Google Exposes Your Competition

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