brand. While these posts do not directly impact local SERPs, they do tend to increase click-through rates helping engagement metrics and conversions which can impact local rankings.

Enable G+ Brand Page

Not available under all circumstances. You may need to enable this via account owner credentials. We will set up the G+ Brand Page if we have the proper credentials to do so.

G+ Brand Account Shared Photo Posts (20 Min)

You get 20+ Properly Prepared Photos Shared in G+…I’m sure you know about the importance of geotagging photos, but I bet you didn’t know that when done correctly each of your business photos becomes a powerful rich-media citation… The best part is that you never even have to leave Google to use this tactic.

G+ Brand Account Public Photo Collections (4)

We create public photo collections using a unique method that stacks these rich media citations to give a better boost to your geotagged photos.

G+ Brand Account Niche Relevant Publishing (4)

We publish a series of niche related and locally relevant content on the optimized G+ Business Page. Each publicly shared post contains safe and effective link sets designed to interlink the publishing activity and connects to a larger brand fortress across a variety of supporting web 2 and Google platforms.

Google My Map with Embeds

Google My Maps are powerful citations owned by Google. Simply put, you need to add directions from multiple points in the city that you’re trying to rank in… Each “My Map” citation must include, the exact NAP, geo-tagged photos/YT video, GMB category titles, links to the business Google+ page, directions from the city center AND directions from the biggest landmarks in the city.

Submit Links to Google Submit URL Tool for Better Crawl and Indexing

Upon the completion of every task, we are always sure to submit the created links to Google’s Submit URL tool to help increase the rate of crawl and get more of your online properties and brand mentions indexed.

120 Day Advanced Local SEO

The 120 Day Campaign is designed for higher competition niches and medium-sized cities. It includes advanced GMB ranking tactics for added power and because the optimization occurs over 120 days your brand has a chance to become even stronger, which increases the likelihood of breaking into the 3-Pack for competitive search terms.

All 60 Day Tasks Plus
Create and Optimize 40 More Secondary Citations

We create 40 additional citations based on your location and niche to further round out your brand’s digital presence. These are manually built business listings with complete details filled out and a careful attention paid to your company NAP and information.

Submit to Six GPS Listing Services

We submit your brand information to 6 GPS or GIS mapping and positioning data platforms. These six platforms were selected based on either having crawlable databases or indexable mapping platforms.

Authority Brand Network Links

We build about 40 branded links spread across 4 target URLs from our local link strategy on platforms such as web 2.0’s, social sharing sites, media sharing sites, industry directories, and online community profiles

Social Authority Stacking (DAS Link Building)

We slow drip the highest authority niche links to 14 selected social accounts of your Branded Network.

Apple Maps – Claim and Verify

“Apple Maps is now used three times as often as its “next leading competitor,” namely Google Maps, on Apple iPhones and iPads, the Associated Press reported Monday. Apple’s navigation app tallies more than 5 billion map-related requests each week, the AP said.” Source Your local maps optimization is not complete unless your business is listed and optimized for all of the top Local Maps Apps, including Apple Maps.

Bing Places – Claim and Verify

Admittedly search volume is lower than Google My Business and Apple Maps, but Bing Places is still a valuable listing to have optimized correctly. A correctly optimized Bing listing acts as not only another source of valuable traffic but also as a powerful data aggregator for your company maps listing.

My Map Citations and Brand Mentions

These are manual brand mentions and citations created using the Google My Maps platform. Each one is hand built using local IPs to replicate map mentions from local customers and clients.

Rich Media Citations and Brand Mentions

Additional unstructured citations for your brand created through your brand’s Pinterest account. We create locally optimized boards and places pins that are powerful signals from a top-tier social platform.

Google Places Map Embeds

Additional signals of your brand’s online popularity and prominence, we make sure that the place map gets embeds and shared on niche relevant blogs and web 2.0’s.

Google Authority Stack and Google Sites Network

With all the changes to Google local maps (GMB) in the past 2 years, it’s easy to get left behind…the 7-Pack was reduced to a -Pack, the maps ranking algorithm now takes into consideration organic ranking position, there’s no public link to the GMB listing itself, possum filter wrecked havoc, and G+ Brand Pages no longer connect to the GMB listing. We have found that by stacking the authority of a brand’s other Google properties, such as YouTube, public Google Docs and Slides, My Maps and Blogger and by consistently using the brand’s NAP on these other properties, combined with interlinking correctly, that you can quickly boost a brand’s prominence and it’s map ranking.

Write and Syndicate 2nd Premium Local Press Release

180 Day Elite Local Maps and GMB Campaign

Now Available! Local On-Page Website Optimization

The 180-day campaign is designed for the highest competition niches and large metropolitan areas. It includes everything from the 60-day and 120-day options and many more strategies available exclusively from SEO Secret Sauce. This is designed for Local 3-Pack Domination!

All 60 Day and 120 Day Tasks Plus
GMB Website Creation

We set up your brand site within the GMB dashboard. This acts as an additional branded property and interlinks to the GMB listing, your main company website, and selected brand profiles and features a Google Map embed, hours, and NAP information.

1k Words GMB Website Content

A high-quality article written with calls to actions and complete company information. We are using this article similarly to the original GMB descriptions where we highlight your location and geo-area as well as your brand’s services and contact information.

Client Site On-Page Local Optimization

Tasks include Optimizing Title Tags, Metas, H1 and H2 Tags, Image Alt Text, Inner Linking Structure and Anchor Text, Outbound Link Structure and Anchor Text, Create and Validate Organizational Schema Script and Implement our TF-IDF Action Plan on the target page.

Client Site Store Locator, Map Embed, and Schema

We further optimize your local business JSON markup, Google Maps embed, local relevancy linking, NAP and hours, and a store locator feature.

Create and Optimize 40 More Secondary Citations

We create 40 additional citations based on your location and niche to further round out your brand’s digital presence. These are manually built business listings with complete details filled out and a careful attention paid to your company NAP and information.

Create and Optimize Geo-Network

Geo-Networks create local relevancy for your brand, a key ranking factor in the local search algorithm. These networks can help make the difference in high competition niches and large metro areas that now have an infinite number of map pack based on searcher proximity.

15 Geo-Local Articles and Links

We create top quality content for the Geo-network, specifically discussing the location and combine this with our proven link strategy designed to funnel massive Geo-relevance to your brand.

15 Driving Direction Maps w Embeds

Each article in the Geo-network also gets a unique driving direction map either embedded or linked from within the local article. These driving direction maps literally tell Google that your brand is relevant all across the city helping to offset the proximity factor.

Create and Optimize Niche Network

Focused specifically on the top category we are targeting, these web 2.0 accounts are miniature authority sites all about your main and secondary categories. Combined with our advanced link concepts and the Geo-networks above this tactic is an extremely powerful way to blast through the maps competition.