How we improved local SEO and Map SEO in one move

Most people believe that local SEO is pretty straightforward. Sometimes, it really can be as simple as setting up Google My Business correctly, building citations and getting review. We didn’t say it wasn’t a lot of work! But the process can be pretty straightforward. Sometimes it isn’t this simple. As local SEO experts, we’ve seen plenty of examples of map listings dropping for no apparent reason or even cases of them not appearing at all. When this happens, it often requires an expert eye to spot what is wrong.

While we can’t give you our experience, we can tell you what works for us. So in today’s post, we will be looking at an extreme example of what to do when your map listing isn’t working. This is a real-life example from one of our clients so it proves that what we preach, we practice, too.

If you can’t rank, change the game

Over the years, we have noticed that there are some cases where it doesn’t matter what you try, you just won’t be able to rank. It has happened to us recently with a local fishing business that wanted their site to show up as located in a certain marina. But no matter what we did to their listing or how many citations we built, we just couldn’t get the ranking to appear.

In the end, we concluded that there must be something wrong with the location. We thought that maybe a business located in the marina had used blackhat techniques and now the entire area was being punished. So, to see if this was right, we changed tactics.

Our solution?

We simply changed the location of where we were trying to rank the business for. Rather than rank in the marina, we ranked the business location for the client’s home address, instead. Instantly, the listing soared to the top of the map pack.

This action improved organic rankings, too

Not only did we improve Local map rankings for the client by doing this, we also improved their organic listing, too. Soon it started to rise quickly and it now sits at the top of the organic results.

To us, this suggests that a bad map listing can also hurt your organic listing, too. Why else would the organic listing suddenly jump? At the same time, it shows us just how important it is to make sure that all of the citations your business has are correct and up to date. Even just one bad listing can have an apparent impact on your organic listing.

Let us help improve your local SEO

If you’re having issues with your local SEO, and especially your map pack we can help. Whether your ranking has dropped or, like our client above, you can’t rank at all, we’ll help you to make the changes necessary to improve your local SEO.