These is a summary of the seminar from SES London 2011 on factors effecting local search.
Presenter: Lisa Myers, CEO, Verve Search
Main factors effecting local search results:
- Location: Proximity of your location to the search query, hence if Hotel is located closer to where Google thinks is the centre of city it will have better ranking
- Relevance: internal factors – business name (keywords not too important any more) & category associated with in business centre (business places). Use at list 1 default category, location keyword in category not that important. Do not use custom categories where possible, as they can look spammy and result in penalties
- Prominence: external factors – reviews, data available and occurrences of user generated content i.e. MyMaps. Most powerful off-page is web citations, putting value back into local directories. Make sure all is consistent. Get competitive analysis done by going to competitors ages clicking on link “more from around the web” to see their citation. User reviews important in travel but impact varies in other industries. Still not sure if Google tweaked the algorism enough to identify Quality Vs Quantity. But it is still important factor for conversion. For now Quantity is important while Google develops sentiment analysis. Another emerging factor would be Review Velocity, referring to consistency of review accumulation. UGC not only reviews, but also images and videos, again volume counts.
- Coupons use on Google places can give your listing a boost
- Make use of paid Tags to promote.
- Remember about Google HotPot – integration of your friends social review into the results – Search going Social.