Matt Versteeg

With experience in growing his own business online, Matt shares his favorite magic tricks for local SEO. 

Google Business Profiles

We will focus on Google Business profiles as they drive a lot of traffic. I’m not as familiar with Google Business profiles in Ukraine as I work in the US, but I do know that when you search locally, Google Business profiles, that map pack, shows up, and it drives a lot of business. Thus, we’re able to get a lot of phone calls to the brands that we own.

Reinstatements Are the New Verification 

When your listing is suspended, and every Google listing at some point can go through a suspension, due to the way Google filters and algorithms work, your client starts losing the phone calls and other leads they used to get from the listing. So, understanding how to navigate a suspension and being able to reinstate your listing is a valuable skill, and that’s why I’m saying it’s the new verification. 

It’s actually more important than just being able to verify your business because if you verify your business and Google decides to suspend it for some reason, you’re in a tough spot or your client’s in a very tough spot. So, here are some reinstatement tricks.

Google wants to see proof that your business is real. But the time to gather this proof is not when the listing is suspended. What most people do, is they just put their listing up thinking that everything’s good and then Google suspends their listing, and then they go: Oh, shoot! 

I suggest that the time to gather the proof is immediately when you’re making the listing or when you’re helping the client to set that listing up. I recommend gathering these items right away.

So the first would be any sort of business registration documents: registration documents, LLC, Corporation docs, DBA licenses, Insurance Signage, whatever it is equivalent to in your country. Get those government documents that show you have a real business. Photos and other evidence is also useful, but not as authoritative as official documents.

How to Expedite Your Reinstatement via GBP Chat

If you have a Google Workspace account, meaning a paid Google account, and you go to Google Business Profile support, you will have several contact options available to you. The chat option and the phone option are very helpful if you are trying to navigate a suspension. They can be used for things other than suspension, too. The chat or phone call can get this department to escalate your appeal or transfer you to another department email. 

If you ever need to contact Google for anything related to your profile with a Workspace account, go to support, click “get support”, “enable chat”, and then “next.” You’ll get a chat option, a phone call option, and an email option. 

Reviews for Faster Rankings

About a year ago, I started to see some businesses that were very quickly rising up the ranks of map results of these local business results. It was puzzling to me because some of these listings didn’t have big established brands. Some of them didn’t even have websites. How could they be beating businesses that are very established, that have been in that map pack for a while?

They were rising their ranks very quickly and in some cases, they didn’t have that many reviews. It didn’t look like they really had much going on. What I discovered in analyzing a number of listings is what I call the recency and velocity of reviews.

We probably would all agree that reviews would make sense to be part of the algorithm. If a business had reviews, you would think that would contribute to a better ranking in comparison with those that didn’t. But there’s something in the algorithm that is very tied to the recency and the velocity of reviews, and this is how some businesses are coming out of basically nowhere and ranking.

Here are some of the ways that reviews can affect a business’s ranking in Google Maps:

• Number of reviews: The number of reviews that a business has is one of the most important factors in its ranking.
• Rating: The rating that a business has is also a factor in its tanking. Businesses with higher ratings tend to rank higher than businesses with lower ratings.
• The recency of reviews: The recency is also significant in a business’s ranking. Businesses with more recent reviews tend to rank higher.
• Location: Businesses that are closer to the user tend to rank higher than those that are further away.

How to Find Your Competitor’s Review Freshness and Velocity

What you can do is go to any of your competitors’ Google Business profiles, go to any of their listings, you can go to their reviews, and just sort them from newest to oldest. Thus, you can get a sense of how quickly they are getting reviews.

For you to quickly pass them up in the rankings, the surefire approach is to beat their review freshness and their velocity. If they’re getting about one review every seven or eight days, you need to do better than that. Aim to get your customers to leave you more than that many reviews, get a couple of reviews every single week. And what you’re going to find, is even if there are more established brands, you’ll start to pass them up.