How Google Places works – Improve your position

Google Places is the new primary goal for SEO experts. As your website can sit, in most cases, at the top of Google, with a map, it is the most likely place people will click on when searching for businesses in their area. Google relies on a large amount information from a few different places. However, they claim the information that you submit to Google is the information that they trust the most.

Anyone with a physical address can submit their business to Google Maps. However there are a few things they do to make sure the system is not being manipulated. To make sure the basic information you submit is accurate, Google will ask you to verify it first by entering a PIN that will be sent to either your business address or phone number.

There are a few things you do to your chances of getting listed high on the front or side to improve Google Maps. Before we get into the nitty gritty, here are three quick things to remember about Google Sites. It is a far higher value on information from authoritative listings such as Yellow Pages, White Pages and other directories down. The closer the information on Google Maps on your Yellow Pages listing, the better.It is based on your physical location. There is more focus on the city / suburb of the search as the keywords.The more you try old SEO tricks to manipulate the results, the poor are tuned to.Google Places relies on proximity to the center of the town to determine which results are displayed. If your business address is in a great city, and you are far away from the center, you'll fight to your offer further.

The Easy Stuff

A listing for each physical location. They also cover several cities, do not use two lists.Use instead to explain the description of your company or category, the various services your company offers. Company with special services such as law firms and doctors or health centers are not allowed to cause several offers to meet all of their specialties.Use information as it would appear in the real world. People are going for you with your business card, etc. You can also find your company by his real address in the professional directories, etc. You try to look for should be listed as official as possible.Do NOT attempt to "SEO" your company name and business listing. Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. Again, this comes back to Amazon and professional associations, (authoritative listing), listing of your company. Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the company.Do not create ads in places where the business does not exist physically. Mailboxes do not count as physical locations. The exact address for the company must be provided in place of the broad city name or cross streets.Enter a phone number that connects to your specific location as directly as possible.For example, you should place an individual phone number instead of a call center.Enter a URL that identifies the best to your individual site. redirect do not offer phone numbers or URLs "relate" to other users or landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.Use contain the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in the title of your company, address or category fields.

The Harder Stuff

Choose your battles. If you have the chance to present your company in a small local list, do it. Do not try to up against larger competitors in larger areas.Try changing your address listed in as many places as possible. Add a physical location for each time list in a local directory.Local citations are king. You should try to get listed your company and your address in as many local addresses as possible.Good reviews by Google Places improve your position. You should encourage your customers, a review of you to write as much as possible.

PPC vs SEO

It seems to be the hip choice to spend money on SEO right now. The forums are full of people claiming; don’t spend money on Adwords, it is expensive and short sighted. In some instances, this is true, however it does not tell the full story.

Why does PPC advertising work?

The bottom line is Google Adwords works extremely well in some markets. First of all you have to realize that spending money on PPC advertising is a strategic choice. The strategy could be long or short term, however you do need to look at it in a targeted and outcome based way. You can’t spend money on PPC advertising in an aimless manner. Second of all Google Adwords has to be one of the most ubiquitous advertising method on the planet right now. More people interact with Google on a daily basis than watch the Super Bowl. You can reach any niche, any target in a cost effective way not imaginable 10 years ago.

What is the problem with Google Adwords?

However in recent years Google Adwords has become  too good for its own boots. We regularly document changes in the pricing of Google Adwords, and mostly they never go down. Over the last 6 months the cost of ALL adwords has increased, with some markets experiencing a 24% increase in the cost of advertising. Some keywords cost $50 plus per click, which is pretty much out of the reach of any small business marketing budget. This is compared to a far lower cost per click on something like Facebook. The other problem is that, because almost anyone can have a panel of Adwords  on their website, and because the best markets have become wary of advertising from Google, the quality of clicks from Adwords has also slowly decreased.

When does SEO work?

Building, and raising, an online profile takes time, effort and skill. SEO isn’t just about links, or just quality web content. It too can take time and money that might not see a return if done incorrectly. It is certainly more fickle than an Adwords campaign. However it is generally a far more profitable strategy for long term lead generation. In some markets, where there is little competition for certain keywords, one good link from an online directory can be enough to give a website a front page berth. In fact this would be the case with almost all local markets, and local keywords, where there are less than 10 competitors looking to make the front page.

In this scenario, the cost to the website owners might be a few hours in the beginning and then maybe one or two hours a month after that to maintain front page status. This is compared to $1 per click on Google adwords in a small market that, in a $150 campaign, will only generate a few leads for one month only, after which the owner has to start all over again. Even if you look at spending money on Facebook ppc advertising, you might get some response from 50c per click, but again it is short term and may generate some followers on your Facebook page, but that is about it.

When is a Google Adwords campaign a good idea?

Spending money on Adwords can be a very effecting marketing strategy in the following scenarios;

The strategic campaign

Got a short term offer, or event, that might last for one day or two weeks? Adwords is a great idea for this. If you are promoting an event, or something that is only going to exist for a short term, ppc in any form is one of the most cost effective online advertising methods. Adwords or even social media advertising allows you to target a diverse range of people, even in just one local area. SEO for this scenario would take a long time to build, for something that exists for only a short period of time.

Where SEO is expensive

Effective, long term SEO can be expensive in highly competitive global markets. International insurance companies are a good example. The leading Australian global insurance companies have exceptionally high PageRank and have tens of thousands of affiliates linking to them. If you were to launch a marketing campaign in this market, the $50 price tag per click would actually see cheap. If you found the right target, and could convert, almost any form of ppc would work better than attempting an SEO campaign

Where you are branching out into new markets

If you are an established player in one market, and you are looking to move into a new area, Adwords, or some other ppc campaign,  might be your best and only option for an online marketing campaign. When a website builds an online profile, the search engines will give the website a ranking for a particular keyword. Once that keyword profile has been established, it is very hard to shake. So if you have rated well for “Sydney Marketing” if you suddenly want to add “Brisbane Marketing” onto your keyword profile, you are not only looking at starting again, you are also looking at having to work against the “Sydney” keyword profile you have already got.

We will go into the major Adwords markets later this year, but for now, you can see, Adwords are great in the right place.

2011 SEO Trends

Here are the top SEO trends affecting business right now, and into 2011.

1. Increased Focus on Local Search (Google Places)

Google has already shown its intention to increase the importance of local search. Some keywords have already started showing a combined local and normal search, as you can see in the image here.

It seems that businesses will be hampered in optimising for a location, when you don’t have a Google Places listing in that area. This means good things for local businesses that have a reputation, and bad things for international businesses that don’t have local HQ. It also places a greater emphasis on local reviews, as they are now listed alongside your normal web listing.

What can businesses do? Well for starters every business should claim their Google Places listing. Next you should try to get listed in every local web directory you possibly can. For more information you can read our post on Google places.

So what could Google do next? Google has removed the use of external reviews from their local search but in the next year businesses will be able to have their own testimonials from their website appear on their Google places listing. This indicates that Google intends to make Google Places to keystone of their move forwards for search.

2. Different optimisation for mobile search

Right now if you do a search on a mobile device, unless you specify otherwise, you will get the same results as a normal browser search. There is already some changes to the way search is presented, but not really enough to notice a difference. This has to change to increase the focus on websites that are correctly optimised for mobile browsing.

Mobile browsing currently makes up around 5% of all web browsing, however we already know that those browsers are tech-savvy, heavily connected, early adopters. This means that by the end of next year, we expect, mobile browsing will make up as much as 15% of all web browsing.

As mobile browsers have different requirements (screen size, media use etc) to desktop browsers, there will have to be a change in the way Google evaluates websites to give properly mobile optimised websites preference over those that are not. In the same way that Google is increasing the value of fast websites, so too will they increase the value to websites that are optimised for mobile browsing.

3. Increase in link value for “in context”

At the moment, most web masters know that links that are out of context (ie links that have nothing to do with the page content) get less value than those that are in context. What we expect to see over the next year is an increase in the value of in context links. We are not going to speculate on the current value of things like blog comments and forum posts, but we expect these to reduce in value over the coming months. Why? Well it is a small chink in the search algorithm that spammers go for. At the moment an SEO spammer can forum post, blog spam, mass three way link exchange, and even though there is diminishing returns, these links still count, and against pages that are old but have no links, they do quite well.

Overall what we expect to see in the next few Google updates is a reduction in value for links from spam havens like Digital Point forums, and an increase in the value of links from quality pages/posts, EVEN if they are rel=”nofollow”. There may even be a balance between high and low quality links, with a penalty for a high number of low context/quality links.

This expectation is reinforced by the face that EVERYONE is saying the only way to build links is with websites that are in the same field as you.

4. Rise of Yahoo/Bing

This is highly speculative given Google’s long term dominance, and that in 10 years of web growth both Microsoft and Yahoo have done nothing to crack the market. However it would take a further massive failure on the part of Microsoft for them to no steal at least some of the search traffic from Google. Right now they make up about 5% of the traffic to this website, but they make up about 10% of the total web search traffic. We think this has every chance of rising to 20% by the end of 2011.

Ever since Bing started to provide the search results for Yahoo (effectively turning Yahoo away from being a search provider and into a content provider), they pretty much became the only other English language search contender to Google.

A lot of web users have forgotten about other search engines, which means they only need to become reacquainted to start using another search engine. There are a lot of instances where Google’s first page results have become filled with content that is not relevant or is getting a little spammy. It will only take a few of those for a user to start looking for something else.

Yahoo/Bing will need to work on some partnerships with browsers and content providers to become a serious alternative however, but they have all the potential to grab more of the search market.

5. Social Media Integration

In the same way that Google has integrated customer ratings and local places into search, we expect that Google will combine information from popular social networks link Facebook into the normal search results. At the moment you can see results from Twitter, but there is little to no connection between the social result and the normal search result.

As media like Twitter becomes more popular, we expect to see Google integrate feeds from social websites into their normal search. We don’t think it will affect the results in any way, ie you wont be able to spam Twitter to improve your normal search place. However we do think there will be some reference to social media activity within your listing. You Facebook/Twitter page may well become like your physical address in Google Places, who knows.

6. Website Speed

I wasn’t going to include website speed as a trend, because it is sort of already happening, but I have decided to throw this in here at the last minute. Google has already shown that it is taking the speed of a website into consideration as a ranking factor, but also stated that a slim percentage of website will be affected. It is fairly easy to see that Google will continue to make website speed an increasingly important  factor in assessing the quality of the user experience.

Do you have any coming trends for 2011?