Backlinking to GMB Listing

[Josh Vinecombe]

What are you linking to?

Now I'm confused, what are you linking to?

 

[LennySEO]

I am interested in results as well

 

[keyserholiday]

I too am curious to hear and see tests in this as well. This has been talked about for several years now. As D Shaw said, he tired or in the last and it didn’t work. I would love to see a final and definitive answer on this. Honestly, I’ve never seen any benefit in doing this in the past and I doubt that there is any validity in it now. I’d love to be proven wrong.

 

[Tim Colling]

I am interested as well. Why not just post the results here, rather than DMing them to a bunch of folks?

 

[rossdunn]

Hotels have been the hardest nut to crack for us, so this is extremely interesting. Thank you for sharing this @resorts

 

[IMP]

When I started this thread I didn't realize it would garner so much interest!

@JoyHawkins - This wouldn't replace traditional back linking but supplement.
@resorts - Which link are you linking to for clarification.

 

[resorts]

@Tim Colling - After some deliberation, I'm going to post a screenshot from our YEXT Enterprise account so everyone can see the Discovery triggering that occurred after we linked. For the record (and for those that like exact metrics), the links were all from highly relevant travel blogs and online magazines.

We use aHREFs because we like the stricter authority metrics, so the links were from NEW content (mainly hotel review articles). There were 9 links overall the were indexed by the time we saw triggering, the DR's were as follows

DR5 site
DR77 site
DR45 site
DR80 site (after this one got indexed we really saw the needle move)
DR15 site
DR4 site (but hyper local)
DR4 site (also very local)
DR25 site
DR65 site

Here's the screenshot:

BUT... full transparency, our actions graph only looks like this for this period...

HOWEVER,... a couple of notable takeaways (and a LOT of this info is going to be hotel related, so if you don't deal with hotels in your GMB/GH profiles then it might not apply to you)...

During this period...

- Our website bookings measured from our GMB went up dramatically by about 28%
- Our Google HPA Ads (which run ON the GMB Knowledge Panel) went up about 9%
- Our OTA bookings also went up, and as well all know, the OTAs run ads directly ON our GMB and Google Hotels profile, but... we do not know which ads from OTAs might have generated the revenue, because OTAs will not share that info
- Our revenue management team was actually able to raise our ADR by almost 15% YoY, so each booking we did get direct was earned us a lot more this year during this period (so far)
- Our regular Organic Channel to the website is up slightly by about 5%
- Our call center conversions on calls during this period is up almost 40% !!!! - the amount of calls YoY doesn't seem to have changed much, BUT... it seems the voice calls we have gotten lately have been much more oriented towards booking the destination with high intent...

That's it. It's posted. I'm still on the fence about putting this out there, but the numbers don't lie. And BTW, we're not the only ones doing this for hotels. I got the idea from another chain that was WAYYYYY ahead of us on this...

For those asking what link we're linking to? It's the hotel link. @JoyHawkins can provide more insight on this link in the next release of her training curriculum I surmise. (Hat tip to Joy for being,... um,... well,... Joy!)

Cheers

 

[IMP]

Thanks for sharing. So you are linking to the Hotel GMB page?

 

[DanLeibson]

Okay, so I'm jumping in late to this. But I just want to express my curmudgeonly skepticism around this. A few things:

1) I have tried this pretty regularly for years (though not in the last 18 months) and don't understand what would have changed for this to work. Without that explanation, it's very hard to believe (for me).

2) There is a claim that links had an almost immediate effect on ranking. I'm even more skeptical of this then I am about linking to CID pages/profiles. Google doesn't crawl -> process -> index -> update link graph that fast.

Would really appreciate answers to these questions so I could better understand

 

[mborgelt]

Thanks for sharing this! It's great that you not only saw ranking increases but a boost in ROI!

 

[resorts]

Hotels have been the hardest nut to crack for us, so this is extremely interesting. Thank you for sharing this @resorts

Np.

 

[resorts]

I am interested as well. Why not just post the results here, rather than DMing them to a bunch of folks?

Your call to do so was convincing. All the best Tim...

 

[resorts]

I too am curious to hear and see tests in this as well. This has been talked about for several years now. As D Shaw said, he tired or in the last and it didn’t work. I would love to see a final and definitive answer on this. Honestly, I’ve never seen any benefit in doing this in the past and I doubt that there is any validity in it now. I’d love to be proven wrong.

Me too. Although the implications are scary...

 

[amiteo]

I've been told I should be creating back links to my clients GMB listing directly. Does anyone have any experience and thoughts on this practice?

Last I heard from an expert - it does help. I'm currently doing a small (not controlled) experiment of my own on the subject. Hopefully I'll have some results to share soon.

 

[resorts]

Last I heard from an expert - it does help. I'm currently doing a small (not controlled) experiment of my own on the subject. Hopefully I'll have some results to share soon.

Please do share as it will be helpful to know if these are just isolated flukes because we couldn't weed out all the variables, or if this is legit rank criteria.

 

[JoyHawkins]

This took a while but I finally published my findings on this so you guys can have a slightly more informed answer to this question: Does Creating Backlinks to Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing Help Ranking? - Sterling Sky Inc

 

[Tim Colling]

This took a while but I finally published my findings on this so you guys can have a slightly more informed answer to this question: Does Creating Backlinks to Your Google My Business (GMB) Listing Help Ranking? - Sterling Sky Inc

That's great info, @JoyHawkins !
Thank you for all the work you and the rest of the team at Sterling Sky do to research and publish things like this!