Google have started to produce some extremely useful, if a little less than fully polished, videos about their ranking system on local maps.
As local business becomes more and more relevant for search engine marketing and for every website owner as a consequence, it’s clear that these couldn’t have come at a better time.
New Zealand features some further differences which I managed to find out by my association with Google-affliated companies. (Google owns a share of UBD, Wise’s, Finda and Menumania, among others. Updates to your account in one should automatically be fed into the other directories, and appear in Google Maps and Local Search)
This video focuses on the ranking criteria, and how to make changes to your listing, especually if it is incorrect, or you believe there is a spam component that is causing it to be unfairly penalised.
In New Zealand, the retrictions placed on Google by the Federal Trade Commission (The US trade body FTC, scrutinises trade practice) don’t apply, so the line between sponsored advertising and genuine organic results is, for the time being at least, “blurred”. Our own Commerce Commission has yet to scrutinise the search industry, so there are some minor loopholes for the monolithic incumbent to exploit by default. Perhaps a greater number of people would benefit if they left poor old Mr. Hubbard alone?
The effectiveness of having your name right up there next to the map is well known, and there are more than a few ways to achieve it. For instance, and these should be givens, they’ll get you past go and while you may not collect $200, you could be on your way to a monopoly…
Get some good, genuine reviews. Update your photos. Use one photo for your brand or other visual identity. Fill out all the fields.
As the use of Google (forget the the other search engines, even if Bing is making a halting progress – most users try it and go back to Google, humans are very resistant to change…) replaces Yellow Pages almost completely, your business needs to get up to speed – and you need to be aware of “first mover advantage”!