Business Logos on Google Maps

Google calls this “sponsored map icons.” Businesses can pay to have their logo show up on Google Maps, replacing Google’s generic gray graphics. There’s no doubt it stands out amongst the otherwise bland colors, but that may not be the case when a lot of businesses are putting their logos on the map.

For now, this is only available to a limited set of U.S. companies “with multiple locations and a well-known brand.” But it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to see this expanding into something that any local advertiser can do. AdWords users who target locally have already been able to show an icon when their ad appears on the map. Today, if you’re using Google Tags, the yellow icon shows next to your red map marker … so you have to assume Google can and will make Sponsored Map Icons more widely available. And that could be a good thing for local businesses with a recognizable identity/logo.

Product Inventory in Search Results

Google’s been doing this on a limited basis for a few months now, but just this week expanded it for wider adoption. In Google’s search results, the red map marker shows up with an “In stock nearby” message.

In order to take part in this, there are some technical/feed-related guidelines that have to be met. There’s help documentation you can read, and an interest form if you want to apply to get involved.

Two interesting announcements this week, signs of things to come, I believe.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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That’s why we’re introducing the Google Small Business Blog, a central hub that brings together all the information about our products, features and projects of specific interest to the small business community.

(snip)

Of course, we’ll continue to post relevant news about individual services such as AdWords, Apps, Google Places and YouTube on their respective “home” blogs, but feel free to visit or subscribe to this Google Small Business Blog to get everything relating to your small business needs.

So, there you go. If you decide not to keep an eye it, that’s okay. I’ll do it for you.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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But a few words of caution are still in order, I think.

Responding to reviews is generally a good idea (though not always), but you have to be careful how you go about it. A little over a year ago, in an article called 5 Ways Negative Reviews are Good for Business, I wrote this:

A negative review is an opportunity for you to shine, to show you care about making things better — not only for the customer who left the negative review, but also for the countless others that are reading. There are plenty of negative reviews out there, but far fewer stories about how the small business turned the negative review into a positive. If you can do that, people will notice. They’ll tell their friends what you did, how you turned a bad experience into something good. And you’ll be better off in the long term because of it.

Along with today’s news, Google has written a pretty good guide to help local business owners respond to reviews. I would suggest reading that, and also read Scott Clark’s article, 15 Tips for Responding to Google Place Page Reviews, that he just published today.

I should add, in case Google’s announcement didn’t make it clear, that you can only reply to reviews left directly on your Place Page — you can’t reply to the reviews from 3rd-party sites that Google shows. And, this is only available to business owners who have claimed their Place Page.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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This is an updated version of a post that I first wrote on this blog in February, 2007. It represents a summary of my contributions to David Mihm’s 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, which includes the thoughts of a couple dozen local search marketers. I highly recommend reading that for wider perspectives on the issues I discuss below.

Based on my experiences with local clients, here’s my best educated guess about what matters the most today for ranking in Google Maps.

1. Your address. If you want to rank for keywords related to a particular city, you better be located in that city. My wife ranks highly for “richland wa real estate agent” because that’s where her address is; she’s nowhere to be found for “kennewick” or “pasco” (the other main local cities) keywords. An exception: She also ranks highly for “west richland wa real estate agent”, primarily because there’s only one real estate agent with an office in West Richland (Tri-Star).

2. Your business categories. I’m sort of torn over this and the next factor as to which matters more. But I think it’s slightly more important to have your business be categorized correctly than to have the right keyword in your business name. When I dug into the “san francisco bakery” 7-pack, all seven businesses were categorized as a bakery. I often see similar results on other searches.

3. Keyword in business name. I’m ranking this highly mostly based on what I’ve seen lately while watching real estate keywords. The agents who have modified their listings to say “real estate” as part of their business name are doing very well these days.

I thought it was a shame that, in the LSRF replies on this factor so many folks focused on the potential spammy aspect. But there are a ton of businesses that legitimately have a keyword in their business name — I ate breakfast at Henry’s Restaurant yesterday, for example — and I’m sure this helps them rank better.

4. Citation quantity. As David Mihm famously wrote, local citations are the “new” links. Google relies heavily on citations — mentions of your business elsewhere on the web — to validate your business name, address, and phone information. The more validation via citations, the more trust Google has to show you in its local/maps results. Quick story: Earlier this year, my wife’s Place Page lost all of its citations; every one. Her listing vanished immediately from the 7-pack.

Be sure to read Why Citations Are Important to Your Local Business Listings from GetListed.org for more on this.

5. Completing your business profile/Place page. I don’t think that just claiming your listing really matters jack-squat on its own; there are plenty of unclaimed listings that rank very highly in Google Maps. (Only one of the seven San Francisco bakeries had claimed its listing.) But what does matter, a lot I think, is completing your profile. I’m talking extra information like hours, payment options, a well-written and complete business description, and especially adding photos and videos to your listing. Google is directing more users to Place Pages, so it’s logical that pages with a lot of good information would rank higher.

6. Business data consistency. I ranked this very highly in 2007 when the original article was written, and it’s still hugely important as a general local search ranking factor. Your business name, address, and phone number need to be consistent across the many sources of local business information.

But since this article focuses strictly on Google Maps rankings, I say this isn’t as important. A local insurance agency is doing just fine with its claimed Place Page at its current address … meanwhile, an unclaimed listing associated with its old address is also in Google Maps’ database and ranking right below the claimed one. Duplicate listings with inconsistent addresses or phone numbers are not uncommon inside of Google Maps. (In fact, Google has gone to great pains to explain how to handle duplicate listings and the general advice is to be careful.)

7. Reviews and ratings. Google Maps is, at its core, a recommendation engine. It recommends Italian restaurants, dry cleaners in Dallas, and hotels in Manhattan. If Google made a habit of recommending local businesses that offered poor products and customer service, how long do you think people would keep using Google Maps? Right. Not long. Having (positive) reviews and ratings gives Google more confidence to recommend a local business. Google is extracting what reviewers say about local businesses and showing the sentiment analysis right on Place Pages.

8. Proximity to location. We tend to talk about “proximity to city center,” but I think “proximity to location” is more accurate to think about because a lot of searches are about a specific location: hotels near the Space Needle, restaurant near art museum, and so forth. To me, proximity to city center is much less important than proximity to the location being searched. The city center/centroid factor seems to be decreasing in importance, for what it’s worth. So don’t worry as much if you’re business isn’t located right near your city’s red marker.

9. My Maps and other User Content/Data. At the very bottom of a Place Page, Google shows the user-generated content associated with a business. This is typically in the form of people using Google “My Maps” tool to create their own maps and add important locations/businesses to those maps. I believe this is becoming a more important signal recently, in part thanks to what seems to be more people using My Maps. But there are other forms of user content, too, such as geotagged photos of a business. I believe all of this adds to a local business’s Place Rank. In the bold heading for this item, I have “Data” at the very end because I also believe that user data, such as how often a Place Page is clicked/viewed, plays a part.

10. Certain traditional SEO factors. I don’t think most traditional SEO factors play a huge role in Google Maps rankings; this is a different ball game than regular organic listings. But I think some SEO-related elements do come into play. In that list, I’d include things like age of the Place Page and/or age of the domain associated with the business; the business URL that’s included in the Place Page — i.e., a domain with “real estate” in the URL may get a slight benefit — and so forth.

Google’s View on Ranking Factors

In a recent video about local search rankings, Jeremy Sussman of Google Maps described Google’s local algorithm as having three main pieces: location, relevance, and prominence.

“How do we decide the order of which museum to show you? Some of it’s the distance; some of it’s the relevance of the query; and some of it is the prominence of the actual business.”

So, let’s look at my ten ranking factors in terms of Google’s terminology.

Location/Distance: Two of my factors fit directly — your address (#1) and proximity to location (#8). Two others also fit: No. 5, completing your business profile, plays a role because you need to provide a location. No. 6, business data consistency, also involves defining your location.

Relevance: The ones that fit this are business categories (#2), keyword in business name (#3), and some traditional SEO factors (#10).

Prominence: From my list, No. 4 (citations), No. 7 (reviews and ratings), and No. 9 (My Maps and user content) are all about determining the prominence of a local business.

Final Thoughts

I really can’t emphasize enough that the actual factors that will determine your rankings in Google Maps and the 7-pack are dependent on the industry you’re in, where you’re located, what keywords are involved, and other things. The things that decide why “san francisco bakeries” are ranked as they are are different from the factors that will determine the rankings for, say, sprinkler repair companies in Tulsa.

The above is my list of what’s currently most likely to play a role in a lot of local searches, but you should use this information — and the wider set of opinions in the Local Search Ranking Factors study — to study and decide for yourself what matters to your business in your location.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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In the end, I’m not sure David has uncovered anything definitive, but he definitely has some interesting stats and charts in there that are worth your time to review. In my post, I admitted that I hadn’t dug nearly as deep as I could’ve and invited others to do so … so thank you, David, for taking me up on that.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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Have a look at the seven-pack results on Google for san francisco bakery:

(click for a larger version if you’d like) Ignore the blue check mark for now; I’ll get to that in a little bit. Let’s take a stab at deconstructing these search results, shall we? Here are some common and important things that are said to determine the rankings of these business listings:

Verified/Claimed Business Listing: Stella Pastries ranks at the top of the pack, but has not claimed its listing. In fact, the only business shown above with a claimed listing is the “C” listing. Would it rank lower with an unclaimed listing? Good question. In any case, despite being the only business with a claimed listing, there are other signals that are keeping two businesses ahead of it.

Address Matches Search Query: The search was for San Francisco bakeries, and all seven businesses have a San Francisco address. This one’s pretty obvious as a local SEO factor.

Proper Categories: It’s important to have your business listing categorized correctly. Even unclaimed listings are associated with categories. Here’s how these seven are categorized:

A: Wedding Bakery
B: Bakery
C: Bakery, Bakery, Restaurant, Pizza Restaurant
D: Bakery
E: Bakery
F: Bakery
G: Bakery

The top-ranked business is the only one listed in a category that’s more specific than our search term. The other six match the search term perfectly. Go figure.

Keyword in Business Name: Five of the seven businesses have the “bakery” keyword in their name, yet the top-ranked listing doesn’t. Stella Pastries has overcome the power of this factor via other signals.

Location Near City “Centroid”: That blue marker I added to the screenshot? That’s Google’s centroid, as shown when doing a Maps search for San Francisco. It would appear that the three highest-ranked businesses are among the furthest away. D and E are certainly closer, and it looks like F is, too. Let me repeat the image right here so you don’t need to scroll up:

Reviews: You can look at the screenshot and see that there’s no exact correlation between how many reviews a business has and where it ranks. The “D” listing, Tartine Bakery, has more than 400% more reviews than the B and C listings. Stella Pastries has the third-highest number of reviews, but ranks in the “A” spot.

Ratings: Google doesn’t show star ratings on the seven-pack, but if you click to see the results in Google Maps, you’ll get ratings and reviews together. Do the star ratings correlate with rankings? Let’s look:

A: 4.5 stars
B: 4.5 stars
C: 4.5 stars
D: 4.5 stars
E: 3.5 stars
F: 4.5 stars
G: 4 stars

There’s a little correlation here, in that the top four businesses are all 4.5 stars and none of the seven are any higher. But it falls apart slightly with the lowest-rated business in the “E” spot.

Citations: Citations are the links of local SEO. They’re really important. (I could show you one business that recently lost all its citations and went from the “A” spot to being gone completely.) Here’s how our seven bakeries compare for citations:

A: About 35
B: About 38
C: About 107
D: About 174
E: About 80
F: About 28
G: About 92

Much like reviews, there’s no obvious correlation between quantity of citations and rankings. Hmmmph.

Inbound Links: Place Pages tend to not attract many links; those tend to point toward actual web sites. So, if one of these business’s Place Pages did get a juicy inbound link, that might push it way up the rankings, right? Maybe not. Last September, when Google announced Place Pages, the blog post linked to the Place Page of Tartine Bakery — a clean, followed link from a blog post that’s now PageRank=6. And yet Tartine Bakery only ranks in the “D” spot. Go figure.

User-Generated Content: Much like citations, Google Maps shows how often a business/address appears in user-generated content. This is mostly made up of “My Maps” content created by Google users, but can also include geo-tagged photos from Panoramio, Flickr, and other types of UGC. Let’s see how much user content Google counts for our seven bakeries.

A: About 74
B: About 34
C: About 143
D: About 1,000
E: About 198
F: About 43
G: About 434

Just like citations and reviews, there’s no obvious correlation in these search results between how often a business appears in user-generated content and where it ranks.

Summary

In this search for “san francisco bakery,” the highest-ranked business

• hasn’t claimed its listing
• doesn’t have a web site
• doesn’t have the keyword in its business name
• is in a seemingly too-specific category, at least compared to the other six
• is relatively far from the city center
• has substantially fewer reviews, citations, and user-generated content than many others below it

Meanwhile, the business in the “D” spot

• is close to the city center
• has a web site
• has the most reviews/citations/user-generated content
• has the keyword in its name, and
• even has a juicy link from a PR6 Google blog post

Local search is super-easy, isn’t it?

Final Thoughts

There are countless other factors that could be at play here, but the above pretty much covers the foundational elements of local SEO and maps optimization. Every search is different, and no doubt searches in other cities with a different keyword might be much easier to deconstruct. If someone else wants to pick up where I left off and dig deeper into more random and obscure factors, please let me know when you’ve posted your findings.

But, please, the next time you see someone talking about how easy local SEO is … show them this. And remind them that sweeping generalizations are often way off the mark. Local SEO is much like traditional SEO: sometimes easy, sometimes not.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

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