Google Places Listing, Florist SEO & Local Search Engine Optimisation » Map Optimisation

How To Increase Your Google Places Ranking

Andrew — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:31:27 +0000

A client of ours, Townsville Florist, came to us again recently due to an issue with their Google Places rank dropping from rank A, to rank F) in Google Places. This may not seem like a huge slide in the overall scheme of things this represents a 40% dip in turnover which is huge – it is our mission to get that rank back up to rank A) & to achieve this as soon as possible.

We hope to increase their Google Places rank by doing the following SEO tweaks to both their listing & website:

Tune the contact us page in website
Make local phone number more visible
Add more content to Places listing
Ensure all citation sites are carrying the correct information about Townsville Florist
Add website to more directory sites
Add website to webmaster tools in their Google account

Google Places Verification Changes

Andrew — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 23:57:58 +0000

As most of you will know we are working with over 40 clients at the moment which makes us incredibly busy, so busy in fact that we only have two Google accounts across all those clients – it would be impossible to have a log in for each clients.

Anyhow, last week I went to update one of our clients listings and we were shocked to see that the only way to verify this change was to send a postcard to the listed address of our client. I did some searching online and could find nothing on the issue, including Google blog.

Subsequently, I have tried listing from five other PC’s, on a different network & even from an Internet cafe’ & still the problem remains, thanks goodness it was not our accounts that are the problem.

So it seems Google phone verification may be a thing of the past, and it disappearing is creating a huge problem for businesses like ours. Yes, if you had not guessed it, we have lost a little of our control. Now, just to do the smallest change, we have wait until Google sends a postcard to our client (up to 3 weeks), then hope that is actually gets there & then they relay the information to us.

Surely this is not a cost effective option for Google.

I invite anyone who has had any experience with this change, or has any opinion, to share their experience with us as information on this issue is extremely limited at this stage.

Just a litle follow up on this article. If you need confirmation of this issue please visit Google Places Help.

Google Places May Be Changing

Andrew — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 01:34:15 +0000

What is Google up to? Where are they heading with Google Places? My first thought is, “who knows”, because as much as I think I know about Google Places, I really know nothing – sounds very Socratic doesn’t it.

One thing I am certain of is that today Google Places has been experimenting heavily today with different set ups, which suspiciously looks like they are trying to give more credit to Adwords advertisers, therefore the ‘cash cow’ get bigger and even more formidable.

What they are doing today was hard to get good screen shots of as, one minute it was there, the next it was gone. Further, I could only pick up the new experiments in Firefox, and only on one of our PC’s in our offices – even though we are running all through the same modems. Google huh.

In the screen shot below you will notice the following changes:

The map is on the right of the page where some og the Adwords advertisements go
The SERP results contain letters that correspond with with the map results on the right hand side of the page
Reviews can be seen right of the SERP result, but left of the page
All the contact details can be seen next to the place marker under the SERP

Using Additional Information In Google Places

Andrew — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:32:52 +0000

Using Additional Information In Google Places is something many of our clients do not use and is something vital to any good localised SEO campaign. That being said, I can understand to some degree why it is underused – it is just so confusing to some people with how it is formatted.

A good example of the power of this section of Google Places can been seen with a client of our Flowers Cairns. In Flowers Cairns Google Places listing you can see in the additional details section we have listed in the left section of the list the categories of flowers for the business, and in the left you can see all relevant hyperlinks directing customers directly to the landing pages. See below.

Toowoomba Building and Pest Inspections

Andrew — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:38:45 +0000

I typed the search term Toowoomba Building and Pest Inspections into Google just to see what sort of search results Google Places would provide when using an address that contains a letter – like 220B. I feel that Google gets a little lost when providing these sorts of results which is a little disappointing, especially if you are a business owner with a letter atached to your address. See example below:

You can see by the Google search result that the Google Places has placed a makr on the map where the business is but it has not allocated a letter. I dare say that this would be different if the business owner had an address without a letter within it.

The Google 10 Pack

Andrew — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:07:55 +0000

In the beginning of 2008 all the major search engines, and that includes Google, began to show a totally different interface at the very top of their respective search results pages for keywords that are locally-targeted or even “key phrases” too – for example Townsville Florist. The new look of the Google search results show you a localised Google Map and results of generally ten local business, in the world of search engine marketing this is known as a local 10 pack. Sometimes though you can also still see a local 3 pack too but most local search results will be in the local 10 pack format.

Just to reiterate, the results shown like this will also contain a suburb, town or city name.

At To The Point it is our goal to have you listed in this top tier of search results!