Global Local Search – Lisa Myers – International Search Summit
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Global Local Search – Lisa Myers – International Search Summit

18th May 2011

Lisa Myers from SEO Agency Verve Search presented on Global Local Search and started by saying 1 in 5 search queries have local intent across the search engines which is a great deal of demand and 97% of consumers use local for shopping. Google
Places operates in 100 places including Greenland! Google Places is still the biggest player in Europe.

In the last year there have been a great deal of changes from blended search to maps pack and review changes. In a lot of cases places maps push the

Local ranking factors:
1) Location – look at where your business is based and proximity to the location search query
2) Relevance
3) Internal factors such as a business name associated categories and external data
4) Prominence
5) External factors – link dev for local: data citations, reviews occurrence of business in UGC.

If you target multiple locations with Google Places use the bulk upload function. It is difficult to get it approved. It is far more strict now with verification by post card. In the US there seems to be more support for local but this hasn’t been the case within the European markets to date.

Reduced impact factors
1) Keyword in business title
2) Location keywords in categories
3) Location description in places description

Emerging factors
1) Rich snippets
2) Reviews
3) Volume of UGC

Citations
1) Consistency – keep the same business name address, telephone number
2) Major Data Centers – mentions

Reviews
1) Gaming reviews – incedents of reviews being manipulated
2) Review velocity counts
3) Review #s count , sentiment not being used

Tracking
1) Use the utm_source to track the local 8 pack results within Google Analytics

New features:
1) Google Hot Pot – ratings and recommendation for Google places
2) Integration with Google Products – big brand search shows stores and offers
3) Integration with Google Adwords
4) Richer Snippets – from review centers such as Yelp
5) Local search dominates the serps for local queries
6) Google Boost – simplified way of doing adwords, tick for google boost, add your budget and start paying per click on your places listing. Danger is that it will be broad match therefore maximising Google revenue.
7) Support will be better once Google boost is live

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Written By
Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.
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