Your Guide to Improve Local SEO with Google Pack 3 for Boosting Your Business

Google’s 3-pack is a list of the top 3 search results displayed by Google for local Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Whenever a person is using the google search engine to look for places to serve a purpose, google makes use of a local SEO service to display a pack of top three results that are relevant to a user’s query. 

Google, the world’s leading search engine with revenues are forecast to grow slower (8.95% per year) than the US Internet Content & Information industry average (12.21%), has a 3-pack list of the top 3 search results displayed by Google for local Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Whenever a person is using the google search engine to look for places to serve a purpose, google makes use of a local SEO service to display a pack of top three results that are relevant to a user’s query.

The world is changing, and the must-have features homebuyers expect in their home are changing too. In the last several years, Airbnb, an online platform for vacation rentals and tourism have a return on equity forecast to be high in 3 years (57.21%), has made it easy for homeowners to rent out their home or spare room. With more than half a billion check-ins through Airbnb, this platform has built a trusted reputation with people and communities around the world and created a market of people looking to buy homes with rentable component

So, for example; if a user searches for “salons near me”; google displays the top 3 three salons in a specific area from where it was searched from. Google thrives on optimizing search results keeping Local SEO in mind, hence the results keep evolving based on the location from where it is searched by users. This is something that a lot of Local SEO company tend to forget and as a result, miss out on optimizing a client’s business for google pack 3. 

Businesses are growing rapidly, especially one considers the scenario of a local region. It was relatively easy for Local SEO agency to rank businesses in the previously used google local 7 pack. However, this Google pack 7 was discontinued in favor of introducing Google pack 3 in the market in 2015. Additionally, Google pack 3 works quite differently than Google Pack 7 and that’s not just in the case of listings. Hence, it has become quite challenging to rank in the Local SEO results prepared by Google pack 3. 

With that in mind, here are some tips that definitely will improve a business’s rankings on Google pack 3’s listing system:

1. Get good Google Map reviews:

Good review criteria for Google pack 3 were initially based around Google+ reviews. However, this social media platform was shut down in 2019. The reviews given by people at the time of its closing were migrated to google maps and it became the center for all kinds of customer reviews.

Presently, Google makes use of all google Maps reviews to enlist the top 3 contenders in the google pack 3 list. This is a strong reason since 86 percent of customers tend to try out businesses after reading google reviews. This is supported by the fact that 97 percent of customers tend to read local business reviews before trying them out. This is why getting good reviews plays a major role in ranking businesses. An average of all customer reviews appears inside a certain local business’s rankings in the form of a little snippet. Expanding a business listing gives a user an idea of a business’s overall reception in form of customer ratings as well as good or bad; all kinds of customer reviews.

Since reviews play such an important role, here’s what businesses can do to increase business reviews:

• Make use of Encouraging signage with a QR code at business location to access local business’s review link to encourage customers to write reviews.
• Collect contact information like email addresses and mobile numbers from customers at the time of servicing their request and reach out to them asking for a review of the service they took from the business.
• Explain the importance of reviews to the business staff and train them to promote taking reviews from customers, especially when a customer is happy and satisfied with the services received from the consumer.
• Add Call to action buttons to redirect customers to the review page from the official business website. The inclusion of third-party review profiles will also help to promote rankings from the perspective of local SEO.

2. Optimize the Google My Business listing:

Google My Business is one of the easiest ways to showcase a local business on google. It not only gives a basic idea about a specific business but also provides necessary information like contact details, address and business timings about it. Creating a Google My Business (GMB) listing offers an attractive opportunity for clients to showcase their businesses to google and its users.

Hence, when working with the GMB for a business for local SEO purposes, ensure that all kinds of information are properly filled out at the time of registration so that it offers a customer a better idea about the ways one can interact with the business. Its importance has been noticed since there’s a 70% possibility that people interact with businesses that have a GMB listing. This is further made evident by facts like 81% of the customers tend to prefer business description as the key factor in choosing a local business. 

Here’s what you can do to improvise GMB listing and give a local business an outstanding chance to be considered for Google pack 3:

• Get rid of any possible duplicate business listings.
• Wisely make use of the primary category for all locations.
• Hyperlink to specific links of the business website.
• Make use of a professional email ID that resembles a domain name.
• Consider including a local phone number instead of a toll-free number for better local communications.
• Consider writing GMB posts. Such posts attract a searcher’s attention and enact like a mini-ad or sponsored social media post. These posts can be an ideal way to market sales, events, blog posts, and many more.
• Consider adding a booking button. If a local business happens to offer services that are based on an appointment system; adding a booking button can significantly boost sales, especially when the booking button is directly linked to official scheduling software by the local business. Such a setup helps customers to book appointments by directly clicking the book button from your GMB listing.
• Responding to business Q&A is also a critical part of growing a local business. Replying to business questions asked by people on google can potentially turn them into customers in near future.

3. Keeping website design responsive:

The evolution of connectivity and smartphones have paved the way for a mobile internet revolution. Mobiles occupy 50.81% of global website traffic that is almost half of the internet traffic of all devices combined.  Hence, local businesses must have their websites responsive enough to be handled by mobiles and tablets. Similar to reviews, Google Pack 3 also considers website aspects like responsiveness in its enlisting criteria. 

Advantages of having a mobile-friendly website far outweigh the cons of not having a responsive website. In general, mobile-friendly websites are known to load textual content and media like images, videos and animations by adapting to the kind of device a user is launching the website on. It also brings additional advantages like a seamless User interaction, a good User experience (UX), and drops down a website’s bounce rate by strengthening web presence and local SEO. 

4. Improvise Local SEO on the internet:

SEO keywords are essential for boosting a search result up the search engine results and towards the google pack 3. Hence, it becomes essential to optimize a brand’s global presence with the help of local SEO. A good local SEO agency can assist in getting that done by ensuring that all tags, keywords, links, and titles are arranged in order.

Making use of techniques like the addition of location data like city name inside titles, URLs and within textual content like reviews and experience blogs can significantly help in boosting the local presence of the business in search results. This is more evident when the content is unique for every region a business is present. This might seem a challenging task given the solutions and similarities of operating the business. However, highlighting minute differences brought on by the location and customer needs can help serve the cause. Additionally, media like photos and videos can also demonstrate regional exclusivity of the content produced for the business located in a specific location.

5. Obtain high-quality backlinks:

Backlinks, also known as “one-way links” are one of the easiest and direct ways to redirect a customer from search results to a local business’s website. These backlinks are scored with the criteria of votes. These votes, in turn, search engines like google to rank the search results and eventually rank a business in the google pack 3 results. Webpages that score high number of votes for their backlinks usually occupy top positions in organic search engine results. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors to rank on search engines. If you want more organic traffic to your website then you must need good quality backlinks. You need to check your competitors backlinks and approach sites for getting backlinks. Many online tools also generate automatic backlinks. Visit truely.com to check the best  backlink generator tools to improve your site SEO.

This is why it becomes important for local businesses to work with a local SEO company to build quality backlinks. Apart from building generic backlinks, local SEO service providers must also work on building region-specific links to boost web visibility. An original, quality content serves as the backbone for driving a massive audience to boost a business’s value. If the audience likes a certain content; they are likely to share the content among peers. Collaborating with fellow local businesses to build a host of local resources that comprises links to relevant pages. Additionally, practices like guest posting also help in building quality backlinks. Doing guest posts in form of blogs and articles with appropriate URLs to the client’s business website can help serve the cause. Optionally, one can also choose to get their websites registered in local directories in a specific domain while relying a focus on quality links.