Giving Google What They Want!

We keep being told to provide “Helpful Content” and “Unique Content”. And although we all thought that AI was going to be our saviour to do this, we’ve found out that it’s only a good starting point and that we need to make changes to AI output in order to make it helpful and unique.

Using accurate custom maps provides this opportunity by providing content that your audience will want to use and explore. This is accomplished by embedding the maps on a page of your website allowing you to attract your audience with keywords you most likely aren’t currently targeting.

This is a long term strategy that will benefit any website, when used correctly, and not cause ranking issues in the future.

For example, you own a pet store. You create custom maps for your area for veterinarians, dog training, pet grooming, dog friendly parks, dog friendly accomodation, etc. These maps are very useful for the people you market to. And since most sites do not target these keywords, they can give you exposure to your audience in a way that is not being used currently making this unique content in your market. This strategy when done properly can help to create additional traffic and expanded exposure to your market.

This strategy is great for businesses to use as it’s simple to create these maps to get the benefits discussed above. Many businesses struggle to find great topics to post on their social media accounts. Providing these maps allows them to make continual posts about the different maps especially for seasonal topics. Going back to our dog store example, posting several times through the good weather season about local dog friendly spots to take your dog or even creating separate posts highlighting the individual locations. And providing links back to your maps on your site to help drive traffic.

This is also a great strategy for people providing marketing services to businesses. They will be able to create the maps and embed them on optimized pages to help their clients generate more traffic and exposure. They will also be able to provide ongoing services of maintaining the maps over time making this a recurring service which is what most marketers are looking for today.

Affiliate marketers could also use this strategy for promoting their products regionally and also building a list. If they were promoting an online course for dog training, they could create maps for all things related to dogs and offer the use of the maps to businesses in specific areas. This would allow the businesses to embed them for free and not have to deal with the maintenance of the maps. The affiliate marketer can use the map description to show that the map was provided by them and then to promote their product including a link back to that products page. They would also need to have an optin on that page to also help build their list.

Technical Aspects of this strategy

A great source of unique and helpful content for both websites and to include in social media posts.

Because of the opportunity to discuss our maps on social media with a link back to that map or the page it is embedded on, it provides the site owner with additional sources of traffic. So important now as organic search is providing less and less clicks.

Since we are embedding a Google product on our website, it has the opportunity to provide a ranking boost to that page and overall reputation score for the site.

Since the maps have the opportunity to rank in search, this provides an additional source of organic clicks for searches not currently being considered. For the pet store, their map could be easily opimized to generate traffic from people looking for the services they have maps for. So when someone is looking up a dog groomer, the map for dog groomers could be listed attracting clicks to the dog store webpage with the embedded map. This provides exposure for the store, an opportunity to promote on that page and the very helpful content for the visitor.

When using the MyMaps service in a proper manner, this is a long term strategy that can only help a website rather than short term hacks that will help in the short term but can cause serious repercutions in the future.

Ultimately, although Custom Maps are not new, the strategy to use them for marketing your business most definitely is. And with both businesses and marketing agencies/freelancers looking for more ways to find their audiences and provide content for many uses, this is a great opportunity for them.