Small Is Beautiful: Small Business Keywords On Google Maps

**Small Business Keywords On Google Maps**

**by Hanan Lifshitz**

In a previous column
<http://searchengineland.com/keyword-visibility-for-orlando-local-businesses-31491>
, we saw that about 20% of Orlando businesses show up on Google Maps'
first search engine results page (SERP) for at least one local
keyword, and that 61% showed up in one of the first 50 SERPs. These
figures surprised many, as they imply that one in five local
businesses is highly optimized for Google Maps, a fact that is not
consistent with the common perception of the online marketing skills
of SMBs.

The main criticism was that showing up for one keyword is far from
being enough. In most categories, the critics claimed, local
businesses have to rank high for multiple keywords in order to compete
effectively and to reach many prospective customers.

For example, if you are a small law firm in San Francisco, you may
want to rank high for: lawyer, attorney, advocate, legal adviser,
solicitor, law firm etc., as well as for sub-categories (e.g. divorce
lawyer, accident lawyer etc.), for popular modifiers (e.g. cheap
lawyer, best lawyer), and for geographic modifiers (e.g. lawyer in San
Francisco, Bay Area lawyer). Showing up on page one for "legal
advisor in SF" is nice but it is far from being a great success, as
you will still be missing out on many relevant searches.

To get a clearer picture, we analyzed those 79K Orlando businesses
that showed up on one of Google Maps' first 50 SERPs (according to
AmIVisible <http://www.amivisible.org/>
) to see how many got there with 1 keyword, 2 keywords, 3 keywords
etc. The results can be seen in the chart below.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/23148333@N06/4250493839/>

As you can see, of the businesses that managed to get into Google
Maps' top 50 SERPs, many businesses got there with more than one
keyword, and over a quarter (27.6%) managed to get there with more
than 10 keywords.

For a full analysis, we would have to look at the actual keywords for
each business and assess their relevance, search volume etc. But as a
whole, it looks like most SMBs can be found for multiple local
keywords.

It would be interesting to see how many of these business owners
actually spent time and money on SEO and whether the credit goes to
them or to Google (I suspect the latter…).

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.

Hanan Lifshitz <http://searchengineland.com/author/hanan-lifshitz/>
is CEO at Palore <http://www.palore.com/>
, a provider of local businesses' advertising data and information on
their online activity. He also blogs at The Palore Blog
<http://palore.wordpress.com/>
. This column is researched and written by the marketing department
at Palore, which is led by Hanan.

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