How To Improve Your Local Ranking On Google With The Google My Business App
If you want to improve your local ranking on Google, give Google what it wants. Google wants information to show to their users and they want to be able to show that information at the right time. If you want Google to show your information, and send you visitors, then you need to make sure you make your information easy for them to understand so they can organize it.
Google’s mission is: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
By doing this they have become the main place that people go to find information and the most popular site on the internet. They make their money by selling ads to advertisers. As long as people keep finding the information they are looking for, they will keep “Googling” things and Google can keep selling ads. If people don’t find what they are looking for on Google, they might start “Binging” or “Duck Duck Going”. You can tell how much Google dominates search because their name has become the verb for searching online - almost nobody uses “Binging” to describe an online search!
How Google Ranks Websites For Local Businesses
Google ranks websites that have information that is relevant to what the user is searching for. This post is an example of providing relevant content. It shows Google that this website has information about:
- Local SEO
- Improving Your Local Ranking On Google
- The “Google My Business” (GMB) mobile app
Google loves to provide users with “rich media” ie. photos and videos because that’s how people prefer to consume information. That’s why Google owns YouTube (the #2 search engine on the planet).
Adding photos and videos about your keywords and topics will help you to improve your rankings in Google.
Google decides which website to rank in their search results pages (SERPs) using a complicated formula or algorithm. The algorithm includes hundreds of different factors or “ranking signals”. This post is focused on just a few of those ranking signals, but there will be other content on this site, linked from this page, to help you better understand search engine ranking factors.
Images and Videos Can Be A Ranking Factor
The presence of images and videos can be a ranking factor. The files names, alt text and descriptions of that media can also include ranking signals. Rich media also includes geodata. GeoTagging is the process of adding the geographical identification metadata to media like photographs and videos, and even websites, SMS messages, QR Codes or RSS feeds. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates. These GPS coordinates can be a strong indicator to the search engines that certain content is relevant to a search in or about a specific location.
When you take photos or record videos using a smartphone, they are automatically geotagged. If you have a local business, you’ll want to use your phone to take pictures and capture videos for this reason.
Google My Business Mobile App
Google has a mobile app for managing GMB (Google My Business) pages. Links to download the app are below. When you use the app to upload pics and videos to your page, Google also knows the location of your device. That means you can provide them with another signal that your page is relevant to a specific location. Using the app from your business location will help your business show up for searches close to that location.
GMB - Google My Business - Android App GMB - Google My Business - iPhone App
A Simple Tip To Improve Your Local Ranking On Google
If you have a “service area” business and you provide service to your customers at their location, uploading pictures and videos from those locations can help your business rank for searches in those locations. Take pictures and videos from your customers’ locations and add them to your page on the spot using the My Business app!
Want help ranking your local business in Google? Click here to get started!