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The following information was revealed to me by a contact I made through a friend I met in Chiang Mai. I have his full permission to share the strategy, but he has asked that I not reveal his name.
I’ll preface the note with the fact that the GMB strategy landscape involves a ton of spam and in my humble opinion a lot of these services are being sold because they sound like they would work, where in reality, there is no natural reason Google would use them as signals. I don’t want to go into specifics, because I don’t want to make enemies. I’ll just say this, I think Google has a ton of “natural” signals it can use, especially for businesses where customers visit the location. Think of natural, tough to game signals like driving directions from people who visited a location, took a photo, reviewed from their phone and answered the questions that Android users are accustomed to after visiting a business + more.
I’m telling you all this to set up some context for what I’m about to share.
The following is an email Google sent to one of my GMB clients:
This is literally the only piece of valuable advice Google is going to give you to optimize your profile, but the advice from Google ends there. The advice from me and my secret source continues in the paragraphs below.
Go to any GMB listing right now and take a look at the photos. They’re ranked in order of relevance; much the way a SERP is ranked.
So what is Google using to rank images?
I can’t say for certain, but it’s using something akin to: https://cloud.google.com/vision/