Google Local works based on citations and the more citations you have the higher your listing will rank. A citation is basically a mention of your business address of phone number on a website that Google trusts as a data provider.
The standard advice is to list your website in as many of the major citation providers as possible which is a good strategy until all your competitors do the same thing. Citation building is the same as link-building, you need to get the sort of citations that your competitors can’t get.
One of the best ways to do this is to build a custom relationship with a partner which is trusted by Google to give citation data but in a sector not directly related to yours. As an example if you had a chain of restaurants you could approach a hotel reviews website and pay for a sponsored section on each of their city & town pages listing the 3 nearest restaurants from your chain. Read more →
Google Places is the single biggest change to the natural search results this year and considering the resources Google are investing in making the system work its something that every single website needs to start using.
At present Google Places results are shown for geographical queries such as “plumber in Leeds” as well as the more general “plumbers” query. In the future I can imagine Google will start showing these results for pretty much everything.
My feeling is that the recent changes are very positive. The old Google Local system wasn’t very good and the move towards a single algorithm will mean more investment and better services for website owners. Already the results are impressive, we’ve run some tests and you can now edit your listings and the changes will appear in the main Google Places search results in real time. Being able to change a Google search result in real time was unheard of until this new system rolled out. Read more →
Google Places is big news this week but it is exposing a massive flaw in the methods Google uses to find out where searchers are physically located.
The main problem Google has is that they use IP geolocation which is woefully inaccurate in the UK. The second issue they have is that they use two separate systems – one for Adwords and one for the normal Google Places results.
This brings up the ridiculous situation that when I search for “pizza” from my IP address in Harrogate Google shows Adwords ads for pizza restaurants near Manchester and Google Places results for pizza restaurants near Great Yarmouth. I use Sky Broadband and Google guesses my location differently every day, sometimes they get within 50 miles but most of the time it shows results hundreds of miles away. The same applies to our office connection on BT – the results are always inaccurate.
The image above (click for full size version) shows just how bad this situation is. I can understand they might get the location wrong but surely they can use the same system for both Adwords & Places.
Google needs to accept that geolocation in it’s current form simply doesn’t work for the UK and then they should stop showing geotargeted results for generic queries that have no specific local intent. Either that or partner with the big broadband suppliers to get more accurate data.
Google should take this post as constructive criticism because if they can figure out how to geolocate people to their actual location as accurately as Twitter seems to be able to then they will be hard to beat in this sector.
Google has announced a major change to the way that the search results are displayed for local based search queries. Rather than having a map at the top of the results Google is just going to integrate the local results into the main organic results.
The impact of this change is that in the long term any site that doesn’t have a physical address in the location that people are searching for will probably no longer be able to rank for local based queries. There are still some sites that are ranking, especially for hotel related keywords, but I’m sure that as this launches Google will be showing a lot more local results and a lot fewer results from the traditional local directory style sites.
Quite how the algorithm works is unclear however we understand that the Google Local algorithm and the natural search algorithm have now been consolidated into one main algorithm. For the sites we work with one of the interesting things is that Google is sending people directly to the homepage rather than the more relevant internal pages we have registered with Google Local.
As you can see from the screenshot below (taken from here) there are still some organic results but the chance of anybody clicking on them is almost zero.
I really hope Google is going to give us some more details about this.
Google Local Business listings are a huge source of traffic for businesses lucky enough to have locations in lots of different towns. Unfortunately over the last few months Google has removed a lot of links from these listings and it’s costing people a lot of traffic.
Previously if there was only one business listed on the map then it used to link directly to the businesses website, now it just links to the “place page” which is of course full of AdWords ads. This is the same for verified and unverified listings.
Add this to the fact that Google is rolling out sponsored listings within the Local Business Listings and it all starts to look like we might be seeing a big decline in the free traffic we are used to from the Local Business Listings.
Until the invention of the Local Business Listings Google had two sets of results, AdWords and natural. Placing some ads around the natural listings was a perfectly acceptable thing to do but Google is limited by the number of ads they can show due to the size of the page. Adding 4 or 5 ads at the top simply wasn’t going to help the user experience.
Fast forward a few years and Google invented the Local Business Listings and suddenly started displaying them for one in every 13 searches (and virtually all the time for geographical searches).
This is probably the cleverest move by Google since the launch of AdWords 10 years ago because it gives Google a 2nd area of the page to fill with ads and a huge ready made inventory of impressions and advertisers – in any competitive industry every single result in the Local Business Listings will become “enhanced” overnight.
Google has always been very much against having paid listings within the natural results but it seems that they are more than happy to have paid listings appearing within the Local Business Listings and on the listing pages.
Google Local Business Listings are either a fantastic opportunity or a really annoying barrier stopping a site in 4th place from getting any traffic.
For example when Google displays a map for the query mobile phones it’s annoying for the poor site in 4th place because they get a massive drop in traffic but it’s also not an opportunity really because most people are not looking for a local phone shop they want a national online retailer.
If you are lucky enough to be in an industry where local search matters then 2010 could be HUGE for you. Read more →
Google is clearly going for some kind of record with product launches this quarter. Today we see them extending support for the rel=canonical tag across two different domains as well as adding sentiment analysis to reviews in Google Local.
I don’t see any situations where a cross domain rel=canonical tag would be the right thing to use but here is what Google has to say: Read more →
With Google Local results taking up more and more space in the search results local search is becoming (at least for Branded3) one of the key things we focus on for clients with multiple locations.
The Google Local algorithm isn’t the same as the main search algorithm but it does have similarities such as citations & reviews which work on the same principle as PageRank & links. Read more →
Over the last few months Google has been really pushing local search in the UK (with plans to push it even more) and we are finding Local Business Results increasingly creeping into generic keywords such as mobile phones.
Today I thought it would be interesting to take the “mobile phones” search results and see what percentage of the page each element takes up. The results are below and you can click on the screenshot to see a full size version of the whole page.
The top 10 organic results now only account for 21% of the page with local listings taking up 9.3% – almost the same as the Adwords ads which take up 14.3%. Just under 50% of the page is either white space or navigation links.
