NetGains Marketing

It’s always great to discover a local treasure, a new bakery or coffee shop to check out, but sometimes finding these treasures can be tricky. Leave it to Google to simplify the process.

Last week Google announced changes to Google Places (formally Google Local Business Centre) that will make it easier to find and compare local businesses. Place Search is a new kind of tool that organizes search results based on location.

Coupled with Google’s new real time search, Place Search results will begin appearing automatically if Google predicts you’re seeking local information. Likewise, “Places” now appears as a search option in the left-hand panel (under the Google logo), so you can switch to these results at any time. For example, if you’re looking for a Calgary Dog Groomer, here is a screen shot of what you can expect to see:



Results are indicated with a red place marker on the mapped image, and each result includes the title, description, contact information, as well as web links and reviews.

1. Focus on local SEO
Businesses that rank well on Google’s organic search results may not appear on the Place Search results. If your business is locally based, you may want to consider shifting your SEO focus from placement on specific keywords, to optimizing for Google Places.

2. Reviews are more visible
That all important customer review just got more important. People who may not have previously dug to find reviews on website’s such as Yelp will now have that information more easily accessible and more visible. So, ensuring that you are monitoring your online reputation, and responding appropriately to negative feedback, will be more crucial.

3. Ensure your listing is accurate
This is probably the most important implication of this new tool. If you haven’t yet claimed your Google Places listing, do so! Making sure that you are included in their data base and that the contact information on your listing is up to date could be the difference between getting a contact and losing it to your competition.

Have you ever tried to Google your company name and not even shown up in the results? Super powers are cool, but if it’s your website that’s invisible, you may need to think about getting a new one.

If you run a local business, having a presence on the search engines is crucial. Last year, 80% of searches online were looking for a local business, if you aren’t showing up on the results you are losing customers to companies who are.

Here are some red flags that your website isn’t getting the placement it deserves:

1.  You aren’t optimizing your meta tags

When Google displays a search result, you are able to see two main elements, the Title and the Description. These elements are among the most important in the search engine’s determination of what your website is about. Having “untitled”, generic “home” or “about us”, or simply your company name is not helping in your quest to rank on a specific search term. 

2.  Your website is 100% flash based

If your website is 100% flash based and you aren’t being indexed on the search engines, you may want to consider a redesign. While the movement is beautiful, there are many drawbacks to flash based websites. Consider using a more search engine friendly programming language such as HTML5, which can mimic the movement of flash, but still allows the search engines to spider your website. 

3.  Your content isn’t SEO friendly

The search engines “read” your content to try and determine when your website is relevant. Ensuring that your content has been written to include the keywords you want to show up on is important. Having those keywords included in important elements of that content, such as h1 tags and anchor text will help even more.

4.  You are using outdated or ‘black hat’ SEO strategies

Did you know that the algorithms used by the search engines to rank your website are constantly changing? Did you know that some of the tactics that yielded great results 3-5 years ago, may actually get you black listed today? If your website’s SEO strategy includes keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, or other “black hat” SEO Techniques, your might find yourself banned from the search engines.

If your website isn’t driving you the business that it should, and any of these red flags are present, you need to consider having your website redone, or at least “made-over” in a search engine friendly manner.  With more than 450 million searches performed daily on Google alone, if you aren’t ranking, you may as well be invisible.