Is it valuable for a local business to build links into its Google Place?
-
G'Day All, Almost all of my clients are geo-based small service-based businesses. I've noticed during my research that the google places for our competitors in 3 separate niches (3 different clients) seem to be the dominating results for almost all relevant keyword terms. I'm curious to see if anyone has actively tried to increase the ranking of a google place by building links into it. Is this something that anyone else sees value to for a local small business? I would love to get some thoughts. And for that matter I'm also curious to see if anyone thinks there might be value to optimizing a Facebook Fan Page or Yelp Business page. They all seem to be key drivers of traffic our client websites so I'm wondering how difficult it is to make them rank as opposed to a website. Thanks!
-
Thanks guys. Very much appreciate the feedback! I'll run a couple of them and see how they go
-
I feel that linking to the Google places listings from the company website is still something which you can drive benefit from you can also link to the places locations from various 3rd party sites.
Whilst linking to the places account provides benefit, I feel that other factors have more importance such as the number of reviews, the on site text targeting the page, huge number of citations from 3rd party sites, category's also if the domain name is a EMD (exact match domain) it can provide some benefit to the ranking which I have seen.
-
I have asked this question in the past and generally gotten the answer that it is not useful. I look forward to hearing other peoples opinions on the topic though.
One thing i have noticed in the last couple months with local SEO is that all the sites that really rank, actually really have quite a lot better page/domain/trust rank than the sites that don't rank well. It seems more than ever it is important to have good qaulity, high authority backlinks to your domain, in order to rank will in local. It seems citations are hardly that important at all anymore, but reviews still hold some weight, if you can get them to stick in a believable pattern.
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
-
Keywords local and national
Hello everyone. I asked a similar question but still find myself a bit confused. I am a magician who is trying to improve my web presence. I found a list of keywords which I will list below. The results read from left to right the search results in the United States, and in Ohio ( where I am from). I found these results using google planner. Magician 14800 390 Magicians 5400 170 Corporate Magician 170 10 Comedy Magician 140 10 Here is my question. Lets use the word Magician as an example. I see that there are 390 results in Ohio for the search term Magician. Would I want to key the phrase "magician" or "Ohio Magician". How does google work with this? If I key just the word "magician" and someone in Ohio google searches for Ohio Magicians or something similar, will it detect their location and put me on there radar? When I key in " Ohio Magician" in the planner the results that come back are 0 or less than 10. I'm curious if google works on location and if I'm wasting my time keying in all of these cities that are showing no results. I began targeting "Cleveland Magician" "Columbus Magician" etc. Should I just stick with the main term Magician?
Competitive Research | | Jasonalanmagic0 -
Help link building
Í am looking for a good company to help me on high cuality link building . Please can someone give any recommendations of good seo companies
Competitive Research | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Why is razorservers.com the #1 result on Google for dedicated server hosting?
Why is razorservers.com the #1 result on Google for dedicated server hosting? The site also ranks well on Google for the keyword dedicated server. It outranks sites with a PageRank of 7 and 100k+ back-links. Thanks
Competitive Research | | stevenbond0 -
Manta inbound link in OSE - competitor site yes, my site no, why?
Our site has had a link back to our site from Manta for a long time, but it's not appearing in our OSE results. One of our competitors similarly has an inbound link from Manta and that link DOES appear in their OSE results. I'm not certain whether that matters for us. Does it? But in any event, why would the one link appear but not the other? Thanks! Tim
Competitive Research | | tcolling0 -
Business Directories and Spammy Link Profile
Hi, have been reading a lot about submissions to directories and posting spamming blogs and forums and how they're a bad idea, saw a great post on it by Rand in a white board Friday lecture, the only thing is I've been analysing a company and that appears to be what makes up its entire link profile, all the links point to their home page with their primary phrase as the anchor text. Just wondered how a company with some 4k links the majority being follows, hasn't been penalised for what are a really bad set of back links. Should add that this is an insurance company, they're no light weights in their industry but certainly not one of the big boys. Thanks, Lee Example here
Competitive Research | | LeeMiller0 -
Link Attack
Here is an interesting situation. Overnight SEOMoz is now reporting about 1.1 million new backlinks to my site. The links look like they were added in March of 2011 and they are all on porn sites and link back to me with the words like "Indian Sex", "Sex Bathe", and "insex." This appears to be yet another attack on my site and it looks like it happened right before the April Panda update that hosed me. As an example of one of the pages you can look at seapotentialdifference.com/inurlife/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3081 and look for the link for Indian Sex. They linked to my forum and not the home page. At the same time SEOMoz discovered these links my DA dropped from 62 to 58. I'm wondering if anyone thinks these issues are connected. More importantly, does anyone have a suggestion on how to deal with this? For some reason the PA and DA of the porn site pages is above 70. This will probably be an ongoing battle for me since I am a journalist that covers the debt relief world and scammers don't like for me to expose them in an effort to protect consumers.
Competitive Research | | rockpaper0 -
Linkdomain google searches
I am watching a SEOmoz webinar: Future of Link Building.At 13 minutes into the move an example search is shown where the search term is linkdomain:seomoz.org -seomoz. Rand explains this search will show the results of all pages which mention seomoz.org but do not offer a followed link. I tried that search for one of my sites: linkdomain:www.terapvp.com -terapvp. It doesn't work at all. It shows a list of sites discussing "tera pvp", none of which have links to me at all. That leads to two questions: how does the linkdomain: query work? how would I ask Google to show a results page of sites with nofollow links and/or citations to my site?
Competitive Research | | RyanKent1