What is Google Maps Citations and how to make it yourself

What is is all about

There are two things called this name (for some reason), the second one is about adding the business to local catalogues and increasing business positions in local Search Engines Results. We will talk about the first and right definition - creating points on My Google Maps.

You may have seen, and probably have since you are reading this article, numerous offers for creating Google Maps Citations on freelance websites such as Fiverr, PeoplePerHour, etc.

Usually such offers are accompanied by an image like this.

On Fiverr, for example, prices for this service are usually extremely cheap and services themselves are abundant since these maps are easy to create, especially by using software.

Allegedly this type of custom maps can help to increase the position of a business added to Google My Business in Search Results as shown in the picture below.

Google My Business block in SERP

We have to mention that this is a controversial point and many SEO experts claim that it doesn’t play any role in positioning and is just a waste of money and time.

But now we will go through all steps of creating such a map, you will be able to see how easy it is and maybe test it by yourself before ordering some professional service.

Let's create our own map with business citations

We, like everybody else, will use Google My Maps for creating a custom map. So our first step will be going to https://www.google.com/mymaps/

Create new map in Google My Maps

You will see exactly or very similar to the one presented in the picture above. Let’s proceed to creating our first map - click the "CREATE A NEW MAP" button.

After a short time of processing your request you will be redirected to the page with the map.

At the beginning we need to set a title and description of the map, typically the title is set as a search keyword we want to promote.

Setting the title and description in Google My Map

Then we go to the place of our interest, click the “Add marker” button, click anywhere near our business location, enter the name (“Point 1” for example) and enter you business description in the description field.

Adding marker on a Google My Maps

This is the whole process, but how, you can ask, to add thousands of markers in certain areas the way it is done by professional services.

Creating markers in bulk

This is our exact next step. To create numerous markers the easiest way to do so is through importing them from the file that contains all the points with titles, descriptions and coordinates. The file should look like this:

Excel template for adding markers to Google My Maps in bulk

The next obvious question is where all these coordinates can be found. The most straightforward way is to click on the map and copy them manually, but it will take an immense amount of time even for 100 points.

We asked our developers if they can help us with this task and they created an online tool to simplify the process of collecting coordinates.

This is the result of their work - Online tool for creating markers on the map within a polygon

Let’s take a quick glance on how to use it.

First - create a polygon on the map, the needed tool should be already preselected once you opened the page.

Selected polygon on the map

Once you closed the polygon the “Generate points” button would become active. Enter the amount of points you need and click the button. Click again if you need more points and this is the result you will eventually see:

Polygon with generated markers

That’s it! Now you can copy coordinates to your file, fill the title and description cells and it’s ready to be imported into your custom Google My Maps. Also some routes can be added as some services present it as a feature.

Final Google My Maps with added markers and routes

Tip: in case somebody doesn’t know you can multiply titles with increasing numbers (e.g. Point 1, Point 2, Point 3, etc) by entering in the first two rows “Point 1” and “Point 2”, selecting them and then dragging down, excel will multiply them with 3, 4, 5, etc numbers automatically.