Local Ranking Case Study: We Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is
Almost every day, an agency that resells our white-label Google Business Profile optimization service tells us their client will not do the work to get reviews because "they don't care about reviews," "they're too shy to ask," or any other reason. It's always painful to hear since we are so positive that they are shooting themselves in the foot.
But are we right? Is getting a steady stream of Google reviews even that important to rank #1 on Google Maps?
Rather than just preaching our beliefs, we decided to conduct a little test, and the results are nothing short of... exactly what we expected, if not even more extreme.
You see, since we're more of a SaaS company than a local one, we've been building up our own reviews on Trustpilot for years, completely ignoring our own Google Business Profile. Ironic, yes, I know. But to test the importance of Google reviews in a situation we have complete control over, we had to start getting reviews on our own GBP.
In the past 30 days, we went from six to twenty-four 5-star reviews then compared our local rankings before and after style, which you can see below:
I'd like to repeat something very important: These are results after just 30 days!
Each number represents where our GBP ranks if someone was to search for that phrase on Google Search or Google Maps while standing there. Simply put, the greener the better.
These were just a few of the keywords we're tracking. Getting a steady stream of reviews (on top of all the other GBP optimization work we do on our own profile each month) made the difference between not showing up and being at the very top of the search results.
So, tell me... which option below do you prefer?
Option 1: The slight fleeting awkwardness of asking someone to leave you a review
Option 2: The extreme pain of not getting more customers in your business
Speaking of which, if you enjoy our newsletter, can you please take a second and leave us a review on Google or Trustpilot? They mean so much to us and encourage us to keep putting our heart into these updates each week & keep building free tools for you, including this one which will let you create your own heatmap ranking audit reports like the ones seen above.
ProfilePro tip of the week:
Get reviews!
News: we updated our AI image creation feature to be less cartoon-like. If you haven't tried this feature yet you really should. It's pretty cool!
Wondering how well your Google Business Profile ranks on Google Maps for different keywords? We built a free local ranking audit tool you can use to quickly find out!
Check out our guide on every possible ranking strategy for Google Business Profiles!
Google Updates You Should Know About
Google updates their algos regularly, and we check and then digest them for you. Here are the latest ones local marketers should know about:
You can find details on all algo updates here.