Yes, the collaborators made the data collection possible and without them this would have been dead in the water.

Mike

As I read this and my brain started working on simple conclusions as brains do in the face of such things. What I kept thinking is that the best long term strategy for a small business in Maps would be to focus on traditional SEO.

I’m thinking as time goes by one would expect categories to move to the right in terms of competitiveness. So, one might as well focus to the right of where the category is now for long term results.

Thoughts on this?

Thanks for publishing that, Mike. I agree with Miriam. We should do some more data sets. I’d continue to use the same format for a bit, just to verify the data.

While we had over 400 different business records we only looked at 4 data sets. Another set or two might skew the information in each category; (few signals -> many data signals.). We might want to look at data wherein the information is spread around over a larger geography including a city with a lot of square mileage and/or a small state.

The more data -> the better the research.

Wonderful presentation.

Dave

Sorry – I meant to say, they scraped ‘my’ Search Engine Guide article.
Miriam

Thanks, Mike. There are a couple of scraper blogs that seem to just hog any bit of content that I write on SEG. Annoying, but all too common. I appreciate you removing that pingback.
Miriam

@tim
Yes that is a good way to look at it.

There are some differences that correlate well like business title/category and title tag etc but are unique to local…In Sept 2006 I wrote Does Business Name = Title Tag?.

Then there are the wider latitude things like what does a local link look like. It needs to include pure geo citations as well as solid link phrase link backs type links. If I were to define the ideal web reference it would be a solid link phrase + a complete geo reference all in one. But I would take citations and linkbacks just the same.

Then there is the straight geo web stuff that isn’t really clear yet. Do KML, KML widgets and GeoRSS files add rank? Or do they just confirm location and legitimacy?

While I agree with you that the geo web will tend towards more complete web based info and lots of main stream searches will be defined by that completeness on the right side of the graph…there is still the long tail local searches where more purely local factors will come into play (like on the left side). The strategy for approaching those will be unique to local at least for now.

Mike

Fascinating research here Mike et al. Would it be possible to get details on the methodology, so as to better understand what the numbers mean (e.g. 80% importance of the centroid, 16% variability… that slide in particular didn’t mean anything for a non-attendee 🙁 ).

Really great research Mike, I think that the key factors that I have seen over the years and more recently are:

-organic position
-distance from the centroid
-citations
-pages mentioning your location
-telephone number
-physical address

It probably also helps to be linked to local sites…

I also read a thread sometime ago and someone was asking about influence being given to the other search sevices that Google has relationships with, i.e. CitySearch, Restaurant Row, SuperPages etc… Was wondering if this may be influential?

Thank you for this – I’ve been looking for a neat little summary on local search to refer to, this is now it!

You have presented an awesome research as a simple beautiful slides.
Goals of the research like Quantify the critical factors in ranking, Understand what we know for sure, Understand what we think we know and what we need to learn, Establish protocol and questions for additional research, So that we can develop best practice marketing that is honest AND cost effective based on facts were good. I’d seen the link to this post in many other blogs and thereby it sure your research was a very successful one. Congrats Mike, you have done a great thing 🙂

Thank you for such helpful research. It is an eyeopener.