3 Tips to Help Your Business Show Up in Google’s 3-Pack

The change from Google’s 7-pack, to a reduced 3-pack has had a major
impact on local SEO. Many businesses struggled to get featured when
there were seven spots available. Now getting into the top three can
seem like rocket science. The good news is that this goal is not
impossible.
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However, it does take time, skills, and knowledge to get it done. Being
seen by local consumers just as they’re searching for your type of product
or service is the most targeted type of marketing known today. But
getting there can be tricky unless you really know what you’re doing.
To help you get started down the right path, here are three helpful tips:

1. Get more citations

When it comes to ranking your local listing, one thing Google pays close
attention to is how often a company is mentioned in other sources. In
other words, it looks for “citations” to validate your business. A citation is
a mention of your business name along with another piece of business
information anywhere on the web – with OR without a link back to your
website.
The additional information could be your phone number, website URL, or
physical address – combined or individual. In order to count as a citation,
the information must be an EXACT match to the information on your
Google My Business listing.
Citations help prove to the search engines that you are a real company;
therefore, the more of them you have from quality sources, the better
your local listing rankings will be.

2. Add photos to your listings

It’s no secret that consumers love photos. The more, high quality images
you have on Google local listing profile, the more appealing it will be to
potential customers. This goes farther than Google; Yelp has even
published advice on how to optimize your business listings, claiming that
photos make a massive difference. It even goes as far as to say that
according to research from Review Trackers, consumers spent 2.5 times
more of their time on listings that featured photos.

3. Get as many reviews as you can

Reviews are an important part of getting noticed online these days.
Consumers love writing reviews about businesses and they also like
reading them. Google has taken note of this. It wants to promote the
best local businesses and what better way to determine who those

businesses are than through positive user reviews? If you want to really
increase your rankings, encourage your customers to leave reviews
whenever you can.

Getting your business to show up on Google’s 3-pack is a lot more
challenging than it was with the 7-pack; obviously, because there are less
spots. The tips above will help, but you will need to continually keep up
with local search changes and ensure all of your company’s information is
listed correctly and updated going forward. Not only that, but make sure
you make smart use of categories and strategic keyword placement within
your profile to give it strength.