Category: Google

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Identification of Trends Impacting Google Maps Placement

Image of a Google Maps exposure on Google.com.

I am starting to see a few trends in Google Maps that can be leveraged for placement and wanted to share them with you.

I have particularly studied several pest control firms up in the New York City and New Jersey areas. Here’s what I see in regards to who owns the top spot and on down. My comments below are based on what I see for the New York City search query above, but are matched with the New Jersey listings as well.

1. Typically the business with the most number of reviews will be placed first. These reviews are pulled from maps.google.com reviews as well as other review locations. The New York City reviews are being pulled from NewYork.CitySearch.com in the link above. All the business locations with the city name in the query with reviews are listed first and in order with the one with the most reviews listed in the number one position.

2. Google Maps then appears to pick up adjoining cities alphabetically with the business with the most reviews first. In the link above the first city was Astoria. The business listed had nine reviews.

3. Any businesses that had no reviews were then listed with the city that matched the search query first and then additional cities were listed in alphabetical order. So in this case the first listing without a review had a Manhattan address (as Google understands that this is New York City). The second business was in Astoria and also had no reviews. The next listing without a review was for Brooklyn.

Additionally Google will show a listing over another if it has a coupon. So if you have no reviews, but you offer one or two coupons, your listing will appear in a higher position than others without reviews and with no coupons.

It is easy to create coupons. You do so by logging into your Google Maps or Google Local Business Center account. Now getting positive reviews is harder.

My recommendation is that if Google Maps placement is valuable to your business is to get busy soliciting customer reviews. Provide clients with a link to post reviews directly on your Google Maps profile page when you have sold or completed your service. You may want to even encourage reviews with a small monetary tip, coffee cup with your name, or personal email asking for their comments and a link to your Google Maps page. I would also recommend that you create one to five coupons for your business.

This is the first real trend that I have been able to see in regards to how Google handles who gets placed where when it comes to Google Maps. At this time we do not offer Google Maps placement services as really getting reviews and creating coupons is about you and your interaction with customers directly and not necessarily something that should be farmed out. That being said, clearly the “nut has been cracked” so get busy working to improve your Google Maps placement starting with customer reviews and then coupons.

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Google is Trying Out Social Networking Integration on Search

I just checked this out yesterday and as I was doing testing on this new Google.com tool I said to myself, “now, this is really cool”. What I am speaking about is Google’s integration of your own social media networks into your personal search results.  To get involved in the project sign into Google.com and then enter this URL: http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html select the first experiment at the top of the page called Google Social Search.

Once enrolled you will see a new feature at the top left of every Google.com page. The feature says Web and then a show options + mark. Open the + and you will now see a new left navigation bar that stretches down the page.  From here you can search in Google.com sectors such as images, video, news, blogs, updates, books, forums, and even social.

The take away from this new experimental project is that when you yourself are personally involved in social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms, the information you post is now searchable by others in your expanded social network all tied together in one neat interface using Google’s Social Search.

This is a real boon for web exposure and the creation of web authority for business owners and serious entrepreneurs. With some saying that social media is too time consuming to pursue, I say think again look at this new Google experiment which will most likely be the “face” of search to come and rethink your position on social media and social networking sites.

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Google Says Website Page Load Speed is Key

This past month Google has been talking about website page load speed. They have been chatting up the topic in forums and have even recommended a Firefox browser plugin that runs a website speed clocker that provides recommendations for improvement.

The chatter in the forums and blogs is that Google is going to be considering page load speed as one part of their organic algorithm. Remember however that there are about 100 factors that Google considers for organic placement so although this may be an important one, it is not the one that will make or break your website’s organic placement.

My recommendation is that if you are redesigning your website this year a snappy page load should be a design consideration. If you have an existing website, do what you can to improve page load time, but don’t get so spun up that it becomes your only concern.

For existing websites, there are many important factors that you can still very easily control now such as content freshness, authority of your content, readability, search friendly navigation, good site architecture and cross linking between pages that will help you right now even without tweaking your page load speed.

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Improving Your Google Local Business Placement – Don’t Be Fleeced

I have just this week had a prospect tell me that she had paid a firm $1,200 to move up organically in the Google Local Business listings. Wow, that’s a lot of money to spend on moving up in results when there is really very little information available on the Web on how to garner better placement in Google Local Business Listings.

Let me back track a bit. First, what I am speaking about are the listings that appear on Google Maps as the push pin locations on the maps and then the listings of businesses that appear next to a map for some searches at the top of the organic results on Google.com. It used to be that these listings were called simply Google Maps Listings, but now Google calls them Google Local Businesses.

There is very little information on the Web about how to improve your placement on this Google service. In fact my own article that is nearly two years old is about the only real information that pops up on how to improve placement. That being said, it is important to know that Google Local Business is undergoing a major overhaul. Google has purchased a new system by buying out a company and has been introducing new aspects of the Local Business Center in the past several months. One of the newest introductions was Local Business Favorites Places. For this service Google selects you based on reviews and reader feedback.

Of additional interest is that Google tried to buy Yelp! and was rebuffed. Yelp! reviews have fueled some of the reviews listed on Google Local Business/Google Maps. I would imagine that as part of the overhaul that Google will roll out its own business review service now that the deal with Yelp! has fallen through.

I had two clients just this last week ask me to be a paid consultant for improvement in Google Local Business. Both I told they should not spend money until it is clear what is needed to garner placement. Too many changes are being enacted on Google Local and there is literally no information available on what to do to improve your listing placement. In fact much has been said that it is not about the quality of your listing but rather your proximity to the center of the city that is being searched. Others swear that it is the number of reviews on Yelp!

I would recommend that if a firm states they can improve your Local Business Center placement that you nail them down to the details before you get separated from your cash. I would make sure to ask for recent client results from the last two months as Google appears to still be tweaking results based on some unknown formula. Make sure you get value based on the current changes that impact placement not based on what used to work.