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Foreword
Thanks for checking out our guide on ranking Locally. Most of these tactics will be focused on the GMB ranking
aspect of Local SEO but most of the strategies will also help with gaining visibility in the SERPs as well. We are always
testing tactics and ranking concepts and you should too.
We broke this guide into several Parts, so those that are just starting can start digging into their local campaign
starting with page 1 and by the end of their reading will have an extremely solid grasp on what it takes to compete
in local SEO.
More advanced readers can skip around and extract any nuggets as they see fit.
Part I: The Mechanics of GMB and Local SEO.
Part II: Automating your GMB Reporting and Management
Part III: Ranking Signals Walkthrough

Even if you are a more advanced digital marketer, it would behoove you to at least check out the first part because
we cover a lot of the mechanics of GMB and best practice. There are a lot of moving pieces to consider so having an
A-Z laid out for you in one place is advantageous.
I might be biased but I do believe this is the most complete guide on GMB out there. Take advantage of it and enjoy.
Take action and rank some local businesses. Have a successful day!
Part I: The Mechanics of GMB and Local SEO
What Is Google My Business?
Google My Business (GMB) is the search engine’s business directory, similar to other online directories like Yelp or
the Yellow Pages. GMB makes it easier for users to find the information they need about your business, such as your
location, phone number, website, products/services, operating hours, and customer reviews.
Your listing information can show up in four places:
- The knowledge panel, a panel of information that a user gets when they search for a specific business.
- The local pack (also known as a snack pack or 3-pack), which shows up right under the ad portion on the
search engine results page but above the organic results.
- Google Maps, which can be accessed either through the mobile app or through a browser by clicking
“Maps” in Google Search.
- Local Finder, which is what comes up when you click on a listing in the SERP or on the “More places” button
at the bottom of the local pack.

Local results have a prominent place on the SERP. This is why it’s so important to set up and optimize your GMB
listing – a higher ranking directly translates into more eyeballs on your listing. But local SEO isn’t just about improving
your brand reputation, it’s also about increasing conversions.
From 2017 to 2018, experts have found that clicks from GMB listings have increased by almost 30%. In that same
period, phone calls increased by 22%. What this tells us is that Google My Business is a major potential source of
leads – if you know how to make the most out of it, that is.

Google Local Ranking Factors: Explanation & High Level Action Plan
AUTHOR NOTE: In this section I am going to cover, philosophically, what we look at
optimizing and working on during the life of a campaign. Think of this as a high level
overview before we dig really deep into the nuts and bolts of these concepts in the
remainder of the guide.

Many factors affect your rank in local search results, but some matter to Google way more than others. The good
news is that we can break the algorithm down into three main pillars: prominence, relevance, and proximity.
All local ranking factors fall into at least one of these categories. We’ll take a deep dive into the most important
factors under each pillar to help you understand how Google decides rankings. Even better, we’ve also included a
concrete action plan that will help you optimize your content, build a more visible online brand, and snatch those
top local pack positions.

The Three Pillars Of Local SEO
Prominence
If you’re familiar with organic SEO’s E-A-T pillars (Expertise, Authority, Trust), you can think of “prominence” as local
SEO’s counterpart to “authority”. Prominence simply refers to how popular or well-known your business is to its
users. The more prominent you are, the more likely you’ll rank in the local search results.
Your prominence is affected by both online and offline factors. If you are prominent in the real world, then search
results will reflect that as well. Google also takes into account your brand visibility online – more citations, links,
features, and positive reviews boost your prominence.
Relevance
Relevance is the foundation of not just SEO but Google’s entire algorithm. When a user searches for a specific
keyword, Google wants to give them the most relevant and useful results that match their query. For example, a
listing for a digital marketing agency wouldn’t be very relevant to someone who is looking for a place to eat.
Increasing your relevance is simple enough. You just have to optimize your content and other related entities so that
Google understands what your business is all about. You can do this by completing your online profiles and adding
relevant keywords.
Proximity
Proximity is about how close your business is to the user. For example, if someone is searching “best pizza
restaurants” in New York, then Google won’t return results in California – unless they include a location keyword in
their search term (e.g. “best pizza restaurants San Diego”).
Google’s algorithm for proximity is more complex than most people realize. Your search term and location play a
role, of course, but there are other factors involved as well. If you are walking and search for “pizza near me”, for
example, Google would show you restaurants that are within walking distance rather than those that require a drive
or commute.

Distance is a major factor in local SEO because a user is more likely to patronize a business that is closer to them.
This is also an interesting pillar to try and work with because it’s a bit more challenging to influence compared to
relevance and prominence.
Since you cannot move your business address to rank in other locations, you have to optimize your local business
profile so that your business is displayed to the customers you want to reach. Conventional rank trackers are
notoriously inaccurate because Google serves results based on the user’s location, and that varies wildly from user
to user and even device to device.
Local SEO Ecosystem

Now that you know which factors are the most important for ranking in Google My Business, it’s time to take a
deeper look into Google’s algorithm to figure out why things work the way they do. This section will teach you about
the ins and outs of the local search ecosystem as well as the best data-driven practices for local SEO.
For more insight into the search engine algorithm, we turned to some of Google’s patents. SEO experts often look
at patents to test local SEO theories and prepare for potential algorithm updates, especially since Google isn’t
particularly transparent about its ranking process.
It’s important to note, however, that not all patents are useful or relevant. Google claims thousands of patents a
year, including some which are not in use and some which will never be. You shouldn’t turn to patents as the endall-be-all
of your SEO strategy; instead, use them to test your theories and create a stronger, more effective
approach.
With all that said, let’s get started on those patents.
Document Scoring
According to this patent, Google’s system assigns a “score” to every document based on its prominence and georelevance.
The number of referring entities (e.g. links, backlinks, citations, profiles, etc.) and the backlink graph are
both essential to how Google handles document scoring.
It’s clear from the patent that authority is still paramount. We’d recommend boosting the backlink profile of your
referring links or the entities that point to your assets. Tier two link building can pass a lot of authority, but you have
to be cautious – many of these link building networks are read as “spam” by search engines because they’re often

used for black hat SEO. You should not cut corners or engage low-quality PBNs for your link building unless you want
to get penalized by Google.
Two other factors can affect your document score: reviews and keyword relevance.
Reviews are a huge location prominence signal, and proper reputation management (both online and offline) can
significantly impact your local “score”. The patent also talks about how Google scans documents for search terms.
Adding keywords in your document title, content, and/or category will help you rank for relevant local searches.
Geo-Relevant Documents
“Location, location, location” is a common mantra in real estate, but it’s been co-opted by the local SEO industry as
well. Proximity is one of the biggest factors when determining a local search result’s relevance, which is why it’s
important to add necessary geographical markers to help Google match you with nearby customers.
This Google patent tells us that the search engine indexes documents according to geographical relevance, based on
a wide range of location signals (e.g. addresses, zip codes, latitude/longitude, etc.). This validates what pretty much
every SEO expert tells you: if you want to succeed at local SEO and rank in GMB/Google Maps, you have to make
sure that you have your NAP (name, address, and phone number) in as many of your online assets as possible – and
make sure it’s consistent.
If you add location signals to your content, it becomes an unstructured citation for your business. Collect structured
citations alongside these to further reinforce your geo-relevance. You should also add geographical data to your

website, GMB posts, backlinks, and more. This could be in the form of your business address, GPS coordinates, a
Google Maps location, and even driving directions.
Adding location markers alone won’t boost your rankings, but it does provide the geographical data necessary for
Google to return relevant results to its users. Combine it with other local SEO practices for an effective campaign.
Authority Documents
Originally filed in 2004, this patent tackles how Google determines a particular document’s authority. It’s a relatively
simple process – Google looks for documents associated with a location, then it identifies authority signals that are
associated with the documents such as backlinks, anchor text, document titles, and more. After weighing all the
associated signals, the algorithm determines the “authority score” of the document. Documents with higher
authority scores are more likely to be displayed in a prominent position in the SERP compared to documents with a
lower authority score.
This reinforces what we already know about authority while tying it in with geo-relevance. The best way to boost
the authority of your document or page is by increasing the number of referring links, tapping high-authority
referring domains, and improving the strength/relevance of those links. Then, they pass that coveted link juice to
your assets.
Another helpful practice is associating all documents with your entity/business by adding your NAP where relevant.
You should also link to other related documents/pages to help Google’s bots crawl and index your content.

Geo-Relevant Signals
Another proximity-related patent filed by Google in 2004 talks about how Google assigns location markers to a
document that doesn’t have any by looking at the geographical signals of relevant or associated documents. What
this means is that Google’s search engine algorithm can analyze a set of web documents, determine the location of
the first document based on keywords and other geographical data, then assign those geographic location identifiers
to a second web document if Google determines that there’s a relevant link between the two.
You can make it easier for search engines to “assign” the right location by including addresses, phone numbers, and
other geographical signals throughout your document/page. Anchor texts in link building – specifically those that
mention your town/city – can also potentially increase your geo-relevance.

Semantic Geo-Tokens & Nearby Locations

Whenever you add a geographical marker (e.g. address, driving directions) to your document, it receives a “geotoken”
that represents the location. These geo-tokens are responsible for providing relevant local search results to
the user by operating off a “confidence system” – the more defined geographical information you have associated
with a document, the higher the confidence score, and the more likely you will appear as a result for that location.
Again, this strengthens the importance of adding geo-relevant signals to your content and documents. This patent
makes it clear that the system looks at both on-page and off-page signals to determine your location. It scans your
document for addresses, city names, landmarks, neighborhoods, zip codes, and more. It also reads backlink anchor
text (see the figure above for an example) to figure out the correct location.
Nearby locations can also be associated with your document. For example, a document for a business in Atlanta can
be associated with nearby towns or cities within a certain distance. This helps you rank for searches even if you are
just outside the given location.

Trusted Sources & Spam
Google’s goal is to provide its users with the most relevant and useful results, which is why they developed a system
for determining a source’s trustworthiness. Before retrieving business information to display to a user, Google looks
to see if the source is trusted or not. If the source is trusted, it displays the result. If the source is not trusted, then
Google weighs several factors, assigns a “trust score”, and displays or withholds the result depending on that score.
The patent gives many clues as to what could trigger a spam classification. Using subjective terms like “best” or
“cheap” repeatedly throughout the content, adding commercial modifiers where they shouldn’t be, and stuffing
your content with keywords are a few things that could get your document categorized as spam.
You can avoid getting tagged as spam by using natural language, incorporating keywords organically, and getting
listed on trusted platforms. Increasing your trust signals and avoiding spam triggers are the two most important
takeaways from this.

Local Search & Universal Search
If you’re familiar with SEO, then you should already know that local and organic search are different things. But there
are times when the two aren’t completely separate; this patent explains how search results are merged.
Documents are scored through two different search engine algorithms – one for local, the other for
universal/organic. A document may have different rankings for each. But when the search query requires the two to
be merged, Google combines the two results and rescores the document based on the second algorithm.
This just means that ranking well in organic search results could positively affect your local rankings and vice-versa.
Higher authority in one system can still benefit you across different search engines, so it’s still a best practice to
include organic SEO in a local SEO strategy.
Structured Data For Entities
This patent demonstrates how Google collects structured information about your entity/business from all over the
web, including data aggregators, directories, and more. Structured information refers to your structured citations –
usually, these mean your business directory citations.

Make sure that your business information is consistent no matter where it appears on the web. This involves
standardizing your NAP and updating old listings with the correct information.
Term Frequency For Entity Knowledge
In 2011, Google filed a patent on assigning “terms of interest” to an entity, giving us an idea of how Google builds
its database and categorizes documents. When you add keywords (or “candidate terms”) to your content, the
algorithm is more able to determine what your content – and therefore, your entity/business – is about. The patent
also talks about “learning” this information from user input and queries as well.
This patent reinforces the importance of adding keywords, related terms, and variations throughout your content.
You should also make sure that any referring entities use the correct keywords since the algorithm also looks at offpage
signals to determine an entity’s subject matter.

Google isn’t entirely transparent about how it ranks results, but understanding the algorithm is the first step to a
truly successful local SEO strategy. By looking at Google’s patents – past, present, and future – we can test out our
SEO theories, prepare for upcoming algorithm changes, and figure out which practices could get you ahead of the
competition.
How To Rank Locally In Google
So how can you use your knowledge of prominence, relevance, and proximity to influence your rankings?
The trick is to create an action plan that specifically targets each of the pillars. You need to have all three to rank
high – focusing on just one or two won’t cut it. This doesn’t mean that you should put equal effort into all three; you
can push harder on a specific factor if you’re lacking in it, as long as all three are present.
Keep reading for hard-hitting, actionable optimization tactics for better local rankings.

Increasing Your Prominence
Building prominence is all about building brand reputation and awareness. In this section, we’ll cover some of the
most impactful prominence-building tactics: social media, link building, and reviews.
Establish Social Media Profiles
It might sound very basic, but you’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t get this step right. If you want to do
SEO – heck, if you want to do any kind of business – you need to have your social media profiles fully fleshed out.
Categorize each social media platform into either essential social profiles and secondary profiles. Essential profiles
include the major social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other industry-specific

platforms (e.g. Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc.). These have to be set up first. Once you’ve established your essential profiles,
you can move on to lesser-known secondary sites like Academia.edu or Square Cash.
Build Citations
Link building is not as impactful as it used to be, thanks to shady businesses using black hat SEO tactics. But having
a strong backlink profile is still an important ranking factor because it signals to Google that your content is accurate,
relevant, and trusted.
To build citations the right way, turn to Google-approved techniques like adding your business to a directory site,
writing guest posts, and reaching out to blogs/newspapers/journals/etc. to get featured.
Reinforce Your Backlink Profile
Linking to your “properties” can pass link juice. Take advantage of this by creating a backlink graph, or a list/collection
of your most important backlinks. Adding this to your website comes with plenty of benefits:
- It encourages faster indexing since Google can just crawl that page for new links.
- It adds authority/prominence signals because you have a lot of sites linking back to you.
- It adds relevance signals because Google takes each citation in context. This means that they look at who is
linking to you, what type of site they are, the content your link was placed in, the anchor text of the link,
and many other factors to determine the “topic” of your site/page.
Collect Reviews
Reviews are a controversial aspect of local SEO – some experts say they matter while others say they don’t. Our tests
show that most businesses should see a minimal increase in rankings thanks to review generation campaigns. This
means that, while reviews are important, they shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all of your SEO strategy.
Aside from rankings, there are many ways that reviews can help your business. More positive reviews increase trust
and prominence with Google, even if your reviews are hosted on a third-party platform. Higher ratings also develop
trust with potential customers, putting you in a more advantageous position compared to lower-rated competitors.

Increasing Your Relevance
When trying to improve your relevance score, there are two things to keep in mind: your location and your niche. In
this section, we’ll look at how adding niche and geographical keywords can help increase your relevance.
Optimize Your GMB Content
If you aren’t optimizing your GMB content for relevant keywords, then you’re losing out on a lot of relevance. Just
make sure that you don’t over-optimize by stuffing your listing with keywords – that’s the best way to get penalized
by Google.
Make sure that your content contains the right keywords while still being natural and easy to read. Use synonyms,
related search terms, and LSI keywords. You can also use a tool to generate keywords and calculate ideal keyword
density so that your content is on par with your competition.
Choose The Right Category
The category that you choose on GMB can significantly impact which search terms you rank for. Choose the most
specific and most accurate category possible. We’ll go into more detail about GMB categories in a separate article.
Add Geo Markers
Increase your geo-identifiers or any information that specifies your location. This includes zip codes, neighborhoods,
GPS coordinates, Maps pin location, and more. The more of these you have, the stronger your geographical
relevance.
Optimize Your Website’s Location Page
Although organic SEO is a completely separate field, it synergizes with your local SEO efforts. Google looks at your
organic rankings to help determine your local search rankings, so it’s important to keep your website optimized for
both niche and location keywords. You can even add a location page to your well-ranking website to boost your local
performance. We’ll talk more about optimizing your website in a different guide.

Optimize Your Photo & Video Content
Optimizing your visual content is a small yet impactful step you can take to get better local rankings. Photo/video
optimization covers a wide range of practices, from choosing the best images/videos to adding alt text to
compressing file sizes to improve page speed.
Connect Related Entities
Connect your online brand entities such as your website, GMB profile, social media profiles, and more. Creating an
interlinked network of pages is a great way to build relevance and authority in Google’s eyes. Plus, linking out to
your profiles can encourage users to learn more about what you do and further engage with your brand.
Increasing Your Proximity
As we’ve mentioned earlier, working with proximity is tricky. We’ve conducted a lot of tests and experiments to see
what works to increase proximity signals, and we’ve compiled our findings into our 50-minute GMB State of the
Union video. Watch the video to learn more about effective proximity-building strategies.
At the end of the day, your local ranking is based on a complex web of factors. It’s important to know which ones
affect your rankings the most and which are a waste of resources. Focus on building your prominence, relevance,
and proximity through our concrete action plan steps, and you’ll see your online brand grow in no time.
The 3 Main Types Of Businesses
GMB 101: The Basics Of Local SEO
Before we get started on the basics of GMB, you first have to understand the three kinds of businesses that are
accepted on Google My Business. Below, we break down what they are as well as the advantages and challenges of
each.

Knowing which type your business is will guide you throughout the rest of the process. But if you’re struggling with
this step, don’t worry – you can always change your listing later. Choose the one that best fits your business right
now, and update it if it changes.
Storefront
Storefronts are the most common type of business. To qualify as a storefront, your business must satisfy three
conditions:
1. You must have a physical location, office, or storefront where you conduct business.
2. The physical location must be staffed during office hours.
3. You must not conduct business anywhere else other than your storefront (e.g. customers’ homes).
Storefronts include most retail stores, restaurants, gas stations, supermarkets, and the like. The exception is when
those businesses offer delivery services, but we’ll get more into that later.
Ranking for storefronts is mostly based on relevance. You’ll want to rank for the area that your business is based in
since customers are usually looking for the business nearest to them. However, you can also rank for surrounding
areas and even neighboring cities. This is especially true for businesses based in small towns or those that don’t have
a lot of competition in the area.

Service-Area Business (SAB)
Service-area businesses (SABs) are businesses that don’t require their customers to visit a physical location. These
businesses send people out to the customer’s location instead, like in the case of construction, plumbing, electric
work, or delivery-only restaurants.
Because you don’t conduct business with your customers on-site, your business address should be hidden from
public view. Some of these businesses may not even have a “proper” business address since SABs are often run out
of someone’s home. Hiding your address will prevent customers from showing up at your office.
Unlike storefronts that may target surrounding cities, SABs can only rank in the area/s they serve. You cannot rank
outside of that service area since those customers cannot benefit from your business.
For example, let’s say that you’re a plumber that services the Las Vegas area. Even if you’d be willing to travel to
nearby Pahrump for a customer, you will not rank in their location unless you specifically choose “Pahrump” as a
service area.
GMB currently allows you to choose up to 20 service areas for each listing. We recommend choosing the largest or
broadest service area first to cover as much ground as possible.
Hybrid
Hybrid businesses, as the name implies, are businesses that combine both storefronts and SABs. These businesses
serve customers on-site while also serving customers at other locations. Examples of hybrid businesses include pizza
restaurants or flower shops that have a delivery option.

If you are a hybrid business, you should display both your business address and your service areas. For example, this
Italian restaurant below serves diners at its location in Las Vegas, but they also deliver food.
How To Set Up Your GMB Listing
If you want to start ranking the local search results, then you need to have a GMB listing set up. The process is simple
enough that you can set it up on your own. But if you want pro tips for higher rankings, check out our step-by-step
guide below.
Best Practices For GMB Naming - 2020 Update
If your GMB rankings changed suddenly and inexplicably around November or December of last year, you’re not
alone. Many businesses noticed that their listings were performing very differently, even though they hadn’t made
any changes. This sparked speculations that Google had updated their local search algorithm yet again.
Within two weeks from when it was first noticed, Google confirmed that they made several updates. However, they
wouldn’t go into detail about what happened until a few weeks later.

Theories about proximity, link building, and the like floated around. But the official announcement confirmed that
this new update – called the Nov. 2019 Local Search Update – dealt heavily with relevance, specifically how your
GMB name can affect your rankings.
Today, we’ll go through the most important takeaways from the November update, how it affects GMB naming
conventions, and the best GMB name practices in 2020.
The November 2019 Algorithm Update
The November 2019 Local Search Update was one of the biggest updates to local SEO since the Possum
implementation in 2016. Sure, there have been a few minor or niche-specific changes, but none like this. Last year’s
update overhauled a lot of what we knew about Google My Business and what works for local search, especially
because it was across the board – listings in every industry and every country were affected.
Before Google announced the algorithm change, it was known as “the Bedlam update” because of all the confusion
it caused in the local SEO community. Many listings either dropped in rankings, climbed in the local pack, or
disappeared from the search results altogether.
Eventually, it was revealed that the update didn’t change the fact that proximity, prominence, and relevance were
the most important factors in local SEO. But it did change how Google understands relevance, especially as it pertains
to Google My Business names.
Before the Nov. 2019 roll-out, it was quite common to see high-ranking listings that contained a city or location in
the GMB name. This was proven to boost relevancy and improve rankings, so plenty of businesses were taking
advantage of it.

Adding main keywords to the name was also a usual practice, even though it was technically frowned upon by
Google. Listings weren’t getting suspended as much, which further reinforced the widespread practice.
But after the update, which Google says heavily focused on language, it seems that more and more listings are
getting suspended or filtered out of the local pack for violating GMB guidelines on naming. If you had a location
modifier or main keyword in your listing name, you were suddenly at risk of major penalties.
We’ll get into the what-to-do and what-to-avoid in a bit. First, we need to talk about how the algorithm is sniffing
these listings out.
The new local search algorithm uses something called “neural matching”. This was originally rolled out in 2018 for
organic search, but it’s now found its way to local SEO. Neural matching allows Google to better interpret and
understand search intent. By understanding the relationship between two different search terms, the search engine
can still match you to the right businesses even if there’s no direct keyword match.
In a 2019 tweet, this is how Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan explained neural matching:
“For example, neural matching helps us understand that a search for "why does my TV look strange" is
related to the concept of "the soap opera effect." We can then return pages about the soap opera effect,
even if the exact words aren't used…”
Sullivan also called it a “super-synonym system”. Basically, a business doesn’t have to rely on exact keyword matches
anymore to get relevancy signals, as long as they have other related words or concepts in their listing. We speculate
that this is why the spam filter has tightened – as search engine algorithms get smarter, they generally also get more
restrictive to prevent people from manipulating the system.
The ranking fluctuations from the November update should have settled down by now, although minor ups and
downs should still be expected due to a constantly-changing algorithm.

What We’re Seeing From Our Campaigns
Despite the current crisis, we’re still doing around 100 campaigns a month. This gave us a good enough sample size
to test how the algorithm change is impacting rankings.
As we mentioned earlier, adding cities and keywords used to give us great results. We had quite a few listings that
employed this technique. As the update was rolling out, however, those listings were dipping out of the local pack.
We changed the names a little bit, and they started appearing in the results again and ranking.
So here’s what we learned from that:
- Including a city keyword at the end of the listing can trigger filtering.
For example: Company ABC - Baltimore
We suspect that the hyphen makes it easy for the algorithm to spot these appended location modifiers. If
you want to keep the city in there, you need to incorporate it into the listing name a bit more naturally (or
simply avoid adding it altogether).
For example: Company ABC Baltimore Office
- Including the category in your listing name can trigger filtering.
For example: Company ABC Website Designer
This isn’t technically new – even before the November update, adding a primary category keyword in your
GMB name upped the risk of a penalty. But now, even secondary category keywords are potentially
triggering the spam filter.
Again, the solution is to get a little creative with how you incorporate the category.
For example: Websites by Company ABC
- Including an exact keyword can trigger filtering.
For example: Firm Personal Injury Lawyer
It seems like the algorithm has caught onto this popular practice. This has always been frowned upon, but
more so now than ever before. If you want to skirt around this, consider using synonyms or keyword
variations instead of the exact keyword.

For example: Firm Injury Litigation
Other Examples In The Real World
It’s been a few months since the update was launched, so we’re already seeing the real-world impact of these naming
changes. Let's take a look at some live examples.
Here’s what the local pack looks like for “appliance repair baltimore”:
This is a niche we’re familiar with, so we know that exact match keyword listings used to dominate the local pack.
But now, the top performers are “Baltimore Appliance Masters” and “Mr. Appliance of Owings Mills”, both of which
incorporate their location modifier in an innovative way. This is way better than just tacking on the city at the end
of the name, which would easily trigger the spam filter.
Here’s another example in another niche:

As you can see, using “of” is a good way to add a location to your GMB name and still rank despite the update. It
doesn’t just use the hyphen, and it sounds more natural – like it’s a real business name.
The legal industry was another niche that saw huge changes in rankings. Before the update, most local pack listings
incorporated a keyword like “personal injury lawyer”. Here’s what those local search results look like now:
The #1 rank still incorporates a similar keyword, although it isn’t an exact match. This may be the reason it’s
performing better than all the other listings while still avoiding suspension. When we looked at the rest of the results,
we saw that most listings didn’t have any keywords at all – a huge change from before the update, when it was full
of spammy-looking, keyword-stuffed GMB names.

All these examples prove that Google’s spam filter is more restrictive than ever before. We don’t often see keywords
or location modifiers in the local pack anymore.
But it also proves that relevancy is still an important factor and that keywords contribute to your relevancy. Wellperforming
listings manage to “sneak” those in more naturally, which helps them avoid the spam filter...for now, of
course.
Best GMB Naming Practices 2020
So, what should you do now that the “Bedlam update” has been fully rolled out?
According to Google, nothing. The search engine said that businesses don’t have to change anything about their
listings if they followed GMB guidelines in the first place.
According to Sullivan, the algorithm update was designed to make things easier for business owners. You don’t have
to worry about incorporating keywords into your business name. But this doesn’t provide much comfort or guidance
for SEOs, so we put together this best practices guide to help you name your GMB listings moving forward.
- If you want to include a keyword or modifier in your GMB name to increase relevance, there’s one thing
you can do to protect yourself. If possible, get a business license or a DBA (Doing Business As) that reflects

the business name with the added keyword. This won’t prevent your listing from getting suspended, but it
can make the reinstatement process easier for you. It’s important to have official documentation that your
business name matches what’s on the listing so you can get your suspension lifted.
- Incorporate any cities or keywords naturally, as if it’s a real company name. Instead of exact match
keywords, use long-tail keywords or keyword variations to bypass the spam filter.
- Keep in mind that changing your GMB name means that you’ll likely have to re-verify your listing. Before
you do this, you have to make sure that the rest of your listing is squeaky clean. For example, if your business
is listed at your home address (which is against GMB guidelines), you have to change the address or hide it
before you submit the listing for re-verification. If there’s something fishy going on with your listing, it could
delay the process or even get your listing flagged.
- Follow Google My Business guidelines. This is the safest way of optimizing your listing.
Important GMB Guidelines
To help you stay suspension-free, below are some of the most important guidelines on naming your Google My
Business listing.
- The name on your GMB listing should match your business’ real-world name. This is the name that you use
on your storefront, signage, website, letterheads, business cards, and is how customers know you. This
means that you shouldn’t put any taglines, operating hours (e.g. 24/7, unless it’s part of your actual business
name), or location signals.
- The exception to this is if you have different departments. For example, many universities have
separate colleges, or a grocery store might have a bakery section that operates as a distinct entity.
- Adding LLC, Inc., and other legal terms are not necessary unless they are part of your real-world
representation. So if your signage says “Coffee Shop”, your GMB name shouldn’t be “Coffee Shop Ltd.”
- If you are an individual practitioner (e.g. dentist, doctor, lawyer, etc.), you can include
titles/certifications like Dr., MD, JD, and CFA.
Ever since the Nov. 2019 Local Search Update, the algorithm’s spam filter has tightened tremendously. You can’t
add location modifiers or keywords willy-nilly unless you want a swift and harsh suspension.

If you really must incorporate a keyword – after all, if you don’t get suspended, it still contributes to your relevance
– the best way to avoid a penalty is by getting a DBA. You can enjoy the relevancy and ranking bonuses without
worrying about suspensions. It doesn’t prevent the suspension, of course, but you can easily reinstate your listing as
long as you have documentation backing you up.
Knowledge Panel
The Knowledge Panel is one of two main ways Google displays your GMB information on a local search results page.
When you Google a business, the search engine will sometimes return an information box that contains all kinds of
data about it. This includes the business name, address, phone number, website, operating hours, photos, and so
much more.

How To Get A Knowledge Panel
Like much of SEO, there’s no way to secure a knowledge panel for certain – it highly depends on Google’s algorithm.
Even verifying your listing doesn’t earn you a knowledge panel automatically, although it increases your listing’s
trustworthiness and credibility for customers.
The best way to get a knowledge panel is by optimizing your listing. You’ll need to complete your GMB profile with
accurate, up-to-date information. Next, you’ll need to add photos, gather reviews, and incorporate the right
keywords throughout your listing. Then, you’ll need to work on increasing your domain authority through organic
SEO. Again, this won’t guarantee that Google will display a knowledge panel for your business, but prominent
businesses have a much higher chance of earning one.
In 2017, some businesses and marketing agencies reported that their knowledge panel was no longer showing up,
even if they directly searched for the business name or brand. More specifically, knowledge panels would show up
if you searched the business name along with a location keyword, but if you removed the location keyword, the
knowledge panel would no longer appear.

One fix that has proven to be effective across the board is this: remove all your business categories except for your
main one. If you do that, your knowledge panel should return.
Step #1: Gather All Your Information In One Place
First things first, make sure you have all the information you need to set up the listing. The most important of this is
your NAP or name, address, and phone number.
For this guide, we’ll use this NAP:
Name: Las Vegas Low-Cost Handyman
Address: 4709 Arial Ridge St, Las Vegas, NV 89147
Phone number: 725-400-7190
Keep this handy when setting up your GMB. This will help you keep the information consistent, no matter where on
your GMB listing it’s located.
Local Vs Toll-Free Numbers
While putting together your NAP seems pretty straightforward, there’s one part that some businesses stumble on:
choosing between a local phone number and a toll-free number.
Local numbers are assigned based on location and are easier to call for nearby customers. Toll-free numbers, on the
other hand, can be dialed out of state or even out of the country. This allows customers to call you even if they’re
not in your area without incurring any extra charges.
While this makes toll-free numbers seem like the better option, the opposite is true. Studies have shown that local
phone numbers perform better for local SEO.
A SinglePlatform survey found that local businesses are heavily preferred by customers, with 72% willing to pay more
for a local product if it’s comparable or better than its national or international alternative. Having a local phone
number on your GMB listing will reinforce your branding as a local business, which in turn improves your reputation
with local-minded consumers.

If you want to include both your local and toll-free numbers, you can! Simply add your local phone number as your
primary number, and add your toll-free number as a secondary contact number. Here’s how:
1. In your GMB dashboard, click on “Info”.
2. Click on the “Edit” pencil icon next to your primary phone number.
3. Click “Add phone number” and enter your secondary number.
4. Click “Apply” to save your contact information.
Step #2: Validate Your Address
Note: This step is only for businesses that don’t have an existing business address or are using a fake address. If you
have a proper address, skip to Step #3.
If you don’t have a physical location yet, you can still sign up for GMB. The trick is to find a location near your target
address or the address of your biggest competitors. You can also choose the city center to maximize your reach,
especially since proximity is a huge factor when it comes to local pack rank.
Whenever you’re using a fake address (or if you’re adding suite numbers to an address that shouldn’t have them),
you should always validate the address using this tool. This is very important because Google will try to validate your
address if your listing gets suspended or put under review.
Here’s what a verified address looks like:

Step #3: Fill Out Your Profile
Now that you have everything you need to set up your GMB listing, it’s time to create one! Go to the GMB home
page to get started.
If you are signed into an account that already manages a GMB listing, then you will be taken to the dashboard. You
can add a new location by navigating to your “Manage locations” screen, then clicking on the “Add location” dropdown.
If you are not managing any GMB listings, then you will be directed to a page where you can search for your business
name to see if there’s an existing listing for it. If there’s no existing listing, you can click on “Add your business to
Google” to create a new one.

If you have to create a new one, type in your business name. You also need to choose a business category. We’ll talk
more about categories in a bit, but for now, just choose the broadest category that best describes your business.

After selecting a category, Google will ask you if you want to add a location where customers can visit you. Keep in
mind what type of business you are:
- If you are a storefront (e.g. gas station, supermarket), select “yes”, then enter your business address.
- If you are a service-area business that does not cater to customers on-site, select “no”, then add your
service areas.
- If you are a hybrid business that provides goods/services both on and off-site, you can choose either yes or
no at this point.
Choose A Category
You can change your business category whenever you want, so you don’t need to worry about getting it right the
first time. Earlier, we mentioned choosing the broadest category possible when setting up your listing. Now, we’ll
go into detail about the best ways to choose your primary and secondary categories.
Our approach is simple: find out what categories your competitors are using. Doing competitor research is essential
if you want to optimize your listing and get better rankings.

You can find out your competitors’ categories by searching for your primary keyword on Google Maps. For example,
your primary keyword could be “pizza restaurant Baltimore”. Then, look at the top three results and click on each of
those listings. Take note of the primary category, especially if they all have the same one.
Aside from your primary category, Google also allows you to add several secondary categories to your listing.
Secondary categories allow you to show up in related searches. However, unlike your primary category, secondary
categories are not viewable on your listing. This makes doing competitor research for secondary categories a lot
more complicated.
To view a listing’s secondary category, follow these steps:
1. Access the listing on Google Maps.
2. Right-click on the listing, then click “View Source”. Alternatively, you could press Ctrl + U if you’re using
Google Chrome.
3. Press Ctrl + F to open the search function. Search for the primary category.
4. Look for the categories that come after the primary category. These are the listing’s secondary categories.
Take note of the secondary categories that you find on each of the top three listings for your main keyword. We
recommend having one primary category and two secondary categories maximum, so pull only the most popular

and relevant ones from your competitor research. If you add too many secondary categories, it could hurt your
ability to get a knowledge panel for a branded search.
Choose A Service Area
This one only applies to service-area and hybrid businesses. If you conduct business with customers outside of your
business address, then you need to choose your service area/s.
Again, you can add up to 20 different service areas. To maximize this, we add service areas in a very specific order.
You don’t have to add all of these to your listing; it’s best to add only the ones that apply. For example, if you don’t
service customers outside of your county, then don’t add neighboring counties to your listing. As a rule of thumb,
you should only add service areas if:
1. You actually can serve customers from that area; and,
2. You want to rank in that location.
Here’s how we add service areas, in order:
1. Your county
2. Neighboring counties
3. Your city
4. Other neighborhoods inside your city, if they are shown on Google Maps
5. Neighboring cities, towns, etc.
6. Specific zip codes of your service area/s
If you max out your 20 service areas before you get to add zip codes, that’s okay! As long as you have gone through
the list in order, your listing should still rank in the most important locations for your business.
Step #4: Complete Your Listing
On the next screen, you will be prompted to add your phone number and website. Fill this information out to get to
the last step of the process: verifying your listing.

To manage your listing and update the information when needed, you first need to verify it. By verifying your listing,
you’re signaling to both Google and its users that you are a legitimate, reputable business. This also prevents other
people from gaining access to your listing, making inaccurate changes, and misleading your customers.
Most businesses have to verify via post. Google will send a postcard with a unique code to your business address.
Once you receive it (usually 3-5 days later), you can enter it online to verify the listing. Some listings may be eligible
for other forms of verification, such as through phone call, text message, or email.
If you have the option to verify by phone, make sure you turn off your IVR (interactive voice response) functions. If
IVR is enabled on your phone, you might not receive the code.
Step #6: Maintain Access To Your GMB
After setting up your listing, the next thing you should do is protect it in case something happens. You’ll want to add
another user to the listing just in case you lose access to the primary email. Here’s how:
1. In the dashboard for the listing, click on “Users”.

2. In the “Manage permissions” pop-up, click on the “Add users” icon.
3. Enter the user’s name or email address to add them to the listing, and choose the correct role.

Optimizing Your GMB Listing
A complete profile is the first step to better rankings. In this section, we’ll go through a few tricks and trips for
optimizing your GMB listing.
Operating Hours
Businesses With Physical Locations
If you have a physical address where you serve customers (i.e. a brick-and-mortar shop, a storefront), then you
should set your hours for when you are open and serving customers.
Even if you take calls after hours, the hours on your listing should reflect your operating hours. This is very important
to keep in mind – if your business is listed as “open” but you aren’t serving anyone, a customer can report your
listing to Google and get it suspended.
Let’s say that your business is technically open 24/7 to receive calls and queries, but you only serve customers
Monday to Friday from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM – these should be your listed hours. Alternatively, you could also choose
to not show your hours at all.

Service Area Businesses
Service-area businesses are businesses that don’t serve customers at their business address. If you have an SAB, set
your hours to when you are open to receiving calls or bookings. If you can answer the phone all day or if you also
accommodate emergency calls at night, you can list your SAB as open 24/7.
Seasonal Businesses
Some businesses may have different operating hours depending on the time of year – these are seasonal businesses.
If this category applies to you, you must set your business hours to your current hours. If your business is closed for
the off-season, you need to remove your hours and set it as temporarily closed (more on that later).
Appointment-Only Businesses
For businesses that operate on an appointment-only basis (e.g. medical professionals, salons, etc.), showing your
operating hours might give the wrong idea.
There’s currently no feature that allows you to indicate that you are an appointment-only business. Instead, Google
recommends that you remove your operating hours if you don’t want customers showing up at your location without
a prior booking.
Temporarily Closing A Listing
There are some cases in which you’ll want to mark your listing as “temporarily closed”. If you’re planning to do
renovations or close your business for the off-season, this is a great way to let customers know that you aren’t
operating at the moment but will be back in business shortly.
You cannot close a listing from your Google My Business dashboard. If you want to temporarily close your listing,
you'll need to contact support to get the label.
There is a known bug where businesses that are temporarily closed still appear as “open” on Google Maps. If this
happens to you, contact GMB as soon as possible to get it reviewed.

Adding business hours helps customers know when you’re open. Only use your real and correct operating hours –
Google often does “spot checks” by calling businesses during their listed hours. If the business doesn’t pick up the
phone, they risk getting their listing suspended.
In some industries, it’s common for businesses to open and close multiple times a day. For example, a restaurant
might be open for the lunch and dinner rush but is closed all other hours of the day. If this sounds like your business,
you can add multiple sets of operating hours (e.g. 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; 5 p.m. to 11 p.m.) to the same day.
For holidays and the like, you can add special hours to the listing. Special days include holidays (e.g. Thanksgiving,
Christmas), special occasions (e.g. a company party or trip), or any other day that you would have different hours.
You can choose from Google’s special hours suggestions or create your own.
Whenever you add operating hours to your GMB profile, make sure that you check your other directory listings.
Google pulls data from around the web for your knowledge panel, so your information must be consistent no matter
where it appears. If you have outdated information listed somewhere else, Google might erroneously add that into
your GMB listing.

How To Edit Your Operating & Special Hours
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. Click on “Info”.
3. Click on the “Edit” pencil icon next to the “Hours” or “Special hours” section.
4. Add your operating hours, then click “Apply”.

Website & Appointments
Place your website’s URL in the website field. You can use either your GMB site (more on that later) or your regular
website. It’s better to use a website that you’ve built on your own since you have more control over its content,
structure, and design.
For the appointments link, this should be a link to a page where customers can schedule an appointment with you.
You can use your website’s home page, as long as there’s an appointment form or something similar. If you don’t
add the correct link, you’re losing out on a potential lead.
How To Edit Your Website & Appointments Links
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. Click on “Info”.
3. Click on the “Edit” pencil icon next to the “Website” or “Appointment links” section.
4. Add your URL/s, then click “Apply”.

Services
If you provide services to your customers, you can display them on your listing. Not only does this give customers a
better idea of what you offer, but it’s also a great opportunity to add long-tail keywords into your GMB listing.
When you add services to your listing, each service must fall under one of your chosen categories. For example, we
have a listing that has three categories: “Handyman”, “Painter”, and “Electrician”. We group our services under each.
This means that we would put “exterior painting” under “Painter” while we’d put “ceiling fan installation” under
“Electrician”. Don’t put a service in a section it doesn’t belong in because that would be confusing for users and
Google alike.

Google suggests services based on your categories, and you can add those easily to your listing. If you don’t want to
use Google’s recommended services, or if their suggestions don’t contain your target long-tail keywords, you can
just delete them and add your own. In a recent update, your category becomes your top-level service. If you edit
this, it will also change your category.
When you add a custom service, you will be prompted for the service name, price, and description. Include a longtail
keyword and your brand name in the description to add some relevance. You have a maximum of 300 characters
to work with, so keep it short and avoid stuffing it with too many keywords. You can write these descriptions, but
we’d suggest hiring a writer to provide you with high-quality copy. To edit your custom services, click on the Edit
pencil icon next to it.

There are four types of price structures: No price, Free, Fixed, and From. Let’s break it down one by one:
- No price: If you want to hide your prices or encourage customers to contact you for a quote, don’t list your
prices publicly. You should also choose “No price” if you bill per hour (with a varying number of hours per
job) or if the other pricing options don’t apply to your business model.
- Free: Only list something as free if you’re telling the truth. Customers can report your listing to Google if
you don’t accurately represent your prices.
- Fixed: Fixed prices are best used for services that cost the same no matter what. For example, if you offer
consulting services at $75 per hour, then you could display a fixed price.
- From: From prices are for services that vary in cost but have a minimum charge. For example, your website
design services start at $1,000 but could cost more depending on the client’s requirements.

How To Edit Your Services
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. Click on “Info”.
3. Click on the “Edit” pencil icon next to the Services section.
4. Add business categories and services as needed.
You can either keep or delete Google’s recommended services. If you can’t delete them, you can still edit them,
change the service name, and add the price type and description.
Description
Your business description offers another good opportunity to get geo-relevance and add keywords to your listing.
You have a maximum of 750 characters to describe what your business does. Again, do not over-optimize with too

many keywords – it needs to be natural and easy to read. We recommend hiring a writer who specializes in SEO
copywriting.
The business description should contain an “elevator pitch” of your business and a call-to-action. Before publishing
the change, check that it does not violate Google’s guidelines.
How To Edit Your Description
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. Click on “Info”.
3. Click on the “Edit” pencil icon next to the “Description” section.
4. Add your description, then click “Apply”.
Editorial Summary
The editorial summary shows up on some, but not all, knowledge panels. Google manually creates a summary for
big enterprises, chain brands, and other popular businesses. It appears in the top part of the knowledge panel and
in Google Maps.

Business owners have no control over whether they get an editorial summary. Similarly, if you do have an editorial
summary, you cannot write or edit it. If the editorial summary contains inaccurate information, you can reach out
to Google My Business using this form and request them to fix it.
Attributes
Attributes help a customer understand more about your business. The kinds of attributes that you can add to your
listing highly depend on your business category, so make sure that you choose the correct one first.
There are two kinds of attributes: factual attributes, which describe your available amenities/facilities or other
objective things that make your business stand out (e.g. wheelchair-accessible, Wi-Fi, woman-led business, etc.);
and subjective attributes, which describe less tangible qualities (e.g. popular, cozy, casual, etc.).

Editing/Adding Attributes
As a business owner, you can edit your factual attributes. However, you cannot edit or add your subjective attributes
– these are added by users who have visited your business.
If you want to add or edit factual attributes, follow these steps:
1. Log into your Google My Business dashboard.
2. Click “Info” > “Add Attributes”. Click the edit button.

3. Search for or select the attributes that you want to add. When you’re done, click “Apply”.
Attribute Icons
Some common attributes come with icons that show up as “badges” on your GMB listing. These are only viewable
on mobile by viewing the listing on your mobile browser.

The list of attributes with icons is constantly growing, and it includes both factual attributes and user-generated
ones. There are also special attributes that you can only “earn” by meeting certain conditions. This includes the
“Highly rated” attribute, which you can only get if you have an average rating of at least 4.5 stars, and the “Trending”
attribute, which is added automatically by Google.
Missing Attributes
If you can’t find the attribute that you want to add, it’s most likely because that attribute isn’t available for your
business category. The attributes available to you are determined by your primary business category. The attributes
of a dentist would look very different from the attributes of a marketing agency.

Because no list identifies with absolute certainty which attributes are a part of which categories, you’ll have to
experiment with different (but related) categories to find the one that contains the attributes that you want. For
example, the “Happy Hour” attribute is not available under the “Dentist” category. But switching over to “Bar”
provides you with the option to select it.
Even better, attributes “stick” once you’ve added them – so if you want to change your primary business category
back to the original category (or to an entirely different category altogether), the attributes that you’ve already
added will remain on your listing, even if your new category doesn’t contain that attribute.
Again, you have to change your primary business category to get different attributes. Adding a secondary category
will not give you access to that category’s attributes.

Finally, Google adds new attributes regularly. You should always check your dashboard to see if there are any new
attributes that you can add to your listing.
Subjective Attributes
Like factual attributes, the available subjective attributes change depending on the primary business category. Unlike
factual attributes, subjective attributes are not available on your Google My Business dashboard – instead, these
attributes are added and voted on by customers.
Users can add a wide variety of subjective attributes that describe the place’s atmosphere, service, quality,
amenities, and more. While you can’t control this part of your listing, it does give you great insight into what
customers think about your business.
You can find your business's subjective attributes by following these steps:
1. Open your Google Maps app on your mobile device.

2. Click on “Describe this place” or the “>” arrow next to the business description. If you can’t find either of
those options, that means that there are no subjective attributes for that business category.

Alternatively, you can also check your Google My Business Insights dashboard to find which attributes are most
associated with your business (under “Insights > “What your business is known for”), but this is only available for
listings in the restaurant or cafe categories.
Photos
Photos can serve many purposes on your listing. They can attract customers, help them find your location, and push
them towards making a decision. They can even help you rank better in Google Maps through increased georelevance.
Collect as many photos as you can of your business. Google recommends several different types of photos such as
exteriors, interiors, products, and photos of your team at work. We encourage you to publish a few of each so that
customers get a better picture of your business. Make sure that each photo follows Google’s content and format
guidelines.

Photos should be taken using a high-quality camera. But, you don’t need to splurge on a DSLR – even an iPhone
camera works well if you have the proper lighting! If you can’t take photos of your business for any reason, you can
simply add photos of the city and surrounding area.
Once you have your desired images, you have to optimize them on your own or through a geotagging tool.
Geotagging tools allow you to optimize images in bulk, speeding up the process, and making it significantly less
tedious. Local Viking has a built-in optimization toolkit, but you can use any geotagging tool to format your photos.
Here’s how we do it:
- Filename: Name your photos after your brand name and/or a main keyword.
- Title: Add a main keyword or keyword variation as the image title.
- Subject: Add a keyword variation as the image subject.
- Tags: Add another keyword variation as the image tag.
- Comments: Add your business name, address, and phone number in the image comments.
- Authors: Add your website URL as the image author.
- GPS: Add your business’ latitude and longitude/GPS coordinates.

Then, when all the images are optimized, upload them to your GMB listing. Make sure you upload your photos in
the correct section (e.g. At work, Team, etc.).
We found that Google strips some of your image data when you upload to GMB. But photo optimization is still
important for two reasons:
1. Google may still read the information before stripping the data. We know, for example, that Google reads
the photo title – so adding a keyword here could boost your listing.
2. You will be publishing your photos in places that do not strip the EXIF data, such as Google Drive, your
website, and across the web.

Unlike Google, most sites do not remove the EXIF data when you upload your photos online. Google will still be able
to find these photos and read the data from these, so optimizing is crucial. Add images to your website’s location
pages, citations, press releases, social media profiles, and your Google My Business site (which we will discuss in a
later part of this guide).
Other Optimization Tips
Now that we’ve covered the most important optimization techniques, here are a few more tricks that could give
your listing an added boost in the local search results.
- If you have Google Ads for your GMB listing, add a Google Ads location extension to track your calls.
- Add your opening or establishing date. This makes your business seem more legitimate, increasing your
trustworthiness and authority with potential customers.
- If your business has multiple locations, you can add a store code or a unique identifier for your specific
branch. This helps Google tell the difference between your location and another location under the same
name.
- Don’t stuff any section with keywords, especially the “Advanced information” section. Some of our tests
have shown that using too many exact-match keywords in this part of your listing could increase the risk of
a soft suspension.

- Under “Labels”, you can add more long-tail keywords and location markers. We’ve tried a variety of signals,
including our listing’s CID and MREID. Experiment to see which keywords increase your rank, keeping in
mind not to keyword stuff. We’d say two variation keywords are more than enough for this field.
GMB Posts
GMB posts allow you to inform customers about upcoming events, special offers, new products, and other updates
on your business. Posts are also usually overlooked as a ranking factor, so this is one area where you can stand out
from the rest.
In this part of our GMB guide, we’ll talk about the four types of GMB posts: Updates, Events, Offers, and Products.
Sometimes, Google will also launch special post types, like when they let businesses add a COVID-19 update during
the height of the pandemic.
Whenever we set up a GMB for one of our clients, we always have at least eight posts (two for each type) ready
before launch so that users already have several posts to look through.
You can add a new post by following these steps:
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. Click on “Posts”.
3. Click on the post type that you want to add.
4. Complete the post, then press “Preview” or “Publish”.

Update Posts
The most general type of post is an update post. You can use updates to make announcements, feature customer
testimonials, or give users a peek into the day-to-day of the business. Update posts last for seven days, after which
they are archived. Archived update posts can still be accessed on your GMB business site, but they will be hidden
from search results and your knowledge panel.
How To Create An Update Post
When you create an update post, you can add photos or videos to help it stand out. You can either upload photos
from your computer or choose a photo that you’ve already uploaded to GMB.

The post itself should be short and descriptive. There’s a 1,500-character limit before your post gets cut off – this
translates to around 250 to 300 words. Make sure you incorporate your brand name, address, phone number, and
the keywords you want to rank for. You can also link to previous posts, social media profiles, and your website.
You can add an interactive button with your desired call-to-action. You can choose from Book, Order online, Buy,
Learn more, Sign up, or Call now. Then, add the appropriate link, whether that’s to your website or an online booking
platform.

Events
Event posts are pretty straightforward. If you have an upcoming event that you want to promote, add an
announcement to your GMB listing. These can be offline events (e.g. conferences, gigs, parties, etc.) or online events
(e.g. webinars). Event posts expire after a specific date, and you can set up an event post up to 364 days in advance
before it expires.
Similar to Update posts, you can add a photo or video to your Event. You’ll also have to add an event title and
date/time. Use the description section to add keywords and explain what the event is about. Don’t forget to add
your NAP and link to your other posts!

Offers
For special deals and promotions, create an Offers post! Here are some examples of great offers that you can provide
to your customers:
- Discount coupons
- Deals on shipping
- Extra items for a minimum purchase
- Free quotes/estimates
You can offer anything you like, as long as it is real and legitimate. If you are caught promoting a deal that you don’t
offer, your listing could get suspended for violating Google’s terms of service. Also, keep in mind that you cannot
offer anything in exchange for reviews as that also goes against GMB policy.
To create an offer, you’ll have to add a photo/video, offer title, start and end date, and description. Like Event posts,
you can set the expiration date up to 364 days after posting. There isn’t a call-to-action button, but you can add a
link to your offer, discount code, and/or the terms and conditions of the offer.

Products
If you sell goods, then you can show them off in Product posts in your GMB listing. When you create a product post,
you’ll be asked to provide a photo/video, product name/title, price, description, and a call-to-action button. Like
Update posts, Product posts automatically archive after a week of posting.

You can add products from your GMB listing or create new ones. We recommend linking the call-to-action button to
the product page on your website or a page where users can buy that product. If you decide to link the CTA button
to a different page, make sure you include the product page as a naked URL in the post description. Then, set the
link to no-follow.
Publishing Posts
No matter what type of post you create, the next step is always publishing it to your listing. Click the “Publish” button
at the bottom of the dialogue box to make your post go live.

But publishing isn’t the last step – you still need to promote your posts so that customers find them. This can be
achieved by sharing your posts with your social media followers. Here’s how you can grab a shareable link:
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. Click on “Posts”.
3. Next to the post you want to share, click on “Share post”.
4. Click on one of the social media buttons to share it directly to Facebook or Twitter. You can also share it via
email or copy-paste the link instead.
5. Take note of the post link. Add it to a Posts spreadsheet if possible.

When you publish a post on GMB, it cross-posts to your GMB site. You can also grab the link from your business site
and share that URL instead of the GMB one.
Posting regularly is almost as important as what you post. Try to post at least once a week, or more, if possible. If
you run out of things to post about, you can cycle through products you’ve already featured or showcase customer
reviews.
Reviews
Reviews are a major component of your GMB listing and one of the most important factors that contribute to your
local ranking. Plenty of high ratings and positive reviews signal to Google that you’re a trusted business that provides
excellent services to its customers.
The knowledge panel displays your overall rating as well as your total number of reviews below your business name.
Further down the knowledge panel, Google will show snippets from three customer reviews.

Sometimes Google pulls old or negative reviews that no longer reflect the current state of your business.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to control which reviews will show up in the knowledge panel preview. Upvoting or
collecting new reviews doesn’t impact which snippets are shown in the knowledge panel.
How To Get Reviews From Around The Web
The rating that the knowledge panel displays is an aggregate of your Google reviews score. But the knowledge panel
also pulls data from third-party review sites, listing your scores in the section “Reviews from web”. This is a great
way to “compile” all your customer reviews and ratings in one place.

Of course, this only applies if you have profiles on those review sites. Employer review sites like Glassdoor are not
included in the knowledge panel, and neither are scores from review giant Yelp. Some review aggregate sites source
the same reviews, so you may see duplicate scores.
To get reviews from around the web, your business name on GMB and your third-party profiles must be an exact
match. For example, if your business name on GMB is “Quick Water Solutions” but your name on the review site is
“H2O Inc”, then Google may not make the connection between the two profiles and it will be excluded from your
knowledge panel.
If it still doesn’t show up, you can also encourage Google to include third-party reviews in your knowledge panel by
linking to your review profiles from your website.
Removing Reviews From Around The Web
Google wants to provide its users with fair and accurate business reviews, which is why you can’t simply remove a
review profile from your knowledge panel without good reason. There are two cases in which you can request for a
review profile to be taken off your GMB listing: if the review profile is linked to the incorrect business and if the
linked review profile is from a complaint site.
Getting a wrongly linked review profile removed is fairly simple – all you have to do is contact GMB support and
request for it to be removed. Make sure you include the following information in your request:
- The keyword/s that triggered the knowledge panel with the incorrect review profile
- The link to the third-party review profile that you want to remove
- An explanation of how the two businesses are not related
The process for removing a complaint site profile also begins with contacting Google My Business support. A
complaint site is any review site that is dedicated to collecting (mainly) bad reviews. This would skew your overall
score since these sites focus on negative feedback and your reviews there don’t offer a fair or complete picture of
your business. Google is usually willing to remove these review profiles if you reach out.
Photos
“A picture is worth a thousand words” may be a cliche, but it applies to your Google My Business listing. Your photos
tell a story that your business information and even customer reviews can’t, so it’s important to get it right.

Your profile image shows up at the top of the knowledge panel and is one of the first things customers will see about
your listing. Plus, studies have shown a strong link between your GMB photos and local search performance.
Businesses with more photos get more views, more calls, more clicks, and more inquiries than average. It potentially
increases your rank, allowing you to show up on more searches and reach more customers.
How To Find Target Keywords
If you don’t know what keywords your customers should be using in their reviews, here’s our proven keyword
research method.
Take your main keyword and plug it into the search bar. Identify the listings with the most reviews – even a few
dozen or so will work, but the more reviews, the better. If you live in a small town, you might not get many hits. In
this case, search for the same keyword plus a location keyword of a big city. For example, “handyman Las Vegas”
will probably get you listings with more reviews than a similar search for a rural area.
Click on the listing to bring it up in Google Maps. Scroll to the reviews section and look at the featured reviews. Some
words will be bolded – these are the keywords you need to take note of. Repeat with other listings until you have a
list of keywords. You want your customers to use these keywords, your main keyword, and a location keyword as
well.

Here’s an example of a review that incorporates the keywords above:
“I called this company and got a swift response. The price they charged was lower than the quotes I got from other
Las Vegas handyman companies, and the quality of work they did was outstanding!”
Questions & Answers
Since Questions & Answers were added to GMB in 2018, this feature has been mostly overlooked by many SEO
experts and guides. Because of this, many businesses are missing out on the great opportunities that the Q&A section
offers.
Any user can ask you a question on your listing or answer a question that’s already been asked by someone else. But
the real value comes in answering the questions yourself.
Answering questions allows you to add keywords to your listing, but that’s not the biggest reason to prioritize your
Q&As. You can clarify information, expound on your products or services, or even create a quasi-FAQ on your listing
by posting (and answering) your own questions. Even better, your Q&As can show up in the search results page,
which increases the chance of someone stumbling upon your GMB.

The Questions & Answers section is also a great place to show off your amazing customer service. This improves
customers’ overall experience with you as well as how they perceive your business.
How To Add To Your Q&A Section
1. Go to your GMB dashboard.
2. On the home page, click on “View on Search”. Alternatively, you could pull the knowledge panel up directly
on Google Search.

3. Scroll down to the Questions & Answers section, labeled “Ask a question”. If you can’t find it on the listing,
click on “More about” to expand the section.
Note: The listing must be verified before you can ask a question.

4. Ask your questions.

5. Answer the questions you’ve just submitted by clicking on the Answer button. You can use any account (e.g.
personal, business) to ask and answer questions. We suggest using a personal account to ask questions, and
then answering them using the business account.

Removing Questions
Sometimes, users ask inappropriate, irrelevant, or inflammatory questions. Thankfully, you can easily get them
removed by reporting the question.
If you want to remove a question or answer, just follow these steps:
1. Click on the three vertical dots next to the question you want to remove. Click “Report”.
2. Choose one of the following categories:
a. Incorrect information
b. Hate, violent, or inappropriate
c. Advertising or spam
d. Off-topic
e. Something else
f. No longer applies
In most cases, the question will be removed automatically and immediately.

Relevancy
One of the main pillars of local SEO, relevancy refers to how much your listing matches what the user is searching
for. Increasing your relevance starts with adding keywords – both niche keywords (e.g. handyman exterior painting)
and location modifiers (e.g. Las Vegas) are essential, especially if you want to rank in areas other than where your
business is located.
We’ll cover just a few basic tips to help you build relevance in your target locations. Stay tuned for another post on
more advanced relevancy-building techniques!
For now, here are a few simple things you can do to add relevance to your GMB and rank in your target areas:
- Add location keywords in your listed services. Add a different service for each geo modifier, making sure to
use the location in both the service title and description.

- If you’re creating an FAQ in your Questions & Answers section, try to include your keywords plus a geo
modifier for the location you want to rank in.
Example: Do you provide exterior painting services in Las Vegas?
- When answering questions, try to include the target keywords + location marker as well.
- After answering questions, log into another account. This can be your personal account. “Like” all the
answers you’ve just submitted by pressing the thumbs up icon.
GMB Business Sites
Google My Business doesn’t just offer a directory listing, it also offers a free business website. Unlike a regular Google
site, this website is automatically populated with data from your listing (another reason to make sure your listing is
always updated and accurate).
There are many things that you can do to optimize your business site through the GMB dashboard. Let’s go through
those optimization tricks now.

Basic Setup & Optimization
To access your GMB business site, go to your GMB dashboard and click on “Website”. From here, you can customize
your settings, choose a design, and build your website.
Select a theme that best fits your business. Then, click on “Edit” to optimize your site content.

Pro-tip: When you’re working on your GMB business site, make sure that you save your progress regularly. Some
users have reported GMB crashing or glitching, causing them to lose their unsaved work. You can save your site by
clicking on the checkmark at the top of the Edit panel.
Primary Button
One of the first things you should add is a primary button, also known as a call-to-action button. The primary button
is located in your site header and, therefore, is one of the very first things users will see when they visit your website.

Currently, you can choose from six different CTAs. These are:
- Call now
- Contact us
- Get quote
- Make appointment
- Message us (SMS)
- Message us (WhatsApp)
Different CTAs work for different businesses, but we’ve found that “Call now” and “Make appointment” are the most
effective. These are the CTAs that put the customer further down the funnel, bringing you closer to a sale. Others
like “Contact us” and “Message us” leave room for the potential customer to ignore your responses.
No matter which button you choose, the contact information connected to the button is pulled directly from your
listing. If you make any changes to the contact number on your GMB site, it will also change the contact number on
your listing.
The “Make appointment” option redirects users to your GMB’s appointments link. As with your contact number,
changing the link on your site will also change it on your listing, so be careful with this. If you are a service-area
business, we highly recommend using this button because it’s a do-follow link, which means that it passes link juice,
authority, and relevance to the target site.

Site Headline
The site headline is the text that appears at the very top of your site. Initially, this will be auto-populated with your
listing name. The good news is that you can change it without affecting your listing. This is a great opportunity to
add a keyword to your headline and increase its relevancy.
Site headlines are always formatted as an H1, so apply any header best practices when crafting your GMB headline.
Through extensive testing, we’ve found that a keyword plus a location is the most effective combination. If your
brand name already contains both a keyword and a location (e.g. “Las Vegas Low-Cost Handyman”, you can stick
with it or choose another variation. Just keep in mind that you have a maximum of 80 characters to work with.
Description
Your site description appears below your headline. It’s automatically generated with your category and operating
hours, but you can change it without altering any data on your listing. We prefer using a keyword variation since
we’ve already included a main keyword in the site header. You only have 140 characters for the description, but
since you’re only adding a few words, you don’t have to worry about running out of space.

Summary Header & Description
Your GMB site’s summary header is similar to a regular website’s H2, so make sure that you include a long-tail
keyword or a keyword variation to increase your relevance. You can add up to 40 characters in the summary header.
Although it is called a summary “description”, you should think of this as the body of your content. This is a great
place to put a long-form article that’s optimized with keywords. You don’t have to worry about a character limit, so
you can take up as much space as you need. You can write your own article, but we’d recommend hiring a
professional writer with SEO experience to get the highest quality work.
Your article should be peppered with external links to relevant locations, your website, and other sites within your
industry. All these links are no-follow, which means that they don’t pass authority. However, they still add to your
relevance, which is why you should add them.

Use GMB’s editing tools to format your content in a way that’s easy to read. Divide up the paragraphs for better user
experience and use bolded or italicized words to draw attention to the most important ideas. The editing controls
are at the bottom of the panel.
Publishing
When your site is set up and ready for launch, go ahead and publish the site by clicking on the “Publish” button in
the upper right-hand corner of your screen.
Once you’ve already published the site, the blue button will change to “View Site”. Click on this button if you want
to see how your site looks when viewed by the public.

Posts
We already talked about the basics of GMB posts earlier in this guide, so in this section, we’ll focus on how posts can
boost your GMB business site.
Whenever you publish a post to your listing, it gets posted to the front page of the business site as well. Recent posts
are shown on the site’s home page, but you also get a unique URL/page for each of the posts. To get the post’s
business site link, simply click on the post on your GMB site home page.
This presents a great opportunity for building links, both internally and off-page.
The first thing you should do is organize your GMB site in a silo structure. Divide your posts into categories or topics.
Then silo them by linking these posts to each other, also known as “daisy-chaining”. Your first GMB post should link
to your GMB home page, while subsequent posts should always link to the post before it.

For off-page link building, link back to your posts’ unique URLs. Since all of your posts are interlinked, any link juice
or relevance from the external site will flow into your business site – not just the target post.
Videos
Like photos, videos are a great way to visually represent your business. However, there are a few guidelines that you
have to follow:
- Videos must be less than 30 seconds and 100MB in size.
- The minimum resolution for videos is 720p.
- Videos must be stable (in focus), well-lit, and of good quality. Videos that are shaky, out of focus, or darkly
lit may be removed by Google.
When you upload a video to your GMB listing, it shows alongside your photos. Once you upload two or more videos,
then your listing will get a dedicated videos tab.
Products Beta & Services
Businesses usually sell products, services, or both to their customers. Slowly, GMB has been rolling out two features
that could help businesses advertise their offers and even close a sale: Products (currently in Beta) and Services.
We’ll get into the details of both below, but first, a note: you can add both Products and Services to your listing.
However, having both features enabled doesn’t mean that both will show up in the main overview tab – only
Products will appear in the business info section, although both will get their separate tabs.

Products (Beta)
In 2019, Google My Business launched a new feature for most business categories: Products Beta.
Products Beta allows you to showcase top products and even allow customers to buy them directly from your listing.
You can even organize products by category or collection!
“Products” shows up on all mobile and desktop searches, although it doesn’t appear in Google Maps. If you’re
viewing it via desktop, the Products section takes up a very prominent place in the listing. It even shows up before
your Google Posts, which is where businesses used to promote their products and services.
If you are viewing the listing on mobile, “Products” shows up as a separate tab. It also appears in the main tab if you
expand the listing.
The major difference between Products Beta and products on Google Posts is that Product Beta gives you much
more visibility. Product posts only appear in your desktop knowledge panel for seven days after posting. In contrast,
Product Beta lets you display products permanently on both desktop and mobile searches.
Currently, some businesses are experiencing issues with Products Beta. First off, it’s not available to all business
categories – hotels are just one example of an ineligible business category. Second, even for eligible categories, the
option is not available to all listings.

This is a known issue with Products that Google has yet to resolve across the board. It seems like the Product Editor
may not be available for some older accounts and accounts that use GSuite.
Services
The Services feature is similar to Products Beta, except it’s tailored for more service-oriented businesses. This feature
allows you to add your services, prices, and other relevant information to a “Services” or “Menu” tab. Please keep
in mind that the Services tab currently only shows up on mobile searches.
When you add services to your GMB listing, Google may suggest a few popular predetermined services based on
your business category. Of course, you can still add your custom services if you can’t find them on the list.

You also don’t need to worry about optimizing your Services (or Products) – your content here does not affect your
local ranking in any way. There’s only one exception to this: if you have a GMB website that contains a services
menu, you can add that content to your listing. And since web content can influence your 3-pack ranking, optimizing
that services menu with the right keywords is worth the effort.
Other Link Building Opportunities
Links inside your GMB post are do-follow links, which means that they pass juice. You can use site posts to build links
to other assets such as your website, social media, and more. This creates plenty of link-building opportunities for
your other online profiles.
Your first step should be embedding your business site on your actual website, social media profiles, Google sites,
PBNs, press releases, and wherever else you have digital assets via an iframe. To add an iframe, add this piece of
code:
<iframe src=”your-business-site-url-here.com” width=”600″ height=”450″ frameborder=”0″
style=”border:0;” allowfullscreen=””></iframe>
Adjust the width and height so that the iframe is the correct size. You can place the iframe anywhere on your site,
but we’ve found that it’s best positioned at the bottom of the page. Google’s bots crawl the page from top to bottom,
and iframe codes may stop them from crawling the rest of the page. Put the iframe at the bottom so that the bot is
sure to crawl most of the content.

You can also build up your GMB site by linking to the posts and the jump links from your other profiles/sites. Take
advantage of all of these link-building opportunities to help you rank higher in both local and organic searches.

Other GMB Features
Appointments/Bookings
If you want to accept appointments, reservations, or bookings via your Google My Business listing, there are two
features that you can look at.
The Booking feature allows you to integrate a third-party booking partner into your listing. Currently, there are
dozens of “Reserve with Google” integrations (such as Klook, TripAdvisor Experiences, Full Slate, and Appointy), and
dozens more in the works.
Using the Booking feature makes it easier for customers to see your schedule/availability, make a booking, and get
reminders for their appointment. On the business end, it allows you to manage customer information, modify
bookings, and view booking insights.
If you already have an account with the scheduling provider, you can simply link your GMB account to your
scheduling account. If you don’t, you’ll have to sign up and pay the necessary fees (if any). There may also be fees
associated with booking through Google, depending on your provider.
In contrast, the Appointments feature is a field where you can add a URL to your booking page. While it doesn’t
have the “fancy” features that come with the Bookings integrations, it’s completely free and doesn’t require any
third-party scheduling provider.

Don’t use the Appointments feature to link to your homepage URL. If you don’t have a booking form or page, you
can link to your contact page instead.
Short Names
In April 2019, Google launched the short names feature to much fanfare. Short names allowed businesses to add a
variation of their business name as well as get a customized GMB link that they can give to customers. These custom
URLs make it easier for customers to access the listing and leave reviews.
When the feature first launched, it caused a lot of issues. One of the biggest problems was that businesses found
that their listings disappeared after creating a short name. There was no notification in the dashboard nor through

email that the listing was removed or suspended, and the listing was still accessible through the dashboard, so this
was extremely confusing. Rankings also dropped immediately, undoing months of hard SEO work.
Google released a statement denying that listings were suspended. What actually happened was that the system
was having trouble associating the new short name with the listing’s CID URL. This could affect any listing with a
short name, but there seemed to be a much higher risk for listings with short names that were very different from
their brand names.
Even months later, the issue hasn’t been completely resolved. There’s a chance that adding a short name won’t
make your listing disappear, but considering that short names haven’t been proven to improve rankings in a
significant way, we’d say it’s not worth the risk. Unless you’re willing to test it out (and face the consequences), just
leave the short name field empty until Google fixes the problem.
GMB Mobile App
In this section, we’ll talk more about the GMB app and some of the special features it provides.

Not only can you respond to reviews and update your listing through the mobile app, but you can also access two
unique features that are not available on desktop or through your browser: Welcome Offer and Messaging. You
must have the mobile app if you want to set either of these features up.
Welcome Offer
The Welcome Offer encourages people to follow your GMB listing through the Google Maps app. Like Offer posts,
you can offer anything you want in exchange for a follow – discounts and free items are the most common welcome
offers.
Whenever a user follows your listing, they will get notifications about any new posts. Getting people to subscribe
means more people that you could market through your posts. Welcome offers are viewable on your listing through
Search or Maps.

Subscribing to a business listing automatically activates the offer, and users have up to two weeks to redeem it.
Putting a time limit on the offer redemption period creates a sense of urgency. Without a time limit, they may not
ever redeem the offer. With one, they’re pushed to take action before they lose out on the deal.

Creating a welcome offer is very similar to creating an Offers post. You have to add the offer title, description,
discount code, terms and conditions, and a validity period.

Messaging
Messaging provides you with another channel to communicate with your customers directly. You don’t even need a
third-party app for this – customers contact you through your GMB listing, and you receive notifications on the
mobile app. You can turn this feature on using the app’s dashboard.

Only turn messaging on if you can handle the volume of inquiries. According to Google’s policies, you have to respond
to all messages within 24 hours. Otherwise, they will turn messaging off. How fast you typically respond will be
displayed to users, so make sure you stay on top of your messages!

Google My Business is the cornerstone of local SEO. Through it, you can improve your brand visibility, provide helpful
information to customers, and rank higher in the search results.

Hopefully, this guide has provided you with everything you need to know to set up your GMB listing. Of course, this
is just an introduction, so make sure to read our other blog posts to learn more advanced optimization techniques!
Part II: Automating your GMB Reporting and
Management
Many people think that once you’ve created and implemented your SEO strategy, the hard part is over. But in reality,
that’s when the work really begins.
You won’t know if your SEO efforts are working unless you measure your results. In this guide, we’ll walk you through
the basics of GMB analytics and how to handle client reports.

After setting up a campaign, the next priority should be automation. A lot of local SEO can be tedious and repetitive.
These efforts are necessary, of course, but they take your focus away from the things that need the most attention
– like bringing in new clients and developing strategies, just to name a couple.
Automating certain action items saves you time and money in the long run. It also frees you to scale up without
sacrificing quality or performance, meaning you can take on new clients (and increase your profits). Or, if you’re a
business trying to DIY your marketing, this lets you focus on actually running your business.
This guide also contains helpful advice on how to automate parts of your strategy. So if you’re ready to improve your
efficiency and create more effective local SEO strategies, read on!
Note: GMB reporting and automation are highly dependent on the tools you use. For this guide (at the risk of sounding
like self-promotion) we’ll be using the Local Viking dashboard. Most of our recommendations and instructions involve
this software, but there’s also plenty of advice that you can apply no matter what program you’re using!
Tracking Your Local Pack Rank
The truth is that most conventional rank trackers don’t give a complete or accurate picture of your SERP placement.
We won’t go into too much detail about this, but we did write a blog about why local rank trackers often suck, so
you should check that out if you’re interested.
But the general idea is that conventional rank trackers only show you what the rank is in the area of the person doing
the tracking. We all know that proximity is a huge factor in local search, so what may show up as the top result in
one neighborhood may not show up at all in another.
This is why we believe in the GeoGrid – it accurately reports how you rank depending on the location of the searcher.
Having access to this data means that you can identify which markets you’re performing well in, and which areas
you need to boost. Hyper-local optimization is the name of the game.

Client Reports
Many marketers dread the monthly client report meeting, but reporting is essential to maintaining good client
relationships. These meetings allow you to demonstrate the real value of your SEO efforts, which increases customer
satisfaction and the likelihood that they’ll renew their contracts.
We believe that, in most cases, poor customer retention can be traced back to poor client reporting. Many don’t
know which metrics to include or how to present their wins. It doesn’t matter if the results are great – if clients don’t
understand that, then they won’t be able to justify how much they’re spending on SEO.

In this section, we’ll go through the Web20Ranker’s process for automated reporting and customer management.
How To Automate Reporting
GMB Insights is a useful tool, but we want to dive deeper for our client reports. So we import our insights into the
Local Viking dashboard using an API. Not only does this give us way more information to work with, but it also lets
us see the growth of our top metrics at a glance.
If you don’t understand these metrics or what they mean to your client, you can check out this video:
INSERT VIDEO: https://youtu.be/FfLWbevtews
How To Choose Metrics
Half the battle of client reporting is knowing which metrics to present. You don’t want to overwhelm the client with
too many metrics, even if they show positive growth, because they dilute the impact of your biggest wins.
One of the biggest mistakes that beginner SEOs do is only reporting on local rank. While this is technically the “goal”
of your local SEO efforts, it doesn’t mean anything to the client. Your job is to report on the metrics that directly
correlate with economic value. These are your conversion metrics, like phone calls, website visits, and driving
direction requests.

The metrics we’ve included in the Local Viking dashboard are our favorite ones to report to clients. We don’t use all
of them all the time, and they may not be relevant to your clients specifically, but they’re a good starting point.
How To Present Metrics
If choosing the metrics is half the battle, presenting them is the other half. Great results don’t mean anything if your
client can’t understand them.
When you’re delivering the results to the client, you want to present them in small, digestible pieces. It’s
overwhelming for anyone to be presented with large amounts of information, even more so if they aren’t familiar
with SEO.
The Local Viking tool lets you click on each of the cards to “highlight” them when reporting to your client, making
each piece of information more “bite-sized”. You can even omit certain metrics from the report, especially if you
don’t want to draw attention to any negative results.
This might feel like you’re lying to your client to make your campaign look more successful. But focusing on the
positives will benefit both you and your client.
Negative results can distract clients from seeing their wins. We’ve had many cases of clients chewing out our account
managers because of minor decreases, even though the most important metrics show major improvements.
Omitting negative results also lets you troubleshoot internally before presenting them to the client.

Highlighting your progress is a good way to keep retention rates up and take care of your team. Of course, you can
still present negative metrics if you can spin them into a positive or propose an action plan to improve them.
At our agencies, we submit client reports every 1-4 weeks, depending on the needs of the client and the scope of
work. So that we don’t miss any important meetings, we set up notifications both on our end and the client’s.
GMB Posts
No one should anchor their entire local SEO strategy on GMB posts, but they do contribute a small boost in rank if
you know how to optimize them. We’ve had a few clients in low-competition markets that managed to edge out the
competition just through a few posts with the right location keywords and geo-tagged images.

You can also generate an RSS feed through Local Viking, then syndicate your post content to your other brand
entities. Or, if you’re looking for a more advanced post-optimization technique, try analyzing the keyword results of
your commercial queries. Take note of what keywords are being used and how frequently, then mimic that in your
posting strategy.
This guide, however, isn’t about optimization strategies. Instead, we’ll talk about how you can use Local Viking to
automate your GMB posts.
How To Post To GMB From Local Viking
In the Local Viking suite, there’s a posts section where you can see your stats and previous posts.

If you click on “New post”, you’ll be able to draft, publish, and schedule your posts without leaving the dashboard.
From here, you can choose what kind of post you want to make. Right now, there are three types available: Standard,
Event, and Offer. You can also add a CTA button and assign a URL. Add this if you want to direct people to your
website, a product page, or your booking/appointment platform.

Add your content, which should already be optimized according to the best posting practices. Make sure that you
link to the GMB listing itself, the relevant location page, and your previous post. Daisy chaining is an important part
of this process since your posts appear as separate web pages on the GMB site.
Automating Posts
It can be tedious and time-consuming to do this process every time you want to post to GMB. The Local Viking
posting tool supports syntax, which means that you can automate creating the post itself. For example, it can
automatically insert SERP and domain URLs that you’ve previously used, which shaves a few minutes off the process.
Also, scheduling your posts in advance lets you take care of your upcoming posts in one go so that you’re not going
back and forth every week. To automate your posting, toggle the switch next to “Schedule Post?”. This will open up
a calendar where you can select the date and input the time that the post will be published. You can schedule posts
months in advance, although we like to do it only one month ahead, which gives us some room to change our content
strategy if necessary.
If you have many clients and/or need to upload posts in bulk, there’s an easy solution. You can upload a CSV file that
contains your content, URLs, and even posting date. This lets you schedule a lot of posts in advance without having
to do it one-by-one in the Local Viking tool.
Photo Optimization
Photos aren’t just “decoration” for your GMB listing and posts. If you optimize them correctly, they can push niche
relevance and location signals as well.
How To Add Images To GMB From Local Viking
In the “New media” tab of the Local Viking suite, you can add and optimize your GMB photos. The tool lets you add
a category and schedule when it will go live.

You can upload your own images (which we highly recommend for your listing photos), but you can also use the
extensive stock photo provided by Local Viking for your GMB posts. Just search for the image you want, and add it
to your dashboard. You can also adjust the image dimensions or crop the photo, so you don’t need an external image
editor to make minor edits.

Optimizing EXIF Data
Your images shouldn’t just look good, they should also be optimized. Thankfully, the Local Viking tool provides an
easy way to edit EXIF data before you publish your photos.
Select the “EXIF” tab from the navigation bar. You have three options: keep EXIF, edit EXIF, or clean EXIF. If you
choose “edit EXIF”, all the metadata fields will become customizable. We use syntax in ours to automatically pull
data from our listing and populate the metadata fields, which makes this process even more efficient.

There’s another helpful feature here. At the bottom of the screen, there’s a GPS section. “Use GPS from location?”
is automatically checked, but you can uncheck it if you want to add your own GPS coordinates. This is great for hyperlocal
optimization or if you want to target areas outside where you would normally rank.
To identify the right GPS coordinates to add, you can check the GeoGrid or a GPS coordinates tool.
Questions & Answers
Questions and answers, despite their importance in local SEO, are often overlooked. This section is a great way to
add keywords, address customer queries, and build trust with both consumers and Google alike. Still, keep in mind
that, like GMB posts, Q&As should not form the foundation of your local SEO strategy. It’s an extra bit of optimization
that can provide a small boost, but not enough to justify spending hours working on it.

This is why we’ve automated certain aspects of our clients’ Q&As – our listings still get the benefits, while we’re
freed up to focus on the more demanding aspects of our strategies.
Having an FAQ on your listing is a good way to increase engagement. And since more people are moving towards
voice search (where their searches are often in the form of a question), having your info laid out in a question-andanswer
format can help you rank in voice results.
How To Answer Questions From Local Viking
Click on the Q&A tab in the Local Viking suite. You can view all of the questions currently on your GMB listing,
whether you’ve answered them or not. You can answer questions right from your dashboard by clicking on the arrow
next to it. The question will pop up on the right-hand side of the screen, along with a text box where you can input
your answer.
Aside from answering questions, the Local Viking tool lets you ask them. So if you want to create a quasi-FAQ page
on your GMB listing – a great opportunity to add keywords, by the way – you can do so from here.
Bulk Uploads
The bulk upload option is one of the best Q&A features that the tool offers. You can upload a CSV file that contains
all of your questions and answers so that you don’t have to add them manually. If you handle a lot of listings, this is
a great efficiency hack because it provides a fast and easy template where you can literally “fill in the blanks”
depending on the client.

To take advantage of this, you have to create your CSV file. Open a new spreadsheet, and add two columns: one for
questions, and one for answers. You should also leave two columns for the legend/key.
First, let’s tackle the key. The information you place here should match what’s on the GMB listing, including
formatting. In the example below, we’ve included just seven cells. But the more information you have, the better.
Next, write your Q&As. But when you’re drafting them, use substitution variables based on the “key” information
you have. For example, instead of writing out your phone number, write {{phone_number}}. If you handle many
clients in the same niche, we suggest writing more general questions so that you can reuse this template across
several campaigns.

Once you have all of your questions and answers laid out, it’s time to substitute the variables for the actual
information. Click on Edit > “Find and replace”. Under “Find”, add one of the substitution variables (e.g. {{City}}).
Under “Replace with”, input the corresponding data (e.g. {{Baltimore}}).
Make sure that Search is set to “This sheet”, then click “Replace all”. This will automatically replace every instance
of the variable with the actual information. Repeat this until you’ve replaced all of the substitution variables. Then,
quickly scan over the finished work so that all of the substitutions make sense. You may need to reword some if
there’s awkward phrasing or incorrect grammar. After that, your file should be ready for uploading!
Copy-paste the questions and answers column into the CSV file, then upload it to the Local Viking tool. It will
automatically import and publish your Q&As to the listing.
This is a great tactic for marketing agencies or SEO professionals who handle a lot of listings within the same niche.
You can just reuse the template and customize it for each client rather than starting from scratch, which saves a lot
of time. Plus, it’s easy enough that you can assign the work to someone else (like a virtual assistant), and it will take
them just 10-20 minutes per client.

How To Prevent Malicious Edits
Local Guides (which is what Google calls its Maps users) can suggest edits to your GMB listing, from your operating
hours to your phone number to even the business name. This is a double-edged sword – while this sometimes makes
listings more accurate, it also makes them prone to malicious edits by competitors or trolls. And since these edits
can potentially cause you to lose some rank, this is a real problem.
One of the easiest ways to prevent malicious edits from negatively impacting your ranking is by watching your listing.
If you regularly check on your GMB, you’ll be able to catch malicious edits before they cause too much damage.
But the Local Viking tool offers an alternative: instead of spending time watching over your listing, the tool acts as
your last line of defense. With our Automated Reversion Technology (ART), you can “lock” certain attributes. People
will still be able to make edits to your listing, but ART will “correct” them with your default information.

Just keep in mind that the system takes some time to correct the edits, especially since Google has to approve them
first. We’re still figuring out how to prevent the edit from pushing through in the first place, but until then, this is
the next best thing.
We may be a little biased, but the Local Viking tool really is one of the best tools for SEO professionals and marketers.
We developed it because we saw that our local SEO efforts were draining a lot of time and manpower, and we knew
there had to be a more efficient way of implementing our campaigns.
Local Viking automates many parts of the process for you, from posting to client reporting. You can even white-label
the tool so that it carries your branding – your clients will love the professionalism.
If you want to check out the tool, you can sign up for it here, or you can schedule a demo with us. We believe in it
so much that we offer a money-back guarantee for anyone who isn’t satisfied!
Part III: Ranking Signals Walkthrough
Half of the Local SEO Battle: Website Optimization
Most on-page optimization guides only tackle the organic SEO side, overlooking the fact that site optimization plays
a significant role in local SEO as well. By adding location signals to your website, this tactic packs a 1-2 punch: you
can increase your rank in the organic SERP as well as the local pack.
In this guide, you’ll learn more about the different strategies we use to optimize our sites for local search. We won’t
get too technical because we want to focus on improving your site’s authority, but we’ve included a lot of actionable
advice and step-by-step instructions to get you started.

Our On-Page Optimization Philosophies
Every SEO agency has their own philosophy on how they approach on-page optimization. We’ve tested several
different approaches to varying levels of success. After years of refining our strategies, we now swear by two big
ideas that consistently deliver great results: the 2/3 rule and reverse engineering.
The idea behind the 2/3 rule is simple: when adding keywords to various elements of the page, they should only
appear in 2/3 of those attributes. For example, if you have a keyword in your URL and page title, you can skip out on
adding a keyword in the H1. It’s not a perfect science and there are some exceptions. But this is a great rule of thumb
to avoid over-optimizing, especially for new SEO professionals.
But when it comes to the larger framework in which we operate, we’ve found that nothing is more effective than
reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is when you look at what other, successful businesses are doing and mimic
that in your strategy.
Since search engines aren’t entirely transparent about how their algorithms work, this (combined with testing and
refining) is one of the best ways to build an effective local SEO game plan. When we try to reverse engineer our
competitors’ winning techniques, we look at the top three non-directory results.
Optimizing Basic Elements
A successful on-page strategy usually targets a wide variety of ranking signals. But for this guide, we’ll focus on the
three on-page attributes that are most essential to local SEO campaigns: page title, meta description, and headings.
You’ll want to compare how your competitors handle these three elements, then reverse engineer the best
practices.
If you want to save time, you can invest in a tool that extracts this data automatically for you. Some software will
even make specific recommendations based on the information they pull. But these programs cost money, which
makes them inaccessible to beginner SEOs and businesses who are DIY-ing their marketing.
The good news is that you can still pull this data on your own, for free, and with a tool you’re probably already
familiar with.
By setting up the ImportXML function, Google Sheets will extract the data you need, allowing you to create datadriven
optimization strategies. Just keep the 2/3 rule in mind!
First, create a sheet, one for each keyword you want to evaluate. Here’s an example:

Fill out the top row with your competitors’ website URLs. Then, add these formulas into the appropriate cells:
- Title: =IMPORTXML(A1, “//title/text()”)
- Meta Desc: =IMPORTXML(A1, “//meta[@name=’description’]/@content”)
- H1: =IMPORTXML(A1, “//h1/text()”)
Replace “A1” with the cell that contains the competitor’s URL. Using the example above, that would mean A1 for
the first column, B1 for the second column, and C1 for the third. If you want to extract other headings, you can
modify the H1 formula (e.g. //h2/, //h3/).
This is the most basic version of this strategy. If you want to power it up, create a sheet with your target keywords,
then add the ranking competitor URLs for each. Use the Import formulas to pull the data into another sheet
automatically. This way, you can just add URLs to the first sheet any time you want to analyze a new competitor or
keyword.
Content Structure & Links
Out of the three pillars of local SEO, proximity is one of the hardest to push. While you can improve your relevance
and prominence, you can’t change where your business is based. This limits your ability to rank in GeoGrid nodes (or
areas) outside Google’s predetermined distance.

But there are ways to push the algorithm and expand your geographical signals. Here’s how you can do it through a
local content silo.
The Silo Structure
A silo structure is a logical way of organizing your site content where everything is divided into topics and subtopics,
like below:
In this section, we’ll talk about two different approaches. In most cases, you will have to use a bit of both to get the
best results.
Quadrant Approach
This approach helps you improve your proximal influence or how strongly associated your brand is within your
geographic area.
If your business is based in a large city and has several different verified GMB listings, this approach is particularly
effective. List all of your service areas and break them down into quadrants. Ideally, your website should have at
least one service page for each quadrant.
Start by making a service page for each of the verified listing locations, then add a link back to the site homepage.
For quadrants that don’t have a corresponding listing, you can still create a service page for that area. Don’t forget

to add a link to your home page! Then, link those location pages to the nearest GMB listing. For the anchor text, use
a niche + quadrant-specific location keyword, such as “plumber Long Island”. Since Google looks at the context of a
link, combining location-specific content with a geo-modified keyword can push relevance to your listing.
Service Area Expansion
Another approach to this is quite similar to the quadrant strategy we outlined above, except this helps you “expand”
your service area outside of the GeoGrid nodes that Google has “assigned” to your listing. This extra real estate
means that you could potentially rank in nearby areas where Google would normally not show your listing.
Service area expansion still requires that you create location pages, just like in the quadrant approach. The difference
is that, instead of focusing on quadrants, you focus on smaller neighborhoods and towns.
Create neighborhood-specific content for the areas surrounding your current service area. Make sure to include
images that are optimized and geo-tagged for these “hyper-local” nodes.
Content Creation
Now you know that you need to create location pages to supercharge your GMB listing and rank in nearby locations.
But what kind of content should these pages have?
At the very minimum, your service area pages need to have your geo-specific keywords, a link back to your
homepage, and a link to the relevant GMB listing (especially if you have multiple verified listings for the same brand).
Beyond that, it’s up to you what else you want to include.
Get creative! We like to feature client testimonials, “proof of quality” photo galleries, and the specific services we
provide for that area. When showcasing satisfied customers, we recommend adding a location marker to boost your
geo-relevance. This doesn’t mean that you should put their entire address – their city, town, or neighborhood should
be more than enough.
But your content creation plan shouldn’t end with location pages. Your other site content should be locally-optimized
as well.
Find ways to incorporate local-specific language or topics into your content strategy. For example, instead of an
article about “the cost of teeth cleaning”, write about “the cost of teeth cleaning in Chicago”. Even that minor change
can drive more traffic to your site while also increasing the geo-relevance of your pages.

Another thing that you have to keep in mind is that you need to target different keywords for each page/piece of
content. Otherwise, your new content will compete with your other target pages and may even “cannibalize”
rankings from them.
If you don’t have a content plan in place, it’s easy to run out of ideas and revert to the same topics over and over
again. We like to look for ideas on forums, social media networks, and other platforms. Find out what questions
people are asking about your niche. If you’ve already tackled the main topic, you can update your current content
with it. If you haven’t, you can build a new piece of content around it.
Again, don’t write several blogs on the same topic or targeting the same keywords. You don’t want your pages
competing against each other for rank.
Interlinking
We’ve already touched on this a little, but let’s expand on the role of interlinking in local SEO and what the best
interlinking strategies are.
Interlinking your content helps to pass trust, authority, and geo-relevance from one page to another. It also
encourages users to explore other content on your site.
When you link to another page, drop the link naturally. Use anchor text that contextualizes the link and incorporates
an important keyword. Each page needs to be linked to at least one other page, but you don’t have to link every
page to each other – if it makes sense and encourages further reading, go for it! But if it feels clunky or forced, leave
it out.
Avoid using irrelevant or vague anchor text that doesn’t describe what the linked page is about. And don’t add
hundreds of links on one page! You can be aggressive with your linking strategy, but most of all, be smart. There’s a
line between aggressive and spam.
Schema Markup
A schema markup is a piece of code that allows Google to read and understand content. Without a markup, crawl
bots won’t parse the content the way you want them to.
There are different kinds of schema markups, each designed to extract a particular type of data. Today’s schema
markups are incredibly sophisticated – there are markups for recipes, reviews, events, videos, and so much more.

Building Your Schema
There are two ways to build a schema markup: you can either use a template or build your own with a schema
markup tool. We’ll cover both methods, in detail, below.
Using A Template
For most campaigns, templates are an easy and affordable way to add schema. All you have to do is fill in the blanks
with your content, and voila! You have your markup.
The problem with templates is that many of those available online – whether through a plugin or a random generator
– are clunky or not as feature-rich as the schema markups you can build from scratch.
Still, there’s always room for templates in a local SEO campaign. We use them quite often and have even included
some of our favorites in our local marketing toolbox.
Before implementing our schema markups, we like to test out the code using the Google Structured Data Testing
Tool. You can even build the markup here, so that you can see how the schema looks as you edit it, in real-time. This
saves you a lot of time and effort since you’re not going back-and-forth every time there’s a problem with the code.
But the real reason why templates work for us is that we’ve spent countless hours refining our schema strategy.
Templates can be a real winner if you know when and how to implement them.
Using A Schema Markup Tool
Schema builders still use “templates” where you can fill in the blanks, but they also allow you to build the code as
you see fit without having to start from scratch. Most markup tools have a bit of a learning curve, but once you get
the hang of it, it becomes incredibly easy to create custom schemas.
Check out our local SEO toolbox to get access to a free schema app builder. Once you have that downloaded, read
on for tips on how to use it.

You can use the search bar or drop-down menu to find the schema code you want to use. When you click on a
schema type, the code will appear in the right-hand box.
Some schema markup types come with additional options. On the left side, you’ll be able to toggle and customize
certain parts of the code.

If a section has a plus sign, it means that you can add other elements to the code. For example, clicking on the “+”
under DayOfWeek in the local business markup allows you to specify what days you are open.
Go through each section one-by-one, and take note of how your input alters the schema. Don’t try to go through all
the sections at once, especially if you’re new to this. Take your time, and finish one section before moving onto the
next.

This schema builder app has hundreds of options to choose from, and it’s fun to tinker with code. But be careful
about spending too much time using the tool – you’ll likely only have use for a select few schemas anyway, and your
time is better spent on other local SEO efforts.
On-page optimization isn’t just for organic SEO anymore. By reverse-engineering your competitors’ optimization
tactics, creating location-specific content, structuring your site in a silo, and smartly using schema markups, you can
enjoy better rankings in both organic and local SERPs.
The Ultimate Local Link Building Guide
Time and time again, link building has proven to be an effective optimization strategy. But too many guides are too
scared to go in-depth because of the potential consequences. Most link building practices are considered gray or
even black hat SEO. Trying to influence rankings through backlinking is a direct violation of Google’s terms of service!
But, this doesn’t mean that you can’t operate above board with link building, it just means that you have to be more
creative with how you approach it. We don’t believe in “hats”, we believe in what works – and the processes we’ve
outlined in this guide...they work!
By the end of this, you should come away with a deeper knowledge of link building and the best practices to adopt
in your local SEO strategy. We know that gray hat isn’t for everyone, so we’ve included both safe techniques as well
as riskier (yet super effective) practices.
What Is Link Building?
When another website links to yours, that is called a backlink. Link building is the process of acquiring more backlinks,
which in turn could boost your SERP rankings.
Link building is important in SEO for two reasons. First, links help Google crawl, index, and rank new content. Second,
and more importantly, a backlink is a “vote of confidence”. In the same way that you wouldn’t recommend a bad
film to a friend, the assumption is that you wouldn’t link to something that you wouldn’t trust or recommend. Google
takes a look at a page’s backlink profile to determine how useful and relevant it is. If a lot of high-quality websites
keep linking back to your content, then Google is more likely to rank it higher on the results page.

Link building has been a foundation of SEO ever since PageRank was introduced in the ‘90s. But some people figured
out how to manipulate the system, which led Google to update the algorithm and penalize certain link building
techniques.
Considering how hard it is to build powerful but white-hat backlinks when Google’s algorithm is constantly changing,
it’s no surprise that link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO. But it is integral to any optimization strategy, so
it’s worth the effort. If you can become an expert backlinker, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition.
Link Building 101
Gone are the days when the number of backlinks was the most important factor. In 2020, you can’t just drop a link
anywhere on the web and expect it to drastically change your rankings – you need a smart strategy that gets you
the most results with the least amount of work.
To create that winning strategy, you need to understand some of the fundamentals of link building for local SEO. In
this section, you’ll learn which properties you need to link to. Since this is about local link building, the focus here is
on how to improve the backlink profile of your Google My Business listing, not your website.
CID URL
The CID, short for “Customer Identification, is the unique code assigned to every entity in Google’s ecosystem. A
business’s CID remains the same on Google Maps, local search, and elsewhere, which makes it useful for collecting
all “documents” under a certain entity.

When you’re building backlinks for local SEO, you’ll want to link back to your GMB listing by using the CID URL. Based
on our tests with real client listings, we’ve found some success with including the CID URL in our citations.
To find your CID URL, follow these steps:
1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Search for the listing. Make sure that it is the only listing on the right-hand panel; otherwise, you won’t be
able to get the CID.

3. Right-click anywhere on the listing, then select “View page source”. Alternatively, you could also press “Ctrl
+ U” if you’re accessing it from a PC or “⌘+ U” if you’re accessing it on a Mac.
4. Click “Ctrl + F” or “⌘ + F” to launch the search function. Search for “ludocid”.
5. After the word “ludocid”, you should see a string of numbers and letters. Take the numbers in between
“u003d” and “#lrd”. That is your CID.
For example: ludocid\\u003d10055226065046849962#lrd\\
6. To convert your CID into a CID URL, simply add the CID to the end of this link:

https://www.google.com/maps?cid=[CID]
For example: https://www.google.com/maps?cid=10055226065046849962
7. The CID URL will automatically redirect to your listing. You can use this URL whenever you need to link back
to your GMB.
Maps Linking
The CID URL isn’t the only thing you can link back to. Using the Maps short link as the backlink target can significantly
amplify your listing and improve your rank. To find the short link, simply access the listing on Google Maps, and click
on the “Share” button.
Google Maps offers other opportunities for link building as well. We like to embed the map on our website, blogs,
press releases, and other places online. To get the Maps embed code, click on the “Share” button, then click on
“Embed a map”. Adjust the size as needed, then copy-paste the code. This creates an IFrame with the business’
name, address, rating, and Maps location on it.

Unlike what some SEO experts recommend, we don’t add keywords or schemas in our IFrames. This kind of overoptimization
isn’t necessary to see better rankings. But if you want to embed a validated schema into the Maps
IFrame, you’ll have to insert it before the closing IFrame tag </iframe>.
Here’s what it should look like:
<iframe src=”https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3085.874802540008!2d-
76.62094868463662!3d39.33642197950544!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x0
%3A0x8b8b56d4cf5dc9aa!2sDr.%20K.%20Michael%20Murphy%20%26%20Associates%2C%20LLC!5e0!3m
2!1sen!2sus!4v1577854169329!5m2!1sen!2sus” width=”600″ height=”450″ frameborder=”0″
style=”border:0;” allowfullscreen=””>ADD SCHEMA HERE</iframe>
The Three Pillars Of Local Link Building
All of our local SEO campaigns are launched with links from the Big 3: data syndicators, socials, and essential citations
with tiered links. We use this three-pronged approach because it’s the best way to build trust, relevance, and
authority with Google.
But before we cover the action items under each pillar, you must first understand how Google reads and ranks
documents.
For each “document” (e.g. site, page, etc.), Google looks at how many other documents reference it, and what the
quality of those documents are. If there are only a few referencing documents, or if the referencing documents are
considered spammy, then the target document will have a lower score.
Google also uses other documents to find out what your document is about. It reads the anchor text link as well as
the content itself to determine the topic of your document. By consistently associating certain keywords with your
documents, you’ll increase your relevance to those topics. For example, if a page about cars links to your document
with the anchor text “car dealership”, that lets Google know that your document may be related to cars.
When you build links, it’s not just about quantity – it’s about quality and relevance as well. Here’s how you can
achieve both using the Big 3 approach.

Data Aggregators
It doesn’t matter if we’re working with a big client or a small one, data aggregators are always our top priority when
it comes to local link building. The first thing we do in any campaign is submit the business information to the biggest
data syndicators online.
This is important because Google grabs data from all over the web to populate GMB listings. For example, they can
update your phone number if they find different contact information associated with your brand on another site.
Google is even known to create listings based on this data.
If your brand isn’t submitted to the major data aggregators, you’re potentially losing out on a lot of trust signals.
And even if these data aggregators have your info, it’s always recommended to update them regularly. Inconsistent
information can result in a lot of GMB mishaps, such as Google changing your contact information without your
permission.
What are the major platforms? Check out this handy graphic below:
Social Media
We get into the details of social media link building later in this guide, but for now, there’s just one thing to keep in
mind. Every business must have their social media profiles built and filled out. Most brands will have a Facebook or
Instagram, but there are many other profiles you should have as well. You can download our Local SEO Toolbox to
learn about the lesser-known profiles you need to build.

Plus, having social media profiles is only the first step. The next thing you have to do is optimize them. Make sure
that you use your keywords without spamming them. Your GMB categories should be included as keywords as well
as any other search phrases you want to target. Then, once your profile is optimized, interlink your content where
possible to pass on link juice.
Social media optimization isn’t the end-all-be-all of local link building, but our tests over the years have shown that
it does make an impact on your backlink graph. Since creating and optimizing profiles are free, businesses with small
budgets can benefit from this tactic. But for those in competitive niches, we’d recommend putting aside some of
that marketing fund for boosted posts and paid ads.
Essential Citations
There was a time when link building was almost synonymous with citation building, and the best way to hit the top
of the local Maps result was by getting listed on the most number of directory sites. Although there are now many
other factors that determine your snack pack placement, getting citations has always been and still is a major part
of ranking locally. We’ll get into the nitty-gritty of building essential citations in the next section of this guide.
Citation Building In 2020
Building citations has evolved significantly since the practice became popular a couple of decades ago. You can’t just
upload your data on every directory site and call it a day. Despite that, so many SEO professionals and businesses
are still doing the same thing – it’s no wonder they’re not seeing the results they want.
We don’t discount the impact the citations have on prominence, so we still include it in our local SEO playbook. But
we do it differently from everyone else.
We approach citation building in phases. This allows us to create a separate strategy for each of the phases and
prioritize the citations that have the most impact. This way, you don’t have to spend hours copy-pasting your info
onto every other data platform, but you still reap the benefits.
Our Local SEO Toolbox contains a HUGE list of our top, secondary, niche, and location-specific citation sites. We’ll
still break down our favorites below, but downloading the kit will give you everything you need for a strong campaign
start.

Priority #1 - Top Citation Sites
Generally speaking, your priority in any kind of strategy should be the actions that yield the most/best results. This
is why we put essential citations at the top of our list. These include popular directories like Yelp and the Yellow
Pages, but every country has its list – make sure you check those out before building your citations.
There’s also another side to essential citations: GPS directories. GPS directories store information about your
location, which allows GPS systems (in phones and cars, for example) to give the user accurate directions. This boosts
your accessibility while also setting the foundation for your geo-relevant citation building efforts later on.
Must-Have Listings For Every Business
No matter what your campaign or niche is, there are a few citation sites that you absolutely cannot miss out on.
These are high-confidence sites that could increase your document score, which is why every local SEO strategy
worth its salt needs to include these platforms.
Again, you can get the full list of recommended directories through the toolkit, but we’ll break down six of the most
important ones here.

Apple Maps
With billions of requests per week, the Apple Maps directory is one of the most in-demand, authoritative websites
that you can get your brand on. Having a citation on this platform is a great way to increase your prominence and
trust score while also providing users (especially those with iPhones or iPads) more avenues to learn about your
business.
Like Google My Business, signing up with Apple Maps is easy and free. All you need is an Apple ID. Just go to Apple
Maps, sign in with your free Apple ID, and complete the registration process. You’ll need to provide the business
name, country, phone number, category, and status.
After you’ve completed the initial information, Apple will ask you to verify the listing via phone. Verification opens
up more options for your listing such as address, operating hours, and website. Apple will then review your
application, which should take a few days, although some users have reported that their applications were still under
review weeks later.
Bing Places
Bing may not be as prominent as Google or Apple, but there are still plenty of users on the search engine. Creating
a listing on Bing Places is so simple that it’s almost a no-brainer, but what we’re really after is getting some of that
authority passed down onto our documents. Bing is a great source of that, and it takes only a few minutes to set up,
which is why we still include it in our strategy.
To create a Bing Places listing, you need an Outlook email account for the business. Sign into Bing Places with that
email, then connect your (verified) Google My Business listing. If you have a verified GMB (which you should before
you even start citation building), it will automatically verify your Places listing as well.

Yelp
When talking about directories or citations, it’s impossible not to mention Yelp. Yelp is arguably the biggest directory
other than Google My Business, and many other platforms (Google included) use it as a data source. It’s trusted,
authoritative, and prominent – never skip Yelp in your citation building strategy!
Because Yelp is such a dominant data aggregator, anything you put on your Yelp listing could potentially affect your
listings everywhere else, including GMB. While this could result in Google overriding your input and populating your
listing with Yelp data, smart local SEO experts use this to manipulate the Maps platform.
Of course, it’s best to start simple first. Just make sure that your information is consistent no matter where it appears
on the web, and you can avoid these sudden changes.
To create a Yelp account, sign up on the platform and fill out the business details (e.g. name, location). You will have
to verify the listing right away via phone, otherwise, you can’t continue with the process.

Once you’ve verified the account, you’ll be asked to add your service areas, photos, categories, and other
information that enhances your profile.

411
Before the internet, people used to dial 4-1-1 to get local directory assistance. Nowadays, more people use Google
than their telephones to get information. But in a time when this information is fragmented across different phone
carriers, it’s very important to get listed in the national database so that more users have access to your listing.

To get listed in the trusted 411 directory, submit your information on List Yourself!.
Alignable
Alignable is a network of small businesses that provides a decent citation, and it only takes a few minutes to create
a listing. Sign-up on the platform is free and you can easily verify your account through SMS.
To make the most out of your Alignable profile, you need to connect your Facebook Business page. We’ll talk more
about that in a later part of this guide, so don’t worry if you don’t have it set up yet.

Fill out your profile as thoroughly as possible. Always link back to your social media profiles, website, GMB listing,
and other brand documents to get that link juice! Here’s what a completed Alignable profile should look like:
Waze
We go through many more citations in our downloadable toolkit, but the last essential citation that we’ll talk about
in this guide is Waze. Many of us know Waze as a GPS/driving directions app, but it’s also an authoritative source
that can up your document score.
Waze has been a Google property since 2013, and interlinking Google entities is an incredibly powerful way to
reinforce your brand. We’ll discuss that in detail in the “Google Site Stacks” section of this guide, but for now, here’s
how to add your business to Waze. Warning: this is more technical than just creating an account online, so make
sure you follow these instructions closely!

First things first, you need a phone that runs Android. Download both Waze and FakeGPS GO, or any location
spoofing app. Then, you have to enable the developer mode. This screenshot shows you how:
After completing those steps, go back to your main Settings screen and click on the new “Developer Options” setting.

Tap “Select mock location app”, and select your GPS spoofing app.
Open up the app and set your target location. This should be your exact business address for the best results.

Once that is set, open Waze. Check that the blue dot (your location) is set to the correct point. Then, tap on the
orange button on the lower right of the screen.

Tap “Place” to add your business to the map.

Add a photo of the business. We recommend using an exterior shot to help customers find where you are. You can
also use a Street View photo if you don’t have any pictures of the outside of your business. Then, complete the listing
as needed.

Priority #2 - Secondary Citation Sites
Once you have your essential citations down, you can switch focus to secondary citation sites. These are the lesserknown
yet still robust directories that have popped up over the last decade. Secondary sites may not pass as much
authority, but we want to add as much prominence as possible.

Priority #3 - Niche Citation Cites
Although a lot of local SEO is establishing geo-relevance, you need to increase your niche relevance as well. After all,
Google takes a look at the referencing page to understand what your document is all about, and citations from
relevant sources have more weight than those from unrelated directories.

Priority #4 - Local Directories
Local directories and geo-specific citations are a good way to associate your brand with a location. This isn’t always
possible, especially in smaller towns, but most major cities in the US have a local directory. If your area has one,
make sure to include it in your backlink strategy.

Priority #5 - Competitive Citations
A concept that is common in SEO is “reverse engineering”, and we often use it when building citations. We always
take a look at what our top-ranking competitors are doing, and we apply it to our strategy. Competitive parity is a
core philosophy ,and it’s a big reason why our clients are able to get into the local pack.
You can use a tool like Whitespark to find out which directories your competitors have listings on. This helps you
even the playing field and benefit from the best practices of your competitors.
How To Find Citation Sites
To help you flesh out your link building strategy, we’ve put together this handy guide on how to find citation sites.
Below, we recommend some search parameters and terms that you can use to find the right directories for your
brand.
Note: These search terms will help you find geo-relevant citation sites. If you want to find niche-relevant directories,
replace “City” with your business category or main keyword. For example, “plumber”, “restaurant”, or “digital
marketing agency” can all be plugged in to find directories in those fields.
- City + “add your business”
- City + “add your business” site:.edu

- City + “add your business” site:.gov
- City + “add site”
- City + “add URL”
- City + “add website”
- City + “favorite links”
- City + “favorite sites”
- City + “favorite websites”
- City + “listing”
- City + “recommended links”
- City + “recommended sites”
- City + “submit website”
- City + “submit”
- City + “suggest site”
- City + “suggest website”
- City + * directory
- City + directory
- City + intitle:directory
- City + inurl:“.gov” “add your business”
- City + inurl:directory
- City + inurl:submit.php

Guest Posting & Link Outreach
Another core aspect of link building is networking – which means cultivating relationships with other people and
businesses so that you can get more opportunities for citations. In this section of the guide, we’ll focus on two types:
- Guest posting, or writing an article for another website so that you can add a link to your
site/listing/documents
- Local outreach, or networking to bloggers, businesses, and other people in your community so that they
can give you a geographically-relevant backlink
Guest posting is a common tactic for organic SEO, and almost every guide will mention it at some point or another.
But for local rankings, the data suggests that the second type, local outreach, is much more effective at generating
relevance and prominence.
Both practices allow you to add contextual links on authoritative websites, which improves your prominence in
return. A good local SEO strategy will combine a bit of both, especially since your organic rankings impact your local
rankings.
No matter which strategy you choose, however, our advice remains the same: when you get a backlink from a guest
post or local blog, you must amplify it. Link to those sites and boost their authority, so that the link juice you get
from the backlink is greater. This is a powerful strategy that has worked for us for years, and there are both white
and gray hat ways to execute this.
But for this guide, we don’t want to focus too much on the ins and outs of guest posting. A lot of work goes into local
outreach, and many businesses simply choose to outsource it. Guest posting services are affordable and easy to find,
and it frees you up to manage other parts of your business.
Instead, what we will talk about is how to find more opportunities for link building. When we search the local market
for potential backlink sources, we first look at the thought leaders and prominent personalities in the community.
Every city or town has its blogs, forums, and influencers – we just need to find them. Not only does this increase
your geo-relevance and help you rank higher for your location, but it’s also a great way to reach new audiences and
advertise your brand.
Below are some of our favorite places to mine for link building opportunities.

Conferences & Events
Conferences, expos, and other events have always been good avenues to meet people and connect with other
businesses. This isn’t as long-term or sustainable a strategy as our other recommendations on this guide, but you
can still get a link from the event by sponsoring the conference or setting up a booth.
The backlink is merely a bonus. It may sound cheesy, but the real benefit of attending these conferences is the
relationships you make while you’re engaging with the community.
If you are capable of hosting an event, there are plenty of SEO opportunities as well. To learn more about event link
building, check out Moz’s strategy. Even though it was written in 2012, many of the core practices remain effective
to this day, so that’s also worth a look.
To find events near you, use these search parameters:
- City + intitle:conference
- City + intitle:exhibition
- City + intitle:expo
- City + intitle:seminar
- City + intitle:trade show
- City + site:meetup.com

- City + “submit an event”
- City + events
- City + events page
- City + find an event
Donations & Sponsorships
Donation links are relatively easy to build. All you have to do is find a website that accepts sponsorships or donations,
donate enough to earn a link on their website, and reap that link juice. This strategy has a few pros and cons.
One of the advantages is that there’s little work required to get a donation link. Targeting the right sites (like local
business associations or clubs) can increase your geo-relevance while also building authority. And as a bonus, many
charitable donations to nonprofits can be written off your taxes.
Not every donation link is created equal, though. Over the last decade, many people have taken advantage of this
strategy to the point where some donation sites don’t pass much authority or trust anymore. Low-quality
placements on spammy sites that have hundreds of other links are a waste of time and money.
The trick is to be selective about who you donate to. Stick to established local organizations like a sports club or
charity. Not only are you giving back to your community, but you’re also avoiding the usual spam sites that many
SEO experts use to get a link.
To find organizations that accept donations, use these search parameters:
- City + “contributors”
- City + “donation links”
- City + “donation lists” + “contributors”
- City + “donations list”
- City + “list of contributors” + donation
- City + “sponsors”

- City + allintitle:”contributors”
- City + allintitle:”sponsors”
- City + contributors page
- City + contributors page + “donate”
- City + donate to us
- City + donation list + “contributors”
- City + inurl: keywords
- City + scholarship inurl:k12 100
- City + sponsor us $100
- City + sponsor us $100
- City + sponsors page
- City + “contributors”
- City + “donate”
- City + “charity online”
- City + “contribute”
- City + “donate for”
- City + “donate now”
- City + “donate online”
- City + “donate to”
- City + “goods for donation”
- City + “make charity”
- City + “make donation”
- City + “money for donation”

- City + “partner”
- City + “services for donation”
- City + “sponsor”
- City + “sponsorship”
- City + “support”
Forums
Most people overlook forums as a potential source for backlinks, but we’ve found that it is an impactful way to build
an audience, establish yourself as an industry expert, and promote your links. One of our agencies has been mining
forums for link building opportunities for years, and that’s because this strategy works.
If you decide to adopt this approach, make sure you avoid this one common mistake. Many simply leave links in their
profile signature, but you can’t expect a lot of link juice (or clicks, for that matter) by spamming the forum that way.
Make the most of the platform by creating relationships with the owner, moderators, and other forum members.
Pay for ads on the forum (as a sign of goodwill), and negotiate a backlink with the owner. Engage with the
community, answer questions, and drop the link when it’s relevant. You can also provide special discounts or offers
for members of the forum, which will likely result in more links.
Be creative and put a little bit of effort into cultivating those relationships. That will go farther than sneaking a link
in without context.
To find forums to participate in, use these search parameters:
- City + “forum”
- City + “powered by Fireboard”
- City + “powered by ip.board”
- City + “powered by phpbb”
- City + “powered by phpbb3”
- City + “powered by SMF”

- City + “powered by vbulletin”
- City + forum
- City + intitle:forum
- City + inurl:forum
Local Blogs
Never underestimate the power of a local blog! By reaching out to a local blog, you can give your campaigns – and
therefore, your rankings – a serious boost.
Local bloggers have spent countless hours investing in their brand. They’ve most likely built a small but fiercely loyal
community around their blog, which makes their audience much more likely to trust (and click on) their
recommendations. Plus, local bloggers are usually “in-the-know” with local events and trends, and partnering up
with them could open up other opportunities for you to market yourself.
One of the easiest ways to encourage local bloggers to work with you is by giving them something in return. No, not
money, but samples of your products or services. If you’re a restaurant, invite them for a complimentary meal. If
you’re a fashion brand, send them free clothes of their choosing. Even service-oriented businesses can get in on this.
For example, if you’re a dentist, you can offer free cleanings or extractions.
It’s a win-win situation: the blogger gets free products/services (and more content for their blog), and you get a georelevant
backlink in their review. This can improve both your document score and your referral traffic, so it’s doubly
effective. We’ve used this strategy with many clients across varying niches, and they’ve all worked well. You just
need to be creative with your incentives, and choose the right bloggers!
To find local blogs you can partner with, use these search parameters:
- City + blogs
- City + bloggers
- City + blog
- City + updates
- City + inurl:blog

- City + intitle:blog
Sponsored Posts & Local Advertising
There are plenty of local websites that are built on advertising – brands buy a review or feature, and the site posts
about them to their thousands (or even millions) of readers. It may not be the most sophisticated local outreach
strategy, but it’s simple and effective – and that’s what matters the most.
Not all local advertisers offer link building opportunities, but it helps to ask. Sometimes, you may be able to negotiate
a better deal that includes backlinks, but you won’t know unless you try. You’d be surprised at how many of them
are flexible with their advertising packages for the right price. After all, money is money, and a backlink isn’t difficult
to provide.
As with blogs, the benefits of buying media with a local company are two-fold. First, you get your backlink from an
authoritative and geo-relevant site. Second, these websites promote your brand to a large audience. Worst case
scenario, you strengthen your brand visibility. Best case scenario, you gain a few customers.
To find local websites that offer advertising to businesses, use these search parameters:
- City + “advertise on our site”
- City + “advertise on this site”
- City + “advertise”
- City + “partnership opportunities”
- City + “pay for a post”
- City + “sponsor a post”
- City + “sponsored post”
- City + intext:“this is a paid post”
- City + intext:“this is a paid review”
- City + intext:“this is a sponsored post”
- City + intext:“this is a Sponsored review”

- City + intext:“this was a paid post”
- City + intext:“this was a paid review”
- City + intext:“this was a sponsored post”
- City + intext:“this was a Sponsored review”
- City + accepting sponsored posts
- City + inpostauthor:“guest”
- City + inpostauthor:“sponsored author”
- City + inpostauthor:“sponsored post”
- City + intitle:“sponsored author”
- City + intitle:“sponsored post”
- City + intitle:“submit sponsored post”
- City + inurl: sponsored-post
- City + inurl: sponsored-posts
- City + inurl: sponsored*post
- City + inurl: sponsored*posts
- City + inurl:category/sponsored
- City + inurl:tag/sponsored
- City + sponsored post by
Standard Guest Posting
Of course, we can’t end this section without talking about the most common outreach tactic of all: guest posting.
Guest posting is a cornerstone of link building that provides many advantages:
- It allows you to demonstrate your expertise, which in turn raises your brand’s prominence and credibility.
Most people would rather trust a business run by someone they’re already familiar with.

- Guest posting involves networking with other industry professionals, which opens up many other
opportunities down the line.
- It helps to build your name and brand. More prominent names are more likely to be featured organically
by other sites, earning you natural, authoritative backlinks.
There are many ways to get a guest post on another site. The most effective ways involve cold emailing, networking,
and building relationships with other people in your niche. But this guide isn’t about guest posting, so we’ll leave the
nitty-gritty for another post. Instead, we’ll teach you how to find some local link building opportunities through
search.
Just a note: this particular strategy doesn’t get you a lot of opportunities, so don’t put too much time or effort into
it. Still, we’ve managed to land a few great geo-relevant backlinks using this technique, which is why we’ve still
included it in this guide. It’s best if you leave this work to a virtual assistant or another team member so that you
can focus on the more impactful outreach strategies.
To find some local guest posting opportunities, use these search parameters:
- City + “Add Articles”
- City + “Add Content”
- City + “Become a Contributor”
- City + “Become a Guest Blogger”
- City + “Become an Author”
- City + “Bloggers Wanted”
- City + “Blogs Accepting Guest Posts”
- City + “Blogs that Accept Guest Blogging”
- City + “Contribute”
- City + “Guest Blogging Spot”
- City + “Guest Contributor”
- City + “Guest post by”
- City + “Guest Post Guidelines”

- City + “Guest Post”
- City + “Places I Guest Posted”
- City + “Publish Your News”
- City + “Submit a Guest Post”
- City + “Submit an Article”
- City + “Submit News”
- City + “Submit Post”
- City + “Submit Tutorial”
- City + “Suggest a Post”
- City + “This is a guest article”
- City + “Want to Write for”
- City + “writers wanted”
- City + “Add Guest Post”
- City + “Become a Contributor”
- City + “Become a Guest Writer”
- City + “Blogs that Accept Guest Bloggers”
- City + “Blogs that Accept Guest Posts”
- City + “Community News”
- City + “Contribute to our Site”
- City + “Group Writing Project”
- City + “Guest Bloggers Wanted”
- City + “Guest Bloggers Wanted”
- City + “Guest Posts Roundup”

- City + “My Guest Posts”
- City + “Now Accepting Guest Posts”
- City + “Submission Guidelines”
- City + “Submit a Guest Article”
- City + “Submit Article”
- City + “Submit Blog Post”
- City + “Submit Guest Post”
- City + “Submit News”
- City + “Suggest a Guest Post”
- City + “The following guest post”
- City + “This guest post is from”
- City + “This guest post was written”
- City + “Write for Us”
- City + inurl:guest-post-guidelines
- City + inurl:guest-posts
- City + inurl:write-for-us
- City + inurlprofiles/blog/new
- City + “submit guest post”
- City + “accepting guest posts”
- City + “contribute to our site”
- City + “contributor guidelines”
- City + “guest bloggers wanted”
- City + “guest post courtesy of”

- City + “guest post opportunities”
- City + “write for us”
- City + accepting guest posts
- City + become a guest blogger
- City + become guest blogger
- City + guest blogger wanted
- City + intitle:”guest blogging opportunity”
- City + intitle:”submit blog post”
- City + intitle:”submit guest post”
- City + intitle:”write for me”
- City + intitle:”write for us”
- City + inurl:”write for me”
- City + inurl:”write for us”
- City + inurl:category/guest
- City + inurl:guest-blogger
- City + inurl:guest-post
- City + inurl:guest-posts
- City + inurl:guest*author
- City + inurl:guest*blogger
- City + inurl:guest*post
- City + inurl:guest*posts
- City + inurl:tag/guest
- City + submit a guest post”

- City + submit guest post
- City + submit your guest post
- City + submit your own guest post
Press Releases
Press releases are a business standard, but most people don’t realize that they can use them to push link juice and
build powerful backlinks. But you have to do it right, or else your rankings could suffer as a result.
PRs provide a good opportunity for an unstructured citation. If the press release is distributed online in its entirety,
you can also use this space to link back to your Google My Business listing (using the CID URL), embed a map of your
location, and add your NAP (name, address, phone number).
In some low-competition niches, we’ve found that a verified listing with basic optimization can rank highly with just
a press release. You have to use the right keywords in your anchor text to achieve this, and then point the link to an
authoritative site (like one of Google’s properties). When you link back to your money site, use branded keywords,
or a mix of branded keywords and main keywords.

Geo-Networks
To rank in the local pack, you need three things: prominence, relevance, and proximity. While all are important,
none are more essential to local SEO than proximity.
When someone searches for a local business, they usually want brands that are nearby, not halfway across the
country. A person who needs an air conditioning unit repairman in Manhattan won’t benefit from listings that are
located in Idaho. You need to increase your geographical markers so that Google understands which customers to
match with you based on your location.
If you want to increase your proximity score, we have just the strategy for you: geo-networks.
geo-networks are a great way for local businesses to improve the geographical relevance of their listing. It may take
some time to properly set up, but the process is simple. We believe that no local SEO strategy is complete without
geo-networking.
So, what is it, and how can you apply this to your business?
A geo-network is a connected network of accounts, brand assets, content, and properties that push location signals.
By adding location markers to all of your online entities, your business will be strongly associated with a particular
address.
Fair warning to the white-hatters out there: this strategy is extremely effective and versatile, but it does involve
gray-hat tactics. Here’s what geo-networking involves:
- Creating a fake business persona for the location you want to rank in
- Building (fake) social media accounts and online assets for the persona
- Including plenty of location markers to increase geo-relevance
- Using the persona to promote your actual, real business
If this makes you uncomfortable, feel free to skip to the next section on Google Stacks.

What You Need To Build A Geo-Network
Before you start creating your business persona and social media accounts, there are a few things that you need to
have on-hand. Here’s what you need to build an effective geo-network:
- Google My Business listing: As a local SEO strategy, geo-networking requires a Google My Business listing
for the business you are trying to promote. For this to work, your GMB profile needs to be fully verified and
filled out before you start.
- Contact number: Most social media accounts ask for a phone number to verify the account or to enable
two-factor authentication. 2FA adds another layer of security to your account, preventing other people
from gaining authorized access, so we’d highly recommend enabling it. You can use your personal or
business phone number for this if the listing is yours. If you’re handling the listing on behalf of a business,
we recommend buying SIM cards and using a separate one for each of your clients.
- Business persona: Instead of directly adding location signals to your brand entities, geo-networking is all
about building the geo-relevance of a fake business. Think of it like a tiered PBN: your fake business persona
is your tier 2, while your listing is your tier 1. By increasing the geographical markers of your tier 2, it passes
some of it down to your GMB.
You’ll need a fake business name, business owner, and description. The “address” has to be set in the area
you want to rank in. If you are already located in your target city, feel free to use your business’s real
address. For the name, incorporate your location keywords as much as possible. For example, “Hanover
Sports Association” is a good name to start with.
- Keywords: Aside from your location keywords, you’ll need a few niche-relevant keywords as well. This helps
to reinforce keyword co-occurrence and make the fake business profile look more legitimate.
- Photos: Photos enhance your online assets, also adding to the fake business’ credibility. Plus, they offer
some opportunities for optimization. You need to have a profile photo, logo (you can use a logo
maker/generator for this), cover/header photos, and other images. Make sure that you have permission to
use your photos, or get royalty-free images from a stock photo website.
- Content: Google doesn’t look at backlinks in a vacuum – they always look at the context. Prepare a few
articles (at least one per social media account, so around 14-15 will do) that link to your GMB. The anchor
text should be a niche keyword. These don’t have to be Pulitzer-prize-winning content; as long as it’s
concise, straightforward, and not spammy, it should be fine.

How To Create A Geo-Network
Our process for creating a geo-network doesn’t directly increase your rank in the same way that relevance-building
or prominence-building techniques do. But it does help you increase your geo-relevance, which is essential if you
want to rank in your target locations.
By the end of this section, you should know how to:
- Create a fake business persona to anchor your geo-network
- Create social media accounts that support the business persona
- Connect your profiles to reinforce the brand and push location signals
Before we go on to the step-by-step instructions for building a geo-network, there’s one thing to keep in mind. Do
not create any social media accounts for the real business! Unless otherwise stated, all of the accounts have to be
for the business persona. Sometimes, like in the case of Facebook and LinkedIn, you have to create an account for
the fake business owner.
1. Create Your Workbook
We have many clients, which makes it difficult to keep track of information. This is why we always use a workbook
so that we have all the information in one place before we start. Of course, this step is completely optional, but
having this on-hand makes the process much more streamlined.
Use Excel or Sheets, whichever is your preference. These are the three sheets you’ll need:
- Brand Information
- Geo Local Network

- Google Places Maps Link
You’ll learn what the purpose of each of these sheets are and how to fill them out as we go along. In the meantime,
complete the Brand Information sheet first with the details of your fake business persona.
2. Get Google Maps Driving Directions
Embedding maps is a great way to boost geo-relevance, so for this step, we’ll be generating several “driving
directions” maps to add to our social profiles. You’ll want at least one map for each of the accounts you’ll be creating.
First, search “things to do in [location] in Google. This should bring up a carousel of recommended activities and
attractions.

Click on “Maps” to see the full Google Maps results for your search. Don’t click on “More things to do” because this
will bring you to the Local Finder, not Google Maps.
In another tab or window, open Google Maps again. Search for the persona address. Again, this can be your real
address (if you are based in the city you want to rank in) or a fake one. Click on Directions.
Not all addresses will have a Directions button, and that’s okay. If this is the case for you, you can skip the rest of the
process. Instead, get the Maps short link and embed code for the pin. You’ll use this map on all of your socials.

If the Directions option is available to you, go back to the Google Maps list of local attractions. Take note of the top
14-15 attractions (again, one for each social media account you plan on creating). Then, go back to the Maps listing
of your target address. One by one, search for the attraction/address in the “Choose a starting point” field towards
the top left of the screen.
Make sure that both locations are mapped correctly, and that there are driving directions from one point to another.
Then, click on the hamburger menu, and select “Share or embed map”.

Copy the Maps short link and transfer it into the workbook. Click on “Embed a map”, adjust the settings, and then
copy-paste the code into the workbook. Do this until you have 15 or so short links and the same number of embed
codes.
While this step may seem tedious to some, it’s pretty quick once you get the hang of it. It shouldn’t take you longer
than 15 minutes to do this. This process is incredibly effective whether you want to rank locally (e.g. a Hanover
business targeting Hanover) or somewhere else (e.g. a Hanover business targeting Columbia). You just have to make
sure that both your target address and “things to do” locations are both in the city you want to rank for. If there are
“things to do” located outside of your target city, skip over it.
3. Create A Google Account For The Persona
Now that two out of three of your workbook sheets are filled out, you can move on to creating your geo-network.
For this and the next step, keep your phone nearby – you’ll need it to sign up for different social media accounts.
Chances are, you’re logged into your Google account right now. If so, log out of your account and clear your browser.
Make sure to delete your cache and cookies, too. This process works best (and most efficiently) when you start on a
blank slate.
If you don’t want to log out of your account or delete your cache, there are three other ways to go about this:
- Work in incognito or a private browsing window
- Create a new browsing profile specifically for the fake business persona
- Use a completely different browser
Once that’s set up, it’s time to create a Gmail account for the fake business persona. This will be the email you will
use to sign up for the accounts later. Record the username and password in your workbook so that you never lose
access.
4. Set Up Other Accounts
In this section, we’ll break down the account creation process and teach you how to optimize each profile for
maximum geo-relevance. There are 14 platforms listed below. You don’t need to create all 14 if some aren’t relevant
or accessible to you, but the more accounts you create, the more powerful your geo-network.

YouTube
Make sure that you are signed in with the persona’s Gmail account. You don’t need to fill out a form to create a
YouTube account; it automatically registers you using your Google profile info when you click “Sign in”.
Once your account has been created, click on your account icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Then,
click on “Create a channel”.
Complete your YouTube profile by entering the fake company name, uploading a profile photo, and adding a
description. Make sure to add the business NAP at the end of the description.
YouTube will ask you if you want to add your social media profile links. If you have them already, fill this part out. If
not, leave this for later. Just make sure to come back and add those profiles when you’re ready, otherwise, the geonetwork
won’t be as effective!
Next, add channel photos by clicking on “Customize channel” > “Add channel art”. Add a cover photo, then adjust
the dimensions so that it looks good.

To customize your channel design, you have to go into your Settings and enable “Customize the layout of your
channel”. Then, click on the About tab and update your location.
Once everything is set up, get your YouTube channel link and paste it into the workbook for later. You should test
the link in another browser or incognito window to ensure that it works.
Blogger
Blogger is a popular blogging platform and one of Google’s properties, which is why it has such a prominent role in
geo-networking.
Still signed into your Google account, go to the Blogger website. Click “Create your blog” to get started. As with
YouTube, you should be automatically registered with the info from your Google account. Still, double-check your
display name before continuing the process.
Create a new blog, and add your title, URL, and layout. Blogger has many free themes for you to choose from.

Click on Settings. In the Basic section, add your business description. If your privacy setting isn’t public, edit it so that
it shows “Listed on Blogger. Visible to search engines.”
Under “Language and formatting”, update your preferred language, time zone, and other time/date settings. When
choosing location/timezone, keep your business persona in mind – not the actual business.

Click on Layout. Edit your header and upload a cover photo. You can also add a photo via URL. Adjust the settings as
desired, and then save the arrangement. You can also click on Preview to see what your site looks like.
Still in the Layout section, click on the edit icon next to Sidebar (Bottom). Add a Link List gadget.
Under title, you can put “Social Media”, “Other Accounts”, “Find us on the web” or something similar. Leave
“Number of items to show in list” blank so that all of your links get displayed. Under Sorting, choose “Don’t sort”.
Your links will be displayed in the order that you add them.

In the New Site Name field, enter the name of the social media platform you’re adding (e.g. Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, etc.). Then, add the URL. Click on Add Link, not Save. Repeat this for all of your social media accounts, then
click Save to finish editing the link list.
Now that your site is ready, it’s time to add content!
Click on Pages to add a new page to your Blogger site. This will be your Contact page, so title it “Contact”. Insert your
description, NAP, photos, and other essential details. Format the content so that it looks nice. Hit Publish when
you’re ready.
Click on Layout again. Under Page List (Top), check the box next to both the Home and Contact pages. Save the
arrangement. Your Blogger site will now have a navbar that includes both pages.
Now, click on Posts to create a new post. Add one of your articles and embed one of the “things to do” maps. You
can also add photos, your NAP, and other details. Then, publish the post.

To see what your site looks like, click “View blog”. Make sure everything is there and properly laid out.
If everything is good to go, copy-paste the Blogger link into the workbook. Test the link in another browser or
incognito to make sure it works.
Facebook
Previously, we mentioned that most of these accounts will be created in the name of the fake business persona,
with some exceptions. This is one of those exceptions. Because Facebook only allows personal accounts for
individuals, you need to sign up with the business owner’s name and details. Of course, like the business persona,
this “person” can be fake as well.
Whether real or fake, you’ll need the owner’s name, photo, and email address. Sign up to Facebook using this
information. For the birthday, choose any date, as long as you are 18+ years old.

Connect the business owner’s Gmail account, and add a few photos to make the account look more legitimate. You
don’t need to add any contacts, though, so just skip that step.
Go to your Facebook profile. There are quite a few things to edit, such as:
- Work and Education: Since this is the “business owner’s” profile, fill out their work info with the business
persona’s name, city, and description. Make sure that your privacy settings are set to Public.
- Places You’ve Lived: Under both the current city and hometown, add your target location.

- Contact and Basic Info: Fill this out with the owner’s details. Under social media accounts, you can add the
links to the business persona’s profiles.
- Details About You: Add a short description that incorporates your keywords.
When you save your changes, check your profile to make sure that the information is updated and correct. Copypaste
the profile URL into the workbook, and test the link to make sure that it works.
Facebook Business
The reason why we needed to create an individual Facebook account is so we can create a Facebook Business page.
You need to be logged into the business owner’s account to do this.

Click on Create > Page. You can find this at the top navbar.
Choose the category that best applies to the business persona. When in doubt, choose “Business or Brand”. Fill out
the details, including the name, category, address, and phone number.
Then, you’ll be taken to your new page. Upload a profile photo and a header. For your profile photo, a logo works
best.
You’ll also want to add a CTA button on the page. Click on “Add a button” > Contact you > Contact Us. Add a website
link here.

In the About section of your business page, you can customize your username, which will change your FB page URL.
Make this as close to your business persona name as possible. Then, edit other details such as the price range,
founding date, contact information, etc. The more details you can provide, the better.
Click on “More info” to edit your page description. The description should contain your target keywords. Next, add
a Story. Here, you can add one of your articles and embed one of the “things to do” maps. Feel free to add a website
URL, NAP, photo, and anything else that might spruce this section up.

Finally, click “Edit Other Accounts” to add your social media profile links. If you haven’t finished creating all of the
accounts yet, you can come back to this step when you’re ready.
Once that’s all done, go to your Facebook Business page. Copy-paste the URL into the workbook, and test it so that
you’re sure it works.
Twitter
Sign up for a new Twitter account using the business persona Google account. Choose a username that’s close to
the business name and then verify your account through email. As with Facebook, you don’t have to import any
contacts or follow any accounts.

Click on Profile to edit your information. Add your logo as your Twitter profile photo. Upload a relevant header image
as well. Add a short bio that incorporates a keyword or two. You only have around 160 characters for the bio section,
so just take a sentence or so from your description. Update your location to the target city as well.
Post a few tweets. The content can be anything – your tagline, a link to one of your other social accounts, the Google
Maps short link, a photo.
When you’re happy with the profile, copy-paste the profile link into the workbook. Test it in another browser or
incognito window to make sure that it works.
Instagram
Since Facebook and Instagram are connected, you’ll be creating a new IG account using the business owner’s
Facebook. Input your desired username and skip any steps that ask you to import contacts or follow accounts.
Go to your profile to edit your information. In your bio, add a short description or tagline, as well as your phone
number and/or website. When you’re done, copy-paste the profile URL into the workbook and test out the link.
LinkedIn
The next step is to create a LinkedIn account for the business owner, which we’ll later use to create a company page.
Sign up with the business owner’s name, email address, and other details. You’ll also have to add a profile photo and
job title.

Edit your header. Add your birthday and other essential information in the “Contact info” section. You can also add
your social media profile links here, or you can save that for when you have all of them ready.
Back on your dashboard, add a business summary. This should be a short description or tagline only. You can also
upload an image, attach documents, or link to other online assets here.
Add a few skills to your profile. Make sure that it’s relevant to the business category of your persona.

You can only do this next step once the Company page is set up. Add the business persona as the current employer
by clicking “Add a profile section” > Background > Work experience.
Copy-paste the profile URL into the workbook. Always test your links in another browser or private window to be
sure you can access them without being logged in.
LinkedIn Company
Through the individual LinkedIn account you’ve just created, you can also create a LinkedIn Company page. Click on
the Work drop-down next to your profile picture, then click “Create a Company Page”. You may need to scroll down
to see this option.
Create a new page using the persona name. Upload your logo as the profile photo and add a cover image as well.
Under tagline, you can add the business description and NAP. Try to incorporate a few keywords.
Post to your new page by clicking on Updates. Here, share one of your pre-written articles. You can link back to the
Google Maps driving directions, add photos, and more – just make sure that it’s set to “public”.
To get the LinkedIn Company page link, plug your username into this URL:
http://linkedin.com/company/[username]
Then, test your link in another browser before pasting it into the workbook.

Foursquare
You’ll need to register the fake business persona with Foursquare for Business. Click on “Claim my business” to start
the process.
Add the business name and location, then click on Search. If you’re using a fake persona, you obviously won’t be
able to find it on Foursquare – click “Still don’t see your business?” to add it anyway.
Input your address and move the pin so that it’s in the correct place on the map. Add your Twitter account, business
category, and other details to complete the registration process. You’ll need to verify your phone number, so make
sure your device is nearby.

Usually, Foursquare requires a small payment to verify the listing. You don’t have to do this for the geo-network!
Click on your business name to be redirected to your profile, where you can copy-paste the Foursquare URL into the
workbook.
Buffer
You can create a Buffer profile for free, but you’ll only have access to it for a couple of weeks. To continue using the
platform, you have to subscribe to one of their paid plans. If you don’t have the budget for this, feel free to skip
ahead to the last platform on this list. But if you can spare a few bucks a month, the benefits you get from adding
this to the geo-network is more than worth the investment.

Sign up with Buffer using the persona’s Google account. Add all of the social profiles you’ve already created. If you
did this in order, you should have most of them already. If you can’t see the option for your desired platform, click
“Manage Social Accounts” to see what other accounts you can connect.
While on your dashboard, click on Queue. Create a post – the content can be a Google Maps short link, a photo, or
anything else. If you include a caption, incorporate a few keywords if possible.
Buffer will post this content to all of the accounts you’ve selected. You can either schedule the post or share it
immediately by clicking on the down arrow next to “Add to Queue”.
Pinterest
Create a Pinterest business account using the Google account. Choose a few interests that are relevant to the
persona.

Click on your account icon to change your settings. Edit your profile by adding a location, photo, and description.
There’s a character limit of 160 characters, so you may have to cut your description short.
Under “Account settings”, log into your Facebook account to connect it to your Pinterest. This allows you to login
using either Google or FB.
In the Claim section, add all of your other social media accounts such as Instagram and YouTube.

Create a new board by clicking on your account icon, then clicking on the plus sign at the top of your profile. For the
title, enter one of your target keywords. The board should be viewable by the public, so make sure that the Visibility
box is unchecked.

You will be redirected to the board page. Click on the edit button to add a description and category.
After you’ve saved your changes to the board, click on the plus sign to add a new pin. Upload an image, add a title,
and input your description. Make sure that your NAP and keywords are all there. For the destination URL, you can
enter the website or the Maps short link.
Repeat this until you’ve added a few pins and/or run out of keywords. Then, go to your profile and copy-paste your
Pinterest URL into the workbook. Make sure to test the link as well.

Yelp
Since we talked about Yelp in the essential citations section of this guide, it should come as no surprise that a Yelp
account is also essential to a successful geo-network.
Sign up for a free Yelp listing. You’ll need to enter the business persona name and zip code. Complete the sign-up
process by filling out the business category, phone number, address, and email. Before you can continue with Yelp,
you’ll have to verify your number, so keep your phone nearby.
Technically, you can also verify the account through a corporate email. But since we’re using a Gmail account, and
the business persona is fake, the only viable option is to verify the listing through text message or phone call.
Once your Yelp listing is verified, add your photos. The captions should incorporate your keywords and description.
Then, leave a 5-star review on the listing. Make sure to share the review to the Facebook account you created earlier
before posting.
Get the Yelp profile link and copy-paste the URL into the workbook. Test your links, always!

About.me
You can sign up with About.me directly with the Google account. Once you’ve created your free page, you’ll have to
input your page name, photo, location, job title, and interests that are relevant to the persona.
When you are asked what you want people to do on your page, you can choose any of the options. We use “Visit my
company website” and then link out to the website, a social media account, or even one of the Maps short links. You
can customize the URL, or you can skip this step.
Create an About.me email signature that you can add to your Gmail. If you’re not sure how, just click on Copy &
Paste, then follow the instructions on the screen.

Click on Bio to add your description and NAP. Then, click on Social Links to connect your other accounts. Although
you won’t be able to add all of them, add as many as you can.
In the Settings menu, you’ll be able to add your About.me profile link to your other accounts. Copy the page link and
paste it into your bio on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and elsewhere.
You can also share your About.me profile directly to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Once you’ve finished, copy-paste the About.me page URL into the workbook.
Gravatar
Gravatar is the last social media you’ll have to create to complete your geo-network. Click on “Create Your Own
Gravatar” to sign up. Since you don’t have a WordPress account for the business persona, you’ll have to use your
email.
After verifying your account via email, refresh the Gravatar page. Add your logo as the profile photo, and click “Rated
G” as the image rating.

On the next page, click My Profile. Under First/Last Names, enter the business owner’s name, Then, add the
persona/company name in the Full Name field. Add your location and a short description in the “About Me” section.
Click on Photo Gallery to upload your photos. Then, click on Contact Information to update those details as well.
Finally, click on Verified Services. Connect the social accounts you’ve created. If there’s no option to add a specific
platform, you can do so by clicking on Websites and adding them there.

And just as with every other platform, you finish this off by copy-pasting your Gravatar profile link into the workbook.
The Checklist
Creating a geo-network requires several steps and more than a dozen platforms, so it’s easy to miss something
important. Check your work against this checklist to make sure you have the most important elements:
- Except for Facebook and LinkedIn, all of the accounts are set up using the business persona’s details.
- The URLs in the workbook work when accessed through a different browser or incognito window. You can
access the link even if you’re not logged into the account.
- Your YouTube profile has all of your social media profile links.
- Your Blogger site has a home page, contact page, one post, and all of your social media profile links.
- There are a few tweets posted on your Twitter.
- You have at least one board with a few pins on your Pinterest account.
- Your About.me has a bio and is connected to all of your social media profiles.
- Your Gravatar has a photo gallery and all of your social media profile links.
Next Steps
The next thing you should do is put your geo-network to work. Link to or embed the Maps driving directions in your
articles, then share them across the different platforms.

If you want to take things a step further, you can expand your geo-network to include many other social media
platforms. Create accounts on LiveJournal, Medium, Tumblr, WordPress, and other sites. The same core steps apply:
use the business persona name, fill out the profiles, link to your other social media accounts, and share your geooptimized
articles.
Google Site Stacks
A lot of people aren’t comfortable with the gray-hat nature of geo-networks, but they still want an effective, out-ofthe-box
link building technique. We have another strategy that’s just as powerful and versatile, with one major
difference: it’s completely safe and white-hat.
Introducing Google site authority stacking, which we’ll refer to as “Google stacking” for the rest of the guide. The
concept behind Google stacking is simple: when it comes to high-authority websites with a lot of link juice, none are
more powerful than Google itself. You can pass a lot of trust and authority just by creating Google entities – Maps,
Drive, and the like – and interlinking them. Then, you direct it all back to your money site which, in this case, is your
GMB listing. But if you want to use this strategy to power up other things, such as a citation/link or even a YouTube
video, you can do that as well.
While geo-networking focuses on pushing location signals, Google stacking is focused on improving your rank. And
since we’re only using Google assets, the chances of getting penalized are pretty low.
This process takes just a few hours from start to finish, but it’s extremely effective and, again, 100% safe. Let’s get
started!
What You Need To Build A Google Site Stack
Aside from your verified and optimized GMB listing, a Google stack requires a few things first. These include:
- GSuite account: GSuite offers a free two-week trial, but you’ll need to subscribe to one of their paid plans
to continue using the service. A GSuite account is useful for more than just Google stacking, though, so we’d
highly recommend getting a plan anyway!
- Google Console & AWS accounts: Both Google Console and Amazon Web Service are integral to this Google
stacking technique. The full versions aren’t free, so keep that in mind when budgeting.

- Keywords: What keywords do you want to rank for? You’ll want to combine both niche keywords (e.g.
plumber) and location-specific keywords (e.g. Hanover) for the best results. For each stack you want to
create, prepare at least one main keyword and two variations.
- Articles: High-quality content is the best way to improve your rank. You will need to create seven articles
per stack: 6 x 300 words, and 1 x 500 words. The content should be related to your business, category, or
the products/services you offer. Keywords should be naturally scattered throughout the articles.
- Visual media: You need a minimum of two images for every stack you want to create, although having more
images is preferable. If you have a YouTube video, all the better! All photos and videos must be geo-tagged.
Only use photos/videos that you own or have the permission to use.
- Citation list: Gather a list of your structured and unstructured citations. This includes directory listings,
brand mentions, blog reviews, and others. Don’t worry if you can’t get all of them, but try to get as many
as possible.
How To Create A Google Site Stack
This strategy has been tried, tested, and fine-tuned for years by the folks at Web 2.0 Ranker. By the end of this
section, you should know how to:
- Create a site stack using various Google properties
- Connect/daisy chain the entities to pass on trust and authority
- Power the stack up with other strategies
1. Create A Workbook
Again, like with the geo-networking strategy, we like to start by creating a workbook. Using Sheets, Excel, or
whatever spreadsheet program you prefer, create five new sheets. Here’s what they should look like when you’re
done:
- Company Info

- Drive Stack Properties
- Google Site

- Cloud HTML Links
- Amazon HTML Links

You don’t have to worry about most of these for now. Focus on the Company Info sheet first and fill out the
information you already have. This should include the business name, address, number, website, description, social
media profile links, GMB links (CID URL), and your list of citations. You should also have your three keywords.
We’ve blurred out our clients’ info, but it should look something like this when you’re done:

2. Create Your Google Drive Stack
Google Drive has most of what you need to create and host the stack. Make sure that you are logged into the brand’s
GSuite account before you start!
Below, we break down what you need to do to create each asset in the stack in the order that we do it. You can
technically do it in any order, but this sequence minimizes the back-and-forth.
Folder
Create a folder with one of your primary keywords as the name. Right-click on the folder, then click Share >
Advanced. Set the folder to public. Access should be set to “View only”. This allows people to see your stacking assets
without being able to edit them.
Select the folder and click on the “i” icon. This will bring up a panel on the right-hand side of the screen. In the text
box, add your business description + NAP.

Right-click on the folder, then click “Get shareable link”. Make sure you test the link in a different browser or
incognito window to make sure that you can still access it without being logged into the GSuite account.
If it works, paste it into the workbook. If you want to make other stacks, just repeat the process with a new folder.
Images
Add your images to the folder. Select an image to bring up the panel again. In the text box, add a description + NAP.
Do this until you’ve added a description to each of the photos.
Since the images are in a folder, it should copy the folder’s visibility settings. Just double-check to make sure that all
photos are set to public and “View only”.
Get the shareable link for each of the photos, and plug them into the workbook.
Calendar
On the right side of your Drive, there should be a calendar icon. Click on it to open the Calendar app. Then, add a
new calendar and name it after the brand. Add a description + NAP, then adjust the timezone. Click on “Create
calendar”.

Hover over the new calendar, and three vertical dots will appear. Click on that to access the Settings. Set the calendar
to public, then copy-paste the shareable link into the workbook.
Events
In the calendar you’ve just created, add a new event to any day. The title should include your main keyword. You
should also add the event location (where you want to rank), description + NAP, and your most important socials.

Click on the new event, then click the edit button. Check the box next to “All day”, then select “Daily” from the dropdown
menu. Attach one of your photos to the event as well.
Change “Default visibility” to public, then save the event. Finally, click on the event again, then click the three vertical
dots. Click “Publish event”, then copy-paste the shareable link into the workbook.

Drawing
Add a new Google Drawing to the folder with your main keyword as its file name.
Insert your brand name, address, number, website, photos, and social links to the drawing. Add your description or
300-word article as well. Then, format the drawing so that it looks nice and is easy to read.

Click File > “Publish to web”. Adjust the settings as needed, then publish it. After saving your drawing, go back to
your Google Drive folder. Select the drawing, then press the “i” icon to bring up the panel. Add your description +
NAP, plus a keyword and a link to your site.
Get the shareable link and plug it into the workbook. You should also get the embed code.
My Map
Add a new Google My Map to the folder, using your primary keyword as the title.
You will be redirected to a world map. Click on the My Map title in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to edit
it. Add your description + NAP in the text box.

Click on the untitled layer to rename it. Use one of your variation keywords.
Search for your business in the address bar, then click “Add to map”. If you can’t find it, or if you want to import your
data instead, click on Import under the renamed layer.
Add your images and/or videos to the My Map.

Click on the edit button on the location you’ve just added. Add a 300-word description + NAP and social media profile
links here.
Adjust the default view. Center the location marker, and zoom in/out until you get your desired frame. Click on the
three vertical dots next to the title. Click “Set default view”.

The My Map should copy the accessibility settings of the folder it’s in. Check to make sure it is set to public and “View
only”. Then, copy-paste the shareable link into an incognito window or another browser. This is important – the URL
will change to a google.com/maps link after pasting it into the browser. This Maps link is what you need to copypaste
into the workbook.
You should also transfer the embed code into the workbook. Click on the three vertical dots next to the title, then
select “Embed on my site” to get the code.
After saving your My Map, go back to the Drive folder. Select the My Map, then bring up the details panel. Add your
description + NAP and a keyword variation in the text box.
Google Doc
Add a new Google Docs file in the keyword, making sure to incorporate a keyword in the title.
Take one of your 300-word articles and paste it into the document. Import the other assets you’ve created – your
Google Drawing, Calendar, and photos should all be there. As you did with the Google Drawing, format the
document. Organize the elements in a way that makes sense, and break up large chunks of text with images. Use
headings generously.

Link to your My Map and use one of your keywords as the anchor text. Then, add a “Contact us” section at the
bottom of the document. Add your NAP, website URL, and social links here.
Click File > “Publish to web”, then publish the document. Get both the shareable link and embed code, then add
them to the workbook.
After saving your Google Docs file, go back to the folder. Select the document and bring up the details panel. Add
your NAP + description in the text box.

Google Slides
The last Google Drive asset you have to create is a Google Slides presentation. The title should combine a main
keyword, the brand name, and a location marker.
Like with the GDocs file, import a 300-word article and your photos/videos into the presentation. Add your NAP and
link to your Maps CID URL using the brand name as the anchor text.

Then, link to all of the assets you’ve just created. This should include your Calendar, My Maps, Drawing, and Docs
file. Format the slides, then click File > “Publish to web”. Adjust the settings as needed before publishing it.
Get the link and embed code, then plug it into the workbook. After saving the file, go back to the folder. Select the
Google Slides presentation, click on the “i” icon, then add your description + NAP in the right-hand panel.

3. Create A Google Site
A Google site that contains all of your Drive assets is a great way to pass link juice to your target URL.
To create your first Google site, go to the Google Site home page, and click on the “+” button. Rename the site so
that it includes your main keyword.
Change the accessibility settings by clicking on the “Share with others” icon (a person with a plus sign). Next to It
should be set to “Anyone can find and view”. Change the Draft settings as well so that only specific people can edit
the site.

Now that you’re done toggling with the settings, it’s time to create new pages. You need at least two pages: an About
page and a Contact page. You should also have one page for every stack/main keyword that you have. Make sure to
also rename the home page with your primary keyword.
Click on “Publish”. The web address should be the brand name with words separated by hyphens. For example, yourbrand-name-here.
Leave the search settings box unchecked so that search engines will display your site in their

results. Then, get the site link and paste it into the workbook.
About Page
Rename the header to “About”. Then, add a description right below it. There should be a call-to-action that links
back to the Google site home page.
Add your photos, NAP, and social links to flesh out your About page. You can also embed your Google Docs file here.

Create a section for your citation list. Add a header like “Find us on the web” or “Learn more about us”. Now, get
your list of citations and choose the five most powerful. Add them to this section, going through your keywords for
the anchor text. You can repeat keywords if needed. Add the other citations as naked URLs.
To save your About page, click Publish. Get the page link and add it to the workbook.
Contact Page
Change your header to “Contact us”. Add your NAP, website link, and the CID link to your Google Maps listing. Use
a combination of the brand name and a location keyword for the Google Maps anchor text. You can have a separate
NAP section for each of your locations/branches.
You can also embed your My Maps here. Finally, link back to your home page with a keyword as anchor text.

Click Publish to save your changes, then copy-paste the page URL into the workbook.
Stack/Keyword Pages
Change the header text to your target keyword and add an image.
Add a “table of contents” to the page’s body. Each stack page should have four sections: one for each of your three
keywords (1 main + 2 variations), and one called “Learn more”.

Add your 500-word article to the site by adding a couple of paragraphs under each of the three keyword headers.
Break up large chunks of text with images, embeds, and other Google Drive elements. Do not place any elements in
the “Learn more” section just yet!
Once you’ve finished formatting the rest of the page, you can focus on the last empty section. Add your NAP, website
link, social media profiles, and Google Maps link under “Learn more”. Use keywords combined with the brand name
as your anchor text.
When you’re ready, click Publish to save your changes. Repeat this for every stack page you have. Then, interlink the
different pages. The first stack page should link to the second stack page, and so on. They should also link back to
the main Google site URL. Grab the page links and transfer them into the workbook.

4. Create An HTML Site
To create an HTML site, you need to create an index.html file first. You can get a basic template online, or you can
download our toolkit to get access to the one that we use for our clients.
Open the file/template in Notepad. Look for the <body> tags, and copy all of the text that’s in between the opening
and closing tag.
Go to HTML5 Editor. Paste the <body> code into the text box. On the left-hand side, you should see the code. On
the right-hand panel, you should see what the site looks like.
For this part, you don’t have to touch the code. Make your changes in the real-time editor. Here are the edits that
you need to make:
- <h1>: Change it to your primary keyword.
- <h2> & <h3>: Change it to your variation keywords.
- Content: Add a 300-word article here. Break it up into smaller paragraphs.

- Other elements: Add your drawing, My Maps file, videos, and images throughout the content. At least one
photo should be hot-linked to your money site and have a keyword in the description.
- Contact us: The “Contact us” section should have your NAP, website link, and a clickable phone number.
Then, when you’re happy with how it looks, copy the new code and paste it in between the <body> tags. Next, turn
your focus to the <title> section. Make the following changes:
- <title>: Change it to your primary keyword, same as your <h1>.
- <meta name=”description”>: Grab a short excerpt from the article and add it after the “content=” tag, in
between the quotation marks.
- <meta name=”keywords”>: Add your primary and variation keywords. Separate them with a pipe. For
example: keyword 1 | keyword 2 | keyword 3. Add it after the “content=” tag, in between the quotation
marks.
- <meta property=”og:title”>: After the “content=” tag and in between the quotation marks, add your
primary keyword again.
Finally, save the file. The file name should be “index.html”. When you double-click on it, it should open in your
browser and display your site.
This is the file you’ll be uploading to both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.
Google Cloud
Access your Google Cloud dashboard. Then, click on Storage > “Create a bucket”. Use the brand name for the bucket,
separating words with a hyphen. For example, your-brand-name-here.

Under location type, select “Multi-region” and choose the correct region from the drop-down list. Default storage
should be set to “Standard”, while access control should be set to “Fine-grained”. Enable Google-managed key
encryption under the Advanced settings.
Once you’ve created the Google Cloud bucket, you have to create a folder within that bucket. Click “Create folder”
and title it with a keyword. Separate multiple words with a hyphen.

Open the folder, and upload the index.html file. Then, click on the file and choose “Edit permissions”. Click “Add
item”. Here are the settings:
- Entity: “User”
- Name: “allUsers”
- Reader
If you’ve done this correctly, there should be a link icon next to the index.html file, under “Public access”. Click on it
to check that the website is still formatted correctly.
If you’re creating multiple stacks, you’ll need a separate microsite for each stack/keyword. You also have to daisy
chain the sites by linking one site to the next.
When you’re finished, get the Cloud HTML site link and paste it into the workbook.
Amazon Web Service
The process for creating an AWS HTML site is simpler than creating one with Google Cloud. Log into your AWS
Console, then click “Storage > S3”. If you can’t find this option, you might have to expand the section.
Create a new bucket. Create a folder within the bucket with the brand name or a keyword as the title. Separate
multiple words with hyphens. Make sure that the “None” radio button is selected to use the default bucket settings.

In the folder you’ve just created, upload your index.html file. We recommend creating a unique file so that you have
two different sites with no duplicate content.
Click on the HTML file. Find the “Object URL” – this is what you have to copy-paste into the workbook.
The Next Steps
Now that you have a solid (and safe) Google site stack, there are many things you can do to supercharge them and
get better rankings. Here are a couple of suggestions:
- Get all of your created assets indexed. This includes your Google Drive links. We use Speed Links to “drip”
our links over 7-10 days. Trying to index too many links at once looks spammy and suspicious.
- If you’re not averse to gray hat techniques, use a PBN to boost your Google stack. The sites should take top
priority if you can’t get tiered links to all the assets.

Authority Map Stacks
The final link-building technique we will discuss in this guide is called authority map stacking. This technique helps
you create an asset that you can use to get more powerful backlinks, increase your geo-relevance, and improve your
local pack rank.
This section will teach you how to:
- Create a customized BatchGEO map with location signals and keywords
- Boost the map through tiered linking
- Create keyword co-occurrence between your target locations and your brand
What You Need To Build An Authority Map Stack
In addition to your GMB listing, you’ll need to prepare four things before you can begin this process:
- Keywords: Come up with one main keyword and three secondary keywords that combine your niche and
location, such as “website developer Jackson county”.
- Visual assets: Adding photos, videos, and other rich media is a great way to drive traffic from your tier 2
links to your listing. You don’t need any images if you just want to create the map, but we highly recommend
having them on-hand to boost the backlink profile of your map stack.
- Description: In 750 characters or less, write a short blurb about the company. It doesn’t have to include any
keywords, although feel free to incorporate them if you can do so naturally.
- Content: You will need one 500-word article that’s relevant to your business. Make sure that your target
keywords are scattered throughout the headings and text.

How To Create An Authority Map Stack
1. Create A Workbook
Of course, we’ll start this strategy off the right way: with a workbook. You can download our template or make your
own. This is what it should look like:
There are quite a few fields you won’t be able to fill out yet, so focus on the ones that you can. This should include
your business name, address, phone number, website, CID URL, Maps short link, and keywords. You’ll need at least
four keywords: one primary keyword and three secondary keywords.
2. Fill Out The BatchGEO Mapping Sheet
If you downloaded our template, you should already have access to this sheet. If not, and you want to recreate it on
your own, make sure that it looks like this:

Fill out the first row with your business information. “Target Company Name” should be the exact name on your
GMB listing. “URL” should be your website link. “Keyword title” should be your main keyword. Then, add the latitude
and longitude. The best way to do this is by using a coordinates tool, but you can also find the lat/long in your GMB
listing URL.
The next four rows will be a little bit different. Instead of using your brand information, you’ll be using your
competitors’.
Open Google Maps and search for your primary keyword. Take note of your top competitors. You can also use your
secondary keywords if your main keyword doesn’t return enough results.

Simply copy-paste the addresses from the listings into the workbook.
Under “Target Company Name”, add a secondary keyword. When you’re filling out the next row, use a different
secondary keyword, and so on. Cycle through the keywords if needed. “Keyword Title” should still be the primary
keyword.
Under “URL”, put your listing’s CID URL. Add latitude/longitude, repeat for the other top competitors, and you should
end up with something like this:

3. Create A BatchGEO Map
Using the information you’ve just gathered, you can now create your own custom BatchGEO map. Go to the site and
copy-paste the cells into the box. You can also upload the data, but it must be an Excel file and the BatchGEO
Mapping sheet has to be the only sheet.
Click on “Validate and Set Options” > “Advanced options”. The default is usually correct, but this is what it should
look like:

Click “Make Map”, then add the title (formatted as “Main keyword + brand name”) and your email. The description
should contain both your company description and a 500-word article. Set the map to public.
Your custom BatchGEO map – along with its shareable URL, embed code, and edit URL – will be sent to your email.

The Next Steps
So what can you do with an authority map stack? The real question is: what can’t you do? Here are our top
suggestions on how to use your BatchGEO map to improve your rank:
- Get the BatchGEO map URL indexed.
- Embed the map in press releases and citation sites.
- Add the map to your tier 2 PBN sites. This increases the trust flow to your money site.
We’ve gone through several different link building techniques, from the most common to the most advanced. Not
all of these strategies will work for everyone, especially those who don’t want to risk a penalty with gray-hat tactics.
But this guide has everything you need to create a solid, successful link building strategy – the rest is up to you!