How Can I move a site higher in Google Places?
-
As we all know Google Local Business/Places now has significant real estate for many searches. What I find hard to understand is what makes the difference between the different positions. Is it solely based on the content in Google Places itself or is it regular ranking factors.
I am (like everybody) on a hell for leather search to try and rank above my competition but having studied their Places information I do not think there is much I more I can do.
Suggestions hat have actually worked for you?
-
Just to update people on this topiuc and what has changed / not changed
My URL is http://www.grangewebdesign.com and target keywords are website design Cork, web design Cork and Cork before each of these as well as that is the city I live in
- I made some subtle change to the address (removed the area I was on as Google Maps did not recognise the actual area and now it matches the people above me.
- I made sure my content was solid on the page and guess what
- For the search terms website design Cork where I was 5th on the Google Places list I am now on page 2
- For the search terms web design Cork where I was bottom of Page 1 for SERPs I am now on Page 3
Time for a stiff drink. But really I have really worked hard on this and now it seems I am doing more damage than good..
-
If the order reversal includes shuffling the place name away from "city, ST" you can see dramatic differences.
-
Just to keep you up to date. I got 5 more reviews and now I have 6 and the increased reviews have not moved my placement. I suspect that irrespective of the activity that you do on Google Places that your site's actual authority, links etc etc still have a strong factor in the placement.
I am actually creating an excel table looking forensically at the people above to see what really stands out from their Google Places listing from mine to see if even the smallest tweak makes a difference.
What is interesting is that for a different order of the exact same keywords there is only one Google Places listing presented which I find very interesting as well - any ideas on that one ?
-
Google pulls reviews from across the web, not just Google accounts.
-
It sounds like if you're dealing with subtle tweaks and small details you'll need to get some insight into your specific situation, i.e. add your url and search terms to the discussion, or hire someone to hep with an audit.
To answer your question about subtle difference, yes, I've seen something as simple as being more centrally located within a specific area code give a better ranking in map results. This was a while ago though, and I think it's changed some, but it is an example of subtle difference. Of course this might not help your situation whatsoever.
-
Thanks for that working on getting them as well. 3 so far in last week. It's a pain in the behind when the reviewer has to have a gmail address though as my hundreds of satisfied customers (:-)) don't all have GMail addresses.
-
Reviews, reviews,reviews!
-
Thanks Ryan and appreciatethe speed of your answer. I have actually read this article before and have implemented nearly all the items that make sense. I do notice that the Google Categories have changed slightly recently with Services - XXX as new ones for a range ot items.
However after implementing these it has not made a huge difference. I think this URL is a good Intermediate primer for people but I think that it is very small details in this area that will make the difference for me. Has anyone seen subtle tweaks hat have made differences? My keywrods by the way are far from competitive and are in the 1-2K range.
-
http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml This is an excellent break down of the factors that go in to local search. David Mihm is also on the SEOmoz website so if you need an expert in the field you can contact him.
As you can see from the article there are at least 58 positive indicators and 11 negative indicators that all influence your localized ranks, being a combination of localized content and regular ranking factors. Hopefully by scanning through this article you'll be given several ideas of where you can improve your results.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving to https with a bunch of redirects my programmer can't handle
Hi Mozzers, I referred a client of mine (last time) to a programmer that can transition their site from http to https. They use a wordpress website and currently use EPS Redirects as a plugin that 301 redirects about 400 pages. Currently, the way EPS redirects is setup (as shown in the attachment) is simple: On the left side you enter your old url, and on the the right side is the newly 301'd url. But here's the issue, since my client made the transition to https, the whole wordpress backend is setup that way as well. What this means is, if my client finds another old http url that he wants to redirect, this plugin only allows them to redirect https to https. As of now, all old http to https redirects STILL work even though the left side of the plugin switched all url's to a default HTTPS. But my client is worried the next plugin update he will lose all http to https redirects. While asking our programmer to add all 400 redirects to .htaccess, he states that's too many redirects and could slow down the website. Well, we don't want to lose all 400 301's and jeopardize our SEO. Question: what does everyone suggest as an alternative solution/plugin to redirect old http urls to https and future https to https urls? Thank you all! Ol8km
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Can a "site split" cause a drastic organic search decline?
Let's say you have a client. They have two big, main product offerings. Come early April of this year, one of the product offerings decide to move their product offering over to a new domain. Let's also say you had maybe 12 million links in your inbound link portfolio for the original domain. And when this product offering that split opened their new domain, they 301 redirected half of those 12 million links (maybe even 3/4s) over to their new domain. So you're left with "half" a website. And while you still have millions of links; you lost millions as well. Would a ~25-50% drop in organic traffic be a reasonable effect? My money is on YES. Because all links to a domain help "rise" the page authority sea level of all URLs of the domain. So cutting off 50-75% of those links would drop that sea level a somewhat corresponding amount. We did get some 301 redirects that we felt were "ours" in place in late July... but that really accounted for 25% of the total amount of pages with inbound links they took originally. And those got in place almost 4 months after the fact. Curious what other people may think. LnEazzi.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristianMKG0 -
How long will this Site be punished? (place your bets!)
Got hit with a manual penalty in Feb2014. Got it removed in 6 months (before the Penguin refresh). Whole site got deindexed at one point including BRAND searches. (Brand searches has since come back) Disavowed over 20k domains (yea spam was bad). But still have a good amount of authority links such as huff post, edu, wiki, apple apps, reddit etc. About 97% of our links are on page 2 or beyond. Cant get past that spot 11 'Wall'. The suppression machine is not kind. We even had a very popular article get tons of shares, media pick up, and the original article would not rank on the first page for its title. Our 'brand + keyword' gets about 2k searches a month. Just 'keyword' gets nothing, which i find amusing. So whats the prognosis doc? Another year, 3 or never? Anyone else in same boat? Wait for the next penguin refresh and hope for the best? Cheers eXfPjzX.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsHot0 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
Website penalised can't find where the problem is. Google went INSANE
Hello, I desperately need a hand here! Firstly I just want to say that I we never infracted google guidelines as far as we know. I have been around in this field for about 6 years and have had success with many websites on the way relying only in natural SEO and was never penalised until now. The problem is that our website www.turbosconto.it is and we have no idea why. (not manual) The web has been online for more than 6 months and it NEVER started to rank. it has about 2 organic visits a day at max. In this time we got several links from good websites which are related to our topic which actually keep sending us about 50 visits a day. Nevertheless our organic visita are still 1 or 2 a day. All the pages seem to be heavily penalised ... when you perform a search for any of our "shops"even including our Url, no entries for the domain appear. A search example: http://www.turbosconto.it zalando What I will expect to find as a result: http://www.turbosconto.it/buono-sconto-zalando The same case repeats for all of the pages for the "shops" we promote. Searching any of the brads + our domain shows no result except from "nike" and "euroclinix" (I see no relationship between these 2) Some days before for these same type of searches it was showing pages from the domain which we blocked by robots months ago, and which go to 404 error instead of our optimised landing pages which cannot be found in the first 50 results. These pages are generated by our rating system... We already send requests to de index all theses pages but they keep appearing for every new page that we create. And the real pages nowhere to be found... Here isan example: http://www.turbosconto.it/shops/codice-promozionale-pimkie/rat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch
You can see how google indexes that for as in this search: site:www.turbosconto.it rate Why on earth will google show a page which is blocked by the robots.txt displaying that the content cannot retrieved because it is blocked by the robots instead of showing pages which are totally SEO Friendly and content rich... All the script from TurboSconto is the same one that we use in our spanish version www.turbocupones.com. With this last one we have awesome results, so it makes things even more weird... Ok apart from those weird issues with the indexation and the robots, why did a research on out backlinks and we where surprised to fin a few bad links that we never asked for. Never the less there are just a few and we have many HIGH QUALITY LINKS, which makes it hard to believe that this could be the reason. Just to be sure we, we used the disavow tool for these links, here are the bad links we submitted 2 days ago: domain: www.drilldown.it #we did not ask for this domain: www.indicizza.net #we did not ask for this domain: urlbook.in #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://inpe.br.way2seo.org/domain-list-878 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://shady.nu.gomarathi.com/domain-list-789 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://www.clicdopoclic.it/2013/12/i-migliori-siti-italiani-di-coupon-e.html #we did not ask for this, moreover and is a copy of a post of an other blog http://typo.domain.bi/turbosconto.it I have no clue what can it be, we have no warning messages in the webmaster tools or anything.
For me it looks as if google has a BUG and went crazy on judging our italian website. Or perhaps we are just missing something ??? If anyone could throw some light on this I will be really glad and willing to pay some compensation for the help provided. THANKS A LOT!0 -
Need help on SEO for my site. Can't figure out what is wrong.
My site, findyogi.com, isn't ranking well in google SERPs. For some good content and matching keyword, my pages are ranking 200+ whereas other sites that have similar or lower authority are ranking in top 10. I must be doing something fundamentally wrong but can't seem to figure out what. I am not looking at ranking 1 on google right now but my pages don't appear even on page 2-4. Sample Keyword- "Samsung galaxy s4 price in india" . Matching page - www.findyogi.com/mobiles/samsung/samsung-galaxy-s4-b94a37/price Please help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | namansr0 -
Huge Google index on E-commerce site
Hi Guys, I got a question which i can't understand. I'm working on a e-commerce site which recently got a CMS update including URL updates.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn7
We did a lot of 301's on the old url's (around 3000 /4000 i guess) and submitted a new sitemap (around 12.000 urls, of which 10.500 are indexed). The strange thing is.. When i check the indexing status in webmaster tools Google tells me there are over 98.000 url's indexed.
Doing the site:domainx.com Google tells me there are 111.000 url's indexed. Another strange thing which another forum member describes here : Cache date has been reverted And next to that old url's (which have a 301 for about a month now) keep showing up in the index. Does anyone know what i could do to solve the problem?0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840