BIM: Talk to me about the actual placing of the maps on the search engine result page versus the organic results which seem to get pushed further and further down and especially for these services businesses.
Adam Vest: Sure. And I think at some point the organic results might be page 2 with the way things are going as far as the adwords that Google shows they’re on the front of a search engine result page. But, map section shows directly below the Google ads. So you, generally speaking, you have three Google ads below that you’re going to have the map pack, the three pack, and then below that, you’re gonna end up having the organic section. Now, as I mentioned earlier, in some industries there are now four different maps business showing up in that map pack, one of them being an advertisement.
BIM: And the other thing that’s popped up recently for service-based industries as these Google sponsored ads as well, which show up above or below the regular ads.
Adam Vest: That’s exactly right. I believe it’s called the Google guarantee. It can be very powerful for companies that go through the process. It’s a pretty stringent process to become a Google verified business with that guarantee. But, it certainly is a conversation that I’ve had with all of my accounts because it did just recently happened. I think they were Beta testing it on the west coast there for years and then just recently rolled out to quite a few major cities.
BIM: Well, I certainly see it all over the place in Atlanta. So, talk to me about the links to the website. I know the map is location-based, how important are the actual quality of links and the content on the website to actually rank on the map?
Adam Vest: Sure. And, you know, I think those are two of the most important things that you can do for search engine optimization would be, other than having clean code on the website would be having fantastic content that’s not built for the search engines, but that’s actually built for consumption. And then, on the same token, having high-quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in determining your ranking. So, there can be a client with a backlink profile of over a thousand backlinks or 50,000 backlinks and then you can have a client with a handful of backlinks that are very high quality and that handful of backlinks will actually get that client to rank higher than having thousands and thousands of junk backlinks, broken links, things like that.
BIM: What exactly does high quality back look like?
Adam Vest: Well, what we like to say, domain authority is not necessarily a term that Google uses, but I think everybody in the industry kind of knows that they still look at page rank. They still look at DA. We kind of have a cut off when it comes to who we will backlink to. So, your site needs to have authority in order for us to link our clients to your site. And I think at the end of the day, a lot of those relationships are developed over time. So, having the right relationships with website owners, with business owners all around the country and especially here locally is very important because there are a lot of websites that have a very low domain authority score. You know, if you’re looking at Moz or, or one of these tools that still does show the DA Score, generally speaking, we have a threshold that we’re not going to go under as far as linking to their site.
BIM: And if you get a link from a good quality trusted site with a high domain authority and it’s relevant to your business, is there any backend SEO you could do pointing to that link?
Adam Vest: Well, you can certainly link out to whoever was kind enough to link to you in the first place. What we’ve found generally what’s generating these high-quality backlinks is great content and I think focusing on the content is extremely important in 2018. That was not always the case, but, the crawlers over at Google are getting smarter and smarter by the minute and they understand great content versus average content versus bad content. I think at this point having a great content development team is critical to the success of any agency and the success of any business owner as well.
BIM: And of course then there’s mobile, and especially since we’re talking about local a lot here, mobile seems to be extremely important for local searches. How is that having an effect on the search result?
Adam Vest: Mobile has revolutionized the industry. If you remember back to the days you know, not that long ago, we didn’t have cell phones. So now, we have these little computers in our pocket that can pretty much do anything that we need them to do as far as finding information. So, we’re seeing the majority of the searches come in on mobile devices, whether that’s an iPad or a tablet or a cell phone, whatever the case and optimizing for mobile now is an absolute necessity. Google gives you a significant ding if your site is not mobile optimized. With that being said, you can still have a website that’s mobile optimized and still not going to convert. So it’s important to pay attention to both the desktop and the mobile versions of your site if you really want to achieve the goals that you’ve set out to achieve with your online presence.
