Optimising for Local Search Results – Google Place Search
Filed under: Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines
Google Place Search
Is ranking well for local search results important to your business? If yes, read on.
This week Google introduced Place Search, a new kind of search result that organizes the information around local places. Whether you’re looking for a restaurant, dry clean or tuition centre, you’ll find what you’re looking for more quickly and easily.
Google Place Search
They had clustered search results around specific locations so you can make comparisons and choose the best sites. Many a times, the address and telephone number maybe listed, which allows you to quickly pick up your phone to make the enquiry. You should already be seeing place results automatically for many local searches. If you don’t see Place Search results at first, you can always click Places in the left-hand panel of the results page.
Place Search had been around for awhile on beta. Now they had moved the Map to the right and in fact, the map moves with you as you scroll down the page.
How would this change affect SEO and PPC(SEM)?
For SEO, if your site used to be listed in the Top 10, you would had been pushed further down. In some cases, there can be up to 7 Places Page listings and the organic listings is been reduced to 7 only. If your site had always been at 8-10 position, you could potentially be pushed to the second page.
For PPC, with the Map been moved to the right, it pushes the “Sponsored Links” in the right panel further down by about 4 listings. Worst still, when the user scrolls down the page, the Map covers the Sponsored Links showing only the organic results.
And of course, to beat the game of local search, you can:
1) Make sure you are rank in the top 7 for organic results
2) Get your Place Page ranking in the first 7 in Place Search
3) Make sure that your PPC ads appears in the first four-five listing so that you remain in the first fold of the screen
If you click on this link, you can see that we had been able to rank ourselves well for the keyword “seo singapore“.
So if you want to know how we can help you rank well in local search results with the new Place Search, contact us at +65 94500295 or info@advantageseo.net.
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Was about to blog about this, guess you beat me to it. Not sure why I’m ranked at number 1 but no complaints here
Well.. Supposedly, Google take into account the website’s organic performance and take a hybrid with the Place Page results. I am happy to be on-par with the more senior guys since. Cheers!
It is no doubt that google is paying more attention to local searches now.
And also you can see Yahoo is looking into this aggressively too.