Experts Blog

What’s New In Local Search For April 2013

By Mary Bowling on Apr 09, 2013 - 12:17 PM

Here is the April 2013 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

  • There are some things that are good for those managing the new AdWords enhanced campaigns for local businesses even though there are plenty of things not to like about. The best of these is the ability to adjust your bids by geographic area, allowing you to pay more or less for a click depending on its value to you in each market where you sell. These campaign-level bidding adjustments may not give you as tight control as setting up individual campaigns for each region, it is a good way to get started if you have many geographic areas to advertise in.

  • Google officially makes a pared-down version of its most recent quality guidelines public after having them leaked several times over the past few years. I highly recommend reading them. You'll gain a great deal of insight as to how Google thinks about content and what it considers to be outright spam. I hope Google continues to make these guidelines available to all AND lets us know when updates are made to them. Part 2 on pages 27 through 30 is of particular interest to those involved with Local Search but who can resist sections with juicy titles like these: Helpful Webpages vs. Spam Webpages, Specificity of Queries and Landing Pages and Recognizing True Merchants? If you can access a copy of the full document, it gives even more insight than this one, but it's a lot harder to read through, too.

  • Wesley Young writes an awesome piece on how to tell if you should be offering deals and what kind of deals to offer. You'll find this useful in wrapping your head around a topic that often seems to be driven more by sales people trying to sell deals to merchants and the idea that businesses that don't offer deals are missing out on something amazing than it is based upon sound business considerations.

  • Advanced Local University, held early in the month in Baltimore, brought together a core group of Local Search practitioners to network and learn from each other. One of the best things about LocalU's is being able to talk directly with a top Googler in Places/Plus Local and get helpful answers to specific questions and problems. What may have been the most enlightening thing was hearing directly from someone who knows that if you have a verified listing in Places, don't do anything in Google+, yet. Google is going to take care of it for you when it's ready. We were also told we would be thankful for this advice. It's hard for SEO's to sit back and wait, but for most businesses, that's exactly what you should be doing with Google+Local right now.

  • I also had the opportunity to meet Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea at Advanced LocalU. He's the one the SEO industry turns to for insight into Google's patents. Adding his blog to your reading list will help you to think like Google.

  • Google sets up booths to essentially bribe people into reviewing businesses on Google+. This seems to go against its own review guidelines. Maybe it can explain that away, but it's very likely to sound like one of Google's customers explaining their excuses for breaking the guidelines.

  • It's now possible to tell Google to keep your content out of Google+Local search results via Webmaster Tools. Apparently, this is to satisfy some sites, like Yelp, that do not want Google publishing their content, such as reviews. It brings to my mind the saying Be careful what you wish for.

  • People are beginning to say nicer things about Apple Maps and Siri and Apple is hiring more help to make its maps better. Meanwhile, Google seems to be betting on the largely-volunteer community at Google Map Maker to improve not just its Maps but its local business listings, too.

  • Greg Sterling discovers that when Yelp measures leads from its website, it includes:

    click to the business website, menu lookups, maps/directions lookups, calls, check-ins, photo uploads, deals sold, open table reservations.

    That's obviously very broad and includes just about any interaction with a business' listing, but that's what Yelp is using in its new Yelp ROI calculator.

  • I was underwhelmed by the relative lack of live blogging from SMX West 2013. Most of the sessions weren't covered by anyone. True, not everyone can live blog or even do decent re-caps, but there seems to be a HUGE opportunity here for anyone who does a good job of it to build up their blog readership and promote themselves within the industry. Sometimes, live bloggers can get free admission to conferences, too, in the form of a press pass. Are you ready to be the next Lisa Barone?

  • Bing adds sitelinks extensions to its MSN Adcenter ads, which can be instituted at the campaign level, but not at the adgroup level.

  • Yelp publishes its survey on the economic impact it provides to small businesses. Yelp looks really good in it, as can be expected, but if there's even a tiny bit of reality in the numbers, any local business NOT claiming their free profile on Yelp is crazy! I was fairly surprised to learn that the average Yelp advertiser spends $4200 on paid Yelp ads.

  • The Google Maps app for iOS6 gets an upgrade and the always-on location-awareness of the Google Field Trip app is now available on iPhones, too. As mentioned before, Field Trip is definitely an app to watch.

  • Darren Shaw of Whitespark tells us some of the factors to consider when looking for quality citation sites for your business.

  • Andy Beals of Trackur offers some simple tips for local businesses here. These seem obvious to those of us immersed in the world of Local Search, but I'm continually amazed by the number of small businesses and designers who create small business websites who can't or won't follow the basic best practices for Local Search.

  • Yahoo buys Jybe which can provide it with a social discovery and recommendation platform. Sound familiar? It sounds incredibly ambitious to me and there is some speculation that Yahoo is after the Jybe people rather than the Jybe product. Yahoo has fallen behind in so many ways and it's difficult to envision how this will actually help it catch up. I'd like to be pleasantly surprised.

  • Google publishes some new quality guidelines related to tracking codes and redirected URLs in Places listings. You need to read this! URLs submitted in Places/Plus listings should NOT be routed through redirects.

  • Google Maps Engine Lite is unleashed in beta. It's described as an easier way to make advanced custom maps. It's possible to import your old My Maps and layer things onto them and to layer new things onto My Maps that others have created. Maybe it's time to take a look at what you've done lately with mapping?

  • Did you see the tweets coming from the BIA/Kelsey conference that Yellow Pages folk were bragging about the FREE call tracking numbers they provide to their customers? sigh...

  • YP.com (YP is for YellowPages) partners with Yext to help its enterprise customers manage their presence across the web. I wonder if they'll be pushing out NAP-corrupting call tracking numbers via Yext? If so, those who use it may never get control of their NAP again.

  • Google tests product delivery in a couple of large markets. This is one of the Business Builder features that we expected to be part of Google's expansion into more business services for local merchants.

- Mary Bowling, Writer & Lead Local Search Trainer, SearchEngineNews.com