Mastering Google Map Pack with 3 Key Strategies | Maximize Your Business Visibility 2024

Good day. Are you a small business trying to rank well on the Google Map pack? Well, I'm going to tell you the 10 things to pay attention to, but really there's only three that you need to lock in and we're going to focus on that on this video. I'm going to give you one bonus thing at the end that could be surprising how well it can help. Okay, so it's out. We have the 2023 top 10 and beyond, but we're just going to focus on those 10 and again, just those three things that will make a big impact on you ranking well. So number one is your business category. This is the most important thing. Google has many categories PrepU into the system, and if you select the right one for your business and someone out there searching for it, you are much more likely to rank.

Also on this list at number seven is your secondary categories. So you want to make sure you fill in and select all categories that are services and elements you provide for your business. This will help that ranking move up as well. So if someone searching for one of those things, you are more likely to show up. So absolutely, absolutely. Make sure when you're in your Google My Business profile, you are selecting the number one category you want to be found for and then making sure you fill in all those secondary categories that people might be searching for as well, that are services you provide. Number two on this list is integrating keywords into your business name. This can be a little bit of a tricky area though. You might have established your business a long time ago and you might not have any additional words in there, but there is a best practice to this.

Let's look at an example. So there's a restaurant that took full advantage of this and they actually named their business Thai food near me, and it works ridiculously well. It also got them a bit of virality through this approach as well, but if someone's searching and they're in the New York area, Thai food near me, guess what's going to come up really well. It's going to rank ridiculously well in Google. You might not be able to take this extreme of a measure, but it's something to think about. I have done it in my business. I switched my Google listing to be G squared studio web development and content coaching, and it's also reflected on my website, which is important. It needs to be reflected in other places showing that that is truly your business name. So you can't just put in all the keywords after your business name.

You could get flagged by Google, but if you do this appropriately and also infuse it into the appropriate places out there in the world where your business is represented, you can definitely take advantage of this by putting the appropriate keywords in your business name. The next few are things that are somewhat out of our control. Number three is proximity of your address to someone else's address. Who is searching for you. If they're near you, you're more likely to come up, but you can't obviously have five locations in a city trying to make sure you're close to every major neighborhood. But if there is a neighborhood or an area that you want to serve, well, it might be a good idea to maybe relocate your office if you can closer to that area. Number four, physical address. In a city search, this counts more when someone's outside of the area and they're looking for something in an area they're going to go visit.

So for service-based businesses, this doesn't matter quite as much for restaurants and so forth. The closer you are to that city center, the hub of the city, the more likely you are to show up for people that are looking in an area outside of where they actually live. Number five, removal of spam listing. Because Google wants to make sure people can affect this and have the most updated information, people can go in and change information on your listing. So it's good to stay diligent and constantly be staying on top of your Google listing and making sure there is no spam information on there. Number six is high Google rankings. This is having a four or five star average rating for your Google My Business listing. This is one of the most important things to focus on, and this is really the thing you can do on a regular basis to help your business show up on Google listings constantly.

Every time you provide great service to a customer, reach out to them and request a review. This again is the number one thing you can do to keep your listings fresh, to keep it so Google sees that people are interacting with your business and providing good experiences to your clients. There are some statistics around the stars and why it's important to make sure you have a four or five star rating. Here's a little chart showing. So five stars, 13% of people pulled, make it a minimum to have five stars, 51% say four stars or greater, 34%, three stars, 2% say two star, and 1% says one star. So it is important to try and make sure that the reviews you're getting are positive reviews. The only thing you can do when you get a negative review is try and combat it by getting more positive reviews.

The other thing is if it is a total one-off someone just trying to damage your business, you can reach out to Google and see if they will eliminate it. But this is quite a process. It's typically the best approach is to just focus on getting as many five star reviews as possible to get that ranking up. Number seven, we did cover that is adding the additional categories to your Google My Business listing. So beyond the star rating, it's super important to make sure people are actually taking time to write reviews as well. As you can see from the chart up here, 36% of people actually just make decisions based on quickly looking at the star rating, but there are 28% of people that dive deeper and want to read reviews and want to make sure that people are actually putting down information and addressing concerns that they might have about doing business with that company.

So make sure people are taking the time to write out positive reviews, not just doing a star rating. I also strongly suggest you respond to those positive reviews, letting Google know that you are a business that is interacting with your clients and being grateful for the time people are taking to put those reviews out there. Number eight is quantity of negative reviews as we talked about earlier, there are some ways to mitigate this, but mainly the number one way is to make sure you just focus on getting more positive reviews. Number nine is being verified. You really do need to be verified to be up there. So I'm not sure why it's so low on this list, but absolutely make sure you get verified and if you need to know how to do that, I'll be linking to the video that I go over How to set up my Google My Business profile at the end of this video.

Number 10 is proximity of address to Senator Lloyd. This is, again, going back to that if someone's looking for a business in a certain city area, the closer they are to the town center can be helpful for them to show up. So those are the 10 things and those are the three things to really focus on. Make sure your category is selected properly and you have all your subcategories set up as well. Make sure if you can and it's appropriate for your business to have keywords in your business name. And number three, focus on positive reviews. And here's the bonus. Photos are a great thing to make sure you update regularly. If you stay on top of this and put a little notification on your calendar once a month to go and upload a photo or two, this can really give Google a great impression that you're active in your business, you care about your Google listing and can potentially increase. There's some mixed feedback out there on how much it helps, but I have a client who is a massage therapist and every time that she goes and makes a photo update, she gets another lead or two from Google My Business. There you go. I strongly suggest if you haven't set up your Google My Business profile yet, watch this video and I hope you have a great day and great success.