Local Search Rankings — PubCon Vegas

Content is critical. Think local community content that goes beyond the five-page mentality. Write about things outside of your business. Write about local things in your community. People are interested in hearing you speak on things other than just what your business is about.

What events in your community can you cover? How can you tie that into your business? How can you tie your city and business into that content?

He is using an example of a marathon — use a topic like “five tips for avoiding crowds in X marathon in X city,” with parking tips, photos of the events, etc. He is showing some results where he grabbed the No. 1 spot in the results online for the Boston Marathon, then he repeated it for marathons all over the country.

Look at the Places pages to mine data about who is ranking. Look at things like addresses and how they are entered in there (spelled out not abbreviated), brand or type of business (he is recommending going with the brand), use of phone numbers (use local numbers).

We are looking at the Places pages for result No. 1. for a query; right now the example is The Venetian. All the content on the page is coming from Wikipedia. Google is taking the easy way out, he says, because this is basically a scraper page.

He is pointing out the photographs; you should always control this. Put high-quality photos in Panoramio of your business (Google owns this and puts the photos in the Places page from there), and optimize them. You can also upload photos. You can do both.

He is now talking reviews. There are a ton of review sites outside of just Yelp. Not every site is indexed but some are indexed for certain industries, depending on what data Google has for that. For reviews:

• URL shorteners; use this and provide to your clients
• Page with links (your URL)
• Business cards
• Postcards
• Emails
• Receipts

Other important things for ranking:

• Photos
• Locations check-in services
• QR codes