Using the Google Map Tool and Photos for Local SEO

Have you seen the amazing things that Google is doing with Maps? At the risk of sounding like a sycophantic fanboi, these things are amazing!

People are doing many wild and wonderful things with maps – walking tours, undersea tours, embedding photos of their favorite places, even customer lists. Here’s ours…

View Top Local Rankings, Vancouver Customer Map in a larger map

We can keep updating this map and loading the html onto the site as our business grows. We can embed pictures and even video from our customers, giving them an SEO benefit. A big benefit!

Here’s the link to the Map with photos embedded You can choose to add videos, webcams, even real estate listings to your maps. Click on the link, it’s worth a look…

The Thing About Maps Is, People Use Them All The Time Now.

Maps get a lot more traffic than you might suspect. Our customer map is shared online at Google and while I have no idea who will see it or how, I know from other people that it will get traffic. Which is bizarre right? I’m going to keep this updated and make it richer with information. It’s very easy to do this.

Here are the instructions from Google Maps.

There are some steps to get the SEO benefit from this though. Using Google’s very cool photo service Panoramio is a big part of getting your maps to rank and to add weight and effectiveness to your Local Business Center listing.

Here’s How To Get Extra Local SEO Rank Push From Google :

• First put your exterior photos of your business and the area on Panoramio. Sign up for a user account if you don’t already have one.

• Do you geotag your photos? If you do, then you’re ahead of the game. If not, then when uploading to Panoramio you’ll have to go through their steps to geotag them.

• Here’s the SEO optimizing part… add the business name to the photo title. Then add the business name, street address, and phone number to the comments. This enables the photo to be associated with your Google Local Business Center listing.

You’ll get a warning that the photo needs to be approved. It can take 2-4 weeks (…is this because Panoramio is still in beta?) for these photos to appear in a Google Maps, Local Business Center listing. They will show up in the User Content section at the bottom of the listing.

• Data showing up in the “User Content” area of the Local Business Center listing probably affects ranking. We don’t yet know how much. But after all, Google has gone to the trouble of adding this section so I assume that this information is important. It certainly is useful. Your photo will also be included in Google Earth and will appear in general Google Maps image searches, and that might bring more traffic.

To quote noted Local SEO expert, Mike Bluementhal, “If ‘citations’ are the new link than it appears that georeferences are the new citation.”

That means geotags, hcards, .kml files are all worth the effort!