Local Maps SEO for Local Service Businesses: Ranking Google Business Profiles in the AI Era with Mike Martin

James Dooley: Local Maps SEO. Today I'm joined with Mike Martin who's the founder of GPPLaid.com. So he's got a lot of data. He knows exactly how to rank those Google Business Profiles. And first before we get started on the optimization of the Google Maps listings, Mike, how important is trying to improve the rankings of your Google Business Profile now we're in the AI era?

Mike Martin: Well, there's multiple answers to that. I mean, if you think about it, the Google Business Profile is, in most cases, the only real provable entity you've got left. Obviously Gemini is connected to Google Business Profiles. Gemini is obviously one of the AIs. It pushes everything into Gemini now. They've just released AskMap, which again pushes everything from Gemini into AskMap or vice versa. And there's no way that you can rank for single keywords or near me keywords faster no matter what. For example, if you were to rank a local business website, you would target keyword location, yeah? But keyword near me will get at least three times the search, and we've checked this over thousands of different industries, at least three times the search in the area, and you can rank for keyword near me, like plumbing near me, roofing near me, electrician near me, accountant near me, within a matter of weeks on a Google Business Profile, you can be in the top three right above the websites. So the amount of traffic you get and the intent-based traffic that comes from it, it's just ridiculous. People are seeing such good results so fast by focusing on optimizing their Google Business Profiles.

James Dooley: So with regards to optimizing the Google Business Profiles then, you're saying that you're getting three times more searches for, let's say, plumbers near me or roofers near me than roofers Manchester or roofers in Manchester, right? Is there anything different that you do or is it still the same type of optimization for both roofers near me and roofers Manchester?

Mike Martin: Well, firstly, it's a minimum of three times. So we've tested loads of industries, some are 10, 12 times. Like dentists, they get about 15 to 20 times as much search for dentists near me than they do for dentists in locations. Now, so really, obviously, ranking a website, the rules haven't changed massively over the last five, six years. Obviously, the entity side of things and stuff like that stayed the same. But Google Business Profiles is completely different. It's based on daily actions. It's based on small daily actions. There's really four areas that you need to focus on. Filling out your profile completely, posting on a regular basis, posting images on a regular basis, and then chasing reviews and responding to them on a regular basis. That's pretty much it. Now, where a lot of people make the mistake is if they're doing it in the roofing industry, they might go in and say, "Right, I'm going to upload 50 posts a week and 50 images a week." It's impossible to stay consistent and it's completely out of whack with what the other businesses in the industry are doing. Now, if you're the busiest business in the industry, then you're going to be doing more than everybody else, but not necessarily 10 times more because there's only a certain amount of search and a certain amount of work. So if you look in the industry and you figure out that people are posting once a month or once a week and people are uploading images once a day, then you're probably going to want to go and say, "Right, I'm going to do three posts a week. I'm going to do five images a week and I'm going to chase reviews and then respond to them as much as I possibly can." And if you just do that and stay consistent because that's where most businesses fail. It's not because ranking a Google business profile is difficult. It's because ranking a Google business profile is time-consuming and it's daily actions that have to be done every single day. In Google, you can't schedule those things yourself and that's why we created GBPLay because in GBPLay, you can actually schedule everything months and months and months in advance and stay consistent. And it's those four areas times consistency that really starts to build out your footprint online.

James Dooley: In a previous video, you came up with something. It was something like the four P's. It was something like picks, posts, praise, and something like that. What was that saying that you said?

Mike Martin: Profile pictures, posts, and praise, which is basically profile completeness, post regularly, pictures regularly, chase praise regularly, and respond to it when you get it. And that's kind of it. It's those four P's times consistency, which is everything you need to know about ranking a Google business profile. It's more like a social profile. If you imagine you were trying to build a YouTube channel, posting every day on a YouTube channel will get you 5, 10, 15, 20,000. You have to do it over a long period of time. With Google business profiles, it's the same thing, but you see the results a lot quicker because everything you do on a Google business profile over that consistency is ranking you in Google for intent-based keywords like industry near me. Does that make sense to you?

James Dooley: Yeah, it does make sense. Yeah. And consistency is key in so many channels. Article velocity, link velocity, on YouTube, video velocity, uploading every single day massively improves your channel. From what you're saying there, picture velocity, consistently uploading every day, post velocity. I want to touch upon review velocity because I've had fucking real pains where I've just gone and sent out mass emails, loads of reviews coming in a single day, loads of them don't get published because it looks like it's been a load of spam where I've gone and bought 50 fake reviews. Obviously, can you touch upon what GBP league does with regards to the review where you can load in all your client database, all existing clients, but it feeds out and why that's important because now you're talking about consistency, you can get the consistency on the reviews of the Google business profiles.

Mike Martin: Yeah. Well, like you just said, most people will say, okay, I'm going to start chasing reviews and we'll do it maybe one week out of every three months. So they'll send out a thousand emails to a thousand clients and they'll get 50 or 60 reviews come in. And those 50 or 60 reviews will get deleted by Google within a week because Google is like, ah, they're obviously spamming. Otherwise they couldn't have got that many or they must be fake. So what we've built is a system where you can upload your client emails once a week or once a month, and it will drip feed those out over a 30 day period. And because it drip feeds them out, it means that your reviews are coming in consistently over time, which then also improves your rankings on a massive space, as long as you're responding to them. So what a lot of people don't realize is we've got clients that have gone from not ranking anywhere at all. And they're in industries where people at the top have got 600, 700, 800 reviews and they're like, well, I've only got 25 reviews. And I'm like, this is brilliant. Don't worry about it. Let's get you one review a week, over the next six weeks and watch what happens. And they've gone climbing, climbing, climbing, climbing. And they're in the three pack beating people with three, four, 500. So when people see someone with 600 reviews, they look at it and they think, there's no way I can ever beat them. But if you actually look in most Google business profile three packs, you'll see that there's usually someone in there with a lot less reviews than the other guys. And what they're doing is they're winning with consistency. The most consistent business always wins. And I mean, always, obviously you still need things like your NAP information needs to match and your citations all over the internet needs to match and all the other little things you're doing for your online SEO and things like that. But the most consistent business that's got a half decent footprint online will always win in the Google maps, always. And we've tested this so much. It's like, oh my God, it's so true. They just win every single time.

James Dooley: So I've got some quick fire questions for you with regards to local maps SEO, right? You just mentioned their citations and business listings and keeping that consistent NAP, the name, address and the phone number. Is that a ranking factor for improving Google business profile rankings?

Mike Martin: Okay. So some people build citations with name, address and phone number. Some people build citations with name, address, phone number and backlink to the website. Yep. Yep. Skip the website. Just do name, address and phone number. Thousands and thousands of places. Make sure it matches exactly what you've got on your Google business profiles, name, address and phone number. Identical. So if you've got street or you've just got ST, do it exactly. ST followed by a com. Make sure it's the same everywhere. Google recognizes it everywhere. Google doesn't feel like you're trying to do link spam and it actually benefits you a lot more over time because you're building a brand rather than just building lots and lots and lots of backlinks pointing into your website, which in most cases don't help that much anymore anyway because you're not getting them in areas where they're either passing the link juice on or they're even worth having because everybody can, like if I go to chat GPT or if I go to one of the AI bots nowadays and I say, right, I need a thousand places that you're going to list my website with my link to my website, right? You're not going to get any benefit from that because it's dead easy to do. AI can do it super fast, super easy. But if you go in and you only get it to do your name, address and phone number and forget about the backlink to your website, then you're going to start seeing benefits coming from that because you're not building link spam. You're building the brand. The business brand is being mentioned everywhere without the link spam coming back in. Does that make sense?

James Dooley: Yeah, absolutely. Next question with regards to local maps SEO. It's hard to get your client to go and leave you a review with the keywords put in there. When you reply back to them reviews, so within gpp.com, you can reply back to the reviews. Are you trying to get the users of gpp.com to try to work in the keywords of what they did on that job to try and help? Does that help the Google business profile rank better in the maps by getting the keywords in the reply to the reviews that they've left?

Mike Martin: Other than the word keywords, yes. So forget about keywords completely with Google business profiles. Google understands who you are, what you do and where you are and exactly what it needs to rank you for. Keywords is completely irrelevant. It's the intent behind it, right? The intent behind what's actually being put in there. So if a plumber turns up at somebody's house at nine o'clock at night and they put in their thing that I couldn't find anybody local and they answered the call at nine o'clock at night and was here within 20 minutes, then all of a sudden, Google looks at that and says, okay, these guys answer the phone at night. These guys are open at this time of night. And it reads and understands what's being said. So you can forget about the keywords because if somebody then goes into AskMaps and clicks, I need a plumber that's open at nine o'clock and answers the phone around there at night, or I need a plumber that answers the phone after nine o'clock at night, and they say it into AskMaps, it will instantly rank them over the businesses that have got more reviews and more testimonials and have been posting and doing images longer just because of that one little review. So if you can get a client to explain what they wanted, what happened, and then what you did in a review, it's much more powerful than just saying, oh, this guy is absolutely amazing. I love him because everybody gets everybody to say that. So it's more about the intent of what they are writing than actually putting keywords in. Keywords, websites, keywords, not for Google business profiles. In my experience, it's all about those daily manual actions and the intent of what's being put on the page.

James Dooley: Yeah. So let's role play something here. I'm an enterprise SEO agency, right? I've been using GPP for a few months, right? I've gone and followed exactly what you said. I've gone and done a lot of the business citations. I've repeated that nap perfectly throughout the internet. It started to increase in rankings. I'm seeing those red grids turn into amber grids and turn into green grids, and I'm getting really excited. In GPPly, I've got the ranking replays, and they're turning green, and I'm excited. I'm now going using it, and I'm going sending out loads of these reviews. I'm getting lots of five-star reviews. I'm responding with the intent, exactly saying what we've done. And again, it's all going green. And I've got to a point now as an enterprise SEO agency, improving my Google business profile, and everything's green. I'm number one in the whole area. But my client wants to carry on paying me and wants more. How can I then increase the proximity of that grid to go, "Okay, I'm doing it within a three-mile radius. How do I get it to a 10-mile radius or a 20-mile radius of where I'm based?" From a local SEO expert, I want to try and expand that. And when I load it in, now my grid is all green here, but on the outside, it's all red. How do I expand that proximity for Google business profile rankings?

Mike Martin: Right, so one of the key things first, I'll go back to the beginning first of what you were saying earlier on, which is to do with consistency, right? You need to let your clients know and understand that Google business profile ranking is all about consistency. And if you're consistent for months and months and months, and then you stop being consistent, it's going to be worse than never doing it in the first place. And you're going to drop through the floor. It's going to be a lot harder to get back into that three-pack. So you need to make your clients aware of that at the beginning so your clients don't come to you and say, "Well, I'm already ranking. I don't want you anymore." And it's like you need to make sure a client understands that consistency is the key. And if we stop being consistent, right, and there's no way a business owner can do that themselves, right? And then secondly, with regards to ranking further afield. So we've got two tools. So I was the owner until very recently of Magic Page Plugin, WP Schema Plugin, Lead Simplify, Local Content Engine, Quote Flow, Lead Themes, Lead Forms, and Booker Local. Seven or eight software tools. I've just given them all to my business partner because we're completely focused on this. And we've got two tools. Two tools is the only two things we focus on. GVPLay and 3Local. And 3Local, we're keeping that because it's the best proximity maximizer for Google Business profiles that's out there. And the reason, it's not the best, you can do it with websites, but the reason we use it is because of how quick it is. You can set it up in 15 minutes and it'll create pages within 5, 10, 15, 20 mile radius of your business. These location pages specifically point back to the business and the brand inside of the schema as soon as they're created. So what we do is, let's say you draw a radius around your business and you want 150 pages in them areas. We don't care if the pages rank, what we care about is the structure of the schema in the backend of the pages. And the way we do it is we link back to your business with your geolocation data and everything, pointing back to your business, with your business name and brand. But then what we do further down is we have a link going to the same as link, going to the Google Maps CID URL. And then underneath that, we have the geolocation data as a service area page in that location for your business. So we're telling Google three things, this is the business, this is where they're based and this is what they do. This is the same as the information, which is their CID URL for their Google business profile. And this is a service area for this service in this location with this geolocation data. And what that does over a period of time is starts to push the Google business profile out further. And so you still have to keep the consistency. So I always tell a client, when you're very first set up, do post on a Monday, image on a Tuesday, post on a Wednesday, image on a Thursday, chase and respond to reviews on a Friday, done. So you just do that for four weeks and don't do anything else, right? Then what you see is if he starts to see movement, you're like, okay, we're moving, leave it alone and keep staying consistent, which means there's no additional work to do. If you're not seeing movement, add a couple of extra posts, maybe a couple of extra images that week and things like that. And just gradually increase it. And what will happen is the rankings will start to, once you start to see that movement, then what will happen over a period of time is you don't want to go unrealistic on the amount of daily posts and images that you do. But then what you want to do is once that stops and freezes and the client's like we're not getting any further, it's like, okay, the consistency is doing this. Then we start building out the location pages and we structure the schema correctly in the way so that the schema tells Google, this is a service area for this business and this is their Google Maps listing. And what slowly happens is it starts to increase even further and further. We stay consistent and we make them changes and you don't really need to do much else. And that works absolutely brilliant. And that's how we were able to get my coaching business ranking 150 miles in that direction and in that direction for a coaching business near me. And then over the sea in France and lots of other areas. So within a two-hour radius, we were on the first page of Google nearly everywhere with a Google business profile. And like my SEO agency, my SEO agency ranks for SEO agency near me and local SEO agency, probably 25 miles away from my actual, where it's based. And I don't do much with it at all. I just set it up, put it into here and let it go. And it's just sat there for the last three months and it's just tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And now we're ranking absolutely everywhere.

James Dooley: That's class, Mike. So not only can you be looking to get consistent kind of rankings, increase the rankings, you can now start to try to expand that proximity on Google Maps. Anyone who's watching this with regards to local maps SEO, is there anything that we've missed? Leave a comment in the comment section. Also, make sure you check out gpply.com where Mike Martin is the founder. It's a great tool. We use it within a fat rank and promo SEO. We've actually just moved all local SEO sharks clients over there as well. That does a lot of local SEO with regards to Google business profiles, what you've classed as being GMB SEO. It works absolutely great. I absolutely love myself, the ranking replays that I can send through to the client. And I love that being able to drip feed the reviews that comes in. Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure and we hope you like the video on local maps SEO.