Phil

It’s tempting to tweak various settings on your Google Business Profile page, or to add “content” to it in any way you can, or to try out and maybe max out new features on it.  Your hope is that that will help your visibility in the Google Maps 3-pack, and a lot of local SEO advice seems to encourage it, so why not?

Lots of reasons not to.  My basic advice is simple: touch your GBP page as little as possible.  Sure, fill out your basic info, and fix glaring issues (or, better yet, avoid them).  But you probably don’t need to or should not “manage” it, or pay someone else to.  The busywork I’m referring to includes things like tweaking your categories repeatedly, changing your “service area,” publishing GBP “posts,” posting tons of photos, and responding to all or most reviews, and so on.  The cons of those sorts of activities outweigh the pros.  Here are the cons of GBP “management,” as it’s commonly understood:

1. Doesn’t help rankings, in my experience.  You need to have a Google Business Profile (at least for Maps visibility), you can’t set it up bass-ackwards, and you should probably log in every few months to make sure the basement hasn’t flooded.  But that’s about the size of it.  Fiddling with your GBP page and posting on it doesn’t add value to the customer and doesn’t distinguish your business.  Google looks at the bigger picture to determine which businesses should rank where and for what.

2. Most of the features are not very visible in the search results. “Posts” are way below the fold, most photos are several clicks away, videos are still buried, most of your review responses will be buried, and few people will know exactly what your service area is – to name a few points.  Google puts ADS front and center.  Not the non-essential GBP features.

3. Increased risk of suspensions – both hard and soft suspensions.  If you make too many edits in rapid succession, there’s a good chance you’ll be soft-suspended: you’ll be locked out of your GBP page and made to re-verify your ownership, likely by video.  In the meantime, your un-verified page will be more susceptible to competitors’ attempts to remove you from the map.  If you’re not careful in making weightier edits, particularly to your address, there’s a good chance Google will pull your page from Maps altogether, in a “hard” suspension.

If you need to make a big change, like to the address or name, at least update your website and some of your citations first, so it looks more deliberate to Google.  When in doubt, avoid making other changes to your page.  If you need to make them, at least spread out those changes over a few days or weeks.

4. Higher likelihood of accidents, especially if you’re using new GBP features that may still be buggy.  The more time you spend in GBP, tweaking this and posting that, the more likely it is that sooner or later you edit the wrong field, make serious typos, or are in the wrong place at the wrong time and learn of the latest GBP bug the hard way.

5. Missed-opportunity costs. It can take a lot of time to keep your GBP page tweaked to your liking and topped-off with whatever you feel compelled to post on it.  You may even feel you’re never “done.”  That’s time you can’t spend on other things – tasks that have clearer payoff and higher payoff.

6. Hard to scale, if you have many GBP pages. If you’ve got many locations, departments, or practitioners, keeping all of their GBP pages perfectly coiffed will take much longer.

7. Invites extra scrutiny if you need to contact GBP support.  Let’s say you had a hermit-crab GBP page that uses an old address.  Maybe technically you should have closed or merged that GBP page, but it’s ranked well for many years, and it hasn’t run into problems, so you kept it around because every little bit of visibility helps.  Then one day you made one too many tweaks to the page, triggering a suspension.  Now you need to re-verify the page, but the GBP support person says the page violates “guidelines.”  Now what?

8. The optics aren’t necessarily good.  If you’re constantly posting deals on your page, responding to every review, and filling the Q&A field with questions from fictitious customers, you may look like you have too much time on your hands.  Even if your marketing isn’t effortless, it should come across that way.

9. Features get killed off all the time. Remember Tags and Helpouts and Best-Ever badges and Google+?  Sink a little time into Google’s new features if the benefits are very clear to you.  Otherwise, invest that time elsewhere.

10. Lag time and variables. You’re unlikely to notice an effect even if there is one.  If you make a change and your rankings tank, you’ll reflexively tweak your GBP page again, or load it up with more content, or not touch it with a 10-foot pole.  On the other hand, if your visibility improves, you probably won’t know whether it was because of your last change, or the change 2 weeks ago, or something else altogether.  It’s a game of “Clue,” and you have no way to know whether your tweaks to your GBP page are Colonel Mustard or Professor Plum.  The keep-it-simple SOP alone justifies skipping the GBP doodling.

What do I recommend?

a. If you verified your GBP page years ago, and especially if it’s ranking OK, just leave it alone.  Assume that the change you want to make will trigger a suspension.  Is the change still worth it?  When in doubt, let the fur grow.

b. If you must make changes to your GBP page, at least spread them out over a few days or a few weeks.  Let’s say you want to update your description, categories, services, and service area.  Make one of those updates, let it sit for a few days, and then make another.

c. Update your site first.  Don’t make any changes to your GBP page that you haven’t already implemented on your website.  In particular, make sure the address and phone number on your site is up-to-date before you change either of those fields on your GBP page.

d. Try new GBP features and knickknacks if you’d like, but don’t put serious time into them, and don’t assume they’ll help your rankings.  Do assume Google will snarf them without warning.

What parts of your GBP page have you found to be big wastes of time, or risky business to deal with?  How hands-on or hands-off are you?  Leave a comment!

Most wounds are self-inflicted, at least in local SEO.  A weak site makes it much harder to get visible in the organic results and in the Google Maps results, and to stay there.  But you won’t grow the site to be big and strong if simple tasks are a PITA, or if you spend too much time and energy and money on features that stop working, or if your site gets hacked and you can’t get it out of sickbay fast.  Too many plugins, or the wrong plugins, can cause all of those problems and more.

My advice is simple: install as few plugins as possible.  If you pack too heavy, in general you will find it much harder to create and improve pages long-term, more plugins will conflict or stop working, and a vulnerable plugin will result in a hack sooner or later.  All of those things directly affect your ability to do local SEO that’s effective and yields more $$.

Of course, there are hundreds or thousands of excellent WordPress plugins out there.  You’ll probably need at least a few of them to keep your site standing, manageable, and presentable.  So I’m not knocking them at all.  If you’re going on a trip, half of your duffel bag is taken up by clothes, and those are non-negotiable.  So what you need to determine now is (1) what else you should bring and (2) how much extra room you should leave for easy rummaging and for souvenirs.

What plugins are the most useful to your local SEO?  Here is my shortest of short lists:

1. Yoast, or Rankmath, or All-in-One SEO.  Any of these is an extremely handy way to specify and customize a title tag on each page, and to create an XML sitemap. I don’t find the other features useful, but those two are plenty.  By the way, if you don’t use Yoast or a similar plugin, XML Sitemap Generator for Google is a simple and hassle-free standalone plugin that only takes care of your XML sitemap.

2. Max Mega Menu.  This is the best way to get all of the pages you care about – i.e. service pages and spin-off pages – onto the main menu.  That is important because the internal links to those pages are critical.

3. Redirection.  If you rename a URL, retire a page, or kill off or add a subdirectory, you need to be able to 301-redirect one page to another easily, quickly, and reliably, or else you’ll lose any backlinks, or an already-ranking page will drop out of the index, or both.  Other plugins can do redirects well, but this one is my favorite, because it’s simple and never seems to have problems.

4. Duplicate page.  Many of your pages will wind up similar to each other, in their layout if not also in their content.  If you need to spend time building every single page from scratch, you’re less likely to create new pages at all, or you’re less likely to spend your time on making them informative and well-optimized.  This plugin, or whatever duplication or cloning plugin you like, will allow you to create the page you want once and use that as the starting point for subsequent pages.

5. Link Whisper.  I’m constantly on your case about going heavy on the internal links, and part of that involves continually patrolling your pages (and photos) for places where you can add links to relevant other pages (or posts or videos).  The trouble is the sitemaps in our heads tend to be fuzzy.  It’s easy to forget that you’ve got a page on this topic, or a post on that topic, or exactly which one it was.  Link Whisper can suggest specific internal links for you to add.

Honorable mention goes to Site Kit, which often is the least-troublesome way to install Google Search Console.  And install it you must, so you can camp out in it and come to understand how your local SEO is really doing.

If a plugin is not on that super-short list, that’s because (a) it’s useful more broadly, (b) I don’t find it useful, or (c) I simply haven’t run across it yet.

What about plugins I do not recommend?  At the top of the list are caching plugins.  Also, I had a serious problem with MonsterInsights once, and will leave it at that for now.

Local SEO is a matter of doing basic things very well, over a long period.  Don’t let your choice of plugins complicate that.  Pack light, go far.

What plugins have helped your local SEO specifically (and not just your site upkeep)?  What plugins have taken a bite out of you?  Any good plugins I missed?  Any pro tips regarding any of the plugins on my list? Leave a comment!

An SEO can become your trusted consigliere, an all-star utility player, lowbrow ruffian fixer, or some combination of those and more, if only you know the range of tasks that he or she might be able to handle for you or help you with.  They may not be good at everything, and you may not need them for certain things, and that’s OK.  They might be able to save you some money or time or both, and they might have some aces up their sleeves – things you didn’t think they’d be good at.

My advice is simple: use your SEO person or people to the max.  Whether that means they take on additional responsibilities or they swap out some of the current tasks for different tasks, it won’t be hard to make them more useful than they are now.

What’s most useful varies from one business to another, and it changes for the same business over time.  The critical tasks in local SEO change between when you start it and when you’ve hammered it for 8 years.  (You wouldn’t believe the crazy range of things I’ve been asked to do, and typically end up doing.  I oblige whenever I can.)

As usual, the first step is to have a solid inventory of what your SEO(s) may be able to help on.  Only then can you determine what they will be able to help on.  Of course, they may have good reasons to focus on this rather than that, and an honest one will tell you when there’s someone better equipped or more cost-effective.  So first you discuss what’s possible, and then you discuss what’s best.  Some good stuff might have been hiding from you.

 

There are 30 bands hidden in this picture! We spotted one of our favourites!

If anyone knows the artist, pls let us know so we can credit ❤️ pic.twitter.com/lKGGBYeuQP

— Jack Bruce (@jackbrucemusic) November 26, 2020

Below are 50 ways your local SEO unit can pull the weight of its caboose:

(These are in no particular order, except that I’ll start with the few most-obvious points.  Also, contrary to my nature, I won’t explain each point to death.  Please leave a comment if I need to expand on anything.)

1. Troubleshooting.  Determining whatever has hit you in the side of the head, whether it’s a drop in rankings, impressions, traffic, leads, or $$.
2. Auditing.  I’m referring not only to initial sweeps of your site, citations, backlinks, and competitors’ Maps spam, but also to routine check-ups on those areas over the months and years.
3. Laboring.  Setting up GBP pages, filling out GBP pages, finding and landing link opportunities, building and fixing citations, uploading and optimizing photos, and so on.
4. Strategizing.  A good SEO can help you develop a strategy for getting reviews, getting links, “thickening” your visibility, adding a location, make use of old blog posts, and much more.
5. Writing.  I’m referring mainly to writing or expanding “service” pages, spin-off pages, and other high-priority pages, but writing also factors into any YouTube work you do, photo optimization, and other areas that tie into local SEO.  Arguably wordsmithing should be part of a SEO’s job description anyway, but isn’t always.  Worth discussing early and often.
6. Helping you redesign your site or migrate it to a new platform or host.
7. Helping you build an all-new site in an SEO-friendly manner.
8. Gathering competitive intel.
9. Helping you develop internal resources.
10. Helping you cull unnecessary tools and subscriptions you pay for.
11. Using their tools and subscriptions, or letting you use them.  The client and the SEO don’t both need to pay for Ahrefs
12. Making sure other marketing channels play nicely with your SEO.  Are those PPC landing pages indexed and causing problems?  Shouldn’t those TikTok videos also be on YouTube?  The vanity domain is fine, but should it really get all the backlinks?  You get the idea.
13. Sharing with you non-NDA-protected intel from any competitors the SEO might have worked with in the past. Not everything is a trade secret, protected by law, or protected by omerta.
14. Providing intel on what’s worked in other industries.  I can’t think of an effective SEO strategy or process that works in only one space and can’t be adapted to yours.
15. Sharing real-world examples – good or bad.  Sometimes you just want to see an instance of something in the wild before you commit to anything, whether it’s a link opportunity, an approach to asking for reviews, a new look for your main navigation, or whatever.
16. Reviewing proposals from other marketers (e.g. developers).  Get a second set of eyes to look for gotchas, glaring omissions, and confusing or vague language.
17. Interviewing, vetting, or referring to you providers of other services.
18. Providing a second opinion on software.  I’m thinking of ORM software, CallRail, Jobber, Lawmatics, or anything you hope will make your life easier.
19. Researching keywords / search terms continually.  It’s not a one-time deal.
20. Analyzing Google Search Console data and providing recommendations based on that data.
21. Serving as an expert witness, if you’re duking it out with an unsavory marketing company (current or former).
22. Reporting, whether through Google Analytics, Search Console, grid trackers, other tools, or some combination.
23. Helping you rebrand or relocate your business.
24. YouTube work: uploading, optimizing, and embedding videos.
25. Photo work: finding or creating, editing, uploading, and optimizing photos on your site.
26. Featuring your business on the SEO provider’s site, if they have a prominent site and a following (in which case it can be a nice little link).
27. Edit content.  Nominally this is for search-engine-friendliness, but ideally it also just makes for a better read.
28. Helping you curate reading on SEO.  If you’re into that sort of thing.  Often I send clients my blog posts (half the reason I write in the first place), but I’ll also point them toward others’ resources.
29. Teaching you or your people how to do SEO in-house.  Or at least how to do certain parts of it.
30. Mitigating Google Maps spam.
31. Conducting due diligence on business sales, mergers, or acquisitions.  If you’re trading horses in any way, some “Who gets what?” and “What’s it worth?” questions will pop up.  Your SEO person may be able to help.
32. Evaluating the pros and cons of website domains that you might buy or move your site to.  Picking the wrong domain can be a missed opportunity, cost you good backlinks, earn you bad backlinks, confuse customers, or get you in legal trouble.
33. Helping you sell or prune parked domains.  You may want to know which domains might have some SEO value, at least according to your SEO person.
34. Researching the pros and cons of a new address.
35. Smoothing out or establishing relevant other systems and processes: asking for reviews, techs in the field taking and sharing photos, tracking leads, etc.
36. Helping on a related venture, an unrelated venture, or a relative’s business.
37. Helping to get your successor established.  You may want or need to help the next generation get the same results you did from SEO work, and maybe even better.  At first, that will probably involve some consulting, some sharing of internal resources, and some coaching-up.  Later, you’ll need to update the site and maybe other assets.
38. Providing intel on your competitors’ SEO companies or other contractors.  Many of us know each other and have an observation or two.
39. Becoming a customer of yours, and maybe a reviewer.
40. Helping you develop SEO as your side hustle, coaching business, etc.  Here’s an excellent example.
41. Asking customers for reviews personally.  If you haven’t been able to crack the code and get customers / clients / patients to write reviews, even though you’ve basically followed the advice of your SEO person, it may be time for him or her to prove personally that it CAN be done in your situation.  It’s a temporary arrangement, one you might keep in place until you’ve both seen what works.
42. Setting up tools (e.g. plugins, rank-trackers, ORM software, etc.).
43. Contacting GBP support on your behalf, like to lift a suspension.
44. Avoiding GBP suspensions and other penalties by identifying loopholes or gray areas.  You should at least know the slippery route, whether or not you choose to take it.
45. Offering pro bono work to you in exchange for a success story, a case study, a testimonial, a referral, etc.
46. Running tests or experiments on an unrelated or “sandbox” business.
47. Trying out new or invitation-only Google products or GBP features on your behalf, or with an eye toward how they’d serve your business.
48. Identifying prime potential Yelp reviewers.
49. Helping you figure out or establish your niche.  Local SEO tends to be way easier, faster, and more fruitful for relative specialists than for generalists.  A good local SEO can help you maintain some visibility in and income from the services or products you’re trying to move away from, while helping you get more action of the kind you want.
50. Reducing dependence on SEO.  Over time you may notice more word-of-mouth referrals, or have an easier time of getting other marketing channels to work.  That’s most likely to happen if you get your SEO person to help in a lot of loosely related areas, and if he or she has the motivation and resourcefulness to do so.  For both of you, it just takes a little 3D thinking.

What else can you wring out of your SEO person or crew?  What definitely should or definitely should not be in one’s purview (in your opinion)?  Did I miss anything?  Leave a comment!

When you’re trying to clean up a competitor’s dirty Google Business Profile page, it’s not enough just to be right: You also need to make your move at the right time.

When’s the right time to send in a “suggest an edit”?  It’s (1) as soon as you notice a problem, (2) as soon as you know specifically what change(s) you’ll suggest to Google, and (3) after you’ve had a long pause from reporting other Google Maps spam.

The first point is intuitive enough.  Don’t wait until a competitor is outranking you to send in your edit.  Report Google Maps spam that you outrank by a country mile.  Today it ranks #14 in the 3-pack, but tomorrow you may be stuck under its kilt, with nowhere to look but up.

The second point might also be intuitive.  If you can tell Google exactly what’s wrong, and especially if you can point out multiple problems Google should fix, Google’s more likely to take action and you’re less likely to waste your time and street cred.

The third point may be a forehead-slapper (or at least it was to me): It seems that Google is more likely to approve edits that you didn’t submit after a lot of other edits you submitted.  These first-order-of-business complaints are what I call fresh edits.

Let’s say you don’t report GBP spam every day, but rather try to clean it up in batches every few weeks or months.  Let’s also assume you’ve rounded up 10 different Google Business Profile violations on 10 competitors’ GBP pages.  The “fresh” edits generally are the first 2-3 problems you report, and the “stale” edits are the 7-8 problems you report last.  Any of the fresh edits is somewhat more likely to be approved than any stale edit (or tired edit, or crusty edit, or whatever antonym you like).

My theory is that Google sees a “fresh” edit as more likely to come from an objective but concerned third party, rather than from someone with a competitive interest, an agenda, or a beef.  It’s like calling the cops.  They’re more likely to take your gripe – or serious emergency – seriously if you haven’t reported other problems in recent memory.  They’re less likely to take you seriously if you’re the person who calls every time a neighbor’s dog decorates your lawn.

Maybe it shouldn’t be that way.  All 10 (or 22 or 103) of your complaints may be justified.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s theoretically possible that Google takes action on every single problem, and it’s very likely that Google ignores them all.  We’re talking about probabilities here.  How you maximize your chances may determine whether you succeed in thinning the herd of spammers over time or their numbers keep growing and they trample you into the mud.  In turn, that can determine how much of your hard work produces Google Maps visibility and new customers.

How should all of that influence your spam-blasting regimen?  Simple:

1. Spread out your “suggest an edit” reports to Google.  Don’t send in edits every day, but don’t try to get through your entire list in one day and let it languish for the rest of the year.  Ring the bell a few times every couple of weeks or every month or so.  In the meantime, kill a few minutes.

2. Prioritize within your list.  If you’re about to report 8 different competitors, start with the 2-3 who have put the most gum in your hair.

3. Be organized.  At the very least, use a spreadsheet to keep track of the specific businesses (and possibly locations) you’ve reported, when, why, and the status of each.  If possible, enlist a few Robins to your Batman.  More in this post.

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What have you noticed in the timing of your “suggest an edits” reports on spammy Google Maps competitors?  Any patterns as to what works, or doesn’t work?  Leave a comment!

P.S. If you’ve seen this approach suggested anywhere else, please let me know, so I can give that person due credit.

If you break a leg, how long will you need to be in crutches, and how long before you can run?  If you smash your pinky finger, when can you play Chopin again?  If you throw out your back, how long until you can attempt a new personal record in the caber toss?

The answer, of course, is that it depends on what happened and on what you do about it.  That’s also true in local SEO, both in the Google Maps results and in the organic results.  What begins as a minor problem can fester, drag on forever, or become a fustercluck.  What seems like a death knell may be just a wake-up call.  If a specific problem is what’s holding you back and you fix it, sometimes you can start or resume ranking right away.  If it’s a problem that takes you a long time to remedy, or even to discover, you’ll be in the paper gown for a while.  If there’s no discernable problem, in which case you probably just haven’t put in enough work, your visibility may return very quickly or very slowly.

How do you determine that you have a problem, or exactly what the problem is, or when you’ve “recovered”?  I’ve covered those questions (at least partially) in other posts, and will only dip a toe in the waters here.  It’s easy to get carried away and make this post a Tolstoy novel.

What’s important is you know generallywhat you’re in for, in this or that situation.  Otherwise, you’ll have even less of a sense of when your recovery is going fine or when it’s not, in which case you’re more likely to bungle the recovery or create new problems.

Here’s a rundown of some common (and less-common) mishaps that can hurt your local rankings, and roughly how long it will be before you’re back in the pink of health.

1. Google Business Profile hard-suspended (removed from Map): a few days to recover, once you’ve got your page reinstated.  To do that, you’ll probably need to re-verify by video.  After that, your Google Maps / 3-pack rankings likely will bounce right back to where they were.

What if your GBP page is soft-suspended (still showing on the map, but no longer in your control)?  Your rankings won’t be affected, though your page is more likely to be removed if a competitor lobs a “suggest an edit” at you before you’ve re-verified your page.

2. Starting over with a new Google Business Profile page: variable recovery time, but likely to be at least a couple of weeks.  When a GBP page is suspended or seemingly FUBAR, many business owners panic just create a new one, often out of panic.  Occasionally that’s the right move, but usually it just complicates the situation.  In any case, the new page tends not to rank for much for some time, unless maybe you’re in a very low-competition market or have an unusually powerful domain.  Getting Google to transfer any reviews from the old page to the new page may expedite your return, though.

3. Filtered by a competitor who shares your address: instant recovery if you can get that competitor removed from Maps, or weeks or months to recover if you can’t.  The latter situation is trickier, because in that case Google simply has deemed the competitor a better search result, for whatever reason(s).  In that case, you may need to work on everything a little.  The good news is that a super-close-by competitor won’t affect your organic rankings in the meantime.

4. Outranked by a competitor with a fake or keyword-stuffed Google Business Profile name: weeks-long recovery time, typically.  Even if you get the name fixed or extraneous keywords removed, the competitor’s ill-gotten rankings will stick for a while before eventually petering out.

Of course, if it turns out that the address is also shady, you can send in a “suggest an edit” on the address at the same time you report the name, and Google may pull the page altogether.  Murk your competitor like that and you’ll take care of two problems.

5. Rankings cratered after you moved your Google Business Profile to a new address: variable recovery time.  If the move was extremely short (e.g. within a mile), you probably just need to update the address on your site and on your basic citation sources, and let it sit for a few weeks.  If the move was farther AND you’re in a saturated market, there’s no telling how long your recovery will take, although it’s possible that you just stopped ranking in one place and started ranking in another place.  If the move was farther and you’re in a rural or less-crowded market, recovery will probably take just a few days or maybe a couple of weeks, if you lost any Google Maps visibility at all.

6. Lost all or most Google reviews: weeks or months to recover, generally.  This is a tough one, because Google reviews by themselves aren’t a huge driver of rankings, and there’s no telling exactly how much yours helped you or how helpful future reviews will be.  (Reviews are critical for non-SEO reasons, of course.)  But if you realize that even most removed Google reviews aren’t truly gone, you’ll try to get them back.  If you can claw them back, your stay in the doghouse may be shorter.  If you can’t and you need to get all-new Google reviews, assume that that process and your recovery will take many months.

7. Pelted with negative Google reviews: variable recovery time, though usually in the days-to-weeks range.  In my experience, getting blasted with 1-star reviews (legit or bogus) tends not to affect Google Maps rankings, except in some extreme cases.  You’re unlikely to see a drop right away, though.  A barrage of 1-star and 2-star reviews is more likely to hurt your rankings if you have a long history of getting rough reviews.

If you can get a few of the bad reviews removed and rustle up a few good reviews from customers, you’re likely to shorten the recovery time or make it a non-issue.  Your organic rankings won’t be affected at all by any of this, of course.

8. Site hacked, injected with malware, and filled with spammy pages: no downtime if you discover and clean up the malware immediately, or a months-long recovery if you don’t.  If your site is down for more than a couple of days, and especially if thousands or millions of pages get indexed and sit around in Google’s index for more than a few days, it’ll probably take you months to get out of sickbay.  A hack hobbles your organic visibility more than your Maps visibility.  Both will be affected, but your Maps visibility will probably bounce back more quickly after a hack than your organic rankings will.

9. Pages de-indexed after a server error or registrar problem: a few days to recover if you fix the issue right away, or weeks or months if you don’t.  The shorter the downtime, the shorter the recovery.  The issue could be a crappy host, a rubber check for your hosting bill or domain renewal, a bad plugin (like a caching plugin), or a WordPress database-connection error.  If you’re not sure what to do, at least camp out in Google Search Console and take in the data.  I’ve found that Google is surprisingly forgiving of issues like those, presumably because just about everyone runs into one sooner or later.  Some damage is inevitable.

10. Botched website redesign or migration, with URLs changed unnecessarily, 301-redirects mishandled, or internal links lost: weeks or months to recover. This is a rankings killer, especially in the organic results. How bad it will get depends on a lot of particulars. My general advice is: change your URLs as little as possible, and if you do change them, at least be bloody sure you 301-redirect the old URLs to their new homes. But even if you do that, you also need to make sure your developer keeps your internal links the same. Not only do you need to sniff out and fix any broken internal links, but you also need to make sure all menu, footer, and in-line links point to the same pages they used to point to. Keep your eyes peeled.

11. Wiped or radically different title tags: variable recovery time, but probably weeks. If you can flip your title tags back to what they were before Google re-indexes your pages, you probably won’t take a hit. Otherwise, assume it will be at least a few weeks before you can put away the crutches.

12. Page content removed or chopped dramatically: probably months to recover, at least if you’re in a competitive market. By removing a major reason your page ranked well, that whiz-kid developer just made your page or site into a eunuch. Bring back all of the removed content, blast it with internal links, get a few good backlinks you didn’t have before, and you might heal in good time.

13. Lost backlinks: months to recover. This is more of an issue for organic rankings than for the Google Maps 3-pack, but it affects both. Let’s say that through various efforts and the occasional stroke of luck you get lots of good links, from other sites to your site. Slowly but surely it helps your rankings, and you get busier, and you figure you’re done with that part of SEO, so you take your foot off the gas. You’ll be fine for a while – months or maybe years – but if you lose too many good links, your rankings will sputter. If you get those links back right away you’ll probably start heading in the right direction again. But it’ll probably take you months more of work on links and maybe on your on-page optimization to get back to where you were. The good news is that as you start to rebuild your links profile, some of your rankings will come back, and you may even get some visibility you didn’t have before. So you’ll benefit from a partial recovery before you see a fuller one.

14. Google Maps-specific algorithm update: days, weeks, or months. Exceedingly variable. Most of the time, Google makes proximity (i.e. the importance of your location) way less or way more important. In that case, your visibility may dry up indefinitely in one place and increase in another within days, but then it may take you months of work to get visible in both places (if that’s even possible). On the other hand, sometimes Google will botch an update, snuff out your rankings in the process, and days later tweak the update, causing your rankings to return. The best things you can do are to study Search Console, avoid making dramatic changes for a couple of weeks, and not fixate on the map at the expense of your overall visibility.

15. Algorithmic update that hit your organic rankings: months to recover. I’m referring to Google’s seemingly constant core updates and to the smaller updates with the crazy names. In my experience, these can mess up your organic visibility, but not your Google Maps visibility. Same with manual penalties, by the way.

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The best recovery is the one you don’t have to make. A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood. Focus on thick rankings and not just high rankings, study Search Console data before all other intel streams, work on your SEO long-term rather than in furious blasts, spend as much time on trying to convert local searchers as you do on trying to flash before their screens. If you do those things, you’ll head off most or all disasters at the pass and you won’t care much about recovery times anymore. Rather than limping around, you can finally get some air.

What’s a problem you ran into, and how long did it take you to get out of it? Any surprises? Bits of advice? Leave a comment!