Google My Business Proximity Influence Building 2021 - September 2023

Hi, this video is about GMB digital proximity influence. That's a mouthful. Basically when you're trying to rank in the maps. One of the most important parts to Google's algorithm is going to be how… Is basically your business's proximity to the searcher.

Now, proximity. I'm going to kind of use in air quotes here because it's more of a digital proximity in that just, because someone is physically closer… Gives them an advantage for sure, but it doesn't automatically mean that they're more relevant from a proximity standpoint. That's why you can have more influence maybe a couple of miles down the road sometimes than you do some place that's closer. This is also why it's not just whoever is closest to me. I think that how much weight they put on to physical closeness also depends on the market.

Maybe a pizza place versus a construction company. Both of them are going to have probably, Google My Business pages, but I think they're going to be willing to go further for some types of services and Google tweaks. I believe that, that's part of their algorithm, that kind of accounts for that. Anyway. So, this is not super well understood right now, I think. It's a huge part of Google's algorithm. In fact, after GMB category, basically, how relevant they think you are geographically to the searcher becomes the next biggest factor, so to speak. So almost all of my Google, my business, SEO stuff has this included or as the primary objective, is to increase the proximity influence. I'm always keeping that in consideration. If I'm trying to rank a project. If we've got a project with a company that has one or more Google My Business pages for which Google is serving up maps in the search engine results pages.

So, all plumbers with pretty much every keyword that they have, unless it's a super small city. This is a very commonly, a huge part of a project. It's no longer… Maybe five years ago you could say, Oh, I rank second in the maps for a Dallas plumber. Right? You could say that, and it would be reasonable and pretty much all over Dallas. You'd be pretty much accurate. That's not true anymore. It's really. If I hear somebody say, hey, I rank in the maps. I rank number two in the maps for this keyword. It kind of clues me into the fact that they don't really know what it means to rank in the maps. And that's what I'm going to talk about now, because it's a major precursor or a major point of understanding that really needs to be thought about deeply in order to understand how to appropriately affect digital proximity influence.

You need to be tracking this, okay. If you have a project that has Google maps listings, you should be tracking what I call the rank of ranking geogrids. And I'm not the person that came up with this. There's several pieces of software out there that do this for you. I use them just for the ranking geogrids a lot of times they have other features. I don't like it when… I don't use features that involve logging into accounts with clients. I don't want to use the same access code because it kind of creates a footprint. If one of them gets suspended, then it could create the other ones. So, I try to separate the Google My Business pages as much as possible in terms of them all being on different accounts. This is different. This is more of a tracking standpoint, and I can track anybody.

It's not actually accessing the Google My Business page. Quick side track on that. Okay. So here's a bunch of examples. I'm going to use these examples as I go through and give you more examples of exactly how I would implement in different scenarios. You can see here, this is a really new listing. I showed this in another video of more broad maps. SEO video. This is an older lesson and obviously ranks a lot better. You can see the only place that they rank at all is basically right next door, right in this… At the center is the actual Google My Business page location, right? The point is to kind of grow this influence, not necessarily in a circular manner. It Doesn't always make sense to grow it in a circular manner.

As you can see here in this first one. Let's take a look at some of these other ones here. These two are really interesting because it's a pretty significant patchwork. You have one, two, and then nothing. Then oddly, further away you ranked better. Now, the further you get from the first page, the first three to five results. The more fluctuation it could be. This could just be the timing of checking that sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. Like when you're rank 17. The fact that there's multiple data points over here, that kind of… It's pretty interesting that it kind of can go up and down and can be further away and actually rank better. So even all the way up here.

So, what I would do. Let's say this is, well, I'm going to get into that. What I would do this listing. But identify this is maybe an area for growth, basically. And we have already built relevance to this area and we built relevance to this area. Now we still need to work on these other areas. And you can see another example here. Two to 17. This is quickly dropping this way and you have some more influence up here. Now, part of this is, in this specific area, there's a good bit of little cities. And so [inaudible 00:05:29] and this is actually located in South Lake, Texas. But there's a bigger city right here. Grapevine. That you kind of hit a wall, right? So, you can hit walls if it actually moves into a different city in terms of ranking. It doesn't mean you can't rank. Especially right over the border, especially if it's really close.

If the Google My Business pages is a mile from the next city it can still ranked there. It's just a lot harder and so something to be aware of. Here's another one and ranking pretty well. Still could use some influence up here. Build it up in these areas. And then here's another example. We can see there's a lot of number one rankings, but then you just kind of go this way and it's much harder. This is also about competition. This is downtown Fort Worth. So you just got to be more competitive. That's to be expected. It doesn't mean you don't take these low hanging fruit up here. Okay. So, now… Where did this go? There we go. Okay. So how do we go about influencing this? Now that we go, okay, so we can rank in different areas. Let's say we're… This is a really good example right here.

Let's say, we're here. What are we going to try to do? And let's assume this is all one city just for the sake of argument. We're going to try… Actually, this one's better. It's a little better. We're going to try to find a specific point of interest. So this park right here, and we're going to try to build relevance to this specific park relevant to the Google My Business page. So we're going to make the Google… We're going to send information to Google that lets them think that… It gives them information, that these two things are relevant. There's a lot of different ways to do that. You can do that in all sorts of parts of SEO. With it. With your Google My Business page itself. You can do it on your page, on your site. There's actually a lot of things you can do on there.

There is kind of unlimited amount of ways in which you can do this. That you can work on the influence on your site because you have complete control over it with link building. Let's give an example of a link. Let's say I want to be more relevant over here, right? Again back to this analogy up here. And let's say they have a donation page or something on Trammell Park that will allow me to get a link, right? Somehow I can get a link. I can, yeah. I call them up. I can ask them, if it's not like a public thing, maybe this is possible, right? Let's just assume that it's a private park and I can get a link and say, hey, I'll donate a hundred bucks or whatever to you. And I can get a link back to my website specifically back to the URL that is inside the Google My Business Page. The best place. Even just to the homepage would be good too.

That's going to add a lot of relevance because they're telling Google, hey, we appreciate this. That link, especially… They're going to have a Google My Business page. So think about that. This is a brand that is tied into the website. Google my business page is talking to the website and the website is talking to the Google My Business page. And they're linking to your website from their website, which is also tied into Google My Business page. Google can make that connection. Okay. So that is an example of link, now that's a great link. So don't expect to get that very often, but it's an awesome type of link. There's a lot of other kinds of links that you can use to make it more relevant. You can talk both at the same time. That's just one way of doing it.

You can do it on your site. So on your site, have a page about Trammell Park and put it in the section of your site, that is all relevant to that Google My Business page you're trying to rank. So you want to enter the link properly. You could just… If there's a video about Trammell Park. Put it on your site, on one of your pages that would add relevance. There's a lot of different things that you can do there. Examples with the GMB. So you can do insights, that's sort of the backend. You could make a post about Trammell Park. You could talk about it. That's going to add some relevance. I wouldn't do this too much. It's not like you can just make a hundred posts about Trammell Park and then you're super relevant.

Well, maybe… I don't recommend doing that, but it could still work. It's just one… You're looking at this thing and you're going to do it. You're going to add relevance in all these places. Let's say. So we want to rank in Trammel Park. We're going to see… Look for opportunities in all of these places to help improve the influence. And so making a GMB post is just one of several things that you are going to try to do. Outside as well. So if you think about… If someone is sitting in Tramell Park and they get driving directions from their phone to my business, that's a signal to Google. This is much harder to manipulate, but there are still ways to kind of send these signals. It's kind of a whole can of worms in and of itself.

I won't be able to go into in this video. But I think that if you know of any way to send traffic, be it real or fake, or that looks real to Google, this would be something that you could consider. There's kind of like offline marketing, where you get real people to take actions that you want them to do. That's going to be helpful. You can do have to be careful with it because it can't look… If it looks fake, then that could really hurt you. Okay. I want to clarify one last point about what a POI is. It's kind of anything, literally it could be a park. It could be an intersection. It could be a zip code. It could be a neighborhood. And I typically like to pick big, unique things that are unique potentially to the city.

Like in this example, the Dallas museum of art or Trammel Park. These are examples of things that are… There's not another Dallas Museum of Art, right? Fort Worth Botanical Garden right here. Fort Worth Stockyards. These are all good things, I think, to make yourself more relevant too. Because there's a uniqueness to it that makes it… I think the connection a bit stronger. I don't think you couldn't do this, but I would probably never do it. I think I could always find a better opportunity. I would never do like a McDonald's. But I think that would still probably work. I just think it would be out of place and it would not work as much as finding a more… Something that has… A POI that has a stronger presence in Google's eyes.

That's going to be what I have to say on that. I think I covered everything. If you've never seen these before. Well, welcome to the Google My Business page, ranking world. This is absolutely critical. If you're not doing this and you're trying to rank in the maps. Then you're not understanding what's going on. You just can't know what's going on. You can't do enough manual searches to really check this. What you want to do is you want to track this over time for any client.