Local Search Ranking Factors, Vol. 3

MIHMORANDUM NO. 614 | June 7th, 2010

Earlier this morning, I published the results of the 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Some of you may recognize the 2008 and 2009 editions, and as I said in my intro to this year’s version, it’s getting harder and harder even for the Local SEO experts, to keep up with all the developments in our industry. I actually added 20 questions to this year’s survey to try to assess some of these new considerations–a daunting 30% increase in the workload for our panelists.

We had 34 experts take part, including a handful of gurus from Canada and Europe and one from Australia. Their insights are truly remarkable, and although it’s a lengthy piece, I’d recommend getting into the full depth of the responses as soon as you have time.

I was particularly struck by the following responses this year:

Two practices which explicitly violate Google Places’ guidelines (or at least CAN violate them–thanks, Matt) received opposite responses from panelists–keywords in business title still came in as the #8 overall positive factor–though this was down almost half a point from last year. Many folks thought this practice clearly still worked well, however, but hoped that it would further decrease in importance in the coming year. The other particularly interesting question for me was use of location keywords in categories. This was a major factor for ranking well a year ago, in my opinion, but many panelists reported seeing listings drop from the index altogether as a result of this practice today. Google seems to be enforcing this guideline quite strictly.
The effectiveness of MyMaps received a noticeable boost according to the panel this year, and similar to reviews, quantity seems to be more important than quality.
The new-for-2010 questions about location service check-ins yielded a lot of discussion, but on the whole, the panel didn’t feel they were a strong ranking factor (at least yet).
Despite the dramatic increase in the number of searches for coupons–and the popularity of new social discount sites like Groupon and Yipit, the panel felt that adding coupons to your local listings only yielded a very slight increase in rankings. I happen to agree with the wisdom of the crowd, which seems a bit strange that Google would not reward behavior that searchers are clearly interested in. Adding photos and videos garnered a largely similar ho-hum response from panelists.
While KML files and microformatted addresses and reviews are certainly a “best practice,” none seems to be a major ranking factor, at least yet.
Overall, the panel was fairly nonplussed about Google Places’ new service area features but felt that the option to hide address would signficantly, and adversely, affect rankings.

Thanks again to all the experts for participating & I look forward to the upcoming discussion.

Mike Belasco says at
June 7th, 2010 at 6:59 am

David,
Thanks a once again for putting this together. Fantastic job! Thanks also for asking Mary and I to participate once again! Very interesting results this year that should help many people quickly gain a deeper understanding on what is happening with local search.

Linda Buquet says at
June 7th, 2010 at 7:31 am

Great job once again David! I had so many other priorities this AM but saw this and had to stop to read every word. Confirmed a lot of what I’m seeing with my clients.

Thanks so much for putting all the time and effort into doing this for the industry!

Linda

steveplunkett says at
June 7th, 2010 at 8:00 am

great article , thanks.

Todd Mintz says at
June 7th, 2010 at 8:25 am

This made my head hurt…in a really good way. An awesome piece of research and you’ve even exceeded your most excellent 1st 2 efforts with this one.

Michael D says at
June 7th, 2010 at 8:30 am

What I’ll be reading and researching during the next month. Really was interesting to see varied opinions on what’s working and what’s not. Location keywords are no doubt on the chopping block, at least from what I see in the industry I focus on.

Matt McGee says at
June 7th, 2010 at 8:36 am

When you say:

“Two practices which explicitly violate Google Places’ guidelines received opposite responses from panelists–keywords in business title still came in as the #8 overall positive factor” –

I think it needs to be clarified that many businesses have the keyword in their business title legally and by default, and Google can’t/shouldn’t punish them for that. My wife works at Windermere Real Estate. Having that in their business name helps them rank for “real estate” searches. There are lots of hotels that have “hotel” as part of their official name. Plumbers have “plumbing” in their name, etc.

I voted that very highly as a positive factor, not to encourage people to spam or violate Google’s (sometimes silly) guidelines, but because if your business name already has the keyword, it’s a Good Thing for your rankings. :-)

Jim Rudnick says at
June 7th, 2010 at 9:05 am

Hello David…and again, an “annual” thanks for this Report! Will digest it over the next few days and learn more, too…as usual!

One thing tho I’ve noticed right away, eh….is #12 on the list. Just about all of the various experts have commented that yes, closeness-to-centroid matters…my own Local client serps no longer have much “weight” in that area. I dont’ know if that’s because we use google.ca only for this, or what the rationale might be….but for our canuck clients, the distance to our city centroid appears to matter hardly at all, any more. Six to eight months ago, yes…but not hardly at all now….

So…back to the drawing board to learn more, eh?

:-)

Jim

tienda says at
June 7th, 2010 at 9:33 am

This information is very appreciated. A very useful resource for local businesses.

Julie Gallaher says at
June 7th, 2010 at 9:49 am

Thank You – Thank You – Thank You!

I just spent the last hour engrossed in your report. As usual, superb insight.

My predictions for 2011 – check-ins will be very important. They are much more difficult to be gamed and show actual popularity of a business, not merely your success in getting your customers to write a review.

I’m also going to start a big geo-tagging campaign. I think that’s something that could provide a little bump.

My question – how does G handle businesses with same address because they’re in an office park or office building? Will the suite # protect them or are they penalized?

Julie

Julie Gallaher says at
June 7th, 2010 at 9:55 am

Oh, one more thing.

I very, very rarely see yellowpages.com (now yp.com) as a citation. Many times superpages.com, insiderpages, judysbook, citysearch, tripadvisor, angieslist etc. I’m from Northern California, where AT&T/SBC/PacBell should make yellowpages.com strong, but it does not seem to be favored by Google.

Dave Oremland says at
June 7th, 2010 at 10:49 am

David: Nice job. I’m looking forward to scrutinizing the information. That is a lot of “eyes” on the topics and categories. Its certainly better than just one person’s perspective.

Nice work. Thanks for including me in this list.

Todd Bryson says at
June 7th, 2010 at 11:33 am

David: Again, this is awesome. I use this as my “bible” for conducting local search services.

I am always conflicted with the “use keywords in the business name” issue. I constantly see competitors ranking highly with obviously keyword stuffed business names. Its hard to resist adding an extra keyword or 2. (i.e. Ecotech Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning Repair Service as opposed to Ecotech Plumbing).

The keyword stuffed business titles rank very well and continue to do so. And then creating similar citations with the keyword stuffed business name further validates this business name…I’m guessing.

So, what to do???? Until I see more penalties being handed out I don’t see any issue with advising my clients to change their online business name. Furthermore, I have had businesses legally change their name purely to get higher ranking in google. They are using the city name + services as their new business name. I only see this trend to increase.

Anyway, David, this is GREAT resource and I appreciate all the work that has gone into getting it published.

Best,

Todd Bryson

David Mihm says at
June 7th, 2010 at 12:48 pm

Wow, bad morning for a long conference call! Thanks for all of the comments, guys.

Mike, Matt, Dave…thank YOU guys for participating. I’m always amazed at the generosity of our little Local community.

Jim, I think that a lot of us felt that Centroid continued to decline this year but it seems like it still matters a great deal in certain low-signal markets. I think the point about the Centroid now being any random pedestrian’s mobile device was particularly insightful, though…which means accurate data is going to be even more critical going forward.

Julie, typically if the individual businesses within an office park each have a strong enough signal they will be just fine–it’s a scenario Google is aware of. By strong enough signal I mean a uniquely claimed listing, with plenty of citations, and a unique phone number. However, there have been any number of cases reported where listings at the same address have been caught in a “clusterf***” as Matt likes to say :), meaning they merge with one another.

Todd, I agree with you that the business name thing continues to “work” and along with most of those surveyed, I’d like to see it decline in importance–particularly if a keyword matches one of Google’s default categories, which seems like a fairly trivial algorithmic throttle to me…then again, I’m not a tech guy!

Jozef Foerch says at
June 7th, 2010 at 1:40 pm

Bravo David! Thanks so much for taking the time to create something so valuable to so many.

Cheers,

Joe

Jason Lander says at
June 7th, 2010 at 3:30 pm

This research is truly invaluable. Thanks for putting it out there.

Mike Ramsey says at
June 7th, 2010 at 6:56 pm

David,

I find it amazing how much has really changed over this past year. It is also very interesting to look back and and see how much development the space has seen and how many new players are moving into local.

Thanks a ton for the opportunity to participate and for introducing me to some of these great individuals that consider local their playing grounds. It’s been a great year and I really am looking forward to the years to come.

Sebastian says at
June 8th, 2010 at 5:36 am

What Matt said is totally true…
If your business name consists of a location AND/OR business category keyword, than i would never advise to delete these items, if you are the rightful owner of this business title. This implies also the fact, that a SMB usally used this business title on a plethora of IYPs and review plattforms – if you now change your business title, Google Maps could get problems to list all your corresponding reviews exaxtly… and another positive factor, the business title citation itself, could also be destroyed by that…

David Mihm says at
June 8th, 2010 at 5:40 am

Sebastian, I agree 100%. I think I probably rated KW in business title as something around a 3.5 or 4 myself. It still works amazingly well, especially if you can back it up with references from other IYPs. I think the examples that all of us would like to see gone from the 7-pack are things like these, which as I’ve suggested to Google before could largely be solved by a trigger related to # of characters in the business title.

Rob Metras says at
June 8th, 2010 at 7:38 am

As a marketer not involved in a SEO agency but interested in helping small business and non-profit clients with their marketing this report is a godsend. Thank you to you and your colleagues for sharing and letting others make use of its valuable content.

Randy Kirk says at
June 8th, 2010 at 8:46 pm

I have been waiting with anticipation for the new release. Google Places is the core of my internet marketing business and I see Places as a game changer long term. The issue of the day, above, seems to be Business Name/keywords/cityname. Companies are actively changing their actual business name in order to legitimately have the important keyword and geographic name. We are backing this up with name and address blocks on every page of the website, urls that reflect the same either before or after the .com, plus massive uploading to directories, LSE’s, press releases, ezines, etc. with the same name. (Not to mention corporate identity and/or DBA’s.)

For your amusement. . . I had created a blog immediately after the name change, and put up massive amounts of content at http://www.GooglePlacesHelp.blogspot.com Google let me get away with that name for about a week and then abruptly stopped crawling it. lol

Dan Linden says at
June 10th, 2010 at 12:28 pm

This is an excellent article. The 2009 and 2008 have been close to me personally for a long time. This is truly “the” guide to LBL.
I wrote a little Google Place help forum discussion that might help out some people regarding duplicated and merged listings (and more). We see the same questions time and time again. Unfortunately Googles “fix a problem” rarely works.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places/thread?tid=30869083cb774e70&hl=en

Hope this helps some people.

Local Lad says at
June 10th, 2010 at 1:35 pm

An excellent insight into local search. A big thank you to David and all the contributors.

It’s very interesting to see how using a ‘location keyword in the category section’ can go from a benficial factor last year to potentially getting your listing dropped altogether.
It just goes to show how important it is to keep on top of things and to be aware of the guidelines in place.

Dino says at
June 11th, 2010 at 3:52 pm

David:

Great post as I have just now stumbled upon your site. Great stuff, really great stuff, dude. I haven’t finished reading it or the other comments. Nor have I gone through your other posts so please forgive me if my next two points have been addressed elsewhere. I just wanted to get them out while they are fresh in my head.

Couple of suggestions, 1) some of the jargon is a bit over the heads of local business owners who want to read and understand this stuff. Would like a synopsis perhaps after each heading describing what you mean by the title. 2) Would like to see the same survey done for organic searches and websites.

Again, love what you’re doing here. Will pass this along for sure.

Andrea Wilson says at
June 12th, 2010 at 9:50 am

Hi, David,

I have just started to offer Google Places local listings services to my clients and wasn’t really sure where to turn for real advice on how to best optimize a listing without ticking off Google. I am so happy that I found your blog and your survey. Now I know I can do the best job possible for my clients with what I discovered here. Thank you for providing a great service to small businesses and to online marketing consultants like myself.

Todd says at
June 14th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

You, my friend, are the local seo guru. Very nice work as always.

Taylor Cimala says at
June 17th, 2010 at 10:03 am

One interesting note on the coupons bullet point is the fact that I’ve seen the Google Places coupon show up as a citation. So looking strictly at garnering more citations, this does provide value – how much is still the obvious question at hand.

Cindy says at
July 7th, 2010 at 7:52 am

Thank you for all the work in organizing this and printing the results. Great info!

Chris Wheeler says at
July 14th, 2010 at 2:14 am

This is a very interesting artcle. I was wondering whether there are any actual statistics to show how many people in the UK would use the map reseults instead of natural search. After all, the natual listings have a description whichgives more information about the business. I have seen sites which list on Google Zones/Local but are not in the top ten for the term they are on the map for. What are your thoughts on this David?
Chris Wheeler

Cy says at
July 16th, 2010 at 1:08 am

Very insightful, never would of thought Google would of slapped people for using their business category, Its a description of what that company does. Amazing they would actually consider that as almost spam..

Aaron says at
July 19th, 2010 at 4:23 pm

This is incredible!! Thank you so much for putting this together!

I was curious to get some insight on one issue I’d not seen addressed:

Is there a best practice on how to notate both a PO Box AND a physical address on a website, for local search purposes?

Many thanks and keep up the good work!

David Mihm says at
July 19th, 2010 at 4:31 pm

Aaron, you could always put the PO Box #### in an image without any alt text so that it would be readable for humans but not search engines.

Matt Hughes says at
August 2nd, 2010 at 6:14 am

I’ve noticed that mymaps feature increases rankings for keywords with low competition.

I agree that listings mentioning locations have been penalized by Google. Removing locations still doesn’t boost rankings. I guess once you’re penalized, you get flagged for a while even though everything else in the listing looks fine. Any thoughts on that?
Also, does any of you know how to get the rankings back once you’ve been penalized due to the location mention?

Thanks!

Fabie says at
August 3rd, 2010 at 4:40 pm

Hi David – Awesome work.
I am always dubious about the keywords in the page title. If we don’t do it for clients they then realise their competitors are ranking better than them which could be a factor (Australia is a little behind with Maps it seems).

Thanks David :)

John Nagle says at
August 6th, 2010 at 9:53 pm

Good summary.

Is anyone seeing evidence that Google is finding street addresses within the text of web sites? Not microformats, tags, or other information formatted for programs, but human readable postal addresses.

Is anyone seeing evidence that Google is looking at incorporation records, D/B/A records, Dun and Bradstreet ratings, SEC filings, or similar non-web sources? Any sign of Google using sources that don’t contain a URL and have to be matched by street address?

Thanks.

David Mihm says at
August 7th, 2010 at 6:13 am

John,

- The first item is what is meant by ‘unstructured citations,’ so, yes, it sounds like quite a bit of us are seeing those.
- Many of us have speculated that Google will be in the near future, if they are not already, looking at some of those offline business records.

Local Search Ranking Factors, Vol. 3

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