by Dr. William Sen | Founder of blue media

Google Maps SEO: Can You Rank Higher Using Google Maps?

Google's Standpoint on Google Maps API 2024

_{by Dr. William Sen}

In one of my previous articles, I delved into the subject of GEO Location SEO and explained the many ways you can utilize location-based SEO. This brings us to an important question about the effect of Google Maps for SEO purposes.

Using Google Maps on your landing pages affects the page’s rank both positively and negatively. However, this is highly dependent on the context of use.

It will affect your website’s SEO if you include it on your “contact” or “about us” page or pages with similar content.

Google maps will have no effect or even negative effect, if the website has landing pages with Google Maps embedded on too many pages.

Let us backtrack a bit. Because, this was not the case previously with Google Maps.

Use of Google Maps for SEO

Before 2024, having a landing page that focused on a certain location, boosted the page’s SEO results when Google Maps was embedded. Google will in fact, create a match between the location described on your GEO Landing Page and the embedded Google Map location. With time, SEOs abused this feature and Google has indicated their discontinuance of the feature, thereby bringing a halt to it in June 2018.

Let me explain what happened in detail:

Several SEO centered websites were building numerous GEO Landing Pages on websites using the Google Maps API. Let’s have a look at this example: “Over the Top SEO” is an SEO agency that creates Landing Pages for almost each city in the U.S., and thus they made it seem like the company has an office in every city. A search for “Over the Top SEO New York”, “Over the Top SEO Los Angeles”, or any other location at all on Google, returned results with a GEO Landing Page placed at the very top of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The SEO agency did not stop there. This company further built landing pages for nearly 1,000 cities around the U.S. with each landing page having a Google Map embedded. But it was clear that with time, the negative tendencies would crop up.

“Over the Top SEO” is just a small player when it comes to abusing the Google Maps API from an SEO standpoint. Especially large companies involved in travelling such as Expedia, Kayak, and Travelocity, misused this feature for their SEO campaigns in a much larger scale. They have created landing pages worldwide for any location they had business interests in. On the long run, these travel companies had created millions of landing pages on their websites with each location having the Google Maps API intact. Eventually, Google made a decision.

Cost Of Google Maps API

In June 2018 Google placed a fee on their Google Map API. Google started to charge for the use of their Google Map API for $0.50 per 1,000 page load. Users would however have a $200 free credit every month. With this figure in place, Google created an opportunity to even start charging users with the first page load.

This stance by Google also signified that the Google API was not meant for building numerous GEO landing pages. Google’s intention to provide their map was to help businesses to direct their customers to their location by having the map embedded on their “Contact” or “About us” page. It was intended to boost user experience and not for SEO.

For those who use the Google API as mandated on their contact pages alone, Google still associates them with a certain location and ranks them accordingly.

Moving forward from 2024, Google may explore serious consequences to reduce the rank of websites that are still guilty of using the Google Map API without caution. Anything is possible, and if all steps to prevent this abuse fail, Google may out rightly define the practice as a gray or black hat practice, which will not return any good result for these landing pages on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

It is best to discontinue this practice than to fall into the long hands of Google. Google will take time to examine all the loopholes around the abuse of their Google Map API and would roll out their downranking policy slowly but certainly with every new Google Update.

Travel businesses using the Google Maps APIs without regard might already having trouble with rank losses without knowing that it’s because of the Google Maps API they are using.