Before you can compete in Google Maps, you must have a verified Google My Business™ listing for your business. This verified listing must reflect your business’s address and location to include business hours, local phone number, and link to your website.

If you are a restaurant, you can even include links to your menu. If you are a business that accepts appointments, you can include links to where customers schedule appoints.

The key to a successful Google My Business™ listing is having complete and accurate information
about your business.

If the information is not accurate, or your Google My Business™ listing is incomplete, then your business presence in search could suffer due to a lack of relevance.

Google launched a new product for Google My Business™ owners back in June 2017 called Google Posts.

Think of this as a way for GMB owners to post updates and information about their business directly in their Google My Business account.

These new Google Posts will appear in the SERP results along with your Google My Business listing and are a great way to communicate with your audience and customers.

One of the most creative ways I’ve seen businesses use Google Posts is by posting reviews from customers.

You can simply copy the Google reviews from your GMB listing, and republish them as a Google Post.

Other great Google Post ideas are to publish events.

Although normal Google Posts will expire after 7 days, event posts will live on until the end date of your event. Events are the one exception to the Google Post expiration time frame.

If the information is not accurate, or your Google My Business™  listing is incomplete, then your business presence in search could suffer due to a lack of relevance.

Adding a lot of images to your Google My Business™ will increase actions on your listing easily by a factor of 10x. Actions = authority, and authority = rankings.

Images dramatically increase engagement on your local Google business page from mobile devices.

People who find your local Google business page via mobile will find it easy to open your photos and swipe through.

And on mobile, someone can swipe through hundreds of photos on your Google My Business™ listing in a matter of minutes.

The only thing that can generate more actions on your Google My Business™  listing than images are 360° Virtual Tours!

The power of digital media-rich online map listings and the impact of virtual tours on increasing consumers’ interest in a local business is significant. The rise of popularity in virtual reality will only increase the importance of providing virtual tours of your local business.

The longer they stay, the more likely they will pay your business a visit or make a phone call.

Understand that Google’s ranking algorithm favors relevance and authority, and the more time someone stays on your listing, the more authority you’ll build into your Google My Business™  listing.

Creating more interactive media content such as videos, commercials, and your business story will help you boost the “time on site” metric SIGNIFICANTLY!

Telling your business story will help you boost the “time on site” metric SIGNIFICANTLY!

Edit/create an "About" section for your Google My Business™ listing by first going to aboutme.google.com/, and then appending your Google My Business™ / Google Maps ID to the end of the forward slash.

You get your GMB ID by visiting your listing in Google Maps and grabbing the long numbered portion of the URL only. Then add that page ID to the end of the about URL.

Embed your Google maps business listing (Google My Business™) into your city-specific landing pages. It’s also valuable, for some businesses, to embed your Google local listing map into the footer of your website.

Start a business blog and write about local news and information relevant to your targeted metro area, and share your content across all social media platforms, including your GMB listing.

One of the latest updates to Google My Business™ is the ability to add a Post.

New blog posts will help you get higher rankings in Google local / Google Maps because each time you publish fresh content, Google will come back to your website to crawl and index that new content. This helps to build domain authority within your website. And since your website (typically your
homepage) is listed as the landing page URL of your Google My Business™ listing, this domain authority contributes to building location authority.

The more location authority your GMB listing has, the higher you’ll rank in Google local search results (or Google Maps), and the more productivity you’ll get from your listing in the form of phone calls, direction requests, and visits to your website.

Over 90% of consumers trust reviews as a resource when deciding what business to buy from, visit, or hire.

One of the fastest ways to generate reviews is to send an email to recent customers or clients asking for a review and including a link directly to your Google My Business™ listing.