In general you should know who your competition is in the SERPs, but Google just made it easier (unless I have totally missed this feature for months which is possible). I just noticed a “Pages similar to ” widget at the bottom of the results. Here’s what I got when I queried “localseoguide”
It appears that GOOG is using a site’s homepage meta description tag to add the snippet after the link. As you can see from this query for “dev basu” I am not using one.
So this might be a good time for you to check your meta description and make sure the first few words are compelling (I’m talking to you Exposelocal – Love SEOlogist’s btw). So far the longest one I have found is 89 characters including brand, snippet and URL. So if you have a long brand or URL, you are going to have a short snippet to work with.
Here are some examples for local search players:
Yelp
CitySearch
DexKnows
Local.com
CitySquares
Webvisible
6 Response Comments
I’m a competitor with Andrew, Dev and Larry? Whatchoo talkin bout Google?
The one thing I have found is that the accuracy in Google’s results on this don’t always correlate. I ran this for my personal blog and found that it said I was similar to sites completely unlike mine, however they were sites I referenced in posts years ago.
I’m not sure how the algo determines these results, but I think the findings are hit or miss.
I too have seen this feature for the last few months and as Mike mentions, the results are all over the place. I think the information could still be used and as with a lot of Google changes, the results will probably get better with time.
My question is, what is Google doing to determine site relevance? Content? Meta info? Visitor history? Or search query competition? Would be nice to optimize to be listed under my competitors.
I cant find pages similar to widget, where is it ?
Nice find Andrew. I’d seen it and completely ignored it’s value. Nice work.