Better #LocalSEORankings on Apple Maps (and DuckDuckGo) results in more impressions, website clicks, phone calls, and potential leads for your business. With my list of local SEO clients, freshness plays a critical role in rankings. Having a profile that becomes dormant while your competitors are making changes leads to a loss in rankings, which happened to my client. To combat that, I went in and made changes to the profile (added fresh photos), which immediately improved the rankings since the start of September 2025
00:00Hey everyone, what's going on? Greg here again from Team Blast. I want to talk about Apple Maps SEO and the changes that I make for my clients to get them more impressions, website clicks, phone calls, and potential leads for their business. So this is their actual trend. I'm going to show their trend report over here. It's the category search, it's psychic service. Again, this is Apple Map search. So when I took over their account, I got really aggressive with the changes I made to their description, photos, categories, so much that I did.
00:28And then we had our highest share of local voice. Now, just to explain, Local Falcon uses DuckDuckGo for their share of local voice, so it's not exactly Apple Map search specific. But the way that I look at this is that it does line up where if our share of local voice does improve on DuckDuckGo, it usually translates then into more impressions being shown, which is primarily from Apple search specifically, not DuckDuckGo. Anyway, we lost our rankings though.
00:54So I noticed this and I looked at the trends of my other clients that I've really been focusing on Apple Maps for and I noticed a pattern that we could get some new updates on the profile to potentially improve our rankings and we are.
01:06So I'm going to show real quick, just now I'm going to demo off Team Blast as the example and then kind of talk about what I do for my clients when I look at their profile.
01:15So here is a category searches, advertising agencies. Most people on Apple Maps are not searching for this, but if you are a plumber or an HVAC or a psychic or a moving company, this is really what this video is for you.
01:27Because people are going to be searching for movers near me or psychic near me or psychic service or they're going to search for plumbing or HVAC, all these different category searches.
01:37So Apple Maps is going to show a result like this. This is on the desktop version. If I was on my phone, it'd be something very similar.
01:43Now, here's my listing down here. I'll just scroll down to it. It's pretty basic with what you would expect, the name of the business, which is mine.
01:51And then you have some photos, you have a description, all this kind of stuff.
01:55But let me go into my profile over here and really explain a little bit of how I look at it for my clients.
01:59So to start, the About section is the description. This is a ranking factor.
02:06A lot of times when I onboard a client, their description is one sentence or two.
02:10Now, the description is less than the length of Google business profile, so you have to kind of tweak it a little bit.
02:16But I notice this a lot of times that you don't have a fully expanded description.
02:22So this is what I would go into. I would actually rewrite it and make a specific to Apple search.
02:26Here's another tip, though. For my clients who have an audience, let's say, that speaks Spanish or Portuguese or French or anything else outside of English, you can add a language over here.
02:37I've been doing this now for a few of my clients who have, again, clientele who speak a different language.
02:41You can actually take this language, you can translate it and put it into, and you can sort by the exact language over here to change.
02:48This is a small ranking factor. But again, if you say, hey, 10% of our audience speaks Spanish, you want to translate that directly on Apple Business Connect.
02:58Okay, next is the photos. Photos, I believe, are a bigger ranking factor than Google.
03:04Apple, I think, is more visual.
03:05And the reason why I think that's the case is that when you go into the Insights report into Apple Business Connect, they actually show how many people clicked on your photo.
03:12So restaurants, this is huge.
03:14Or really anything that has, you know, like coffee shops, anything else like that.
03:18You want to have photos of your product or your service.
03:24People are going to click on them.
03:24They're going to view them potentially before they call the business.
03:27So nail salons, plumbers, anyone that has like a kind of like a before and after that they can show.
03:33This is really where you want to do this.
03:34You want to add the photos here.
03:36And also what I've noticed for this particular client, for my other clients too, I ask for my clients to send me photos all the time.
03:42But what I do is that I trickle in the photos throughout the week or throughout the month, depending on how many photos I get.
03:48Because if you upload a bunch of photos on one day and then you don't upload this now for the next two weeks, it kind of looks a little stagnated for Apple from like a ranking perspective.
03:57So try to space out your photos.
03:59Obviously, the more, you know, high quality photos you can take, I think engagement is a big ranking factor.
04:04So take photos of the team, the before and afters, anything else like that.
04:09It is a ranking factor.
04:10Okay.
04:11So we talked about the description.
04:14We talked about photos.
04:16Last but not least, actually two more things.
04:18Next is the category.
04:19So category is important.
04:21You want to make sure that you are showing the right primary category and secondary category as well.
04:27So you want to check this, make sure that Apple is displaying the right one.
04:29I've actually seen this now a few times where I've worked now with HVAC companies and they won't even have like a section that says like, let's say sewer company or sewer repair.
04:37But then that will show as like the description, as the category.
04:41That's a bug.
04:43You have to reach out to Apple Business Connect to say, hey, this is not even one of our categories.
04:46We're an HVAC company or we're a plumber.
04:49We're not sure why it's saying sewer repair.
04:52So you want to obviously change that to make sure it's as accurate as possible.
04:55All right.
04:56Last but not least, let's go into reviews.
04:59So reviews are, there's no Apple review, like there's Google reviews or anything else like that.
05:04Apple uses Yelp and they use TripAdvisor.
05:08So these are third party sites.
05:10So let's go back into this search over here.
05:14And you can see over here, you have a 5.0 on Yelp.
05:16And let's go over here, you have 5.0 on Yelp.
05:18So six marketing, they have one review, 5.0.
05:23If you are, again, if you're a mover, if you're a locksmith, if you are a chiropractor, it doesn't matter what it is.
05:29You want to diversify your reviews and getting reviews on Yelp or TripAdvisor is a ranking factor.
05:37So I always recommend to my clients, you know, if you look at your metrics and you say, hey, 10% of our business is coming from Apple Business Connect via phone calls or website clicks that turn into leads.
05:49Make sure then you're getting reviews on these other third party sites.
05:51It's going to really help with your Apple Map ranking.
05:53So, again, really at the end of the day in this video, I think the main thing I'm trying to explain is that a stagnated Apple business profile that's not uploading new photos and it's not getting new reviews and it's not updating their description on a fairly regular basis is going to look kind of still.
06:13It's going to lose that freshness ranking factor and it's going to be dropped down in the results.
06:17So those are really kind of my tips.
06:19I think Apple Business Connect, I think there's even more you can do, but those are really what I've noticed with a lot of my clients is just making sure that we're staying active.
06:25There's no sync button from Apple that connects into Google.
06:29So you really have to do this manually.
06:31But if you can get a few more leads per month in addition to everything you're doing within Google, I think it's clearly worth it.
06:38So anyway, I hope this video was helpful.
06:40I hope this maybe sparks some ideas of what you guys can do.
06:43Again, the main thing is you want to start to flip the map as I'm doing here for one of my clients.
06:48Get more dots, one, two, or three.
06:51It's going to lead to more impressions, website clicks, phone calls, and potential leads.
06:55Anyway, thanks for watching this video and stay tuned for the next one.
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