If you ever want to know how to actually rank for the map searches, those searches that are like, you know, business near me, or business a map, then this is the sort of breakdown of actually how does that work? How do how does Google decide who ranks first? And who ranks below that? This is going to answer those questions for you. Now, before we go in, what I want to do is kind of set the stage a little bit. And the reality of it is, is that some of these things are things are very, very difficult for you to achieve.

They're gonna be very expensive, they're gonna involve you having specific marketing campaigns for those items. One of those one of these eight is, you know, very expensive to do. But there's a good number of these that actually very easy, all you have to do is implement them and do them and then you'll have some success with that. And that's one of the great things about the Google My Business platform is that it's sending you free traffic. I mean, obviously they want to charge you at some point, but they are sending you free traffic at this point in free. Lead opportunities for not a lot of work on your part to get.

So, as we get started on this, we're going to look at a case study and then we're going to go and and jump into these eight ranking factors for local SEO. And I'll be your host Joshua Jarvis. In fact, the first case study is actually going to be from my own real estate company so so Jarvis team realty was a was was my old real estate business, I had a team of people, we did close around 100 deals a month at the end. And I was in an office with about 300 competitors in the same location. And just noticed that this is the analytics that you get, as you develop into, as you add your business to Google My Business, you're actually have access to analytics, that they're trying to show you how successful it is. And just look that 89% of the searches were found on the map.

So how do people find me on the internet? These are sort of branded searches, if you will, but how do they find me they found me by searching on the map. And some people actually knew my name. So this was a, this was the branded search. This is a search when they actually typed in Jarvis team Realty, that was what that's covering. And, and then this is kind of like the mixture of all these in that one section.

So, but just that's a big deal that 89% of the searches and notice that the volume here is 1600. So this is an area that is a suburb of Atlanta. So in a given quarter, I had 1600 people search and find me on the map. And so that's pretty impressive. That's not I don't know what it's gonna be like for you and your business. But, you know, I think all of us could use 1600 more eyeballs on our business, if you will.

So that's the whole point of us doing this. So when they broke it down to the ranking factors it recently someone put together all these numbers for us. And it's pretty amazing that the biggest one is domain authority, and we're going to get into that. But domain authority is really just like basically the the the sort of the influence, if you will, of your website. The next one is naps. And we cover that in another video.

That's the name, address and phone number. And that consistency and how it is on your website, how it is on the rest of the web. And we'll we'll get into some of these a bit. The next one is interactions. And this is user interactions from people who are searching, do they click on your links? They click on your website?

Do they click on your Google My Business profile? So all these interactions, Google sort of tracking that, and that is what is going on at that one. g personal essence. So GE is short for Google. And so nine, almost 10% of of this factor is things that you and I cannot control. Only Google can control that so it's impossible.

And so what this means is basically Google is watching you and how you use the internet and it's displaying results that it thinks that you'll like over others. And so you know, we all are worried about Big Brother. But the reality of it is, is that and some aspects of sort of user interface and user design is to deliver the content that the user actually wants versus, versus just a generic church. So that's what that's about. GMB business signals is what that means is really talking about the Google My Business business signals. And we'll talk about those in more detail in another video, as well as we'll cover it here in just a second.

Reviews, obviously, reviews are a big deal. There's a whole industry around reviews, and we're going to cover that in another video as well, where we cover the tools to generate reviews, and we'll review them and kind of decide is that right for your business or not, but there are reviews are such a big part of this. And it's such a specific thing to get reviews that it's it's an important signal. And then finally, social signals are people typing in your brand name are people signing you on Twitter and Facebook and places that are social, and like YouTube, those sort of things. And so those do play a factor. Quite a small factor, but, you know, everything is considered social.

So, you know, believe it or not social media is a blog is still considered social media just like you know, to your tik tok content is. So, just think about that. So we're going to dive into each one of these in, in this video. So first up is domain authority. This is really like said, the relative influence of your site based on the number of outside links that point to it the content optimization and the laundry list of technicals. So, you know, if that's a mouthful for you, basically, SEO, the basic SEO for your website.

So if you call me and say, Joshua, I want to rank number one, it's gonna be built on three specific legs of, of your SEO strategy is going to be the links that come in from other sites, so that it would be like Forbes linking to your site and saying that you are a great business person. That's gonna be the content that you have. You have content that's rich, that people love to read, and is also optimized for Google. And then also a lunch List of technical so things like PageSpeed? And do you have the right schema markup in is the structure of your site, you know, correct as far as how Google wants to find it. And those things play a role in whether or not you have a site that ranks as well as a site that has authority in the eyes of Google.

And so your domain authority is a big deal when it comes to ranking on the map. So if you have a site that has a lot of domain authority, then basically what Google thinks is okay, this business is more legit than one that's brand new. So if you go out there, and you throw up a Wix website, and then you create your Google My Business profile, you may notice that you're not going to rank as quickly or as easily as other people who have a long term like a site that's been around for a long time, as built correctly. And so I'm going to cast a little shade on Wix. But that's the idea is this is that a site that has more authority that has more structure, it has more content is probably going to be rank a little bit better on map. So, so we look at how difficult is this, this is pretty difficult to create a site in choirs or campaign, these campaigns can get very expensive, or if you're adept, and there's a lot of business owners that are adept at writing their own content, that are adept at, you know, even learning this stuff online.

And but it's just as time intensive creating content. I love to write and creating one piece of content can sometimes take me three, four hours, just for one blog post. So and that's when I do this full time. So, you know, I'll leave that at that. But basically, and then also, no matter how good you are, the time it takes to rank is going to be take a long time a new client coming on as for my digital marketing agency, doing SEO is going to look at three to six months before they actually experience the results. No matter how much they spend.

Even they spend a lot for us to really push it. They're probably not going to see those results until about the three month mark. So just Keep that in mind that even if this is something that you want to do, in order to help boost your business and boost your ranking, that it's going to take a long time and a lot of effort. The next one is naps. Now, naps are really easy. This is your name, your address and your phone number.

And basically what Google is looking for is is this consistent? So on your about page, it does have your name, address and phone number or your contact us page does it have your name, address and phone number exactly as it is in your Google My Business profile? If it's there, then it's like, oh, you get an extra point. The other places it's going to look are outside on the internet. Like the directories we talked about Yelp and Yellow Pages and there's a bunch of other ones as well. Facebook being one of them are the name, address and phone number, exactly the same across the internet, on your website in other places.

And if that's the case, then that's going to represent the second thing that you can control. Now what's great about controlling your your naps, your name, address and phone number is is really, really easy. You just have to be consistent Across the board, the cost is very low. In some cases, it's free, the lot of these accounts are free. Now, when you want to spend a little bit of money and have it automated for you, that's when it can get somewhat expensive. I think our service is right under $100 a month.

There's other ones out there that are like $50 a month. And it really kind of depends on one, how often you want to change it, how often you want up like a half and you want update, like a restaurant would want to do monthly service because they're going to update their their menu, they're gonna update their times and their specials throughout the whole year, and they want all the directories to be updated. So it's really valuable. Whereas the business that's not going to change at all and never gonna change your prices, you're never gonna update, you never run specials, you know, you could do a lot of that on your own. So that's kind of how to measure the cost on that one time. It's fast.

It's very easy to update your name, address and phone number on these places. And it happens the moment that you update it. One caveat to that is if you use a service like a Yext or something else, sometimes it's very, very slow. So if you're going to use a service Then make sure that you read how fast that update happens. So that's a snap. So it's very easy this is that that's definitely what these videos are about is something that you can do.

And this is definitely one you want to focus on getting consistent name, address and phone number on those. Next one is behavior. This is something you can't control, you can't really control the user and how they're going to do that, except for controlling the title tags in your website. And also, any offers that you may post on Google post in Google My Business and things like that. So basically, it's it's tracking your click through rate, which is the rate the percentage of time people see your ad and then click on it or see your your posts, see your content and click on it. How long do they stay on that content.

And then also bounce bounces like basically if they see it, they go, I don't want that and they come back real quick. That's a bounce rate. And what I love about bounce rate is that basically the easiest way to remember what bounce means is that it is such as Essentially literally the same thing in our world, like if we go to a restaurant, and it's time for us to bounce means we left. And so I kind of love that. But the picture is that they went somewhere, and then they left immediately. And that's the bounce.

And these are ranking factors for both SEO and local SEO. And so the difficulty is, it's impossible to really control your user behavior, especially when it comes to your map, because just basically your name. And so the only way to really increase your click through rate on Google, Google, my business and on the maps is to have more reviews, have more content, like photos and videos, and to have posts. And but as it cost you anything, no doesn't cost you anything. And also, time is not really a factor because it's immediate. And it's something again, use really hard to control.

So Google personalizations is another one that we kind of talked about beginning the video, and I spend a lot of time here, but basically, Google is tracking you, and it's displaying the results that you the things that you want. And so if you look at a lot of cat videos, You may notice that all of your real estate agents near huge churches all have people that love cats. I'm not saying that that's real. I haven't seen that in the wild. But basically, that's the concept. Okay, so if you're like a horse lover, and then you know your plumber, it might be standing next to a horse.

In the in the eye again, this this sort of like made up concept. So is it something you can do is actually impossible as a medium to hard, right? Because we can't really track that. It's impossible for you to control what Google is going to show someone else. And the cost. None of this makes any sense like the it's basically no na na, na, maybe this was the slide for the last one, I don't know.

But whatever, I'm not editing it. It's basically impossible for you to choose to help influence what Google is actually going to show to someone else. Alright, so Google My Business signals. Now this you would think this would be another one where you can't control it. But in fact, you can. And this is really what these series of videos is about.

It's about teaching you to be consistent with your name, address and phone number and then also maximizing and optimizing your Google My Business profile. So the ranking factors like categories and service areas and photos and videos and posts and all those things that sort of influence it. Those are things that you're going to do, and you're optimize those. And so what category you select absolutely matters, because when someone types a search in, it's not just keywords that he will that Google uses is actually categories that it uses. And these categories don't always match up with what you think they should. So you have to be really careful what you select.

And a lot of people don't realize this is that you can select multiple categories, you don't have to just stick to one same thing for the service area. It Google really, really weights where your business is located the actual address of that, but adding service areas, let it lets it know that you should pop up on searches that are way outside of where your home or your office is. And then also your photos and videos. Photos can be geotagged, and so that's another thing that says oh, this business is very prominent in a certain area because these photos are geotag. So whenever you get a photo, try to take it on a phone and upload it from your phone. So the difficulty is very, very easy to optimize your Google My Business profile, the cost is low to none.

It really just depends on if you hire someone or not. And then time is fast. You can see the results happen almost overnight, as soon as you make the changes to your profile. So reviews, let's talk about reviews for a second, because that's probably the one where there's an entire industry around and it's probably a really big deal. And it's probably what you thought. But there's some things to think about when it comes to reviews.

And it's that that's not just the review itself. It's the review quantity, the review velocity, that's how how often are you getting reviews and diversity. So one thing that to note is that Google is kind of watching lakhs of the velocity of the reviews and what that means is that if you open a business and you get 100 reviews, you get nothing else, then you kind of lose that little bump it was gonna give in the beginning. So you've got to keep the momentum of reviews up. Once you go in on this, you want to commit to it kind of full time and say, you know, what I'm gonna get reviews is going to be when I'm gonna always get reviews on Google. And frankly, as a consumer, you probably realize this too, that you only want to work with businesses that have recent reviews.

I have reviews from two years ago doesn't matter, especially in a restaurant, right? So you want recent reviews. Google wants recent reviews and then diversity like it's okay if you have all five star reviews. But don't be upset if you get a four or three star review because it shows that you are an authentic real business. Real businesses get one star reviews, real businesses get three star reviews. Now if you have all fives, that's great and what it means in diversity.

Another way to take it is also diversity of location diversity of time. So you didn't get 100 reviews on the same day, meeting 100 reviews from people who seem mysteriously connected to you. Or 100 reviews from people in Russia, like those are all signals that that's a fake account. Whereas if you had reviews all over, let's say your business was in Atlanta, like my business is in Atlanta, and you had a bunch of reviews all over Atlanta, that makes sense to Google, that's what's gonna help. Now, this is really easy to do, you can ask, simply ask the client, hey, how do you get reviews? And we're gonna talk about this in another video about how to get reviews from your clients have different methods and different ways to do that.

But it's really simple. You simply ask, Hey, can you review me? The cost is really low, could be zero cost, it could be high. And what I mean by that is that there are programs out there that help you get reviews, and there is expensive as three $400 a month. And so just be aware of that. Programs like that help automate the review process that basically their email automation systems and texting systems and those sort of things, to help you aggregate reviews into the places that you want.

Those tools can be very valuable, but you have to make sure that that's what you want in your business. And then finally, it's a slow process. So depending on how many customers you serve, is going to depend On how many reviews you can get at any given time. So if you're a restaurant and you serve 100 people a day, if you can probably get 10 reviews a day, if you tried, you know, it's 10%. Whereas if you're a real estate agent, and you close even 50 deals a year, that's, you know, that's one a week, at most. So just kind of keep that in mind that, you know, you want reviews, you want a lot of reviews, but you don't want to do anything fake as far as reviews are concerned.

And you want to be consistent with the reviews, you want to have that momentum carrying you forward. And then finally, social signals. And this one is the more in this kind of mysterious, weird, there's a correlation between Facebook and Twitter and posts and brand mentions for things that rank high. And so you just want to keep that in mind that when you have a brand so I I know and I focus a lot on real estate agents just because that was sort of route where I came from, but those businesses real estate agent businesses, a lot of times they go off their name, a lot of times they have a team name, sometimes they change As the team name, sometimes the name sort of morphs and changes into you add a broker to the end of it and all this other stuff. And that is kind of that's not a good thing for your drinking.

You want to stick pick a specific business and so real estate agents like that are awful this whereas every other business like you're not going to change if you're Joe's plumbing, you don't go and spend two years of your life working to build Joe's plumbing and then change it you know what we're gonna do Sarah, the plumbing? Why would you do that? It would make no sense at all right? So. So real estate agents like said are the ones that are notorious for this. Pick a brand name, stick with it, stay with it, don't change it.

And then make sure that your business like the website you use for your business is connected on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, mainly because you have to even if you don't share content there you want your website there. And you want you know those things pointing to your website pointing to your to your to sort of your brand your online presence in that will help. The other thing is Google. My business offers you the opportunity to Do posts, and you should go ahead and take take that opportunity to go ahead and avail yourself of that opportunity. Now, what I'll tell you about post real quick is that the post probably won't bring you any new business, it probably won't make you that it won't help you feel like you're you won't see the ranking go up. That's basically what I'm trying to say.

And so why would you do it? Well, it just seems to be another signal that if you're doing posts, and you're trying to engage, that you're going to get just a little bit more. And so I would recommend doing posts, I'd recommend part of that, you know, just scheduling them out, spend that time doing it. We don't know when or where or how Google is going to implement this more. But if he can help you a few more percentage points and you get that extra lead out of it. To me, it seems like it's worth it.

So, but your mileage may vary, because I've seen I've seen positive results from posting. So anyway, that concludes the eight ranking factors. I think this eight improve your SEO ranking factors for Local SEO, I wanted to go into them in a little bit, kind of give you an overview of them. And then what we're going to focus on in the next series of videos is things that you can actually implement and do to improve your ranking in these individual sections. And the ones that weren't what to leave out are the ones that are either impossible to change. So like I said, that I talked about this, this is the cost was low to high, depending on how much you invest in social signals.

It's actually you see that switch, switch gears there, so don't let that throw you. But what's actually what we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about the ones that are easy to do. Like, this one's easy to implement, like, you can create a Twitter account linked to your website, you can create posts on Google My Business and copy that post over and post it onto Twitter, Twitter, and now you've got Twitter going, and you've got Google My Business and you're already you know, social media maven now so fast. And so Google picks up these social signals pretty quickly. In fact, it's even connected to Facebook in a sense where as you get Facebook views on your business Facebook page that you this is all going to be connected onto your Google My Business profile. So like I said, what we're going to do is go over these eight.

And then we're going to dive into the ones that you can change the ones that are easy. The ones that require no technical knowledge. So we're not going to talk about domain authority. We're not going to talk about trying to influence click through rate. So we're not going to talk about trying to do the impossible, which influence Google, Google personalizations. Everything else that we're going to do is things that you can do, no matter your level of business, whether you're a plumber, whether your real estate agent, financial planner, Attorney, all of these things are applicable to a business owner that wants bit more business off of Google My Business.

That's the whole purpose of this. So thanks so much for watching. As always, I'm Joshua Jarvis. If you like this video, let me know I would love to do more videos for you. Thanks