While this particular Google Places information accuracy widget is new, Google has long been leveraging similar user-generated content to try to enhance and grow map information. They have been actively crowd-sourcing map accuracy work for a while now, but it’s not without significant issues.

Obviously, one of the more serious issues involved is the fact that people will lie and cheat.

So, it’s no surprise that Google Maps help groups have instances reported where people suspect that their locations have been compromised some by malicious competitors, disgruntled former employees, or randomly psychotic customers. I’ve had clients and colleagues approach me with similar reports, and Mike Blumenthal has reported these types of stories as well.

Not only can some of the general public be expected to purposefully try to cause mischief, well-meaning people can also ignorantly make mistakes in commenting or reporting on data accuracy — just think of all the stories throughout popular culture of stereotyped representations of men who can’t find addresses while driving (and refuse to ask directions) or spatially-challenged women who can’t read maps. I’m not suggesting that these stereotypes are accurate representations of the sexes, but that the stories likely come from the fact that many people, regardless of sex, find navigation and map interpretation highly challenging.

So, there are some inherent problems with attempting to base a large percentage of location accuracy upon crowd sourced information.

What’s particularly concerning about Google’s methodology is that they’ve recently declared that they’ll sometimes use this data to override business owners’ disclosed information, or call into question accuracy in consumers’ minds. Blumenthal hilariously communicated the issue in his brother-in-law’s open letter response to the matter. An actively-engaged business owner may have gone in and verified that their address and map are correct in Google Places, but if a small handful of users claim the address is wrong, it can get incorrectly flagged as being a closed location, or that the address may be wrong — something which would clearly discourage potential customers from going to the business.

Mike organized a really humorous experiment to illustrate this issue when he asked a handful of us to go in and flag Google’s own corporate headquarters as “closed”. For a brief while, the Mountain View location’s Place Page listing carried the flag, “Reported to be closed.”:

Auditors (and perhaps an activity pattern detection algorithm) twigged to the fact that a bunch of users had declared the location closed, and someone at Google corrected the defacement. But, the point was made — users can falsely get a listing flagged as closed. (This was done to illustrate the issue from the perspective of small local businesses, and not with any intent or expectation of causing harm. So, hopefully those of us who participated were not blackballed by Google Places!)

If Google headquarters was a local business that relied upon having potential walk-in customers referred by Google Places, they would have almost certainly lost business during the time that the alert appeared on their Places page. You should ask yourself: is that fair? Should a mean little gang be allowed to abruptly paint a “closed” sign over the door of a viable business?

My concern with the testing of these new crowd sourced accuracy widgets is that the same sorts of stuff can and will happen across the millions of businesses listed in the United States. Having a place flagged as closed is potentially damaging to these businesses, and so is having a location of a business tagged as possibly erroneous — or having the address changed outright to an erroneous place.

There are numerous methods for assessing address correctness which can be handled with algorithms and which do not involve trusting humans. For instance:

• if the street address is outside of the ZIP code polygon;
• if the ZIP is not associated with the City name;
• if an odd-numbered address is geolocated to the even side of a street (and vice-versa);
• if the phone area code is outside of the City or ZIP;
• if the address number seems impossibly high or low;
• if the street address is determined to be less likely to be located in the city block where it’s geolocated (if neighboring addresses are pinpointed elsewhere);
• if the street name is not recognized in the ZIP area;
• if the other directory data sources are in reasonable agreement on the geolocation pinpoints;

…And, there are more. (For a primer on basic causes for online mapping errors, see my article, “Top Causes of Errors in Online Mapping Systems“.)

Google is undoubtedly using some of the algorithmic methods for detecting and correcting map errors, but are they using all of them, and couldn’t they do more?!? For long-established businesses, there perhaps shouldn’t even be an option for users to suggest that a location is incorrect.

Owner-verified listings should be particularly trusted above user-generated content. In fact, there should be some safeguards in place for owner-verified listings such that “this location may be closed” and “the address location may be incorrect” messages perhaps shouldn’t be displayed at all without first alerting the contact email address for the listing, and even giving it some sort of time delay such as a month before the general public would see such a message.

Some of the top yellow pages sites which dealt with these types of data issues for many decades came up with business rules to help mitigate discrepancies in data sources. For instance, for a certain number of months after a business has been contacted and has updated/verified its own info, any other data source is set to a lower priority. And, this is the way it should be in Google Maps as well. The business owner has much more invested in insuring that location information is correct than the general public does. They have skin in the game! This is why data which comes directly from the owner is correlated with a higher degree of correctness than that of the general public (at least when that data is fresh or recently verified).

Google’s user-centered product development is great in many ways, but the ongoing refusal to properly incorporate and represent the business owner in the overall local business ecosystem is problematic. They are a type of user themselves, and they are a highly important demographic which should be given proper precedence in some areas of the communication and presentation of business information. This is why we undertook the experiment with the Google headquarters listing — to illustrate the disparity.

One suspects that Google employees overrode the crowd-sourced edits we submitted stating the location was closed — not only should the flag not have appeared, but the same sort of listing alerts and controls should be extended to small businesses who’ve verified their listings.

Now, I see a wide range of numbers of reviews for all sorts of industries — from zero or just a small handful, to around a hundred, all the way up to a few thousand for highly-popular eateries located in big cities. So, a range of these numbers is normal, and for some cases it’s normal for there to be a few thousand.

For instance, the famous Union Oyster House in Boston is showing a couple of thousand reviews. Considering it’s the oldest restaurant (in continuous service) in the entire country, this even makes sense. It makes even more sense when you see that they have quite a few hundred reviews in Yelp, and OpenTable as well. When someone has placed a reservation for the restaurant in OpenTable, they may be receiving an invite to rate the restaurant after they’ve had their visit there. I’d say this is is a great practice and works well for everyone — the business itself, the person rating, OpenTable, and for consumers shopping for an eatery. The natural outcome is that they’ll have hundreds and thousand of reviews in a relatively short time period.

But, there’s something else going on in vacation rentals which is similar, but isn’t ideal.

Here’s an example from Avalon, California, on Santa Catalina Island where the main industry is tourism and there are dozens of vacation rentals which people stay at annually. Notice the high number (over 1300) of reviews Google shows for a rental agency there:

What I see happening is this: some travel information sites are listing vacation rentals, and allowing consumers to rate/review those rental properties. The rental properties are associated with a particular rental agency, and the travel info site is assigning all those reviews to the rental agency that they roll up under.

Now, this works well for cases where the property is handled by one company which handles the rental and property management. However, there are a lot of cases where multiple rental agents from different companies may be renting out the same property, depending upon who lets it out to a renter first. In those cases, having all the reviews rolling up under one company is unfair.

Where vacation rentals are concerned, I believe that consumers are also fairly naive about what it is that they are reviewing. They are likely being led to believe they’re reviewing the property itself — and if they property isn’t owned by the company managing it, details about its amenities maybe shouldn’t be applied to the rental company. For instance, the process of reserving and renting the property may have sucked, but the consumer is mainly being asked about how great the Wi-Fi was, the hottub, and the quality of the window views.

In most cases I’ve looked at across the country, the large bulk of these reviews are coming from FlipKey, operated by TripAdvisor.

FlipKey’s interface for reviewing the rentals encourages the property be reviewed more than the rental agency, as I suspected. The review form is titled “Rate this vacation rental”, rather than “Rate the property management company”, and it says “Review your stay”. Their tips do suggest that one “Describe the service you received”, but it also says “Tell us how you liked the home”, and to “Talk about the location and amenities” — neither of which are necessarily controlled at all by the property agency.

But, as I see it the primary issue is whether reviews of individual rental properties ought to be rolled-up into an aggregate to represent the rental agency in this manner. Google has no quick way of assessing instances where properties may be represented by multiple rental agents, and property owners sometimes switch the agents representing them — in which case do the reviews then get reassigned to the new rental agency, or do they stay associated with the first rental agent as part of their legacy?

This appears to be a form of spam. FlipKey has been clever with design this so that individual vacation rental reviews will roll up collectively under rental agent listings, and having their data associated importantly with so many businesses is useful in terms of some referral traffic as well as a promotion vehicle for potential advertisers.

This is yet another problem which Google has associated with user reviews and business listings. Not long ago, Google Maps rolled out “Descriptive Terms” derived from user reviews, causing undesirable and often unfair effects for local businesses.

For instance, if your place of business is located in an historic building, you might get it registered with the National Register of Historic Places or you might apply to get it designated a state historical marker. Doing either of those things would get the location intered into dozens if not hundreds of databases and directories, causing the address to get republished in numerous places, resulting in more prominence for the location and your business, by association. I’ve used this sort of tactic before to gain local citational references from Wikipedia.

This has been one of my secret tactics – most businesses may not merit an article in Wikipedia, but their building just might. And, Wikipedia content gets redistributed simply everywhere — even into Facebook! (Yes, Wiki links are nofollowed, but are local citations, hmmm?)

These round-about link-building ideas require some effort on your part to accomplish — they won’t happen in an instant click. However, they’re fairly robust and have some viral characteristics which can mean that you’ll focus on one project which may result in multiple high-quality links and citations.

So, what are some other, similar tactics you can use to nab some astonishing numbers of links and citations? Here are three more, in the same vein:

• Install weather monitoring equipment and become a weather reporting station. You’ll have to buy and install some hardware correctly, but once you do you can feed the weather data into the Weather Underground and other distribution channels, and they’ll begin showing your location on their sites!

  For instance, the JohnDory Vineyard in Sebastapol, California, has a weather station, and the weather data gets displayed on many sites, including KOAA, TV station sites, and newspaper sites. For instance, they’re listed on a weather page on The Post and Courier — a news site — which links straight to their homepage:

  

  Should I mention that many of these links back are nofollow-free?!

• Add a cellular antenna to your property. As with historical marker locations, there are websites out there which specialize in pinpointing cell sites where mobile phone antennas or wireless phone towers are located. Even more aluring, companies will pay you for the privilege of putting their cellphone antennas on your property! What could be cooler than having someone pay you to give you more local citations?

  For instance, see the CellReception.com page for the Prudential Tower building at 800 Boylston St. in Boston, MA:

  

  An even more striking example would be the Epiphany Lutheran Church in Lake Worth, Florida, which erected a 100-foot-tall cross at their building which camoflauges the cellular antenna inside it:

  

  Epiphany Lutheran further leveraged their unique wireless installation by sending out press releases about the cross antenna and holding a dedication ceremony for it. Their story got picked up and reported on by a number of news organizations.

  I also know of at least one church here in the Dallas area where I live that has a cell tower hidden in their bell tower, so this may be moderately common for churches.

• Install a webcam at your place of business. This can qualify you to get listed in a number of local and national webcam directories with links back to your business website. This is one of the easiest things businesses can do to attract links and also more site visits (and user interactions with your site can provide other rank-enhancing signals, too). For example, check out the Waikiki Beach Cam provided by Tiki’s Grill & Bar in Hawaii:
  

  Or, the cam from atop the Yamashiro Restaurant with fantastic views of Los Angeles:

  

  This tactic likely will require one to do the groundwork to register the cam with various directories. But, it also provides some other advantages in that the cam may provide video and photo content which may be used for additional optimization work.

You can see that these various local citation-building ideas have some characteristics in common. They give people more excuses to list information about your business and it’s location. There are more things like this which can be done for similar effects — can you think of any?

For internet marketers, there’s a really compelling reason why one should seriously consider paying the fees and going through the steps for obtaining a trust seal: they can inspire consumer confidence.

Some of the more popular website trust seals include Trust Guard, ValidSafe, Merchant Safe, TRUSTe, VeriSign, McAfee Secure, and VeriSign.

There have been a number of different academic researcher studies which have found that trust seals can improve rates for online purchases. In one research paper from 2001, “Myth or Reality: Effect of Trust-Promoting Seals in Electronic Markets,” Xiaorui Hu, Zhangxi Lin, and Han Zhang found that the seals can encourage consumers to buy from storefronts they are not familiar with, and that the seals that consumers recognized more influenced them more. David Gefen’s earlier paper, “E-commerce: the role of familiarity and trust,” also found support for the theory that trust seals influenced online book purchase decisions.

However, online website trust seals decended from their offline counterparts, which already had a long history, if not track record. In 1894, due to faulty electrical parts causing fires, the National Board of Fire Underwriters started performing the first tests on the combustibility of insulation materials — their mark was the Underwriters Laboratory or “UL” seal of certification. But, even before that, seals of quality, certifications, trustmarks, and seals of approval have been in use by tradesmen or service providers. Royal seals of approval likely date back a few hundred years more.

Although there is not as much research on the subject, I think there’s sufficient evidence to indicate that trust seals on websites probably will also translate into increased brick-and-mortar visitors. Trust seals or trustmarks and other visual cues are absorbed by consumers online as they are researching to decide which business to go to. If a consumer is comparing two different local businesses, a trust seal could potentially tip the scales if many other factors are similar.

We know that store owners are also concerned about various ratings and reviews websites — quite a few businesses even choose to proclaim their great ratings on their webpages by displaying the official ratings badge, such as from Yelp.

And simply having a “Zagat Rated” sticker on your restaurant window is likely to increase your walk-in customer traffic for restaurants. I’m always mildly impressed when I walk up to a restaurant with the Zagat sticker. In districts which have a lot of shopping and restaurants, the Zagat sticker could get more conversions as people walk from eatery to eatery, reading the menus before deciding on a place to dine.

For both online and offline, the Better Business Bureau probably has just about the best and widest degree of recognition. I suspect that placing your BBB badge on your site may directly result in increased referrals and increased conversions into paying customers because it increases confidence.

Now, is there any evidence that trust seals on websites can improve rankings for local brick-and-mortar stores’ online listing rankings? I don’t know of any study as of yet, but I suspect it would be very hard to isolate such an effect for certain, because I think that many sites which display the seals may tend to already be more-popular and more-successful businesses.

Now Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that he considers one of the future issues that’s critical to the future of the internet is the security of webservers (see video below). We know that Google has spent a lot of effort around alerting users who click on pages from sites deemed to be risky, as well as they’ve also alerted webmasters when they sense that their sites may’ve become compromised. So, it’s just possible that Google has pretty good data on whether some of the website security certification services are any good or not, too, and they might choose to use those services’ badges as a signal for trustworthiness of sites. But, there’s no absolute proof that they are doing this.

If I were Google, I might choose to add the presence of trust badges into assessments of trustrank and overall popularity assessments. While Google themselves already have a lot of data around whether a site has malware and such on it, they’re open to other security assessment data, and they might also decide that consumers tend to like sites that have such badges more as well.

But, you shouldn’t consider it just for search ranking purposes — you should consider it for improving consumer perceptions of your company. This is one way to inspire confidence and impress potential customers.

In fact, there are a few different badges that I’d recommend you consider beyond the BBB or industry-specialized badges such as Zagat’s. Some local chambers-of commerce provide member badges, or you could even have your graphic artist manufacture one, if you’re a member of your chamber. Also, there are now green business certifications, fair trade certifications, and more which could enhance your profile in consumers’ eyes.

Of course, some of the online trust badges really will not make much sense from a small business’s perspective, since they may be priced more for large online retailers than for a small, local, brick-and-mortar store. This advice is really more for higher-price product retailers and for businesses operating within hotly-contested business verticals. If you’re in a highly competitive business vertical, you just might consider leveraging a trust seal in order to help squeaze every last chance of edging above your competition in the search engine results pages. I could easily see this as being one of the many potential ranking factors in Google Place Search and Google Maps.

For those who’ve been following our articles and conference presentations for the past few years, none of these broad categories of signals come as any sort of a surprise.

Although Google LatLong declares in their post’s title that it’s about “How Local Search Ranking Works”, they’re still understandably obscure for the most part, and avoid providing all that many specifics. There’s a natural tension between informing businesses on how to provide Google with ideal information necessary for ranking, and providing so much info that search engine optimization specialists have “undue advantage” (from Google’s perspective).

So, I thought I’d take this opportunity to list out a number of more specific factors which could feed into Relevance, Prominence and Distance. Read on for a refresher on local search ranking factors which likely could contribute to each of these.

RELEVANCE

• Business Name matches the user’s search keyword phrase;
• Business Category (in Google Places) matches the user’s search keyword phrase;
• Business Description or additional data fields match the user’s search query;
• Keywords found on the Business’s website match the user’s search query;
• Keywords on the Business’s website and Google Places fields indicate a match for the user’s search location;
• Description text for the videos and images related to the Business include keyword phrases which match the user’s search query;
• Business Categories may be mapped to match related Categories. For instance, if the user seeks “Restaurants”, but you’re only listed as a “Cafe”, then Google would likely choose to display your listing due to thesaurus relativity.
• Fuzzy matching algorithms can also come into play for Relevance. For instance, common misspellings may be matched between the user’s queries and contents of your listing, website, and other data sources about your business.
• Keyword relevance also comes into play with all of the various data sources which Google associates with your listing. For instance, keywords found in your internet yellow pages listings, newspaper articles about you, and places where people mention your business — all of these could be matched up with the search keywords users supply when searching for local businesses.
• It should be noted that it’s likely that information on your website and directly in your Google Place page may be deemed to be more important and therefore more heavily-weighted in relevancy considerations than information on less-central pages such as internet yellow pages, articles, etc. However, having some level of keyword consistency among all the resources citing your business listing could additively help your overall relevancy scoring.

PROMINENCE

• Prominence would be composed of signals which could help Google assess your company’s overall popularity compared with other similar businesses. Google’s classic ranking assessment is therefore also one of their prime signals for local rankings: PageRank. PageRank involves the number of webpages linking to a webpage or website, and the relative importance of each of the pages which are linking.
• Citations are the new link where local search results are concerned, so having webpages that mention your company name, address, and phone number could help to build up your signal weight for relative popularity.
• Your business’s location itself may independently have prominence signals associated with it, somewhat independent of the reputation of your business itself, and this could theoretically influence your rankings. For instance, a Chinese Restaurant tucked away on an off-street in a residential neighborhood might be assessed as less-popular than an otherwise similar Chinese Restaurant which happens to be located next door to a major tourist destination. While this may sound like a proximity signal, it’s really more about the relative popularity of places themselves which then may apply to a local business or organization. So, if your company is located next to a place which merits an article in Wikipedia, or in a highly-trafficed neighborhood, or next to a popular amusement park, you may reap the benefit of the popularity coming off of it.
• Reviews and Ratings are an obvious indicator of popularity and quality, although they’re so obvious that Google has long stated that rating values themselves are not used for ranking purposes. However, there still appears to be some association between highly-rated/reviewed companies and rankings. It’s unclear if this is cause or effect, however, since the most-popular businesses (as assessed through other signals) are also often those which have the best ratings. Further, Google’s recent algorithmic tweaks in the wake of the “Decor My Eyes” story may now be incorporating some review sentiment analysis in determining negative ranking criteria — possibly using such info to penalize rankings of bad companies, while not really using them to influence positive rankings.
• Consumer Click-Throughs to a business from Google search results has been a controversial/theoretical factor among search marketing experts, although Google patent filings document this as a potential metric which could be used for assessing relative popularity/importance. Under this concept, if your business listing info were clicked-upon or otherwise interacted-with more than that of similar competitors appearing in the same SERPs, you could get a ranking boost.
• Social Media signals are likely to be an increasing Prominence factor. Social media interactions are already influencing real-time search as well as personalized search, and I’d bet they may be influencing even more than what the search engines have openly disclosed. For instance, the number of Facebook “likes” of a business and its associated pages should be a valuable signal to search engines. Increasingly, assessments of importance of social media mentions will also rely upon the relative importance/prominence of the person/account posting the mention.

DISTANCE

• Distance has been one of Google Maps prime local ranking signals since inception — so much so that I once jokingly suggested businesses might move locations in order to rank better. It used to be that businesses which were located closest to city centroids had a major advantage over businesses located further out from city centers. Over time, Google has adjusted the weighting of the various ranking factors so that proximity doesn’t have quite the overly-heavy influence it once did, but it still factors in. So, the main element of this has been the relative radial distance from city centroids. There really isn’t much one can do to alter your location, so the classic old business advice still remains valid in this respect: “Location, location, location.”
  

  

• Google has altered some from dependence upon the city centroids, however, and now they are factoring-in the outlines of cities, ZIP code region outlines, or using something like heat maps of population densities in order to figure out location associations according to geographic position.
• For businesses desiring to have a good Distance signal, there is overlap between this and Relevancy signals. It’s important to mention your location’s city name, neighborhood name, as well as various other location nicknames that people may be using to search for businesses in your area. For instance, many denizens of Manhattan use the abbreviation “NYC” when searching online.
• Finally, many service-based businesses provide work in major metro areas beyond the borders of the smaller city region where their listing is physically located. For instance, a Plumber located in Orange, California, might offer services to numerous cities in the greater Los Angeles region. For these types of businesses, it’s very important to mention the names of each of the cities where they offer service — mentioning the names on their Google Place page, website, and other citation sources.
• Downtown searches may still be one special case where centroid distance is particularly influential.

For more information, also be sure to read my “Local SEO Primer” on how to rank in Google Place Search Results.

When you’re asking “which is better?”, it’s important to know what we’re speaking-of, since there are a number of different goals that people could be pursuing. For some, this is a question of which is better from an elegance-of-coding perspective (if you’re interested in this, you might read Evan Prodromou’s great article, RDFa vs microformats). For yet others, the question should be focused on what’s best for their site — which solution is the simplest, most cost-effective to apply, and least likely to cause problems. Finally, the question could be seen from a perspective of what’s going to work best for the purposes of search marketing?

It’s this last orientation of the question that I’m focusing upon — which semantic protocol is going to work best for Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”)?

Now, you might think that since I was probably the earliest marketer to recommend using Microformats for SEO that I’d feel so “invested” in the protocol that I might push it exclusively. While I do enjoy a nostalgic thrill at having accurately predicted where things might go, I’m mostly dedicated to pushing approaches that will be most effective for my clients, and this requires frequent revisiting of techniques.

Microformats have been established the longest of the three protocols, and used by the search engines the longest. Google and Yahoo! both introduced hCard microformat on their own webpages by marking up local listings with it. This was later followed by Yahoo demonstrating that their crawling and code interpretation services were set up to parse both Microformat and RDFa data. So, the best-established and longest-running semantic protocol is Microformat, followed by RDFa.

Microformat’s initial advantage was that it worked seamlessly in existing HTML code, so using it within a page didn’t require any special tags that might overly restrict one’s version of HTML nor cause a page to be invalid code. The downside is that it primarily required using particular naming conventions of class attributes — retrofitting sites to have hCard required renaming of CSS classes or addition of more DIV/SPAN tags to add in the specially-named classes. Also, the marked-up parts of an address or whatever had to be nested properly for it to work.

Now, RDFa was built a bit more flexibly, since it was set up as more purely XHTML — and one key characteristic of XHTML is the “X” part — it’s “extensible”, meaning you can easily add namespaces for your own purposes without breaking a doc. So, RDFa added “property”, “role”, and “about” attributes for labeling information for machines, and an advantage is that you could introduce them without necessarily changing your CSS. The downside is that you technically need to have your document be well-formed to validate under XHTML — a more rigid document coding model than found under earlier versions of HTML. (Naturally, you could add the RDFa portions to your content without making the entire page XHTML-valid, but doing so is risky since it assumes that search engines will be able to properly parse the page when it’s not properly formed. While browsers and search engines successfully interpret invalid page code all the time, the risk to screwing up RDFa markup interpretation may be greater if the page is invalid, since the markup is dependent upon the machine properly recognizing the XHTML markup elements and interpreting them correctly.)

Microdata is the newest kid on the block, and is a format proposed by the W3C as a part of HTML5, and it appears to be heavily influenced by Microformats, adopting a number of the same label names found in hCard, hCalendar and other Microformats.

So, which is best for SEO purposes?

I should note that the use of semantic markup or structured data has never been solely about rankings. For local SEO, the primary advantage was about helping to insure that your data could be best interpreted by the search engines. Semantic markup helped inform search engines as to whether a data element as a street, a city, a business name, etcetera. For instance, if you were “Houston’s Restaurant”, located on “Tennessee Avenue” in the town of “Dallas, Florida” — it could be challenging for a local search engine to correctly associate your business with the right business listing and location. I made that example up, but there are plenty of real-world examples which result in some degree of difficulty in interpreting web content for local search.

For Local SEO, helping to insure your data was properly interpreted does provide ranking benefits — mainly for the cases where data is prone to misinterpretation.

In more recent years, the benefit for structured data has been more in the enhanced presentation of data to attract consumers, and less in rankings. Yahoo’s creation of enhanced search results listings with their SearchMonkey platform, followed later by Google’s introduction of Rich Snippets, allowed webmasters who used structured data to create slightly more attractive listings. The theory (supported by statistics reported by Yahoo) is that slighly jazzier search listings may increase click-through-rates.

Although it’s controversial in SEO circles, I believe that there are indirect ranking benefits associated with increased CTR, too. So, it’s possible that improving the visibility of your pages’ listings through adoption of structured data may eventually result in better rankings as well.

While Google’s Webmaster Tools documentation states that they support all three major structured data formats — Microdata, Microformats and RDFa — there may be some advantage to sticking with the oldest format from the standpoint that it will likely have the best support and widest adoption for the moment. There are likely more systems out there beyond the search engines which recognize the format. From the search engine perspective, it’s also safest to use the protocol that likely has the most usage, since it may have the best support.

If you have a site that’s already well-formed for XHTML, and if you would have some significant difficulty in changing your CSS to use Microformatting, I’d suggest using RDFa.

Microdata is sexy because it’s embedded with the new HTML5, but I suggest waiting a bit to go full-fledged into HTML5 in general, from an SEO perspective. There are relatively quite few sites using HTML5, so I think there’s greater chance for misinterpretation of pages coded in it on the part of search engines. Using HTML5 at this point is a bit like being one of the first adoptees of a 1.0 version of Windows — there could be unforseen negative consequences, so it’s less risky to stick with the older protocol a bit longer until HTML5 is better established.

* One and only one caution about using any of the formats: Matt Cutts recently provided a Webmaster Help video addressing “How long does it take for rich snippets to appear?“. In that video he provides the caveat that Google looks dimly upon hidden content, so don’t make your structured data hidden or else they won’t make use of it.

Now Google’s Webmaster Tools states that they won’t make use of non-visible content in most cases, but there is some invisible content that they would use — most specifically, Longitude and Latitude values for geotagging. I think he’s giving the warning because I bet some webmasters have been lazy about trying to retrofit microformats/RDFa to a page without integrating it, and then rendering it invisible/hidden via CSS so they don’t have to change the page’s code much. This would be a no-no. But, it’s clear from the Microformat documentation and from Google’s Webmaster Tools instructions that it’s perfectly okay to provide longitude/latitude values or alternate formatting for dates via the nonvisible parameters already available in normal microformat code.

Postscript: Yesterday I pubbed an article on using Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol for SEO. I didn’t compare that in this post, because it’s a variant of RDFa. Also, it appears to me that one can use it in combination with the other semantic protocols for local search optimization — so, I’d generally recommend using it in combination with one of the protocols Google supports. In this way you can optimize for Google and Facebook simultaneously.

Title Tag Optimization

Image Search Optimization

Benefits of Loose Image Licensing for Image SEO

Video Search Optimization

Online Catalog Optimization

RSS Optimization

Local Search Optimization

Local Search Ranking Factors

Local SEO 101: Choosing Local Domain Names

Ranking of Businesses Without Websites

Avoiding Tracking Phone Numbers

Category Names In Local SEO

hCard Microformat for Local SEO

KML & My Maps For Local SEO

Even just a few years ago, I used to try to research local keyword phrases for things like “boston plumbers” in a service such as comScore’s qSearch tool, and such phrases would frequently have insufficient search volumes for the tool to reflect back any data. Even Google Trends today states that there’s insufficient volume to show graphs for “boston plumbers“.

The reason why such research is important is because a site seeking to grab as much qualified traffic from consumers interested in a particular type of business as possible, must first know which phrase(s) to focus upon to achieve search engine rankings. They must answer the questions of whether consumers are searching for “plumbers”, “plumbing”, “plumber” or “pipes”. And for local businesses, it’s ideal to match for exact phrases that include local keywords. Do consumers search for “boston plumbers”, “plumbers, boston”, “plumbers in boston”, “plumbers boston ma”, or “plumbers 02118″ (a Boston ZIP code)?

There are cases that are even more complex, where an industry may have multiple terms used to find businesses (“accountants”, “accounting”, “tax preparation”, “CPAs”), and cities with multiple name versions and neighborhoods (“New York”, “New York City”, “Manhattan”, “New York, NY”, “NYC”, etc).

The problem is irritating when there’s little recourse available for researching consumer behavior.

However, various providers have been beefing-up the data they make available in order to help address the marketing demand. For instance, Google Insights will sometimes show us the relative search traffic for phrases in cases where Google Trends will not, such as for the “boston plumbers” example:


(Click to view larger)

One reason why Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool has been so widely-regarded is that it has long provided very granular information for these sorts of searches. However, their overall data stores are less-comprehensive than Google’s usage logs, so there’s greater likelihood of getting some skewed figures for phrases with smaller volumes. Here’s the “Boston Plumbers” example in Keyword Discovery’s main interface, using the historical database:

As you can see, Keyword Discovery is showing that the phrase with the highest volume of searches that contains both “plumbers” and “boston” is “average annual wage for plumbers in boston mass” — which is somewhat surprising. One figures that there are likely a lot more consumers trying to locate plumbers than there would be plumbers looking up wage info or prospective employees of plumbers. There are multiple possible explanations for this surprising result. For one, it could be that someone has linked-to or set up a script to frequently execute searches for this info. For another, there could just be an unusually high number of those searches happening just in the sample of data that Trellian has access-to.

Trellian and other keyword research providers obtain usage data from ISPs and some search engines (typically some of the lesser search engines) which they compile. Since this is a subset of all internet usage data, it’s good to realize that searches with smaller volumes like our example can skew results a bit — so, one must interpret it with a critical eye.

The results also show a number of search permutations involving “local 12″ and “local 112″. These are unions, and those searches probably were not from individuals seeking plumbing services.

Two of the remaining search phrases we see are for “plumbers list boston” and “boston area plumbers”. Both of these are interesting/worthwhile results, particularly since we didn’t initially anticipate those phrases. That second phrase, “boston area plumbers”, is likely of prime benefit to us if we were a local plumbing company. Boston, like many major metro areas, is made up of a conglomerate of smaller towns, so it might be very natural for locals to search “boston area plumbers”, knowing that while there might not be a plumber located directly in their specific town, there could be one in the town adjoining theirs.

5minutesite.com’s Local PPC Adwords & Keyword List Creator by Walter Spurgiasz is pretty good for generating a large list of permutations of local keyword phrases. You submit keywords, a ZIP code and radius, and it will incorporate names of towns within the searched radius and add them onto your keyword phrases. Another similar tool is the Local Keyword Research Tool. These tools are good for coming up with phrases and ideas, but they’re not going to tell you which word/phrase is more popular than another.

In the case of our “Boston plumbers” example, though, these tools could be very useful since they’d spit out a great many of the local town names which you’d want to also target for local searchers.

Ultimately, we may find that we might need to target phrases which include town or ZIP code names less in the future, since search engines such as Google are increasingly returning back local results for broader keyword phrases, targeted to consumers’ geographies (by using IP addresses and a number of other geotargeting techniques). For instance, when you search for just “plumbers”, Google now returns back a handful of organic search results PLUS a map 7-pack of local businesses in your area which are plumbers. This evolution in search engine function is likely to alter searchers’ behavior as they grow accustomed to it — they’ll waste less time in typing in their city names for a local business, so the volumes of searches with the longer local phrases will decrease.

If and when this paradigm shift occurs, one of the best tools for keyword research will be Google Insights, once again. Google Insights allows one to submit a keyword such as “plumbers”, and then drill down to see the relative search volume for it by country, states, and major cities:

Trellian Keyword Discovery also allows one to filter down geographically, but the refinement is insufficient — only allowing one to refine by country.

This feature is particularly important for local search optimization, because average searcher behavior across the country changes by regions. For instance, most consumers across the country search for “Chinese Food” when seeking places to eat Chinese. However, in Hawaii, the searchers there search for “Chinese Restaurants” slightly more often:

Good keyword research requires some experience and intelligence, coupled with the ability to imagine how consumers attempt to find your business online. I’ve often found that companies have become somewhat biased by terms they consider to be important to their own industry insiders versus the keyword terms that consumers actually use to find them. Imagine the case of a prestigious tailor who desires to rank well for “bespoke tailoring” whereas he’s ignoring the many consumers who might find him if he targeted “custom suits” instead. Periodically revisit assumptions about how consumers may search for your type of business, and avoid vanity terms.

Matt McGee also wrote some great tips last year on this subject at When Local Keyword Research is a Dead End – it’s worth reading as well.

We’ve been watching this development since it emerged and comparing results.

For the most part, the organic keyword listings on Yahoo SERPs match up with Bing’s one-to-one, but we do see a few notable differences.

Thus far, we’re not seeing Microsoft PPC ads on Yahoo, and the local map results are different. Yahoo appears to have opted not to display Bing’s groups of related search results or the city-specific block block which can be found at the bottom of most Bing city SERPs. This is most obvious in the results for things like “Dallas, Texas.” This is good in the sense that Yahoo’s first page remains a set of ten results related to your keyword (as opposed to Bing, where page one may show only a Top 5).

Meanwhile, Bing/Yahoo’s combined search share continues to rise, and many have been seeing ongoing increases in Bing referral traffic to their sites.

With Bing search share rising, and their SERPs now being mirrored on Yahoo, the question prime on many marketers’ minds will be: What should I be doing for Bing SEO and Bing Local SEO?!?

For some years now, the Microsoft/Bing (and even Yahoo!) SEO advice has pretty much been: “do what you do for Google, and it works pretty well for Yahoo and Bing”. This advice has held up pretty well, particularly on the general assumption that since Google’s marketshare is so large — we pretty well must aim for the greater target and pick up referrals from the lesser sources as a nice bonus where we can get them. However, as Yahoo and Bing search traffic combines, more focus is going to be placed upon differentiating factors between the Google/Bing search giants.

In our agency, we have increased focus on where there may be some factors which are ranked more heavily in one search engine versus the other. Just a few observations for publication thus far (particularly focusing upon organic rankings for local queries):

• Bing may show preference for shorter URLs.
• Better-known name brands appear to have more advantage in Google than in Bing. (This difference suggests that Google may be incorporating more non-link citations, such as mere mentions of bizname in text, into the ranking mix, while Bing may not be using such a signal. Although, many have noted an overall bias on Google’s part for name-brands above lesser-knowns.)
• There’s a greater degree of duplication in Bing SERPs for local queries, in the sense that the same domain may be allowed to appear more than once in the same keyword SERP.
• Unsurprisingly, Google appears to be doing more to normalize URLs, trying to limit dupes caused by things like uppercase/lowercase variants of the same page from diluting out in the index.
• Bing appears to prefer biz profile pages more, compared with Google which prefers higher-level, larger-PageRank directory pages. But, Bing prefers directory sites more than Google overall. (This could change even more dramatically in this direction if Google’s Local Search “Experiment” goes out of testing into wide release.)
• Bing may prefer to rank a website’s homepage more than deeper content.

Rand’s “Google vs. Bing: Correlation Analysis of Ranking Elements” at SEOmoz and Aaron’s “Optimizing for Bing” post appear to have fairly solid observations which align with some of what we’re seeing as well.

We’ll be further focusing upon Bing local ranking elements, and I might publish further observations in the near future.

]]> http://www.semclubhouse.com/yahoo-mirrors-bing-results-seo-reflections/feed/ 1 http://www.semclubhouse.com/google-maps-ranking-tip/ http://www.semclubhouse.com/google-maps-ranking-tip/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:11:41 +0000 Chris Silver Smith http://www.semclubhouse.com/?p=847 Continue reading →]]> by Chris Silver Smith

So, if you’re feeling intimidated by how Google Maps works, and can’t figure out what to do to get them to rank your website higher in the search results, I’ve got a tip for you. This tip is mainly for small-to-medium businesses who are pretty new to online marketing, and this is simply one of the simplest ways to get listed higher than you currently may be.



This tip is really pretty simple: Claim your business listing!

Yes, that’s right! If you merely claim your business in Google Maps, this factor alone can help you rank higher than other businesses which have not claimed their own listings in Google. This is an open secret amongst local search marketers!

This is one of the FEW ranking factors within Google Maps which Google itself has actually publicly STATED will benefit rankings by some degree. From surveying hundreds and thousands of listings in many cities, I can confirm that this ranking factor appears to be very influential.

There are a few reasons why Google rewards businesses which claim their listings. First, listings claimed by their owners contain information which Google and consumers can trust better — Google obtains business listings from a great many sources, and a common problem is that old, stale and defunct business listings get into directories, but it’s hard to figure out what needs fixing without getting input from the business owners.

Second, Google wants to expand information they have about businesses, so when you’ve claimed your listing, be sure to add in other information about your company within the Google Local Business Center interfaces.

Third, Google desires to get lots of small businesses to be very familiar with them, so that one day you might become self-serve advertising clients and purchase some of their ads.

There are other incentives to claim your listing, too. Businesses which claim their listings in Google have a better chance of achieving “Landmark Icon” status, enabling them to appear on more map views when users browse their area.

Also, Google has sent claimed listings “Favorite Places” decals which can enable consumers who pass by your store to grab a digital address to your Place Page in Google Maps with their cellphones.

So, if you haven’t done so already, claim your business in Google Maps and begin reaping the rewards!

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