LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Executive Summary: Who knows?
But here’s a data point of one:
The Main Street Meat N Fish Market recently opened in Pleasanton.  My wife asked me to find their hours so I went to Google and queried “pleasanton meat n fish market“.  At the top of the SERP was this result from Patch.com (congrats to them!) but [...]

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With all of the brouhaha going on about Google’s test of a new local SERP for category searches that will make it much harder for local directories to get traffic, I became almost willfully blind to the more subtle change that had occurred to the SERP for business name queries.  Thanks to Patrick Altoft for [...]

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Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing:
…you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea [...]

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David Mihm has done it once again and published another edition of Local Search Ranking Factors.  This year David surveyed 32 local search geeks to get their takes on the top factors for ranking high in Google Maps.  The entire set of results is well worth the time for any business that wants to do [...]

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Mike Blumenthal has a great recap of a recent webinar held by the Google Places team where they answered a lot of frequently asked questions.  Here are a couple of my faves:
Q: Can we use call tracking phone numbers in our listings? if not, why?
A: No, please use the most local phone number available. [...]

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and other great local seo tips from Dev Basu. See Page 16 for the GOOG Maps thing.

via @davidmihm

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Last week Google launched a controversial new feature on local Place Pages - a list of nearby businesses that promotes local competitors on a business’ Place Page, even if that business has claimed their GLBC profile.  With this move Google has perhaps decided that the Yellow Pages industry is totally off their rockers - many [...]

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In my recent interview on SEOBook I mused that Google might create ways for agencies to get access to a business’ GLBC profile.  Matt McGee spoke with a GLBC rep today and got the following responses:
“agency access to LBC is unlikely”
&
“they may give biz owner a way to share account with one person”
Not perfect but [...]

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Last week saw the launch of Google Place Pages which Google described as “a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.” Nothing like a modest goal to scare the crap out of everybody else in local search.
According to Greg Sterling Google was not going to be indexing Place [...]

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Google Maps is on the verge of creating an international incident.  I did the following search on Google:
“pizza 94566″
I got the 10 pack.  Check out the URL for “New York Pizza”

If I had wanted a “Damn Tasty!” za from Amstelveen I would have asked for one Google.
I highly recommend checking out the site.  I personally [...]

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Check out the above local result for “flooring phoenix, az”.  Why is www.bakerbrosdeli.com showing up as the URL for Baker Bros Area Rugs & Flooring?  This is likely just a simple case of an algorithmic mismatch, but given how easy it is to edit the business listings in Google Maps, it also could be a [...]

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Mike Blumenthal posted a pretty thorough overview of changes to Google Local Business Center.  As always Mike is the man if you want to dive into the details of everything GLBC.

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