Google Maps SEO in Newcastle, NSW

It is the work of ranking in the map rather than in the ordinary results. The map reads your Google listing, and it weighs how close your business is to whoever is searching.

Two things share a results page and they are ranked separately. The blue links are ranked on your website. The map is ranked on your Google listing, and on how far your address is from the person holding the phone.

That second factor is what makes the map feel unpredictable. A business can sit first for someone in Hamilton and be invisible for someone in Cardiff, on the same search, at the same minute.

What the map weighs

• Relevance. How well your categories, your service list and your website match the words somebody typed.
• Distance. From your address to the searcher, or to the suburb they named. The one factor you cannot change.
• Prominence. Reviews, mentions of you on other websites, and how your site performs in the ordinary results.

Google sets those three out itself in its guide to local ranking, and the order it puts them in has not changed in years.

Your position is calculated from where the searcher is. So there is no one number, there is a map of numbers, and the honest way to report it is suburb by suburb.

Owners ask where they rank and expect a number. There is not one. Stand in Merewether and you get one set of three businesses. Drive to Kotara and you get a different set, on the identical search.

This is also why a report that says you rank second is not telling you much. Second where, and for whom. A single number is usually the searcher standing roughly on top of the business, which is the flattering version.

The Hunter makes it starker than most places. Newcastle is a small centre with a long spread of suburbs around it, then Lake Macquarie, Maitland, Cessnock and Port Stephens. Each of those is effectively its own market.

A rank grid checks the same search from a spread of points across an area and shows your position at each one. It turns the map from a guess into a picture you can compare month to month.

The grid is the only honest way to answer the ranking question. It runs your search from a set of points laid over the area you care about and records the position at each one, so what comes back is a shape rather than a number.

What the shape tells you

• Where you already hold. Usually a tight patch around your address, and it will be greener than you expect.
• Where you fall off. The ring where you drop out of the three. This is the edge worth working on, because it is the closest thing to reachable.
• Where you are not competing at all. Suburbs where you never appear. Those need their own pages and real work in the area, not a longer list of suburbs on an existing page.

Run it before anything changes, then again on the same points later. Two grids months apart is the difference between a report and an opinion.

Some of the businesses above you are ranking on a listing that breaks Google's own rules: a fake address, keywords stuffed into the name, or a category they do not serve. Those can be reported, and reports do get actioned.

Look at the businesses above you in a search and a share of them will be breaking a rule you have been careful about. The most common ones are visible from the outside.

What is worth looking at

• Keywords in the business name. The name field is for the registered name. A name carrying the service and the suburb is against the guidelines and it is the easiest one to see.
• An address that is a mailbox or a house. Google's rules require a staffed location or a hidden address with a service area set instead.
• Multiple listings for one business. Several pins in different suburbs for a business with one location.

The route is Google's own business redressal process, which is where a listing that breaks the guidelines gets reported with evidence. It is slow, it is free, and it does move things.

The other half of that is keeping your own listing clean, which is why the name on ours always matches the paperwork even when a competitor's does not.

Run a grid first, fix the listing, get reviews arriving weekly, build a page for each service and each area you want, earn a few local mentions, then run the same grid again.

1. Measure before you touch anything

A grid over the area you want work from, on the searches you care about. Without it, every change afterwards is an opinion.

2. Fix the listing

Categories, the service list, real photographs, correct hours, and the service area set properly if you travel to customers.

3. Get reviews arriving every week

Sent automatically when a job finishes, and replied to. Recency counts, so a burst last year does less than a trickle this month.

4. Build the pages

One for each service, then one for each area you want to reach. An area page needs real detail about that area and jobs you have genuinely done there.

5. Earn a few local mentions

A club, an association, a local story, a supplier who lists their installers. Prominence is the slow factor and this is what feeds it.

6. Run the same grid again

Same points, same searches. The comparison is the report, and it is the only part of this a business owner should have to read.

Listing fixes can show on the grid quickly. Reviews and mentions are the slow half, and the ground you gain arrives suburb by suburb, closest to you first.

The order it happens in

• The baseline grid is run. Nothing has changed yet. This is the picture everything afterwards gets compared against.
• The listing is corrected. Categories and services first. This is where a position can move on its own.
• Reviews and pages build. The green patch widens outward from your address rather than appearing everywhere at once.

Expect the effect to be strongest close to your address and weakest furthest from it, permanently. That is distance working normally, and no amount of work removes it.

Ask for a grid before and after, ask which suburbs are being targeted, ask what happens to your listing in the first week, and ask who owns the account. A single ranking number instead of a grid is the answer worth noticing.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• Will you show me a grid, before and after? Ours run on the same points both times, which is what makes the second one mean anything.
• Which suburbs are we going after? A named list. Covering four areas is four times the work of covering one and it is worth deciding on purpose.
• What changes on my listing in the first week? Categories, services, photos and hours. And never the business name.
• Who owns the Google account? The business, with the owner as owner. Ours are set up that way before anything else happens.
• Am I locked in? Ours runs month to month and always has. Any arrangement you cannot leave at the end of a month is worth a second look.

The listing half of this is genuinely doable in house, and plenty of Newcastle businesses run it themselves. The measuring is the part that usually needs a tool.