Think you know how to show up on Google? Think again. Google tells us they made over 500 changes to how they rank websites in 2009. How’s a small business owner supposed to keep up?
There’s 3 significant changes to Google Place Pages today.
First, Google has really improved the ease of editing a business listing. It’s easier both for business owners to claim their listing and for others to make community edits to a listing. At the top right, there’s now an obvious checkmark & “Owner-verified listing” if the business is verified.
Non-verified listings replace this with 2 simple links: “Edit this place – Business owner?” Previously, the link to claim a business listing on Google was buried several clicks away. Nice improvement.
A few weeks ago, Google stopped showing the Google Maps/Local results for some searches like:
Sacramento Web Design
SEO Memphis TN
Marketing Firm Knoxville
Ad Agency Lexington KY
There was a good discussion on this at Mike Blumenthal’s blog. General consensus was that Google removed them while trying to fix how they were improperly applying Authoritative One Boxes for some searches.
Today, I’m seeing the 7 pack back but only when the search contains a word like “in” or “near” within the search phrase. So you get a 7 pack on “web design in Nashville TN” but no 7 pack on “web design Nashville TN”
Managing your brand’s online reputation can seem like a huge task. While many things you can do are common sense, there’s usually disagreement and confusion over the details. Read the rest of this entry »
How Can Anyone Know How to Get Better Rankings? It’s a fair question.
There’s a TON of info on the web about how to get higher Search Engine (SE) rankings. Unfortunately, much of it is incorrect, conflicting or out of date. But a more basic question is how can we know that anything we do will actually work?
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