Google Places & Maps

[NeilInFrance]

Hi

I'm preparing a confernce in France to explain Google Places & Maps to an audience interested in promoting local businesses but mainly hotels and other tourism related.

As you know, searches such as Hotel + City are giving a lot of visibility to Google Places results. Being in the top results is as important if not more important than organic ranking.

I'm going to be looking into the new presentation of Google Places results in the SERPs and maybe underlining a difference in results between Places and Maps which I've just recently spotted.

Can anyone recommend some good ressources online to explain the changes that came about with Google Places  and ranking factors I should be talking about ?

If you have a pet theory on what triggers the different presentation of Places results in the main SERPS or what factors make one local business rank better than another in Google Places then please discuss below too

Ah ! Almost forgot, any feedback on Google Boost use also interesting for us ; although it isn't in France yet

Thanks

• Neil

[NeilInFrance]

Thanks Andy

That was a great tip

• Neil

[NeilInFrance]

Thanks for the 2 replies to my question ; Wissam gave a selection of good links and although I'd visited them all before it got me into the right frame of mind for preparing my conf (late one night!)

The conference went well and the slides (in French) can be seen here : http://fr.calameo.com/read/000121207eff44339f40f

Just to give back something to the community here is a resumé in English of what I presented

Introduction showing classic Google Places (Google Adresses in France) at the top of in Google's results for a search for Hairdressers in the town of Urrugne (where the conference was held). Google Places gives the best visibility on this page

The same results as Google Places results

None of these results show a web site or a verfied owner

But there is a choice from 1 to 8 and an order which is important. Being number one is important

The Google Places page and a point on the detail in the data that Google has found: address, telephone number, geo-localisation, Street View and references in other sites

Google Places pages for hotels have added features: prices from booking.com, hotels.com and availability search

Back to hairdressers, the same results in Google Maps (link from the top of Google.fr rather than the link in the left hand column). Some confusion as to what the difference is beteween Places and Maps (the Maps logo is shown on the Places business page)

Why is Zen Cut hairdressers first?

Rather ask why another is only 14th. The screen shot shows that Google found a lot less information on this company.

(Turns out that this person is a freelance hairdresser without a salon in Urrugne)

How could this hairdresser get from 14^th to the top of the results? Understand why Google hasn't found more information about her on the web. Claim the Places page. Create a web site and link this into the Places page

All of these actions should be enough to claim first page in the results. One action may be enough to get in the top 8

I then explain how to claim a Google Place page. The verification process.

Now a more complicated case: Hotels in Biarritz. There are over 100 hotels in the town of Biarritz. Being first in Google means a lot of direct business for hotels who may otherwise depend on Booking.com or other commission based booking systems (there are ranking issues there too)

The results are presented differently in this cas. My take is that is that these are mainly organic results complemented by info from Places, after or instead of classic snippets. In general we're in SEO territory: a large dataset and the need for sorting results with the “best” first. Best being the most relevant to the person searching.

The results in Google Places are NOT the same as Google Maps

We're looking at Google Maps being an application for geo-localising data and Places being a database of business organisations (the yellow pages); Places data can be shown in Maps but there is some other algorithm in action here - possibly with more weight to geographic data but also possibly based on availability information specific to hotels. The Maps results seem to based on an arrival and departure date

How can you be #1 in a more competitive situation ?

1st solution and the easiest: PAY for it. The screen shot shows Adwords with a Google Places extension. Boost is not available in France yet. Not many businesses are using the Adwords option

Now a question on SEO statergy. It's the first time I've addressed the issue in a conference to business owners. Once you know a lot about how Google can select and the order results (this bit to follow), what do you do with the info? White Hat or Black Hat. I'm strictly White Hat but you see a lot of good results from ignoring Google Places' quality guidelines so I can understand that people are tempted to cheat. A lot of people “cheat” un-intentionally

Judgement day is coming though We're seeing a lot of activity from Google's quality team at the moment, so I think that Google France are beginning to take Places a bit more seriously. During my research I came across companies with listings refused or removed. One company with 93 Places listings for his 1 company for example!

A lot of what follows is from the Places Guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528&rd=1 and official Google blog posts that have recently been translated to French

The first easy thing is to do is complete your Places page as much as possible

Be CAREFUL to respect the guidelines; Google says that companies that don't could be suspended from Places

I then show a hotel, in total disrespect of these guidelines, getting a good ranking for an important search by putting keywords in his company name. But my advice is still to correct his business name to respect the guidelines. He may be happy with this exploit now, but he will be less happy if he disappears from Google completely. Don't take the risk.

There is also another example of a hotel using all uppercase letters in his company name ranking well. Again this is against guidelines and should be corrected. We are possibly not facing a suspension for this but it is not impossible that it could affect some quality rating.

In the detail of other Google guidelines, I'm also recommending companies to select just one category in Google's list and then add their own categories if they think it is relevant ; Use service areas rather than creating false listing for nearby towns. Feedback from the audience on company actually doing this successfully though: company with one real address listed in most French towns at the same street address.

Use custom attributes to add links to your web site and keywords. If you're a hotel or restaurant, follow the examples that Google has given. These links are not direct as redirections are added.

You can also add news to your page. These posts can contain links and these are neither nofollow nor through redirections

black hats rush out of the room

Leaving the Places page, understand where Google is getting your data from, what trusted sources could there be in France? I’ve no fixed idea but Axciom exists here; Google originally got its data from Infobel. Official resources exist and these are more or less up to date.

Google is also matching address information in general business web directories and from your own site. Be sure to always use the same address in all your listing. Forgetting your address on your own site is a common mistake.

User reviews are part of the equation. Google has its own reviews (HotPot) and also gets info from other sources. Some are taken with the sources permission, others not. Use the service the review comes from to complain about a review

Reply to review where you can. Create accounts with the sites that give you reviews and give reviews to your competitors.

Is it a good idea to invent your own great reviews? Do you think that Google can spot that? Strange that some users only ever leave one review on the web, ever ... a brilliant one for your business. All using the same IP address. Hmm.

Google Hotpot was launched in January ... No one in the room had ever seen it before

Other review sites can be found by looking at other sites in the same sector. Examples of Hotels and Restaurants. Some reviews are machine-translated from international sites. The quality is questionable. Cases of organisations being attributed reviews from other companies.

Do reviews have to be positive? Here I translated some results from http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml ; general opinion is that no, but a 4 or 5 star listing will look better in the results and will attract more clicks ; improved CTR can improve ranking - possibly

Looking forward, France can expect Boost and Tags to be available soon

Google Real Estate exists in the UK but this is a separate data base

More Google developments on the travel business are expected. The new reservation feature is possibly one step in this; reaction from the room that it only forces hotels to pass through booking.com. Hotels can no longer be independent.

I ended with copy of the Web Equity wheel from http://www.blumenthals.com/index.php?web-equity-infographic which shows that Places is just one of the things that you should be doing to make your local business visible online

Hope that is useful for people on here

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Neil,

I have had very good success with Google places for customers by adding them into more local directories (for one part). Open any places page and go down to the bottom and look at the local results where the site is being found. You want to get yourself into more of these - find out which sites others are being found in and drop your customers in there

Regards,

Andy

[wissamdandan]

Dear Neil,

I wish you good luck @ your Conference, here's a couple of reference for Local Results

• David Mihm (http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml)
• Danny Dover (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-basics-of-local-seo-whiteboard-friday)
• David Mihm and Rand Fishkin (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-local-search-inclusion-with-david-mihm)

Concerning Google Boost, I think it very valuable, here is more details about discussed by Mike @ blumenthals

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/10/25/google-boost-more-details/