In early October I wrote a post about achieving a “an automatically expanded Plus Box” for a client on a valued search phrase (Vacation Rentals Ellicottville NY) BUT having the url Google had associated with the listing pointing to their competitor. After postulating conspiracies and incompetancies on the part of all but myself I determined that I had neglected to enter the client’s URL in the Local Business Center and Google, in its best guess, had made a not so harmless assumption.

I immediately attempted to fix the problem by:

-Correction the local listing in the Local Business Center

– Submitting to Google on their Dissatisfied? Help us improve link.

I didn’t report the aberation to the client preferring the wait and see chicken approach. From experience I knew that local updates might take 2 to 3 months which would have meant that the client would have missed the bulk of her rental season sending visitors to her competitor site. Fortunately, yesterday (and perhaps sooner) Google rectified my mistake and their best guess and associated the listing with the correct url. It took something less than 3 weeks. Continue reading Redemption in the Gilded Google Age →

Greg Sterling highlighted some interesting comments. I was intrigued by the comment from an analyst: I know you were doing some testing with some retailers, putting their names in the bullets on the Maps and things. Can you talk about that at all?

It appears that one of the means of monetization is a strong relationship with national companies. This seems particularly true with the restaurants. The result is that you will frequently find chains at the top of the local list. I hope to investigate this phenomenon.

The full transcript is available here  (again thanks to Greg).

Of interest from Larry Page: This quarter, we partnered with Intuit to make AdWords Starter Edition Maps and Base easily available to Intuit’s millions of QuickBooks users. We wanted to make it easier for them to advertise and find customers online, as well as make their information and products and services available on the Internet. We also launched coupons on Google Maps, and we hope it will be an appealing genre for our smaller and mid-sized advertisers. We teamed up with Valpak to provide coupons from current Valpak advertisers.

Over half of local businesses don’t have websites yet, based on the estimates we see and our local business center helps those businesses easily create a web presence so they can advertise online.

7)Using Google adwords in the local listing

In a previous post about ranking well in Google Maps I listed 6 items that seemed to affect ranking. It seems that there may be a seventh. Although the sample size is limited, there is some evidence that having an adword campaign running in Google Maps adds authority to a local listing. The “authority” may lead to the Google “Onebox” (the phrase referring to the inclusion of a map, local information and a weblink) listing in a broader range of circumstances.

When initially available, the “onebox” would usually appear with a search of “business name + local modifier”. However recently I have seen behavior where the “onebox” is now appearing with a more general search of “business activity + local modifier”.

Using the search phrase “Web Hosting Olean NY” returns the “onebox” listing. With the search “Computer Olean NY” it returns a “onebox” as well. As you can see from the example, the authoritative listing is given page dominance on the organic results page and includes significant additional information beyond either a typical organic listing or a typical local listing.

Why is this important? Obviously achieving a #1 ranking on Google is always nice. But this listing goes well beyond that. It provides the local customer with a phone number, full address, a map AND a link to our site.

But for the first time local search phrases have showed up in our logs. Local search has not generated much web traffic previously. Certainly if Googles new “Vocal Local” (see previous post) takes off then it could provide significant phone traffic.

While a listing like this is of little use in many industries there are some in our local market that receive significant searches on “service + location” searches. “Restaurants”, “Jobs” and “Hotels” are frequently used with our local modifier and in those industries a listing like this would provide significant web and phone traffic.

Now to the more difficult question of why and how…. Continue reading The Google “Onebox” on general search phrases →

Greg Sterling has a thoughtful post where he eflect on what are the “real” local numbers.

From Emarketer.com newsletter

At Mike the Internet Guy’s Blog he has some interesting coverage of the SES Local conference. The summary from Local Search Marketing Tactics – SES Local had a very nice overview by Christine Churchill of the steps to develop a local campaign

In mid- July Search Engine Roundtable noted in a posting that Google Maps results with the map included were displaying prominently in the Google Organic results. Clearly for anyone attempting to optimize for local placement this possibility brought up images of the promised land.

I experimented with tweaking our own listing and in our first listed category out of the 5 categories I had entered we succeeded in having our local listing include a map (and exclude other local listings from the front page). I followed my local guidelines and was able to achieve this ideal placement. That being said I do not fully understand exactly why the listing was upgraded from the normal 3 local text links that appear on the main search result.

But as they say: pride cometh before a fall… Continue reading The road to Google Maps Nirvhana is paved with good intentions →