MIHMORANDUM

Welcome to Year Five of the Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It’s always a total thrill to compile the opinions of the world’s top experts in Local Search Marketing and be the first one to see these experts’ collective opinions about what’s working and what’s not in the world of Local Search.

Aaron Wall has done similar posts for years. But in pulling a couple of screenshots for Local University Advanced on Thursday, this one for “pizza” really struck me.

Mike Blumenthal pointed me to a Wall Street Journal article this morning which mentions the oft-cited stat that 20% of all PC searches have Local Intent. I just have a quick comment that I’ve made to several people in meetings recently but don’t think I’ve blogged about.

It appears to me that Plus and Places are going to live on the same layer of Google’s business data index–one layer ABOVE Mapmaker–further evidence to support the theory that today was an interface update only and does not affect anything back-end is below.

Has anyone noticed this yet? You can now review other businesses as a business on +Local. This is going to make it much, much easier for small business owners to get off the block and get just a handful of reviews of their own business pages.  They’re just going to need a point in the right [...]

Naturally, after a big interface update like the Places-Plus “merge” that just happened, the first question on everyone’s minds–from business owners to marketers–is “OK, so how do I rank in this thing?”  While my advice has always been to focus only on rankings in the general sense rather than obsessing over a certain position for [...]

Not that it is any surprise to anyone, but Google just announced the end of Place Pages. I’ll be posting my thoughts as I poke around on the new interfaces throughout the day. “Check back frequently,” as they say.

Disclosure: GetListed.org, a company where I serve as president, currently receives a small referral fee from both Yext and Localeze for business owners we send their way & sign up for a paid account.  Reader Kat Taylor recently commented on my Local Search Ecosystem post, as well as Kelly Marsh (comment), and a dozen or [...]

We (the GetListed.org faculty) recently completed our first Local University north of the border, May 1st in Edmonton, thanks to the awesome efforts of Darren Shaw to get a room full of 150 business owners to the event.  As part of the preparation for that event, it was necessary to create a Canadian version of [...]

The inevitable integration of Google’s Plus and Places products, obvious since Day One of Plus, finally seems like it might be imminent. We’ve seen several signals from Google in the last couple of months that this integration may be coming sooner rather than later: 1) Google completed a major backend infrastructure update this Spring, presumably in preparation for [...]