2 Less Obvious Things to Consider in Local Search

Mike Ramsey, founder of local search company Nifty Marketing, conducted an experiment to find out how many and which states Google shows local state-wide results for in its regular web search results pages (if you weren’t aware, Google sometimes shows results spanning an entire state, rather than just a city).

He used dentists, used cars, and Italian restaurants as constants to test each state, and found that 20 states didn’t show any local results, but used cars brought up map listings for 23 states, dentists brought up listings in 21 states, and Italian restaurants brought up listings in 24 states.

Ramsey offers the following five steps for optimizing for both city and state results:

1. Check and see if your Industry and State are showing local listings.

2. Make sure you aren’t stuffing location keywords into categories.

3. Do keyword research for city vs. state terms.

4. Look at citations from businesses in other areas of the state and see if you can use them.

5. Create coupons that are focused on citizens of your state.

Read the article if you are concerned about this aspect of search optimization.

On a semi-related note (and I use "semi" loosely), Barry Schwartz points to a conversation on a Google Maps Help forum thread, which indicates that Google doesn’t do well with its listings when multiple businesses have the same phone number. The case in question comes from a doctor who shares the same office, staff and phoneline with competing doctors, but has separate listings in Google.

Google says:

It’s a difficult problem to solve. I’m not saying we’re doing the right thing in every case, but I am trying to give you guidance on how to satisfactorily resolve the issue on your end. If this is a distinct competitor, it seems to make sense to have a separate phone line. Even if the front office is shared.

The doctor says:

I appreciate your help up to this point, but I hardly think suggesting your paying advertisers change their business practices to accommodate your company’s inability to fix a problem is appropriate. I hope this is not a signal that Google is changing into just another corporate giant, stepping on the heads of small businesses.

Sorry to be harsh, but these reviews were entered under my name in your system and then changed to a different name. I find it hard to believe that this is unfixable.

Perhaps the doctor has a point, but I would say that Google is right in that it is probably in the doctor’s (or any other business with a similar issue) best interest to simply have a separate phone line.