What strategies are people using to rank GBPs in the local map pack?

[Guest]

The standard advice is to fill out every section of the GBP, collect as many reviews as possible and use the post feature weekly. Beyond that ranking in the local map pack is all about the location of the searcher.

However, I’ve seen a whole range of strategies employed including:
- Google Stacks
- Geotagged images
- Map stacking
- YouTube Videos (with location data)
- Image shares on photo sites

Which of these strategies do you employ, do they work and are there any other approaches you take?

[Matty]

None of the additional strategies listed have verifiable validity. Just anecdotes.

[John]

At the end of the day, it's going to be "signals" and "user engagement". Leave that to your own imagination here but that is pretty much what will be the biggest movers in the map pack.

[Andrew]

Other than taking time to develop a posting strategy to push relevance and filling out information completely we follow the guidelines to a T.
Anything else is asking for a suspension in my opinion.

[Adam]

Creating local landing pages.
Link building.

[Schieler]

Hey there,

Google has pretty much left no “knobs” for SEOs to turn at this point on GMBs.

Everything is coming down to user signals (calls, website visits, directions etc).

There’s a few ways to increase these signals but the above strategies stopped working about a year ago now, maybe a little longer.

Google needs that ads revenue more than it wants you to rank.