Free links!

A while back I sent an email with some easy backlinks to help boost your SEO – click here for that email if you missed it.

In this email I’ll share another high power (free) backlink that we’ve been using to boost our local SEO customer sites.

For many of the customers we applied this technique to, they saw significant gains in Google Maps rankings but also decent boost in regular organic search too.

For a couple of years now Apple has been slowly building out its Apple Maps product and pages for businesses in Apple Maps are now indexable by Google and carry a lot of weight.

Here’s the Apple Maps page for WPSpeedFix, you might need to copy/paste this into your browser bar if you’re using an Apple device as it usually opens these links in the maps app directly:

https://maps.apple.com/place?q=WP%20Speed%20Fix&auid=4360911687806060067&address=Floor%202%20194%20Varsity%20Pde,%20Varsity%20Lakes%20QLD%204227,%20Australia&ll=-28.079251,153.410862

These pages typically don’t get indexed by default and need a bit of a push before Google will crawl them (and therefore count as backlinks).

Here’s the process we use to get these listings live and indexed:

Go and claim the listing on Apple Maps at https://businessconnect.apple.com/ and make sure the details are correct. It sounds obvious but it’s not very often that we see customers that have a clean Apple Maps setup.

Once the listing is live and verified, you should be able to generate a link to the listing by clicking the share button in the Apple Maps app.

That share link should show up in web browser the same as the WPSpeedFix maps listing above.

Link to the Apple Maps listing in the footer of your site. On our site you’ll see in our footer a “WPSpeedFix on Apple Maps” link.

Once the footer link is live, typically we see the Apple Maps page indexed in 3-6 weeks and shortly afterwards see the rank boost.

You can use this technique even if you’re not a physical or local business.

So long as you have a physical address you can setup maps listings on Google, Bing and Apple. Google has become more strict about this over the years but for most clients, so long as they can receive postal mail at the address on the listing then it can be verified.

Google, Apple and Bing Maps all carry a ton of weight in terms of backlinks for SEO so if you don’t have a set of maps listings for your business right now, it’s definitely worth spending the time getting them setup.

That’s it for this email. If you’re looking to do more with your SEO, our SEO Audit service might be worth a look. If you’re not sure whether it’s for you, click here to request a free site audit and we’ll review your site and tell you how we can help.