GMB Heatmaps!

Hello, my name is Jeff. Today I want to walk you through a Heat Map for the home remodeling niche and give you a sense of the challenges that home remodeling contractors are going to face when they’re trying to rank their GMB and some of the things that they can pay attention to, to crush the competition in their local area.

So for this particular walkthrough, I did a random search for home remodeling in Boise, Idaho. As you can see, Google gave me the ads at the top as they always do and then they give me this map pack in the middle, which is prime real estate. They say 60-70% of the phone calls come to these three competitors.

So, this is where you want to be in the top three. The three competitors here in this particular search, the first one has 30 reviews, the second 39 and the third one 15 respectively. So I went ahead and just chose Nielsen Renovation and I pulled their information and I went ahead and ran a map pack for them just to see, or ran a Heat Map for them rather, just to see exactly where they rank across the city.

So, as you can see any of these bubbles that have a number one, a number two, or a number three are indicating exactly where this particular home remodeler Nielsen in Boise, Idaho ranks in a specific geolocation where these bubbles are for this specific keyword. This is a highly competitive one, “remodeling contractor,” there are multiple other keywords that I could be searching, bathroom remodeling, kitchen remodeling, home remodeling, add contractor to any of those and I could, you know, the list of keywords runs really, really deep.

But if I dig in a little bit here, I can see that most of this area over here where they’re ranking second is not very populated it’s sort of outside of the city limits. So most of this green here is probably not doing them that much good because if you’re in a map pack in an area where hardly anyone is searching, or maybe there’s perhaps no homes then it’s not going to do you any good. So right here in the central area of Boise, if I can see here in central downtown, like right next to the pin, we say where the Google My Business listing is pinned to, or is located rather, they are ranking first right there.

And then it kind of expands like an antenna around that pin and they go into second, then quickly go into, especially in this, Eastern or Western part of the city, rather into the ninth, 10th, 8th, 6th position. So in these areas, you might as well be in 20th. If you’re going to be in six, you might as well be in 20th because no one is looking past this “map pack” right here in the center. If you went view all, then that’s where you would see these additional contractors later on down the list, but really no one’s doing that. So you really want to rank as highly as you can and all of this area where it’s populated. So this particular contractor has a lot of opportunity to expand their rankings and specifically this Heat Map review gives you a clear indication of who your competitors are.

If I click on any one of these dots right here, these geo locations, it’s going to tell me who those competitors are in that list, right? So there’s a Nielsen right there at 10th. So if I go back here, see, I clicked on the button or the, on the geo location that said 10, so that’s going to mean that Nielsen is 10 and here’s the other nine competitors. So what I would need to do is start looking at these competitors and see what are they doing that I’m not doing?

Do they have more reviews on their Google My Business listing?

Do they have more photos on their Google My Business listing?

What do they have that I don’t have?

So in this case, I’m going to let me search, Renaissance because see this one is ranking overall out of all of the averages across the city, Renaissance is ranking the best. It has an overall average of 4.39, Nielsen 5.62. So the fact that Nielsen’s is ranking that highly with most of its power coming from the east, remember where it’s not populated, then there is no clear winner here in this particular location.

So if I look at Renaissance remodeling, I can see they have 39 reviews. I would want to look and see how many photos they have. It looks like they have a pretty, pretty good amount. And if I go to Nielsen, again, they have 30 reviews. So a bit fewer and their photos let’s see, October, 2020 was the last one. It looks like they could use maybe some more, they have quite a few photos, but they haven’t updated them in quite a while. So they could go in and update the photos or not update them rather, but add to them. They could make posts on the, on the Google listing.

So nowadays Google is pretty hot on the posts. It doesn’t look like these guys, well here’s one from July, from the owner. It will show up right here when you make a post, so there’s one from February. So they’re doing them randomly. It looks like they kind of got into it a little bit and then they come back to it once in a while I did a few.

These are pretty good to help ping Google and tell them that you’re here, you’re relevant and you are offering your services. You can also do a little offer of a 10% off or something like that to get people interested. But that’s going to show up right here below the basic information for the listing.

So those are going to be ways that you can continue to improve your Google, My Business listing and then obviously when you go to the website, the website is also going to be a factor. Now, when you’re getting reviews, you want to have as much information in the review, as you can, as far as what the service was, the location that the remodel took place in, or that the service was offered, and so on. So this one looks like they got a couple months ago, a really detailed review here because Google is definitely crawling these reviews for different keywords and see, they have paint, indoors, outdoors, all of this stuff that they have. Then the response from the business owner as well can put in keywords and say, Hey, you know, we’re grateful to work with you on your, your bathroom remodel in Boise, and hope to work with you again, whatever. So the more of those that you can add these keywords here with quartz tile because when you search, you can see that they because when you search, you can see that. See, this is pulling in, you know, when I say home remodeling, it’s saying, oh, bathroom remodeling, residential home remodeling, but where are they pulling that from that they’re pulling that from the reviews and from the website. So that’s how they get a better idea of how relevant this particular services for my particular search, because Google’s job is to give me the most credible, relevant, proximate result for the search that I’m giving. So in other words, if I’m searching for home remodeling and Boise, I don’t want to get, um, you know, ice cream in Seattle or something like that. So that’s Google’s job and that’s what they’re gonna give you most of the time, they’re going to give you a pretty relevant result.

So anyway, that is how a home remodeler would look at the local competition through the Heat Map and determine what actions they could take to expand their rankings and start carving off part of the market share over here. This, when you look at the averages, it looks really good, but again, because this is located further east and east is less populated, they’re probably not getting much benefit out of any of these 2s and 3s over here on the East side of the map. So the idea would be to really dig in and figure out how to rank better in these other more populated areas. So that’s what I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, let me know.