Do Fiverr “Google My Maps Citations” Help with Local Rankings?
Google My Maps Citations are presented on Fiverr to business owners as a way to get quick local rankings, but do these custom maps actually impact rankings? Find out in this Whitespark Weekly episode what happens to rankings if a business builds thousands of map pins in My Maps.
Video Transcription:
Hey there, Darren here with another Whitespark Weekly video. Have you ever seen the Google My Maps citations listings on Fiverr? These Google Map citations, make these really beautiful charts. But the question is, do they have any impact whatsoever on ranking? Stick around, and we’re going to talk about that today.
Alright, so what are these Google My Maps citations? How do they make them? What’s the deal? If you look on Fiverr and just search for Google Map citations, you’re going to see a ton of these people selling these things.
Wow, they look amazing. I definitely am interested in this simply for the beautiful pictures that they make, some of them are really cool. They look awesome. What they do is they go into Google My Maps, and they create their own custom maps.
They place pins of different colors all around the area, and they tag them with your business name. Hopefully that should help your ranking. They make some pretty bold claims on Fiverr.
Claimed Benefits of My Maps citations
- Fast local ranking.
- Your business will rank in the number one spot… it’s going to be your business in the 3-pack.
This sounds pretty good and looks good. So, do they have any impact on ranking?
I ordered 28,000 map pins on December 8. I’m getting lots of these, I want to see what kind of impact they have. So, I ordered this one here, for Shaw Electrical, the job was done in three days. It’s pretty quick. You can kind of see here how it looks:
They make all these pins. They give you a long list of all of these different pins that they make. Looks great. But did it have any impact on my rankings? Any impact at all?
Well, you may be surprised to find out that no, I saw no impact on rankings. I’ve given it like three months, nothing. I ordered on December 8 and you can see this in our Whitespark Local Rank Tracking software tracking it over time, and it didn’t really do anything.
Shaw Electrical is a listing for testing purposes, and nothing else happened. We did no other SEO work for them, except for this one thing. But this was a nice isolated case study to see if it had any impact. There you have it. I’ve basically saved you $50 on Fiverr. You don’t need to go and spend that money to try this thing out. Now you know.
Not a complete loss. Because I got this beautiful picture, I might get it framed and put it on my wall. It’s very nice. I might even make an NFT out of it. Just see if I can sell that to get my $50 back. But yeah, it does make a really good-looking picture. So, if you would like a really good-looking picture of map pins around your business, this would be the way to get it.
If you want to improve your rankings, this is not a good idea. Don’t waste your money on My Maps citations. If you do want something that will help your rankings, we have all kinds of professional software and services at Whitespark. You can check them out. Please make sure you subscribe if you would like to get notified about more awesome videos like this one that we’ll be putting up. Alright. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time.
Have you ever used My Maps citations for your business? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.
AUTHOR
Darren Shaw
Darren Shaw founded Whitespark in 2005. The company specialized in web design and development, however, Darren's passion and curiosity for all things local search led Whitespark to focus primarily on local SEO in 2010 with the launch of the Local Citation Finder, followed by the Local Rank Tracker.
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9 comments on “Do Fiverr “Google My Maps Citations” Help with Local Rankings?”
Great post Darren, confirming my suspicions. Agreed, it makes a pretty picture, or maybe a nice little coaster?
Great video! Maybe it worked 11 years ago and people are still hanging onto stuff like this? https://searchengineland.com/google-custom-maps-a-goldmine-for-local-businesses-27535
Hi Darren. Thanks for your great post. I had a similar experience but unfortunately a lot more painful than yours (probably 10x more) as I spent $500 for map citations at Legiit.com.
It did no improvements for over 3 months of waiting.
So base on my experience I also suggest others do not try map citations building. It won’t work.
I’m a real estate broker. My loan officer turned me on the fiverr map citations. He knows it’s working for him because he saw a definite increase in traffic and people started calling him from places he’d never received calls from. I tried it and have had an uptick in business but not clear it’s from the citations.
Hey Dave thanks for this post. I’ve done a similar experiment with a test site to see what impact 24k map citations would have and I saw Zero improvement in map ranking. The citations I built based off a campaign I ran with you guys proved extremely helpful though.
Frankly, I am surprised that it had no impact on rankings. A hoard to pins all in the space of three days, with none prior and none after that, is a blatant lie. It should have gotten the website seriously punished.
Hi Darren.
I disagree. I have developed a tool to create this type of maps that I call fractals and I can tell you that it is not just creating the map in My Maps. You need to do more things to make it work and improve your ranking. You have stayed halfway.
1.- Each point must include: NAP, link to the website, link to the GMB property and description.
2.- “Original” content in the description of each point. This is achieved with a good spintax.
3.- You don’t need thousands of points. A few hundred may be enough to avoid burning the spintax.
4.- The map must be public so that it can receive visits.
5.- You must “enhance” the map by getting a few high DR links and embeds and get Google to see them.
I don’t know if you have tried it this way but I think it may surprise you.
Why am I not at all surprised by the result? 🙂
Have you checked it for a particular keyword or just in general? I’ve seen somewhere an article that it doesn’t work for the whole website, but work somehow for keywords that you write as a google map title.
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