Tag : Google 7 pack

Google Takes Away 3 Local Map Listings: From 10 to 7

Posted by Jan at 8:13 pm

Were you as surprised as me to see that Google took away the 10-pack and now it is a 7-pack instead. I heard that they are going to take  away even more of them to start fitting some sort of classified local ads at the top.

Not only does the “10-pack” get smaller, the organic searches gets fewer and fewer.

Here is an interesting article by Eric from SEO boy

Google Map listings have undergone a recent change.  Also referred to as the 10-pack, it’s a selection of local businesses that accompanies your local search.  For example, if you search for “pizza springfield, MO” you’ll get a 10 recommended pizza places within that city that are pinpointed on a small Google Map right above the natural search results.

The recent change is that instead of the 10 map points listed as A through J are now truncated. The 10-pack is gone as now only 7 map points listed as A through G.

I personally think, they should have gone down to 6 map points so that SEO workers can go to conferences asking “hey, how’s your six pack?” Heh.

Anyway, what this does is increase competition down at the bottom. Those duking it out on the bottom now have to fight harder.  Losing a spot will mean more with a 3rd of the listing space gone.

So why the change?

The main guess is that Google is making way for Google Listing Ads, a new platform to bring PPC into hands of small business owners.  To introduce these ads, some visual real estate will need to be freed up.  For myself, I wondered for awhile if 10 listings were absolutely necessary.  Of course, when you are 8th, 9th or 10th you’d argue that “yes, they are very necessary!”

The 7 Pack Factors

So how is your “7-pack?”  Below are some factors that can help you adjust your position over time.  These methods don’t guarantee results, but they have generated results.

1. Claiming Your Local Business Listing.

For Google and Bing Listings, claiming your listing is the first step to getting yourself to the 7-pack.  It establishes authority and trust with the search engines.  Websites that “play ball” will get preferential treatment.

2. Having your Business Properly Categorized

I would recommended keeping tabs on your categories and the results of the traffic and then reduce the number of categories and reflect those changes to your main site.  Being sleek in what people are wanting will generate more qualified leads for your business.

3. Keyword Usage in Local Listing Description

This is huge! I’m always about keyword research and keeping tabs on what people are searching on the engines.  The description gives you freedom to put your most devastating keywords in place.

Do On-Page Factors Affect the 7-pack?

There is some evidence that some On-Page techniques can influence your Local Search Results.  Here are some items to consider for your localization of your website.

A. City/State Listed in Page Titles

The page titles are very strong in SEO terms.  Placing your city and state along with your keywords is a very strong tactic.

B. Address in Footer

Including a physical address in your footer will tell the search engines that you are a legit business and the burden of proving you are real isn’t on them.

C. Ditch the Toll-Free Number

Yep.  Ditch it.  Proudly display your local number.  These are local listing you are going for and, therefore, a toll-free number doesn’t make sense.

For more in-depth reviews of different Local Search Techniques, consult this article.  But remember, you need to test your own niche out for these techniques.  Your specific niche and location could probably blow the roof off your local results by just adding a Local Business Center to your campaign.

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Keeping myself on top of all the Google changes and trying to figure out the best way to deal with them is hard! I bet I read 20 reports or articles a week about new things happening. I do it, so you don’t have to @@:)

I try and share all the updates and information I come across that seem relevant. Let me know what you think about the Google changes!

Local Internet Marketing Research – Insider Google data released

Posted by Jan at 11:56 pm

Did you think your websites rank determined your local listing status?

Think again!

Tom Critchlow has done a great job of researching and distilling information about what makes local businesses rank with in the coveted Google 7 pack. Even if you aren’t an SEO junkie it is important information to know because it shows just how critical citations, reviews and proximity can be.

Getting the top spot in Google is always changing and shifting as they change and tweek thier algorithms. So research like this is invaluable in helping local search marketers understand the changes and hopefully – what is coming down the pike for Atlanta local SEO. The information shows that it isn’t just one thing like citations, review or tags, it seems tobe a combination of factors making each aspect  important. It might seem boring to the average business person but it gets alot more interesting when you reaslize that the difference means more calls, clients and sales to your local business!

Here is part of the article: to read the entire thing – click on his name below.

Google Local Research Data Released For Free

By: Tom Critchlow

Being a good SEO involves research. You need to be constantly pushing the envelope on the data that you gather, the insights that you gain and what recommendations you provide in terms of what works and what doesn’t.

What’s In The Data?

The link to the Google Docs file is here in case that’s easier for people.

It’s always nice to try and quantify exactly how important different factors are and do some analysis on which hypothesis are actually correct and which are just learned from the crowd and generally accepted as true.

I’ve got no ground-breaking insights in this post, but by analysing this data and other data I have come to the following conclusions:

1) – The raw number of reviews is not the only ranking factor.

We can see this by comparing for example the Renaissance Seattle Hotel and the Hilton Seattle Hotel – the Renaissance has WAY more reviews but still doesn’t rank.

2) – The raw number of citations is not the only ranking factor.

We can see this because the Grand Hyatt Seattle Hotel has an obscene number of citations compared to any other hotel in Seattle.

3) – The combined number of citations and reviews is not the only ranking factor

Although we’re getting warmer here (the sum column, E) this isn’t the whole story. If we look at the average sum of the top 7 ranking hotels we see that there are 3 hotels that don’t rank which have a higher sum than average – Renaissance, Grand Hyatt and the Crowne Plaza.

4) – Distance to centre (of Seattle) seems to play some part in the rankings

Looking at the data we see that the Edgewater Hotel has the highest combined total with many many reviews and a large number of citations but doesn’t rank number 1. Perhaps this is something to do with the fact that it’s a lot further out from the centre of Seattle than the other hotels – 1.3 miles to be precise, almost double the next furthest out ranking hotel at 0.7 miles (the Best Western).

5) Star ratings could well play a part in the rankings

Typically people have assumed that the raw number of reviews is more important than the sentiment of those reviews. However, this may not be true. Take a look at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, a very low combined reviews and citations score but 4.5/5 stars in total of the reviews.

6) Quality of citation almost certainly plays a part

Firstly, assuming it didn’t – citation spam would be big business! But digging into the data I see that the best western has a very low combined score but has citations from sites such as the New York Times. Same again with the Hilton, which has some very strong citations from authority sites. This suggests to me that quality of citation is important, or perhaps the number of citation root domains? (like with links, perhaps multiple citations from one domain don’t count so much…)

Note 1

There is still speculation that the ‘regular’ SEO factors come into play such as pagerank or strength of domain. I’m not convinced this is a factor. After all, Google Local Listings are attached to an business name (and address/phone number), not a URL. Sometimes there isn’t even a URL for Google to attach to the listing. This makes me think that regular on-page SEO factors don’t carry that much weight. I’d like to hear other’s thoughts on this though?

Note 2

It’s worth noting that in the data you might like to exclude the Crowne Plaza Hotel from your data analysis – when gathering the data I see that it’s missing an image which may imply a wider issue about data perhaps? Not sure what a missing image means but I doubt it’s good news for the Crowne Plaza. This is backed up by the fact that it by rights (i.e. combined citations and reviews score) it should rank, but it doesn’t

Contained in the full spreadsheet is Google Local data for a particular search phrase “Hotels in Seattle”. The link to the Google Docs file is here in case that’s easier for people.

• Summary – The summary information which contains the hotels which rank for the phrase. The top 7 are the ones that I see in the Google Local one-box. The remaining 13 are the ones which rank once you click on the map to explore Google Local rankings. The data contained includes the number of reviews, the number of citations and the distance to the centre of Seattle for each hotel.
• Sheet 1-20 – These sheets list the complete individual citation list for the relevant hotel. So for the edgewater hotel which ranks 4th we click on sheet 4 and see the full list of citations for that hotel.

Note 3

In a usual analysis I would have looked at the category of the listings, I don’t think this is a factor in this case since it’s a competitive SERP and all the listings are likely tagged with the Hotel category.

To Conclude…

What can you do to get better rankings? Get more citations and reviews! The combined number of these seems reasonably well correlated with rankings once you factor in distance from centre etc. Especially if you can get positive reviews and citations from strong websites.

But also, to conclude, we see that the algorithms are somewhat complicated. I’ve still not completely figured out why some sites rank and why some don’t but I’m getting close. I’d love to hear analysis from other Google Local SEOs who’ve been digging around in data. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours

Note: Thanks Tom! this was a very generous offer to share your reserach so freely, go to his blog here and join the conversation!

Atlanta Chiropractors – How many local customers are looking for you?

Posted by Jan at 10:22 pm

Back pain is a popular search: Atlanta Chiropractors need to know

I did some research today on chiropractors and noticed that when I just use “chiropractor” the 7 pack was 3 spots down and the rest of the page was directories. Yet when I added the modifier chiropractor “chiropractor Atlanta” the 7 pack was top and the rest of the page was organic websites. Another caveat is that the people int he 7 pack were different.

What this means for local Atlanta marketing is that the highest volume search term is already being returned with local results, and that even with a qualifier like “Atlanta” getting into the 7 pack will become essential for local Atlanta chiropractors.

Here are some search numbers for chiropractors in atlanta:

“chiropractors Atlanta” 1600 per month – costs $3.80 for PPC

“chiropractor atlanta”  1600 per month – costs $4.74 for PPC

“atlanta chiropractors” 720 per month – costs $4.74 for PPC

“chiropractors in atlanta ” 260 per month – costs $4.19 for PPC

these 4 terms = 4180 searches per month

“chiropractors” 450,000 per month

“chiropractor” 1,220,000 per month

“chiropracter” 27,000 per month

How much is a new client worth to Atlanta Chiropractors?

Lets say your average office visit is $50 and each clients normally comes 12x a year this means that a new client is worth aprox – $600 a year or more!

How cost effective is search engine optimization for local businesses like a chiropractor?

So over 8000 people a month are searching for chiropractor/s atlanta

The top 3 spots get 85% of all clicks on the page

The first listing gets 2/3 of those clicks

Just the numbers mam

Meaning the top 3 local listings can expect to get the lions share of traffic – clicks ( aprox – 4100)

The first listing will most likely get 2/3 of those ( aprox -  2600)

If only 10% of those people follow thru with an appointment that lucky Atlanta chiropractor could conceivably get over 260 new clients !

and if you remember that each client is worth a yearly $600 then that could be over $153,000 on new client business a year!. Now imagine getting over 200 new clients each month – could your chiropractic business even handle that?

and someone is already paying an average of $4 for PPC for those terms meaning getting organic results is equal to scarfing up over $16,000 in FREE traffic.

Heck even getting only 1% could mean 26 new clients in one month generating an added revenue of over $15,000.

Right now many local Atlanta businesses are struggling to get new clients, but the search numbers show that people are still out there shopping, even if more carefully. If you are willing to invest in your future – local search marketing could be the marketing solution for you.

Local SEO to do list:

I will be putting out a video soon that shows this research process and some other important things to consider for local businesses. If nothing else, go Google a term you think people are using to find your business ( NOT your company name) -See who comes up and where you stand. If the map comes up with names, click on the top two and see who is getting the lions share of traffic. THESE are your real competitors.