When it comes to local SEO, it’s all about precision. How do you get your business to appear in search results when users search for services near them? This question, increasingly crucial for local businesses, becomes even more complex when it comes to elements like Google Maps embedded on your location pages.
The study conducted by SearchPilot reveals an interesting experiment: what happens when you remove a Google Maps component from a location page?
What you need to remember:
- Embedded Google Maps on location pages can boost the local relevance of your pages in Google’s eyes.
- Removing a map, even if it seems logical to avoid confusion with a directory, can harm your local SEO by reducing the visibility of your pages.
- It is essential to test any change before implementing it on a large scale, as the results can be counterintuitive.
Study background: A Google Maps dilemma
One of their clients had pages dedicated to their physical locations, each with a Google Maps component. These maps included not only the address of the location, but also those of other nearby locations. This setup caused a small concern: the company was worried that Google would interpret these pages as business directories, rather than pages specific to a single location. This kind of interpretation could, in theory, affect their ranking in local search results, making each location less visible.
Hypothesis: What if the map harms your positioning?
The hypothesis was simple: removing the map would make the pages clearer to Google, emphasizing that they weren’t a directory, but a page dedicated to a single business. The idea was that this would improve Google’s understanding of the site and, in turn, its local ranking.
To test this hypothesis, the map component was therefore removed from the location pages.
The results: a counterintuitive effect
Removing the map had an unexpected negative effect: instead of seeing a gain in traffic, the page saw a 7% drop in sessions. A notable drop, especially when you’d expect the opposite. Why? Well, the Google map, far from confusing the issue, actually seemed to play a key role in their local SEO.
Why did the map have an impact?
The analysis suggests that the map, far from being a negative factor, actually provided a local relevance signal to Google. By showing multiple nearby businesses, the map reinforced the idea that the page was relevant to local queries, beyond the specific business address. This allowed Google to better understand the geographic context of the page, connecting it to a broader area. In other words, the map served as a positive signal for local SEO, allowing the page to rank better for a wider range of location-based queries.
Lessons learned: Test before making changes
This test highlights a fundamental truth in SEO: even changes that seem intuitively beneficial can have unexpected effects. Removing a visual component, such as a map, in the hope of improving Google’s clarity can actually hurt the site’s performance. This finding underscores the importance of always testing changes before implementing them widely.
A message for local sites
The main implication of this study for local sites is this: it can be beneficial to maintain maps that display multiple nearby businesses, as they can increase local relevance in Google’s eyes. And if you were to ask me for my personal opinion on the matter, I would answer more decisively by saying that YES, without a doubt, integrating a Google Maps insert on your local page is beneficial.
However, as each site is unique, it is crucial to test the impact of these elements before making a final decision.
