What if My Keywords Don't Trigger Google Maps?

What to do when your keywords aren’t ranking in local search results.

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[transcript]

Everyone, as many of you well know what I do for a living beyond just building businesses is SEO, search engine optimization. Specially local search optimization. So to do with like Google Maps or what was once upon a time called Google Places or Google My Business. And so some of these short clips that I do will have to do with local search. Probably more so than generally search engine optimization or other marketing or entrepreneurial topics.

Let’s jump into it. I got a question the other day and it’s a pretty common question that I get. And it had to good with a fellow that was quoting a potential client on some rankings for I think the key word was apartment city names or something like that. So maybe it was apartments Vancouver or apartments for rent New York City or Manhattan or something like that. And he was all stoked to prepare a quote for this guy and then he noticed that those keywords no longer trigger Google Maps or you know Google snap pack or local results. And so from where he was coming from, he’s like okay this deal is screwed. There’s nothing more that I can do here. Client’s not going to want to proceed with this project because there is no snap pack anymore. I told him a little bit about how over the years and I’ve been doing this for six years now, we’ve seen a lot of different keywords go in and out of maps. And we don’t even necessary see from a year to…on a sort of you know, one year it’s this, one year we see it in maps, one year we see it not in maps.

This can happen on a day to day basis. So what I told him is not to bet on it not being there or being there. Chances are in a week, maybe a month it will probably come back. And then it will disappear again. Some keywords are more stable than others. I’ve noticed one in particular or a few in particular related to my industry SEO or internet marketing or what have you. It’s disappeared many times over the years. Right now we have it but in a month it may not be there, in a year it may not be there. So does that mean I don’t built citations? Does that mean I don’t try to rank for it in the event that they do turn on Google Maps for that particular keyword or Google by Business for that particular keyword? Absolutely not. I’m definitely going to make sure that I build those citations for that day when it comes on. Not to mention citations are great links. Citations, and by citations I’m typically meaning local businesses directories.

Citations go a long way I think to legitimizing your business. Whether it’s super local or not. So I think he does have a campaign on his hands. I don’t think he should focus primarily on maps because maps may not come back. But I think he should still build it out as if it was a maps campaign. Of course also still focusing on his organic rankings and all that kind of stuff because maps’ rankings don’t generally exist without organic or strong organic rankings. So I don’t think this really changes anything and I don’t think you can bet on it or I don’t think you should bet on it being there or not being there. I think you always have to assume that it can disappear tomorrow and that you need to have your ass covered for the event that it does disappear because that client is going to be very disappointed if you bet everything on maps and maps disappears. So I think there’s still a really good project there assuming that he has the ability to be strong in his organic rankings and other, whether it might be getting a video up so he has more, sorry owns more of that surp real estate. I’ve let him know this and I thought after explaining it to him that someone else might get some value out of the explaining that.

I hope this has been valuable and I do hope that you’ll also take a moment to subscribe to my channel so that you can get more clips like this one. Thanks guys. See ya.