One of the questions that I often hear from business owners investing in my Chicago SEO consultant services is, how can we rank higher in the Google local pack? This question is fair to ask since customers typically will only call the top three displayed results. The best three ways for improving your Google My Business(GMB) listing according to Moz are by having: GMB Signals, Link Signals, and Review Signals.  Let us go over each one of these below. 

Improve Your Google My Business Signals

Your GMB signals account for 25.12 percent of your ranking factors, so getting this step right is critical to your GMB visibility. The main areas you want to optimize are your: proximity, categories, and business title.

One of the most significant factors in determining how well your business will rank in a specific area in your proximity to the user. I will try to explain this a little better.

Let us pretend you own a coffee shop in Hyde Park. When users are near the Hyde Park area, your coffee shop will have a much higher chance of ranking in the local three-pack, than say if they were in Lake View. Not many users would be willing to travel from Lincoln Park to Hyde Park for coffee when there are other nearby coffee shops. Google wants to give the user the best possible experience, so Google will show the user what is closest to them.

With all that in mind, it is best to have a business located in the area you want to perform business in, and you serve customers at their location; you can just set up service locations.

Setting up the correct categories and business titles is also very important if you want to rank well in the three-pack. You will want to make sure the category you select is correct and that your business title only includes your business name to adhere to Google's GMB guidelines. Some studies show businesses with the target keyword in them ranking better, but they do put you at risk for getting your GMB penalized by Google. 

Get Some Link Signals

Link signals will account for 16.53 percent of the ranking factors that go into GMB rankings. These link signals include inbound anchor text going to your website, their domain authority, and their domain quality. You will want to come up with ways to get people to link back to your site with keyword related anchor text since it will give you a significant boost in the local three-pack. For example, I was able to rank well for web design in my home town South Bend, by using link signals.

Ask Your Customers for Reviews

You will want to encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business since they account for 15.44 percent of your GMB ranking factor. Typically you will see a company with more positive reviews ranking better than a business with little to no reviews. A part of this has to do with Google wanting to give the user the best possible experience. You can get more reviews by sending a thank you email to all your customers and asking them to leave a review if they enjoyed your services.

These are just a few ways that you can improve your Google My Business Rankings. I will create a video on how to set up a GMB account from start to finish in the future.