Google Places - Top Listing & Strange Analytics
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Hello, we have been working with this customer for a few years, doing their PPC, organic marketing, and we had established one google places listing for them as well. I guess the owner got sold on having someone else work with us to do google places for an additional office location they recently set up, and for whatever reason, they bypassed having us do it. This company never gained FTP access to the website. And despite heavy competition (apparantly), they have that new location listed in the #1 - A spot, without making any changes to the website.
And, to top it off, when you review the Google places performance, there is a weird result I had never before seen labeled as "* loc:". You can see what I'm talking in both screen shots.
Is there any guidance you can offer, first as to what that listing label means, and second, do you have any ideas how to 'reverse engineer' how they were able to get top listing so quickly for our customer like that?
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Here is the data on the other listing we did. Top listing for the other search term location. These places results also actually have that "* loc:" listing in it as well as you will see. This second listing received less impressions, but more actions.
I just still can't decipher how a top tier spot for a second location was obtained without any FTP access to the website. Thanks for the help everyone, if anyone has more info after seeing this additional info, feel free to chime in
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loc: is a Google search operator that returns results for your search query near a particular location. The average searcher wouldn't be familiar enough with it to use it deliberately. I wonder if those could be Google Maps searches?
How do citations on their listing compare to yours?
I have to wonder if some clickstream data is coming into play somehow, but that's pure speculation on my part.
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I can't help on the * loc but I would also be interested to know how they achieved this so quickly. I tend to see a 2-3 week turnaround until Places listings start to show
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