Why Your Google Local Business Listing Ranks Poorly

by David Bruce Jr on 2009/08/14

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Why do some Google Places Listings Rank and Yours Is Nowhere Near the Top?

Google is a relatively newcomer to the mass media advertising arena. It’s like in the early 60′s when television realized it held the power to make or break a corporation and smaller companies were priced out of the market.

Big Bucks Command Attention

Small to medium size companies just don’t have the advertising budget to get on TV during prime time, let alone the Super Bowl. Even during the dot com bust of 2000 Google’s dominance over search was nothing short of meteoric. From 1998 till 2000 one could get one’s ad (in the form of an entry in the organic or natural search listings) placed in Google for free.

In October 2000 Google introduced it’s form of Pay Per Click (Adwords) which was still amazingly inexpensive. Fast forward to today and for getting top billing in highly competitive markets is going to cost as much (or MORE) than prime time television ad slots.

Fearing that the vast majority of small business owners would simply throw their hands up in despair… Google through them a bone:

Using the existing GoogleMaps infrastructure, Google introduced Local Business Listings, and they offered it for FREE. What a bonus to the little guy.

What I do as a SEM (search engine marketing) consultant is organic search ranking improvement, I get your company website to rank higher in the main search listings than your competitors website ranking. I do that by observing the algorithm that decides which website is “more important” , finding out what it is about the current #1 listed site is that Google seems to like so much and doing them one better.

The algorithm that decides who should be more important is different for the organic (or natural) listings and the Local Business Listings.

So you got your business listed in LBL but it’s buried deep in the bowels of Google Places? Want to know how to get yours to improve?

There are many factors involved (and I’m not gonna tell you all my trade secrets) I will tell you that testimonials (aka reviews) are one of the main reasons for one listing to be ranked higher.

The secret to improving your GoogleMaps Listing is… (insert drum roll)
TESTIMONIALS aka reviews
You aren’t going anywhere in gmaps without a review or three or ten.

Think of Google Local Business Listings (aka Google Maps, Now known as Google Places update 12/31/2010) as if it were a newspaper food critic, if the Washington Post food critic said a restaurant was good, bad or excellent… that would have a huge impact on traffic going to that restaurant.

And here’s MY reviews, these are my customers who thought enough of what I did for their business volume/ increase in hot leads that they “jumped through” numerous hoops to “vote for me”.

Don’t even think about cheating or “stuffin the ballot box” with shills in the audience, every way that is humanly possible to cheat Google or scam Google has been already tried and implemented in the last 60 minutes. Think of it this way: Google can make or break you, and almost everybody with a website is

Google knows if you post your own review

Google knows if the person reviewing created the account 20 minutes before leaving the review and never logged into that account again.

Google knows the IP address of the person reviewing

Google knows this for sure: If the business owner has ever logged into the computer that the review came from… it HAS to be a clean computer.

It’s even better if you, as the business owner is logged in and surfing the web while the reviewer is posting the glowing testimonial from another location, Google knows you can’t be in 2 places at once!

a note about the review/ vote/ fave/ friend process… the more hoops that have to be jumped through the more value a vote / review carries.

Think about it, if it was easy, everybody would get their friends and family or employees to vote for your website. By making it a pain in the ass ON PURPOSE the vote has more value.

The person voting/ reviewing/ giving the testimonial *should* do so FROM a gmail account. From a sales copy point of view your readers, prospects, people reading your reviews because they are just about ready to get out their credit card and purchase… they should be able to contact the reviewer to verify that what the review says, they really did say.

How To Videos From Google itself:

Why Your Google Local Business Listing Ranks Poorly

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