Google has been telling us for a long time now that geographic relevancy is crucial for improving the rankings of your Google Business Profile.
This comes about as Google uses a user’s geographic location to deliver the most relevant results for their search queries. By including geographic keywords and information in your Google Business Profile, such as your business address and service areas, you are signalling to Google that your business is relevant to users in a specific location. This can help to increase your visibility and improve your rankings for local search queries.
Additionally, having a complete and accurate Google Business Profile (GBP) can improve your visibility in Google Maps and Google’s Local Pack, which can also help to drive more traffic to your website and improve your overall online visibility.
When people search for a local business on Google the 3-pack appears.
This is a very valuable “free tool” that people pay a lot of attention to.
Our client Barry Faulkner reaps the benefits of this work that we have done for him. If you are local and need a plumber then give Barry a call.
Once you have a strong presence in your local area then you will want to start to also be found in neighbouring areas.
In recent times we have found that including specifically written articles on your business website, can positively impact how your GBP appears in Google searches. Remember that google wants to understand where your business operates but is likely to only show searches in a narrow band your business profile.
That is why it is essential to expand your geographic relevancy
The idea behind these different types of articles is that we are trying to create topical, relevant events, something that a lot of local business owners just don’t really focus on at all or get completely wrong. When we’re talking about boosting Google Maps rankings, there are three major signals that we’re looking for.
Brand relevance, niche relevance, geographic relevance. With geographic relevance being the number one factor, google has drastically changed the game over the years where proximity matters more and more. There was a major update back in 2016 called Possum. There was a major update that just happened at the end of 2021 called the vicinity update. And basically what Google has been trying to do is shrink the reach of your listing.
If you had an optimised GBP it used to be you’d show up all over town. Then they started to shrink it to where it might be a few square km, and now it’s getting worse and worse and worse, where you might only show up to your searcher if they’re very near that business, maybe just 1 km away.
Where most businesses go wrong when trying to rank GBP listings, and even their own websites, is they have very limited information for Google to use to rank you. Basically, Google is trying to crawl the web and the first sort of source that it’s going to go to is your website. So we need to feed it a lot of good relevant information.
All of this ties into relevance, into the idea of topical relevance.
From the geo standpoint, what we’re trying to do is give Google a lot of information to go on based on your main source, your website, which, by the way, is inside of our Google Business Profile, so the website is tied directly into your GBP listing.
So we want to place topically, relevant geographic articles that are about different points of interest across town to be able to give Google a lot of good information that we are relevant in different areas of town, not just in that near me radius only 1 km away.
To win at Google Maps, I should say, it’s really two different things.
We want to show up for as many keywords as possible in as many parts of town as possible.
How to Create Geo Relevant Articles
Ideally, your start point is 10 articles featuring 5-7 suburbs about places of interest in the neighbouring suburbs to show Google that you are operating in these areas. This content should be about local places. These could be the shopping centre, a park, the library, a school, a tourist attraction, or anything local.
The word count doesn’t need to be long say 4-500 words.
Then what we want to do is create a kind of snowball effect of relevance, where we can take one article, the Geo relevance of that article, and tie it to the next article in the chain and pick up the relevance of that article. Then that article ties to the next one, picks up the relevance of the next article in the chain, and so on and so on. And what it does is it creates a snowball relevance effect so that when these things are tied together and structured in the right way, then we are able to really prove to Google that we are the most relevant player in town.
This is achieved by creating a link inside the first article to the second article and then the second article to the third…. When you get to the tenth article it is linked back to the first article.
This interlinking is done in 2 ways.
Firstly a link to the article in the usual way ( a link in the post )
An example is
https://www.exposurebydesign.com.au/samford-district-historical-museum-samford-village/
The second is by setting up Google driving directions maps and placing on the site.
You do this by going to google.com/maps and clicking on the directions symbol.
Now you need to create a driving directions map from the location in the current article/page to the location that is mentioned in the following article/page.
Once you have the locations recorded you will see a driving direction map created suggesting the best way to travel between the 2 places.
What we need is a copy of this map in your article.
So click on the menu
Then click:- Share or embed map
Copy the code and place it into the article.
You will have a map like this on the page.
Now there are 2 more things that need to be included on this page/Article.
Firstly another link to another page on the website (not one of these local pages)
The second thing that is required is a second driving directions map.
If you are a business that clients visit, an Accountancy practice, or shops etc. Then the driving map will have the place of interest as the from the place and your business address as your to place.
However, if you are a business that doesn’t have a physical address that clients visit, say a plumber or an electrician etc. then the reverse is used. The from address will be your business and the to address will be the place of interest that the page is about.
So what this page is doing is it is using 2 Google driving direction maps, talking about something in your local area, creating a circle of linked pages for Google to follow, and also some internal links.
This is hyper-local info that Google can recognise that you operate in these suburbs. And ensuring that your business will appear higher up in the google maps results.
This is worth significant dollars to your business and is something that you should get done.
If you would like to outsource this task at Exposure by Design we can create these specially designed articles for you for a one-time investment of $225.00.
Send us a message to order.
