There is much talk in the SEO community about an embedded Google map helping with local GMB SEO. Previous SIA tests have proved that links from Google’s own properties helped rank. James checks if simply having an embedded Google map on a page would help in boosting rank.
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Test 390: Does having an embedded Google map on a page help? A lot of talk I think of Maps Liftoff by Brian Willie, Jordan Pierce's map course and a bunch of other ones that they recommend or they don't recommend the embedding of a Google map, and particularly Google my business map, on your web page in order to rank.
Not only does it help increase relevance in a real-world environment to that location but in theory is that it also ties your GMB to help increase your ranking of your map. I don't disagree with that. I actually use that model quite a bit and it does help but we wanted to confirm it.
So James ran this test where he put a GMB map onto a page and said just having it there does that help? Does that help increase rankings? I think the set up is pretty much the same you just put the map down there. He threw it on there and then it popped in the number one, went back down and kind of stayed there and then jump right back up again. So it bounced around.
Now I guess the argument could be made is you messed with the relevancy and that's why you're increasing it up? Because you can play with that iframe code and actually do some stuff to it to increase relevancy and hide some stuff in there.
Keywords, for example, or you put schema inside the iframe. In this case, because it's a single variable and he used a fake keyword, it took a little bit longer and that's why I think that bounce came in. So the act of putting that map on there in and of itself actually did improve the ranking of that page. You can't claim it's keyword density.
I guess you could because you added a little bit of extra code but really at the end of the day, I think it's safe to say that the keyword density is ruled out unless the fake keyword was inside of there. I don't see why he would add the fake keyword into the iframe code so I'm gonna go with it's a good idea to do the map.
Caveat is, if you're a page speed nut like I am, then be careful with the amount of maps you're putting on your pages location page. It's fine, just don't put it in the footer site wide because Google loads for that one map to load in an iframe you're looking at 15-20 different scripts that are added to the load of your page coming from Google.
It’s very inefficient really, but if Google wants you to embrace this system but they don't make it nice so it loads faster but then they cry at you that your page is loading slow. It seems kind of counterintuitive to me but whatever.
If you're gonna use this map, just make sure that you're using it smartly and you put it on your supporting pages where you don't expect a lot of traffic. Put it on your location pages where you expect traffic but you're gonna get relevancy and you're getting relevancy from that map and there's a user perspective there too. But don’t make it like you see a lot these days in the site wide footer map. Don't do that.