For the third year in a row, David Mihm has published the Local Search Ranking Factors. The LSRF 2010 consists of 32 local search enthusiasts their opinion (including me!) on how to rank well in the search engines. It is a definite must read for everyone interested in Local Search. It is also incredible to see how much has happened in the past year in the Local Search business and how a small community of enthusiastic people (and SEO’s ) are willing to share the ins and outs on the matter.

Top 10 take aways from the Local Search Ranking Factors are (thx Andrew ) :

1. Claiming your Google Place Page/Local Listing
2. Have a Business Address in the City That is Being Searched
3. Associate Your Google Place Page with the Proper Categories
4. Put Your Product/Service Keyword in Your Place Page Business Title
5. Proximity of Your Address to the Searched City’s Centroid
6. Product/Service Keywords in your Google Place Pages Description
7. Associating Photos with your Google Place Page
8. Associating Local Area Code with your Primary Place Page Phone Number
9. Associating Place Page with Marginally Related Categories
10. Location Keyword in Place Pages Business Title

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking Factors 2010

This year I will be attending and speaking at SMX Stockholm. There you will find me presenting a Local Search business case with one of our clients; Boat Company Lovers. My fellow speaker will be Jaap Dijkstra, Business Developer at  Boat company Lovers –  one of the leading companies organizing Canal Cruises in Amsterdam. Some of the projects he is currently working on are the world’s first purpose build Fuel Cell passenger ship and an amphibious coach called Floating Dutchman, which will show passengers transferring through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol the city of Amsterdam.

When you are in the opportunity to attend SMX Stockholm, don’t hesitate to drop a note so we can meet up during the conference!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Speaking at SMX Stockholm – 13 October 2009

Some of us might know Slideshare, the online platform where you can store your presentation slides to share with the rest of the world. It appears that this website is a valuable source for local citation building. The real value, or the amount of it that might affect your ranking could vary. If your presentation on Slideshare is doing well, even the better. This all may sound a bit fuzzy, but I will try and explain with the following example:

I noticed our Local Business listing for our company was taken down. So I checked the Local Business center and found out it was not suspended, not inactive, it was just nowhere to be found in the search results.
The regular keyphrase I use to see if our business is still there is the company name. Whereas we normally we would be in pole position in the 10pack, we were now in 8th, but with a listing that derived its source from the Slideshare website.
Curious of course, I went to the Slideshare website where one of our presentations from SMX Madrid was listed. One of the slides had the company name and phone numbers listed and apparently was being indexed due to the transcript of the presentation.
The data of the company was blended with the results of Slideshare, causing the URL of Slideshare.net to appear. The information taken from the Slideshare transcript also appeared in the ‘webpages’ tab as one of the citation sources.

So I’m wondering, what is the real value of citation sources? Is it the domain that counts or just the per-page popularity? What is exactly needed to be a citation? In our case it was just the company name and phone number that was enough for Google to blend all our information in ‘the cluster’ with our listing. Please let us know your thoughts or experiences in the comment section!

PS: after entering the Local Business Center and updating our listing with basically no major changes it appeared back, where it should be; on top of the 10pack.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Slideshare as a citation source

The conference I missed was SMX Local / Mobile. Too bad I’m ‘stuck’ here down in Europe, because I would have liked to meet some fellow local search enthusiasts in person. Well, Maybe next year.

Luckily, for me, and all of you that were not there, there is some good reading material online. David Mihm wrote a thorough recap about SMX local on his blog.
Andrew Shotland created an avalanche of blogposts on his local seo guide blog with snippets and snappets during the first day of the event.

I advice you to go ahead and read David’s recap here and pay some special attention to Mike Blumenthal‘s research, the model of ranking factors

blumenthal model of local ranking factors

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Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

The conference I missed..

Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results.

Other news: latest hitwise reports show an increase of Google Maps usage, it’s now little over 2 percent of all Google properties. 2 % might seem little, but it’s a whole lot of people.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Why Local Search matters

We see highlights of the most important ranking factors, and also those that might harm your rankings. Must read for small businesses and anyone doing local optimization.

Although this article is quite focussed on the US market it still is extremely useful here in Europe. Most of the factors discussed apply here as well. Too bad Google Maps and Yahoo Local isn’t as developed here as we would like it to be.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking factors discussed