How to Rank Your Local Business Using Google Drive

How to Rank Your Local Business Using Google Drive

Bing is no slouch.

Bing handles roughly 900 million searches each day and accounts for 
about 7.5% of search engine market share. 

Since there are over 6.5 billion searches worldwide on search engines each day, Bing is no slouch.

This article isn't about Bing. This article is about how to rank on the current king of search engines, Google. 

Google controls 10 times the search engine market share that Bing does with 77.5%. If you're doing the math, that's a staggering 4.5 billion of those 6.5 billion searches worldwide. Simply put, King Kong's got nothing on Google.

While it's important as a small business to be found by the major search engines, it's also important to get the biggest bang for your buck. Not only does this imply being seen all over Google search but, getting as much free organic traffic as you can. 


So, how can you do this?

You can do this by using Google's G Suite along with Google Drive. 

G Suite offers an amazing amount of capabilities for your business starting at $5 per user/month. Using G Suite for your business allows you to create and manage users on your account. This not only gives your team access to emails and calendars but, other Google apps too. 

G Suite also gives you the ability to manage your business mobile devices so you can keep your data secure, locate devices, require passwords, and erase data. All from within G Suite. 

Google Drive is Google's cloud storage option. They start you with a hefty 30 GB but, you can upgrade that to unlimited storage for just $10 a month with G Suite. Without G Suite, you'll pay $10 a month for 1 TB of storage.  

If you're not familiar with using G Suite for your business, you're going to want to check it out. Especially since I'll be talking about using Google Drive and G Suite to rank your local business. 

Google's the Fairest of Them All

Google suffers from what I call netpotism. They love themselves and their properties and apps and thereby, will select them over other results. It's no surprise that if your business uses video you put your videos on YouTube. If you have a brick and mortar business, you want to have a Google Map. YouTube and Google Maps are Google entities. 

It has been said that since Google loves everything Google, they may give an unfair advantage to people that take the time to use their properties and apps. 

Not to mention, Google was accused of giving their own products preference in search results which lead to an agreement with the FTC to change their business practices. 

Google vs. Bing: A Test

As I started thinking about this test, I wanted to see if Microsoft would do something similar with it's properties and apps. 

I'm going to use one of my test sites and begin by creating 3 separate posts. All posts will be created using Lorem Ipsum -the Latin style nonsense words that usually act as filler on websites and documents until you add your own text - for the title, content, anchor text and the files they open.

If you're looking for a great way to quickly create Lorem Ipsum for your own tests, I use SoyBomb for titles and this Lorem Ipsum generator. 

First, I begin by making three separate posts. Post #1 will have a title, 1300 words but will link out to a Word doc inside my One Drive account.

(fig. 1a) In the Lorem Ipsum generator I select 'Don't start with Lorem Ipsum' and create a 1300 word post with 5 paragraphs. I selected plain text but you can choose HTML if you want or need to.

After the Lorem Ispum generator creates my text I simply copy and paste into my site as a new post. Then I head over to SoyBomb to create my title. 

(fig. 1b)  I selected 'sparmythed' for my test. If you don't like your options in the first list, just keep generating a new list until you find the right nonsense word for you. It really doesn't matter but, I pick words that don't appear too close to actual words. 

Now that all the writing for the post is done, it's time to create a Word doc. I just copy and paste the 1300 words into a new Word doc. I add the word 'Sparmythed to the top of the Word doc and the rest of the doc is exactly the same as the post on the website sharing the same name. 

I save the Word doc to my hard drive and give it the same title as the article, 'Sparmythed'. 

(fig. 1c)  I upload the Word doc to my One Drive account and make sure it's ready for sharing. I create a link so I can add it to my article.

(fig. 1d)  Since the made up title of the post and Word doc wasn't present in the Lorem Ipsum content, I added it. I'm using 'Sparmythed' as the post title, the Word doc title, and the anchor text. I add the link I received from One Drive to 'Sparmythed'. The only optimization step I'm taking is to add 'Sparmythed' at the top of the page within the first 100 words.

I'm not going to add photos or tags because I'm trying to test 1 variable - if Google and Bing prefer their own properties and apps. Also, since the posts are made using Lorem Ipsum, we shouldn't run into competition trying to rank the same nonsense words.

At this point I can publish my post. This doesn't mean it will index. In fact, I'm certain it won't unless I tell Google and Bing. For this test, I'm going to wait until I've completed all three posts before I tell the search engines.

The next step is similar to the first. I'm going to create another post using Lorem Ipsum but, this time I'll be creating a Google doc for the link. Since I'm testing one variable, the link to Google or Bing, I want everything else to be the same.

As I did for the Word doc, I copy the  Lorem Ipsum from the first post to create a 5 paragraph, 1300 word post. Like the first post, the title is 'Sparmythed'.

(fig. 1e)  Since I want Google to easily find the Google Doc, I set the link sharing to ON-Public on the web

Grabbing the link for the Google Doc, I create the 'Sparmythed' anchor text link in my post of the same name. My second test post is done and since it shares the same title as the first post, WordPress has automatically added "-2" to the end of the url. 

Lastly, I'll create the control page. The control page will be set up exactly the same as before, however, this page will not have any outgoing links to a test document. 

With the test pages created and published on the test site, I need to index them with Google and Bing. To index my pages using Google I open Google Search Console. 

If you're not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console, you should take some time to get to know them. 

It's been my experience that anything Google related isn't very user friendly to learn, but there's plenty of help online to walk you through setting things up if you get stuck.

My site is already added to Search Console so I select my test site and go to the sidebar menu to the left and select Crawl.

(fig. 1f)  In the box after the url, I type the page I want Google to 'Fetch as Google'. I add all three test pages.

(fig. 1g)  Once all the pages have been "fetched" I can hit the Request Indexing button for each page. If the url isn't fetched the first time, make sure you typed the correct url into the box and try again. Google may need a couple of passes of your site to find it. If you're still having problems, check that your robots.txt file isn't blocking Googlebot.

It doesn't make any difference to Google but, since I'm testing, I try to submit each page for indexing fairly quickly. 

Now that my pages are on their way to indexing with Google, I need to make sure Bing knows they exist too.

I go to Bing's toolbox and their submit site url page. 

(fig. 1h)  I just enter the site url for the homepage (as requested), complete the captcha and hit the submit button. After submitting the site I get a 'your request was successfully submitted' message.

Now it's time to see if the hard work pays off. I'm going to take extra steps to ensure I'm not skewing my results. 

Since I want to know if Google and Bing give preference to their own properties and apps, I'm going to search for the test posts in Firefox. I'm also going to use a VPN (virtual private network) just in case my IP address factors into what the search engines want to show me. 

Next, I'll look for the pages using Google and Bing search, in and out of their respective web browsers Chrome and Edge.

The first request for indexing was for the initial post Sparmythed. Google indexed the page at 10:09am. Sparmythed-2 indexed at 10:10:32am and Sparmythed-3 indexed at 10:10:58am. 

(fig. 1i)  Even though the other pages were indexed first, the control page shows up first. Here I'm using Google Search within Firefox and I'm using a VPN. You can see that I'm not signed into Google.

(fig. 1j)  Not long after, the post with the Word doc arrives but it ranks below the control page.

(fig. 1k)  3 hours later and no results in Bing

After seeing no results in Bing for several hours I add each page to Bing and have Bingbot fetch them (sound familiar?). 

(fig. 1l)

Heading back over to Google...

(fig. 1m)  The control test page has now deindexed and only the page with the link to the Word doc survives. This isn't over yet!

I log into Chrome and use Google search.

(fig. 1n)  Within Chrome, Google search ranks the control page over the test page with the link for the Word doc. Where is the test page with the Google doc? Where are you Sparmythed-2?

As it turns out, after several days Bing still hasn't indexed the pages. A quick email to support cleared things up - sort of. This is what they were able to tell me:

(fig. 1o)  All they can tell me is they are going to submit the urls - which I already did - and that sites are ranked based on popularity!? I guess this means I shouldn't use Bing when searching for Existential Psychotherapy or Quantum Mechanics! 

The question is, did it move the needle? Or in this case, did it give me a needle to move?

(fig. 1p)  Bing results list the control page twice. Once for the page itself and once for the category it falls under on the site. Since this is a test site and a test, there is no category name so it falls under Uncategorized. 

While Bing's ranking methods skew toward CTR (click through rate), I'm not going to throw money at this test to get clicks and index the other pages. Going back to Google, I can see things are beginning to work.

(fig. 1q) What's interesting here is the article on Microsoft One Drive is ranking above the other pages. The #2 spot belongs to the page with the link to Microsoft One drive and the #3 spot belongs to the control page. Sparmythed-2, the Google Drive article never arrived. 

Results

I considered rewriting this article but, the fact is, a test that's true to the scientific method reports results even if they don't support the hypothesis.

Besides, this article is about ranking local business using Google Drive. Also, it is a good step-by-step beginner test for those interested in conducting their own SEO testing. 

Based on the hypothesis that Google and Bing would choose to 'promote' their own properties and apps by moving them to the top of the SERPs, this test didn't show me what I wanted to see. It did, however, create more questions for future testing like, do files in Microsoft One Drive get preference over other cloud storage accounts? 

What happened to the Google Doc? Neither Google or Bing picked it up which leads me to believe there's something in the structure of the test the search engines didn't like. I was a little surprised that Google didn't list a Google Doc. 

I even took an extra step and used the Google link shortener on the test page. 

While Bing customer support said results are based on popularity, I don't think the Saprmythed-2 article (Google Doc) required hiring a click farm to index it since the other pages indexed on their own.

This doesn't mean Google or Bing aren't promoting their own. It just means more testing is needed. 

One way you can see results of Google giving preference to Google properties and apps is by...


Using Google Drive to Rank Your Local Business

I know, I'm finally talking about the good stuff. 

So how can you use Google Drive to quickly rank your local business? You can do this by building something called Stacks. 

Since I build Google Drive stacks, I will just cover the basics. This is not going to be extensive or a take you by the hand step-by-step process. As they say, the devil is in the details. The rest is up to you to discover or, if you'd like a consultation, feel free to contact me at (815) 981- 8255. 



Three Steps to Get You Started

1. Know your Google properties and apps.  Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Drawings, App Scripts, Sites, Groups, Google+, Youtube, Maps, Google My Business, Photos, Hang Outs, Blogger, Feedburner and more.
2. Use your Google properties and apps.  One simple change can put your business on the track to better Google rankings. If you need to write a document - do it in Google Docs. Need a spreadsheet. Make one in Google Sheets. Creating a presentation? Create one in Google Slides. Questionnaire? Google Forms. Does your site have a blog? Use Blogger. Once you've created your item, set the sharing to Open and embed it on your site.
3. Stack your Google properties and apps. When a SEO or digital marketer talks about backlinks they're referring to a site that links to your site. The idea is to get a popular, relevant, and influential site to stick a link to your site on their website. This will create an increase in organic traffic and boost your site because the search engines already trust the site linking to you. The link on their site is essentially passing along 'juice' (read as value) to your site. Yummy yummy link juice (value). Much the same way Google is the trusted site passing along link juice to your site via the stack. 

Think of a stack like compound interest. A stack is simply adding the Google properties and apps together to increase their power. 

If you use your imagination you may begin thinking about how you could create a presentation using Google Slides and within the presentation include Google Forms, Google Docs, Sheets, Drawings, YouTube, and Maps. 

You may even consider creating a Google Site and adding all of those things as well. Here's the best part; as of now, you can be pretty generous with keywords. 

For example, I may name a site Muffler Repair Shop in Sycamore, IL (815) 895-1234 and then put the same thing in my header and in several other titles for the different apps. You should mix things up for the different keywords you want to rank for. Adding a Best Muffler Repair in Sycamore, IL or Sycamore Muffler and Body Repair Shop. Along the way you're sowing seeds in the form of your links. A link to your home page, a link to a page that needs more traffic. As long as you're linking the visitor to something that makes sense, freely toss your links around. 


Next Steps

Start by using each app to create a 'brochure' for your business. Fill a Doc with a lot of great info about your niche. Remember to include keywords, links, NAP info (name, address, phone) and a call to action. Add all of your directory and web 2.0 listings inside Sheets. Create a Google Drawing that's a call to action. Build out each thing separately until you have everything you need to put into a presentation and site. 

(fig. 1r)

Since you have your stack built and in a folder within Google Drive, (name the folder using keywords i.e., Muffler Repair Shop in Sycamore, IL (815) 895-1234) you'll want to share the link to the folder. 

There are many ways to use the Drive folder to point to your site and many ways to point to the Drive folder. 

In the simple examples above, there's a link placed on your Facebook Business Page or in the description of one of your YouTube videos that points to the Google Drive or one of the apps. This app already has your links all over it and points back to your site. 

What makes these Google Drive stacks work are, not only the power that Google has (4.5 bn searches daily) but, the follow attributes they possess. 

As you may or may not know, you want your links to have the rel="dofollow" coming from big sites. 

Keep in mind that there are a lot of Google apps to take advantage of and a few properties too. Building out a Drive stack takes time but, it's time well spent. Now that your stack is built, you want it to start driving traffic to your website. 

To speed this up, head over to IFTTT.  IFTTT stands for If This Then That and is where you can build 'applets' to automatically run some tasks for you. I have an applet set up to post to this Blogger account when I tweet a certain hashtag. Most people use the Twitter applet that automatically thanks people for following them. 

You can also build an applet that will let you know when the international space station is flying over your house. Why? Because you CAN!

The idea is to build up your social media and web 2.0 properties to gain more followers. Once you've reached a decent level, you can start sharing your links back to your Google Drive or the individual apps you want (see fig. 1q). 

Remember, this was a quick run through and was in no way meant to be a thorough training for building a Google Drive stack or syndication. If you're interested to see how a Google Drive stack and IFTTT syndication network can boost your site, let me know in the comments below or head over to my site. 

Hmmm...what if I created an RSS feed in Feedburner?.... 😉