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Google My Business: Your Guide to Better Local SEO Rankings

Need to refresh your local SEO campaigns? Learn everything you need to know about ranking and visibility for Google My Business.

This post was sponsored by Local Viking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

If you’re working on local SEO projects and managing Google My Business (GMB) listings, you’ve probably scrambled to answer at least one of these questions:

  • How can we increase our visibility?
  • How can we expand our ranking coverage?
  • My GMB listing is “filtered” or stuck – what now?

Don’t fret – we’ve got you covered!

Everything you need to know about ranking and visibility for Google My Business is in this comprehensive guide from Local Viking.

Learn actionable local SEO strategies based on years of serving large agencies in a white-label fashion, owning a portfolio of general and niche agencies, and working with marketing teams on national GMB campaigns with over thousands of locations across the country,

In our 100% free guide, you will learn about Local Viking’s methodology for increasing your GMB listing’s ranking and visibility – broken into a few different components and each explained thoroughly in an in-depth masterclass.

What’s Inside the Guide

The first two sections look at the engine of Google My Business: How does Google determine where it is going to rank GMB listings for certain profiles?

You will get into the meat and potatoes of what components to put where to achieve the best rankings.

Knowing the “why” behind the processes will help you understand deeper contexts and in turn, perform better.

The guide also explores the mechanics of ranking GMB listings – expanding on Prominence, Relevance, and Proximity, and digs deeper into the underlying ecosystem of Google patents and what they mean for local SEO professionals.

Next, we’ll share the first process we perform on every consultation for new clients to determine potential issues that could arise from campaigns that are stuck or have plateaued.

This is an end-to-end audit protocol that identifies missing categories, ranking signal deficiencies, or whether you are caught in a filter.

Auditing became such an integral part of our day-to-day lives that we engineered a cloud-based dashboard container and an entirely separate training system that you can also access for free – no upsell or anything for sale. You can access GMB.management here.

This topic is also covered in the guide, plus you can see training videos and additional resources on the Local Viking YouTube channel and blog.

Under the GMB 101 section, you’ll go through an encyclopedic journey into the nuts and bolts of how GMB works at the administrative level.

Proper setup and optimization ensure you are working within the framework of Google’s terms of service.

This also sets your GMB listing for maximum visibility from the get-go instead of having to complete portions of your campaign twice.

Whether you’re a beginner in Google My Business or a veteran local SEO professional, you’ll find plenty of golden nuggets from this section.

The next section covers one of the most crucial elements of GMB that often get overlooked – the website and page it is attached to.

Optimizing your website in line with best practices is covered extensively, and you’ll get a ton of free schema templates and other local SEO resources to help templatize some of the processes outlined in the guide.

Potentially the most exciting portion of our guide is where we dive extra deep into an exhaustive list of strategies to achieve local signals that push rankings for your GMB listing and local websites, including local guest posting and mining local link building targets.

Plus, snag our list of search operators to find the best opportunities for your campaign.

The guide touches on citations in 2021 and beyond and why you do not need expensive citation tools and services.

Instead, you’ll learn how to build a smart strategy for structured citation sites that you can outsource inexpensively or pass off to an internal team member.

We’ll also take you on a deep dive through properties you can use to optimize and boost your brand’s prominence and build trust in the eyes of Google.

The goal of this section is to ensure you’re equipped with a toolbox of resources for local SEO impacting signal creation.

To bring the entire ecosystem of strategies and concepts together, we show you how to use a system like Local Viking to track rankings in a revolutionary fashion, identify holes in your campaigns, and perform cutting-edge automation to deploy a bunch of tactics we talk about in the guide.

In the GMB insights section, you can create entire media and reporting calendars and track the effect all of your hard work is having.

Leveraging bulk GMB posting and image uploading and optimization makes planning campaigns, both large and small, a breeze.

We have even studied the time it takes to perform a typical month’s worth of GMB tasks and reduced the time down to less than 15 minutes.

You can check out over-the-shoulder videos and timers with descriptions showcasing the methodology live on a listing at our blog and see how you can develop your own 15-minute marketing methodology using Local Viking.

Whether you have your own tool stack you use or prefer a more manual and time-consuming process, you can still uncover a treasure trove of helpful tips and strategies from our content.

So, download the GMB ranking guide and please let us know what you think or any questions you might have.


Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Local Viking. Used with permission.
In-Post Images: Images by Local Viking. Used with permission.

Local Viking CMO at Growth Foundry

I own and help market a portfolio of SaaS projects and digital marketing agencies. Obsessed with learning, training, and improving. ...

Google My Business: Your Guide to Better Local SEO Rankings

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