Vanessa Fox, formerly of Google and now of Zillow, made an interesting comment on the SMX Local SEO panel today. While encouraging businesses to upload as much data as possible, including photos, to Google Local Business Center, she said “If your data matches 3rd party data that is important – you’re seen as more accurate.”

I take that to mean that if the data you add yourself matches the data that Google gets from suppliers like Localeze and InfoUSA, that you get better positioned in Google local searches. Sounds like a good incentive to make sure that all of the data suppliers have your most up to date information.

I’ll try to catch up with Vanessa to see if I can get more details.

Share This Story!

About Author

6 Response Comments

  • Vanessa Fox  October 1, 2007 at 6:39 pm

    I think it’s valuable to make sure that your data is accurate on third-party sites (in addition to registering with the the local component of major search engines) since the search engines use this third-party data as one of their data sources. If you can keep the data accurate across all sources to help the engines aggregate the data for your correctly, it can only benefit you.

  • Andrew Shotland  October 1, 2007 at 9:55 pm

    Thanks for the clarification Vanessa and thanks for stopping by.

  • Chris H.  December 4, 2008 at 11:52 am

    Andrew,

    Do you know if there are any other 3rd party sites that Google references for local business info these days?

  • Andrew Shotland  December 4, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    If you look in Google Local you’ll see that they are matching up data from a number of sources including Yelp, Elocallistings, Superpages, Insiderpages, etc.

  • Andrew Shotland  April 21, 2011 at 9:57 am

    Relocating your business is basically starting from scratch in both the Google Local world and the real world.

  • Andrew Shotland  April 21, 2011 at 10:06 am

    I guess I was thinking more like if you move your restaurant from one location to another you have to remarket your restaurant. Potato/potahto