Good Organic, but Poor Places Optimization. You can have top organic rankings even above local results at times, but now your organic listing will not get integrated with the place page listing, forcing your results down the 1st page to around the 7th-9th position.
Poor Organic, but Good Places Optimization. You might have a great ranking in the 7-pack of Google maps results, but since the change I have been pushed back to the 2nd page and beyond.
Here are the 5 steps to ensure that you overcome and gain the newly coveted integrated local search ranking you seek:
1. Build more local links that mention the business name, address, phone number, and URL. These may range from links that are also examples for local search, or they may be useful references such as those in guest posts, YouTube videos, and tweets. Aim to get these links from other local sites such as local bloggers, businesses, directories, or your chamber of commerce.
2. Make sure your place page URL matches your website URL precisely. In Google’s Research, changing tracking URLs such as domain.com/city which might have been used to separately track maps traffic back to the original domain.com seems to jump-start the consolidation process.
3. Check the accuracy of your existing citations. Make sure your Posts have accurate Name, Address, and Phone number data and ensure that the same is represented on your website.
4. Make updates to your place page. As simple as it sounds, editing the main areas of your Google Place Page can often jump-start the integration process. In our experience, editing the text areas such as the description of your business seems to have a better effect than editing or adding images and videos.
5. Just because directories don’t rank anymore doesn’t make them less useful. Since the new integrated results depend on strong organic and local search optimization, getting links from respected local, niche, or industry specific directories is still important. Just take any claims that being included in such as directory will propel you to the top with a grain of salt, as all it takes is a basic listing (often free) to deliver the desired results.
