Google My Map Creation

Do you want to gain more exposure to My Maps as well as promote your site and services?

The My Maps functionality is one of the unique tools that is offered by Google. It can be used for executing online marketing, improving SEO, increasing YouTube videos’ visibility, and creating awareness for a website’s posts and images amongst others. In this guide, I will outline how you can use Google My Maps to create an interactive online map.

What is Google My Maps?

Google My Maps is a free online map tool that is used for creating, sharing, and collaborating maps. You don’t need to have any advanced skills (like JavaScript programming) before you can use the tool. The tool can be used to create about 10 layers comprising 10,000 lines, shapes, or places. This gives you lots of freedom to create maps that you can embed on your site.

Benefits of Google My Maps

Unlike Google Maps that promotes your store locations, corporate headquarters, and other specific locations, Google My Maps helps you to create an unlimited number of maps that you can customize. These maps show your prospects the different aspects of your business. For instance, you can create My Maps that show the following:

  • Cities where your clients or customers live.
  • Specific locations where you have exhibited at trade shows.
  • Venues of events where you have performed or where your services were used.
  • Locations where you have been delivered a lecture.
  • Other ways through which you can display relevant geographic information visually (rather than using a list).

Google My Maps gives you the flexibility to showcase subsets of your brand like “Client Locations In 2021.” Here are some things you can do to take advantage of the SEO and online marketing benefits that the tool offers:

  • My Maps can rank in search engines (the same way YouTube videos rank on their own). If you do proper keyword research and put the keywords in the correct fields, My Maps will offer SEO benefits for your business.
  • Include your business “NAP” in the description field of My Maps.
  • You can also link to your website, social media profiles, and other web properties (such as your press release distribution account central location, guest post, YouTube channel, and lots more) that you want to promote via the description field.
  • Improve local SEO for your videos by embedding optimized YouTube videos in the specific map marker locations.
  • Embed optimized and geo-tagged images in the right map marker locations.

Information Required to Create a Map with Google My Map

You can map your information as long as it has a location. The location could be any or all of the following:

  • Latitude and longitude coordinates
  • City, town, village, and neighborhood
  • Street address
  • Province, state, and county
  • Country
  • Location of interest

How to Create a Custom Map with Google My Map

Google My Map helps you create your custom map which you can share with customers and friends. These maps are especially useful when your business has several events in the area, and you want to present the events uniquely.

Here are the steps you can follow to create a custom map within Google My Maps:

Navigate to Google My Maps

You can easily get to Google My Maps once you log into your Google account. All you need to do is to navigate to Google My Maps and find the red box in the upper left-hand corner (the box says “+ Create a New Map”). Select the box to start creating your map.

Add each location to the map

After making your way to the blank map, add each of the locations that you’re interested in into the map. You can do this by searching for the name or address of the place in the search bar located at the top of the page.

Once you find the right location, add it to your map. You can do this by clicking the “+ Add to Map” button.

After adding the location, you will see it listed on the left-hand side of your screen. If you want to add more locations, repeat this step until you add all your desired locations to the map.

Customize the map

Google has a lot of customization options that you can use when you’re working with My Maps. One of the options is being able to change each of the icons that showcase the different places on your map. For instance, if you are creating a list of events that are taking place at a specific location (such as an apple orchard), the standard icon can be replaced with an apple. You can do this by going to the list of your locations located on the left side of the screen. As you are hovering over one of the locations with the mouse, you will notice a tiny paint can that appears on the right side of the location. Click on the can to carry out your customization.

When you click on the can and the customization box opens, use the box to change the icons and the color of each of the icons. Google will supply you with a list of standard icons that you can choose from. Apart from these standard icons, you can also upload your icon by clicking the “More icons” button and then “Custom icon” located at the bottom left-hand corner.

If you want to change each of the icons to anything you want it to be, simply repeat this process.

Things You Can Do with the Maps After Creating Them

There are lots of things you can do with the custom My Maps, either with the direct link or through the use of iFrame embed code. They include:

  • Embed the My Maps iFrame code on your blog, site, or other main web property.
  • Share the link to the My Maps URL in any of your newsletters.
  • Share the My Maps URL on your social media platforms.
  • Create a QR code to the specific URL and share the code at trade shows, business cards, or other marketing avenues.
  • Embed the iFrame code on third-party platforms to direct traffic to the My Maps page.
  • Execute other strategies for marketing the URL of the My Maps page.
Google My Map Creation

Types of Maps You Can Create with Google My Maps

Depending on the type of business you operate, here are the types of maps you can create for your business using My Maps:

Collaborative event/ club maps

Most people meet up with their friends or colleagues to go out and eat, get drinks, or enjoy the nightlife in their neighborhood. Other people may be a member of a civic or fun organization or club that meets in several locations. My Maps can help ease these processes.

If you are a restaurant owner, you can use My Maps to add your restaurant locations or event locations in such a way that makes organization simple. Those in your location can use My Maps to locate restaurants they want to visit and they can stumble on your location via the map.

Informative/ educational maps

To show how awesome Google My Maps are, they allow you to use the marking, embedding, and editing tools to design a series of rich information for educational and informative uses. You portray the statistics, events, or dates that help you tell a visual story to your users or audience by embedding text, charts, and YouTube videos into the map.

Types of Maps You Can Create with Google My Maps

GTmetrix

After creating a map that you want to share with your audience via a group or your website, Google helps you to easily set sharing options and allows you to embed your map anywhere. This process is simple and easy to do. Simply ensure you set your map to public and click the menu icon located at the left-hand side of your map. The last step is to select “Embed on My Site.”

Distance or driving instructions

Another feature that you can use on your map is to share or display driving instructions to different business locations on the map. Although this sounds easy and it is a task that most people are already doing, these maps help you to easily visualize the distance between your markers. In the case of shared maps, they help to visualize the distance between the locations and all the connected users.

Wrapping Up

Although Google My Maps is not new to most people, those that are not aware of how simple and fast it is to create maps that can meet several needs may have missed out. Google My Maps enables users to create and collaborate on custom maps that can be used for recording favorite places, barriers to opportunity, and community assets.

You can search for new locations that you want to add to the map. You can also have access to the map via your mobile device and drop a pin where you are standing. Try out My Maps for yourself and explore, learn, and collaborate in your neighborhood.