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by Colan Nielsen
Last October, Joy covered 4 Google My Business Fileds That Impact Ranking on a Whiteboard Friday. The four fields Joy covered were:
- Business Name
- Categories
- Website
- Reviews
Up until recently, those were the only features inside the GMB dashboard that had a direct impact on ranking. As of this month, we discovered a fifth feature that has a direct impact on ranking in the 3-pack and Google Maps – Identity Attributes.
Key Takeaway: GMB Identity Attributes have a strong impact on ranking for keywords related to the attribute.
What are Identity Attributes?
If you log in to your GMB dashboard, navigate to the “Info” tab, and select the edit button beside “From the business”, you will see the available identity attributes. I refer to them as “Identity Attributes” because each attribute starts with “Identifies as”.
Once added, these attributes can appear on the business profile as well as in the 3-pack and on Google Maps and the local finder.
Do Identity Attributes Impact Ranking?
We love testing and figuring things out, so we performed a test to see what sort of impact adding one of the attributes has on ranking. What we discovered is by adding the identity attribute you would start to rank for searches related to the attribute.
What We Did
On March 10, 2021, I added the “Identifies as Women-led” attribute to a GMB profile that was doing virtually no other SEO. Their website doesn’t mention anything about Women-led, so there were no existing ranking signals. I added keywords to both Bright Local and Places Scout to track rankings.
On March 18, 2021, I confirmed that the attribute was live.
There was no immediate ranking impact as of March 18, but by March 29, we started to see this business ranking for the keyword “Women Paralegal”. And by April 21, rankings for that keyword started to explode – again with no other SEO work done on the website or profile. The green pins represent ranking in the 3-pack.
Here’s what the April 21 date looks like zoomed in.
Did Adding the Attribute Create a 3-Pack?
I made another interesting observation when I started looking through ranking screenshots of the March 18 date compared to the April 21 date. It appears that the keyword “Women Paralegal” didn’t even have a 3-pack, to begin with. It appears that adding this attribute contributed to triggering a 3-pack where there once was no 3-pack.
So What?
Knowing, and understanding which Google My Business features impact ranking is one of the most important factors for local search success. Google doesn’t comment directly on ranking factors. They do give some general ranking guidelines, but you need to be continually testing the GMB features to understand the value of each one.
Have you been utilizing the identity attributes for your clients or business? What impact has it had?
Let us know!
Colan is obsessed with everything related to Local Search and is active on many online communities including the Local Search Forum where he is an administrator.
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from
https://fatsfixedassettracking.com/do-google-my-business-identity-attributes-impact-ranking-sterlingsky-ca/2026/
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