Hitting the top of Google Places!
-
Hi there,
I am quite confused about how to get a good rankings on Google Places? It will be much appreciated to get an answers from PROs on following questions:
- On which websites I need to submit my details in order to rank well?
- Are there any rules which my website need to follow in order to rank well in GP?
- **Which techniques are you implementing in order to find proper websites influencing on Google Places? **
- If there any 3rd party websites which helps to do so?
- Could Google Adwords have an impact on my presence in Google Places?
- Any major mistakes I should to avoid?****
Your detailed answers will help a lot, I am really upset about my knowledge about GP.
Cheers,
Russel
-
Dear Russel,
Thank you for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. I should start by mentioning that there are some differences in Local depending on the country in which you are operating. You may need to look for extra tips specific to your country (I'm in North America) but here are the essential steps a local business needs to take.
1. It is critical before embarking on a local campaign that you understand that the heart of local in NAP (name, address, phone number). Nearly everything is dependent upon the consistency with which you publicize your legal business name, physical address and local area code phone number. You only qualify as a local business if you have these three things (NAP). Whether you are on your website or off your website listing yourself in local business directories, you must consistently list your NAP in all places without variation.
2. Create an excellent, strong website with terrific content that has been written from a geographic perspective. In other words, if you are a dentist, you will be writing about the city and state you are in as well as the services you offer. You want a great homepage, great service pages, great city landing pages if you have more than one physical location and a strong contact page. Make sure that your title tags, meta, alt tags are locally-optimized and make sure that your complete NAP is in the header, footer or side navigation on every single page of your website. Make sure that your complete NAP is the first thing you put on your Contact Page.
3. Once you have your great locally-optimized website up and running, you will begin the process of getting your business profiled in the various local business indexes. In most countries, the most important of these is Google Places. It is absolutely vital that you read Google's Places Quality Guidelines and not violate any of them. Here is the link:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528
You are allowed one listing per physical location, unless you run something like a medical clinic, in which case each doctor may have his own listing in addition to one listing for the whole office. Do not attempt to keyword stuff your Place Page or misrepresent your physical location. Pay special attention to each of the rules in the guidelines. Failure to comply 100% with the guidelines can lead to penalization or banning of your account. Each of the different local directories has their own set of rules that you must acquaint yourself with, and there are many, many places you can list your business. In the USA, many people choose to create their Google Place Page and then pay either Localeze.com or Universal Business Listings to automatically submit their business to a large number of local directories. Or, you can choose not to pay these companies and do it manually yourself. Here is an excellent post from Myles Anderson at Search Engine Land regarding the top 50 citation sources for the US and UK:
http://searchengineland.com/top-50-citation-sources-for-uk-us-local-businesses-104938
4. Beyond inclusion in the major local business indexes mentioned in step 3, there may be other niche directories specific to your industry in which inclusion would be valuable. For example, if your business restores vintage cars, there might be some vintage car directories where you would want to be included. These niche resources you will need to hunt for yourself, depending on your industry.
5. In addition to getting profiled in directories, local business owners must also tackle the subject of user reviews. You will want to be listed at review sites and you will want to actively manage your reviews. Yelp is very major in the USA. TripAdvisor is international for travel-related sites. Essentially, you want to keep track of when and where people are reviewing you and then, if possible, thank them for their praise or attempt to help them feel better if they were dissatisfied with your service. Here is my oft-cited article on which review sites allow you which powers of response:
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=502
It is essential that you develop a healthy approach to dealing with negative reviews. You must learn to respond gracefully and wisely so that you don't escalate a situation from bad to worse. There are numerous good articles out there on the web about responding well to negative reviews. Apart from responding to voluntary reviews, you will want to put a process in place for encouraging reviews from your happy customers. But remember - do not write fake reviews for your own business, do not pay any marketer to write fake reviews for your business and do not pay any marketer to post reviews that have been gathered from real customers. Reviews must ALWAYS be posted by the user directly - never by you or anyone else.
6. Once you've got all this going, what you do next depends on the type and competitiveness of your industry. In some small towns with low population and low competition, you may never need to do any more than what's already been covered, but for any business that has to compete a little harder, your next options might included beginning a blog on your site to improve your content and keep it fresh, getting involved in Social Media, video marketing, email marketing, linkbuilding or other forms of marketing. Don't forget, local businesses often need to make plans for offline marketing as well. What you do depends on how hard you need to work to get to the top. Lots of choices! I hope this response will get you started in local with the right understanding and a pro-active mindset.
- Miriam
-
It can happen to anyone. The good part is that Benu Aggarval does share the knowledge with us, and we should be grateful for this.
-
Hi Istvan,
Thanks a lot for your advise I am really surprised how I could miss that webinar. Watching it now! But accent is terrible. Franky speaking leaving in Dubai, I can hear the same accent every day.
Cheers,
Russel
-
Hi Istvan,
Thanks a lot for your advise I am really surprised how I could miss that webinar. Watching it now! But accent is terrible. Franky speaking leaving in Dubai, I can hear the same accent every day.
Cheers,
Russel
-
Great suggestion!
Just for a quick reference, though, ranking correlation for Places has been stated in this order for the few articles I read:
1. Claiming your places
2. Completing your profile
3. Local citations
4. Reviews
Local Citations are things like Yellow Pages, Yelp, City Search, Etc. A company called Whitespark has a tool for checking citations, but I've never used it, so I couldn't honestly recommend it. However, I do plan on using it sometime in the future.
-
Hi Ruslan, Google Places is pretty much based on customer ratings and your location so the best way to rank up is to just market to locals and practice good customer service. Make sure your listing is up to date and takes advantage of everything there is, especially the offers. Some businesses will offer a reward, like a discount, when people leave a good rating but I've never liked this practice. You get superficial reviews and possibly a ban from Google.
However, a lot of customers will be happy to leave a good review if they had a good experience and you ask them politely. It's mainly location-based though. If I look for restaurants near me, I'm going to see the nearest ones first, not necessarily the highest rated (at least that I know of). For people who have already reviewed other businesses Google Places will try to narrow results down a little based on what the person seems to like.
-
Hi Russel,
My advice would be to go and check up the webinar section. There has been a quite good webinar last Thursday pointing out dos and don't for Google Places.
I believe it will give answer to all of your questions.
I hope that will help,
Istvan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Search Console
abc.com www.com http://abc.com http://www.abc.com https://abc.com https://www.abc.com _ your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
AngularJS - How does Google go?
We're rebuilding our entire website in angularJS. We've got it rendering fine in WMT, but does that mean that it's content is detectable? I've looked into prerender.io and that seems like a great solution to the problem of not seeing any static HTML, but is it really necessary? I'm looking into this as I'm having the argument currently with my devs, and they're all certain that Google renders angularJS fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localdirectories0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
Does Google check Whois
Hello everyone, I own quite a lot of website active in the same niche and sometimes targeting the same keywords, these sites are hosted at different IP's. But they all have the same Whois details, i was wondering if Google checks the Whois-data? And if it affects the serp's? Regards, Yannick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iwebdevnl0 -
What is a good content for google?
When we start to study SEO and how google see our webpage, one important point is to have good content. But, for beginners like me, we get lost on this. Is not so black and white: what for you is a good content? the text amount matters? there is any trick that all good content websites need to have?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0 -
Lost Google rankings for the main keywords
Hello everybody, I love seomoz and was enjoying all the benefits it has, was reading Q&A and implementing new marketing strategies for my website. I would really appreciate if anyone could explain my situation. The website, to which I devoted last 12 months of my time, was suddenly dropped from it's main keywords to nowhere 2 days ago, it does not look like a "dance" because some of my competitors lost their rankings too. I think its a penalty. The site http://goo.gl/3VTMq is almost 2 years old, of the highest quality content. I've been adding content slowly over 24 months, building backlinks slowly, the rankings also were going up slowly. Here are some of the keywords I've been ranking for: car insurance companies - 12, best auto insurance companies - 1, top car insurance companies 1, cheap auto insurance - 16, low cost auto insurance 4,lowest auto insurance - 2, and many more... According to seomoz, I have no major problems with on-site seo, I have low bounce rate, high pages/visit and high time on site. There is only one left - incoming backlinks. Google says that it just can't hurt you, but I think this is the only explanation of my problem. My backlinks consist of everything - from high quality contextual backlinks, to lower quality comment backlinks. I used Press Release services too.. This problem is like a nail in my head, I look forward to hearing your response. Thanks in advance, Vaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VazMamnya0