What are you doing differently after Carousel?
-
Especially Restaurant and Hospitality marketers, have you changed your SEO or (as in my case much of my) overall online strategy for your Hospitality Clients after Carousel?
Carousel's functionality as a SERP is so different that it does seem to have larger implications for businesses that will be presented in this SERP format. Now rather than one click to a client's website where you have much more control over the experience, Carousel will create more clicking and comparison shopping within the SERP. Clicking on a Thumbnail in Carousel doesn't click through to the business' website, instead it now returns a new SERP with a search phrase on the business name.
As a result, things like online ratings sites (Yelp, Urbanspoon, etc) are much more relevant to the client's overall digital presence. Hence in many cases the need on the part of clients for more digital marketing services.
And while on first blush, it appear to potentially be a negative for SEO and a boon to other disciplines, I am currently of the belief that this raises the stakes for SEO for restaurants in competitive markets immeasurably. All of the Carousel SERPs that I've seen have been limited to two panels of horizontal thumbnails. If your restaurant doesn't appear in those results, you're much less likely to have online traffic turn into real world traffic. Interested to hear the input of the community, especially those that specialize in Hospitality Marketing.
-
Hi John,
While I don't own a hotel or restaurant or other entertainment-oriented business, I have been working in Local SEO since the mid-2000s. While I'm not sure that it's necessary to do anything 'different', I do think the carousel may prompt Local business owners and Local SEOs to do some things better. Namely:
-
You have got to be on top of your citation sources. Because clicking on a business in the carousel now brings up a big list of citations in the SERPs, reputation management has just been pointed up as more important than ever. Crummy reviews on your Yelp profile or bad NAP data on your Yahoo! Local profile are going to have a greater impact on any user who actually scrolls around through that page of branded SERPs. Keeping your citations up to date, responding positively to negative reviews and working hard to earn good reviews simply matter more than ever now for carousel-included businesses.
-
Images matter more than ever now. There was a completely awesome forum post about how to control which image appears for your business. Go to: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search/8819-case-study-images-businesses-carousel-local-results.html The author's test was relatively small, but his order of operations for getting a preferred image to appear in the carousel make sense to me. I'll quote here:
"The whole point of this is to inform you that; you have control over the images that show on the new results. Here is a quick breakdown of what Google is looking for.
1. Listing verified and managed in Google Places (This is the easiest method of control)
2. Gathers User Photos for unverified listing
3. Uses Citation Sources as a last resort for photos.
4. Adds a map image when nothing else can be found."
At the same time, actually choosing which image will make you stand out in the lineup matters a lot now, too. Mike Blumenthal touches on this in this piece (http://localu.org/blog/google-introduces-new-carousel-display-for-local-results/) but I have yet to see a real study of tactics that make an image stand out. For example, is it better to have a closeup of food or an image of your building as your main photo? What about the use of color? Does using red make your image pop? Etc. This is deserved of experimentation, for sure.
3. Where you're at in the carousel lineup matters, based on early heatmap studies. Mike Ramsey wrote a good piece on this and a study of the heatmap is helpful in understanding this:
http://localu.org/blog/a-heat-map-click-study-for-googles-local-carousel-results/
- Expect change. Google is experimenting with this right now. Just this week, I was discussing with a member here at Moz the fact that some people are seeing a toggle button in the carousel that is totally absent for other people. This kind of behavior is indicative of testing. And, the whole thing with the Zagat-based ratings is in flux right now, too. So, the carousel we are seeing in mid-July may be quite different from the one we're seeing in December later this year.
Overall, I don't really see the carousel as a game changer. I see it as incentive to continue to do better at the core work of Local SEO. Having a violation-free Google+ Local page, building strong, clean citations, earning diverse reviews, managing your reputation, etc.
I hope others will contribute to this important topic John has brought up!
-
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
-
Optimising meta tags: How to write them perfectly without duplicating? Impact of using different keywords?
Hi friends, Generally most of the articles about tags are either title rag or header tags, but not about both. I would like to know how to write perfect title and header tags. How much they must be relevant and different? Can we use the same tags for title and H1? If we are planning to rank for different keywords, can that different keywords can be used? I'm really curious to see some interesting answers for this. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Which is the best way - to have all FAQ pages at one place, or splitted in different sections of the website?
Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | lgrozeva0 -
Dublicate Content: Almost samt site on different domains
Hi, I own a couple of casting websites, which I'm at the moment launching "local" copies of all over the world. When I launch my website in a new country, the content is basically allways the same, except the language sometimes changes country for country. The domains will vary, so the sitename would be site.es for Spain, site.sg for Singapore, site.dk for Denmark and so. The websites will also feature diffent jobs (castings) and diffent profiles on the search.pages and so, BUT the more static pages are the same content (About us, The concept, Faq, Create user and so). So my Questions are: Is this something that is bad for Google SEO? The sites are atm NOT linking to each other with language-flags or anything - Should I do this? Basically to tell google that
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
the business behind all these sites are somewhat big. Is there a way to inform Google on, that these sites should NOT be treated as dublicate content (Canonical tag wont do, since I want the "same" content to be listet on the locally Google sites). Hope there is some experts here which can help. /Kasper0 -
Difference between Google's link: operator and GWT's links to your sites
I haven't used the Google operator link: for a while, and I noticed that there is a big disparity between the operator "link:" and the GWT's links to your site. I compared these results on a number of websites, my own and competitors, and the difference seem to be the same across the board. Has Google made a recent change with how they display link results via the operator? Could this be an indication that they are clean out backlinks?
Algorithm Updates | | tdawson090 -
Mutliple Websites for Same Company (different areas of practice)
My company has had one primary website for a number of years, a few years back we created a second website separate and apart from the first one to generate more business in a niche market that we cater to. Since then we ended up adding 3 more websites to help increase our footprint with more content. Each of the new websites deal with a major aspect of our business and the content generated on those websites are related to those areas of our business. My question is - is it bad idea to have a network of 5 websites for SEO-purposes? What are the pros and cons and why? Any supporting resources to back up your position would be greatly appreciated. Note there is no "duplicate content" problem here, all content we create is unique to the site it is hosted on.
Algorithm Updates | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Changing the # of results per page in Google search settings displays totally different results. Why is this?
Curious what's going on here. This is the first time I've seen this before. What's happening is this ... In Google, I search for "mobile apps orange county" and get a standard list of 10 results. I go to Google's search settings in the top right corner of the page (button is grey with a gear) to change the number of results per page from 10 to 50 (also did 100). When I go back to Google and search again for "mobile apps orange county" I get a much larger list but with completely different results. This time around the top 10-12 are dominated by the same website (ocregister.com) What's going on here that Google would now show different results? Why is this one website all of a sudden dominating the first 12 results? Thanks everyone! ByteLaunch
Algorithm Updates | | ByteLaunch0 -
Why does my Rank Checker result differ to SERPs
Hello SEOmoz members I've got yet another naive question for you. RankChecker is telling me that my client has risen to pg 1 position 7. Whilst SERPs is telling me they are still on position 14. I know that SERPs is variable depending on many factors, but this holds true for separate searches on other computers in various far flung locations. Please give me some insight into what is happening. I'm waiting to open the bubbly! Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | catherine-2793880 -
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey1