3 Ways To Improve Your Google Rankings
I am Andy Stickel. Today I am going to give you three ways to improve your Google rankings. These methods will improve your Google Map rankings. The maps are when you search for something like “personal injury attorney” or “state planning attorney” or “DUI lawyer” and you’ve got that map with the three listings underneath of it. Sometimes there’s an ad in there and sometimes there’s not. But, I am going to show you how to improve your map listing so that you can be found by more people and get more clients.
Tip 1
The first thing that you want to do is add photos to your listings. This is what I tell all of my clients. Take your cell phone out of your pocket and take 20 interior pictures and 20 exterior pictures of your location. The pictures do not have to be fancy. They can be anything. Create a photographic walking tour of your office or just whatever you want. It does not matter because 99% of the people that go to your profile will never actually see these pictures.
The reason that you want these pictures and the reason is so important is because when you take a picture with your cell phone, I don’t know if you know this or not but the latitude and longitude data of the location of where the picture was taken gets baked into those photos.
When you take those pictures and then you upload them to the photos section of your Google My Business profile you’re going to be much more relevant for the geographical location that your office is located in and location proximity to the searcher is one of the most important search engine ranking factors for the maps. Make sure that you add 20 interiors and 20 exterior photos to your Google My Business profile.
Tip 2
The second tip is very easy to do (but often overlooked). Get your Google My Business categories right. Your Google My Business categories are very important. Especially your primary category. What you want to do is make sure to go to Google search. Search for the keyword that you most want to appear for. If it’s a criminal defense lawyer or family law attorney or divorce lawyer or whatever the keyword happens to be, and look at the competition. Look at what the competition has selected for their categories because if you search for something and you see that Google is returning a certain result for them (that is the result you are hoping for) you will probably want to use that too. Typically what we do with our clients is we look at the competition first because we want to see what Google is already ranking.
What we want to do is we want to look at the primary category. There are other categories that you can select as well, but the primary category is the most important one. A lot of times lawyers will select “lawyer” or “law firm” or “legal services” or something like that and all their competitors are selecting “personal injury attorneys” or “criminal justice attorney” which is kind of weird. If you’re a criminal defense attorney they don’t have the option of criminal defense. They have a criminal justice attorney.
There’s a lot of different categories so odds are if you’ve never done SEO or even if you have an SEO company a lot of times you have the wrong category selected so double-check your category. Make sure the category is correct.
Tip 3
Tip three. Check your page title. This is a bit more complicated than most lawyers get but here is what you can do. Again, you are going to Google to that main category. You will search “DUI attorney” or “Baltimore personal injury attorney” or Oakland employment lawyer” and you’re going to look at the pages that are ranking on the first page of Google. What you’re going to notice is in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages), there are a few different sections.
At the very top of the section, there is a blue section that you actually click on. That is the page title. What you’re going to notice is that the keywords, the location plus the practice area, are going to be in that page title. You’re going to notice a pattern. You’re going to notice that it’s saying personal injury attorney in Baltimore or Baltimore personal injury attorney or personal injury lawyer or personal injury law firm or lawyers and what you want to do is you want to look at the search engine results and look at what your competitors have set as that page title.
Then you want to change your page title to blend in with that. Often times what you’ll have instead for your page title will just be your brand name or something like that. That’s not going to cut it. A rule of thumb is typically geo plus practice area. So, Baltimore personal injury attorney or something like that will work for you.
Conclusion
These are three ways that you can easily and quickly improve your Google rankings so that you can get more clients and make more revenue. Add 20 photos of the interior business, 20 photos of the exterior of your business to your Google My Business profile, select the correct categories for your Google My Business profile and adjust the page title so that it matches what Google is actually looking for. So if you have any questions about this at all please comment below. I’ll help you out a push in the right direction and I hope you guys have a great day.
