Today I took a look at the 7 day total for a business account with little activity at this time of year. Amongst the listings in the top ten were 3 references to the name of another business referenced in tiny place within our business site in a manner entirely irrelevant to what drives traffic to our site. How are we showing in Maps for that phrase.

I searched by name for that other business in G Maps. Our reference to this business includes neighborhood name. There we were in G Maps somewhere in the 30′s or 40′s. The G maps reference pulled the reference from our website with business and neighborhood name.

Does that have relevance to our efforts to get strong maps presence for phrases that are of value and reflect user intent. Absolutely not.

How many times in the category in Maps referenced “other” below the top ten references, does our business show for such obscure and unrelated comments. Is there any analytical benefit to getting this info. Should I take actions based on that?

I think not.

OTOH, I get benefit if I take a look at the major categories for the LBC dashboard, and if I’m running Google Adwords ads with full coverage and exact phrase ads. Then I can cross reference exact phrase ads against phrases in Google Maps.

When I cross referenced the time period from the dashboard against data from my google adwords account I saw that the total volume of impressions for the exact phrase ad for the what is the number 1 industry term (without a Geo modifier) was about twice the number of impressions for the phrase in the LBC dashboard.

Then I totaled the number of impressions for the exact phrase PPC ads which include a geo modifier and the term that is number 1 in the industry, which simultaneiously showed as the number #1 volume term in the LBC dashboard.

It turned out number of impressions in the dashboard closely approximated the aggregate number of impressions for the combination long tail search phrases that include a geo term and the industry number 1 term.

Conclusion: Google isn’t running versions of Maps for industry terms that don’t include a geo phrase. They might be running maps for some types of terms. They aren’t running generating maps for the 50% of searches that don’t include a geo modifier.

Interesting. It doesn’t tell me much about how I’m doing in Maps. It gives me information on when Google is and isn’t running maps and specifically that it isn’t running Universal Search Maps for the search terms without geo modifiers.

Hmmmm….those maps were a neat experiment during 2009. They seem to be fading now. Actually that doesn’t surprise me. I think for a variety of industries they probably moved searchers looking for local practitioners from hitting local PPC ads to hitting the record/site link associated with the Map.

In any case, I didn’t like the presentation of data in the LBC dashboard last year, and I still don’t think much of it. I think its greatest value is in cross referencing the limited information it provides with other sources of information such as analytics for your website and/or ppc data.

In 3 cases the initials are at the end of the phrase and in one case the initials are at the beginning of the phrase. Meanwhile I note where 2 potential higher ranking phrases w/ the state initials and the most relevant business phrase are clearly not showing…with that business phrase showing lots of impressions….but of course no breakdown.

I suppose its a small mistake in Google’s aggregating this data and sending it out to people w/ an lbc claimed listing.

The “non geographic” context of this tool is not foolproof at this time.

I had one LBC account that wasn’t showing impressions. Yesterday it started to show impressions dating back one week. All along it had shown actions. (wierd, eh?) I had noticed on twitter that Joel H from Google Maps referenced an update with the dashboard.

Bravo. One small step for Google…one small step for dashboard followers.

I still think it is a medium to poor quality statistical picture of actions and effectiveness with regard to one’s website.

Of note, I will say that one thing it doesn’t measure, nor do other web analytics are calls to a business based on visibility within Maps, and specifically within the map insert into Google.com.

Of course if you utilize a tracking phone number in conjunction with the maps record then you have a terrific tracking tool. Without that though, I notice when maps rankings for a site improves, we both get more visits to the site for subject phrases and we do generate more phone calls–even without a tracking number.

kudo’s to Google for the update. Now if only they could provide some CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!!!

Time will tell if they are on the right track and have the right priorities. Clearly a lot needs to be done to make Local work.

The local search is just a complete shambles, certainly here in Australia anyway. For example, you can’t search “web design ….. ” now and get a full listing. At one stage they removed “security …. ” as a category and now it’s back again though.

But the biggest issue is the gaming of the local search engine. I set up one client for local search and he couldn’t understand why his opposition had eight listings in the local search area. It was simply because the business had listed “all suburbs” and one suburb as the address. This is so blatant it’s almost more transparent than adding text full of keywords to a page in the same color as the background, yet there are heaps of examples of the same thing.

So Google, go to it with the bells and whistles by all means, but make the search returns better for a start!

Cheers,

Ric