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Follow @DistilledSo this is a few days late I’m afraid but here are my slides from the simply awesome Think Visibility 2010 in Leeds:
Google Local Tips & Tricks by Tom Critchlow
I’d like to say thank you again to Dom for organising such a great event and putting us up in a swanky hotel. Good times all round!
Tom Critchlow Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for the NYC office, living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan. Fiercely curious about most things and passionate about everything.Follow @tomcritchlow
Tom Critchlow
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Thanks for clarifying the 5 major factors of local search ranking – categories, number of reviews, citations, verified (owner claimed listing), distance to centre. Personally I feel distance to centre is less of a factor in determining the 10-pack results in Google Local..?
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Hi Tom,
Great Presentation!
Working for a local review Plattform (German market), i can tell, that we are providing Google as their ‘Google local content partner’ with our full data-set of SMBs including reviews in one huge XML-File. From my perspective i just can say, that “distance from center” is totally irrelevant, as long as the competitors don’t display reviews. In that case, i found numerous examples, where the distance from the city centre was around 60km (37 miles)and “our” SMBs werde always on top with their reviews… even though their adress was in a totally different city (and they didn’t use that new ‘Service Area Tool’ in the LBC!).
Therefore thumbs up for Slide 14!
But i think, it’s a dangerous path Google is trying and i already can imagine “reviews companies” working out gazillions of reviews for the local locksmith-industry
Greetings Sebastian
Hi Tom,
That’s a cool presentation, thanks for sharing!
One point about the reviews, slide 14, what if you had a hundred 1 star reviews, and nothing else? Would your ‘quantity over quality’ rule still apply?
Andrew
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thanks for the clarification on the most important factors on local search ranking. I’m in the industry of hotel seo and affiliates sites.. Having a listing in the local Google map section can make or break a site.. It can save years of hard link building and seo if you can get your site to the top of the local listings
It’s important that the local search is used correctly as its easy to get listings removed that seem or are spammy.
Hi Tom – any thoughts on my original question? Also – how has the organic merge results for local effective your views?
Hey Andrew,
Apologies for missing your original question. We’ve been doing a bunch of stuff internally to analyse the new results – quite a lot has changed around but we’re not ready to publish anything just yet. Maybe in the next few months
As for quality of reviews, I’ve never explicitely tested your approach but I suspect too many negative reviews would hurt you. Especially in light of the recent NYT times article about negative marketing. Tom
I think that the system is too innacurate at the moment. If you do a search for “Islington solicitors” it shows a list of solicitors, only 2 of which are actually in Islington (and these on the border of the borough, indicated by the red line on the map below), the other 8 being in the City of London.
Apparently the reason for this is pr? Although I thought it was approximation to the location? Any ideas with this guys?