Local Search

Optimising for Google Places isn’t the same as optimising for the natural search results (although in recent months the algorithms have been merged).

As a result we carry out a lot of R&D in an attempt to reverse-engineer the algorithms.

We know that location is important, but having evolved over the last few years, the system is far more advanced than a straightforward “find my nearest” application.

There are two main aspects to Local Search – appearing in search engines such as Google Local (also known as Google Maps or Google Places) and making sure your website is visible in the normal search results when customer searches for a keyword related to your business with a local modifier (for example “lawyers in Manchester”).

The modern Google Places algorithm takes into account factors such as reviews, citations in popular local directories as well as quality of a listing into account when calculating rankings.

Appearing in the natural search results for keywords with a local modifier is one of our favourite strategies at Branded3 – we’ve been creating localised databases since 2002 and some of our clients attract over a million visitors every year from natural search using this method. The boundary between the natural listings and the Google Places results was narrowed significantly during 2010 resulting in the format below which is now the most common search result type for a geographical query.

Local SEO is particularly suited to large chains of stores with hundreds of locations across a particular country, but can also be good for a business trying to target a particular group of customers. A good example is a caravan insurance provider who might try to rank highly for “caravan park south wales” to reach caravan owners. It’s important to remember that high quality informative content needs to be created for every landing page, which makes the construction of large databases across hundreds of locations quite time consuming.