There’s not much published on the Web about how to rank well in Apple Maps. While the nature of a mobile map result makes “ranking” sort of an ephemeral thing – the order & radius of results will vary depending on the searcher’s physical location – there are a factors that seem to most positively correlate with showing up prominently in Apple Maps:

• Category relevance to query
• Keyword in business name
• Proximity to searches’ centroid (user’s and/or city’s)
• Yelp & Other Providers’ Meta Data – It’s very unclear how important reviews are for rankings, but they likely affect CTR. Meta data like Price rating, hours, etc are important.

 

Of these perhaps the most confounding is “Category relevance to query”. This is because Apple Maps does not appear to do a lot of keyword-to-category mapping. For example, here’s a shot of an Apple Maps desktop result for “hot dog”:

Apple Maps Hot Dog

But look what happens when I change the query to “best hot dog”:

Best Hot Dog

Apple Maps knows “hot dog” is a restaurant category and brings up a set of hot dog restaurants for the query. It doesn’t understand that “best” is a modifier of “hot dog” so instead it treats it like a business name search and it looks for businesses that have “best” in their names and are in a category related to hot dogs. In this case the two businesses listed are both in the “Sandwiches” category.

Some modifiers appear to be driven by Yelp’s meta data. For example, this query for “cheap hot dogs” brings on $ and $$ (pricing data from Yelp) businesses in the Hot Dogs category:

Cheap Hot Dog

But what happens when Apple Maps doesn’t have a mapping of the query modifier to a category. Check out this result for “delicious hot dog”:

Delicious Hot Dog

In this case, Apple Maps decided that “delicious hot dog” was a geo-query so it sent me to Calle Delicias in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. I’m not sure why. “Delicias” is close to “delicious”, and “Mayaguez” is kind of close to “merguez” which is a type of sausage so…

The moral of the story: Stop stressing that you don’t rank for various keywords in Apple Maps. Neither does anyone else.

Taste of Sam’s

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2 Response Comments

  • kit  June 19, 2017 at 12:42 pm

    Does saving an Apple Maps business location to your favorites help with that business’s Maps SEO? Would that signal Apple Maps that the business is more popular than other businesses with fewer or no saves?

    • Andrew Shotland  June 19, 2017 at 12:51 pm

      It would definitely affect personalized results in that the business would be more likely to show up when you enter a related query in Apple Maps, but I have not see it affect the overall ranking of a business for everyone, or at least I have not noticed it.