Seriously, Track Your Google My Business Pages

With all the recent shakeups in SERPs/local SEO it’s becoming increasingly important to have visibility into the performance of all your search channels, including a search engines local search. These days, rank tracking alone won’t get the job done,  so I’m a big believer in tracking clicks from a Google My Business page to a website. I’m constantly surprised that this is not something that all local SEO’s are doing, especially considering that Google rankings don’t measure the actual impact to a business of an SEO campaign. You can create a quick tracking URL using Google’s URL builder tool by following these steps:

1) Put the URL that is your GMB landing page URL in the Website URL field


2) Figure out a naming scheme

We usually use “gmb” for the campaign name and “local” for the source and “organic” for the medium (without the quotes). This allow us to more easily roll-up GMB traffic with all other organic traffic (which it essentially is).

3) Fill out the rest of the URL builder accordingly

4) Add your tracking URL to your GMB page(s)
When you are done filling out the campaign builder click “Generate URL” and you will be given a nifty tracking URL to use on your GMB page. It should look something like this:

/pleasanton-ca-seo-company/?utm_source=local&utm_medium=organic%20&utm_campaign=gmb

Now you will be able to see traffic to your website from GMB showing up in your analytics package. If you use Google Analytics it will be in the campaign section, but you can also roll it up in reports and segments using local / organic as the source / medium. A couple of pro-tips before you run off and do this for all your GMB pages:

a) Make sure you canonicalize pages that are using tracking URLs
This will help prevent Google from indexing the tracking URL as separate from the core URL and will also show the pretty URL in a branded search e.g:

/pleasanton-ca-seo-company

instead of

/pleasanton-ca-seo-company/?utm_source=local&utm_medium=organic%20&utm_campaign=gmb

b) Set your URL parameters in GSC
Here we call this double bagging. Google takes canonical directives as suggestions and if you are doing this for thousands of pages it could theoretically pose a duplicate content problem. We don’t want this to happen to you so make sure you tell GOOG that these parameters are just tracking.