Hi, my name is Philip Stemann, and I will be learning you how to succeed with your website. In this episode of my mini series about local SEO we’ll focus on the map. I’ll, how it works, how you track your rankings and useful tools you can use, and how you rank organic for local keywords. Let’s dive in. The map results or the map pack consists of three elements, the Google Maps results, which you can see in the top search results, where it lists the local results for you, the local business results containing your map information, name, address, phone number is right under the Google Maps results.
And then the third element is, of course, the organic search results, which we know from regular SEO. The map pack does not work under the same rules as regular SEO. Of course, some factors are the same, like interlinking, backlinks and just general optimisation of your website. It’s important to notice that the map pack is not only shown on local keywords, like when you search on a keyword and the city. If you, for instance, just search for grocery store, it will show you the map pack.
Even if it’s not always correct for the keyword, it will still show it. This is important for when you do your keyword research as you shouldn’t only go after keywords containing a city, but more about that in the next episode. Now, how do you track your map pack rankings? Yes, there are tools for this that can help you with this. Almost all SEO ranking tools has this feature. Semrush is a great choice, but if you find that too expensive, you can go for almost any tool that you might find out there.
What’s important to remember is that the location of the person searching plays a huge role in the results Google will display. It’ll often rank whatever store or service is the closest to the person searching, and sometimes even a few hundred metres can do a huge difference. If you go 50 metres away, you might get a different result. You might get the same result, but in a different order because now another store is closer to you. This is why it’s so important that you’re very detailed in the way you set up your tracking.
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If you only track a single location like Berlin, then you lose sight of all the tracking you actually have super local. You need to really pinpoint it out. You can use a tool like LocalFalcon. It will help you to detail out all of your local rankings down to the lowest possible solution. When you set up your ranking it should be store name plus city. Remember to narrow it down and make it as local as you can. You can do coffee shop Berlin, but narrow it even more down to track as local as possible.
Now it’s important to focus on the map pack, but don’t focus only on that. Of course, it gets a lot of attention because it takes so much space. But there is still the organic results which are further down, which I mentioned in the introduction. You should still focus on this because this will help you overall with your SEO and all the lines and all the key which you are focussing on, because in order for you to rank high in these organic search results, you need to optimise your website in terms of speed, in terms of technology and so on.
So if you rank high on these local keywords organically, this is a positive thing because this means that you will most likely also rank high on other organic keywords, which are not necessarily local. So just to sum everything up, focus on both the local map to rank high here. Remember to track extremely local as the result changes just within a few hundred metres. Make sure to always focus on the organic search results as this will help you overall on all types of searches.
And this will make you appear in all types of search results, even though it’s not local. And of course, this you do by optimising your website overall in terms of speed, in terms of the technical parts, which you can often use a plugin to solve and so on. So I hope it’s been helpful. I would highly appreciate if you would leave a review wherever you are listening to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, consistency is key to success.
Let’s catch up on the next one.
