It's been another remarkable year in Local Search. The space continues to evolve at a frenetic pace, and as I wrote in December, the number of digital marketing opportunities that small business owners must try to make sense of has become truly overwhelming. If your head spins as much as mine does even trying to conceptualize how all of the pieces fit together, I suggest digesting this infographic recently created by Mike Blumenthal.
This survey remains an attempt to make sense of at least one small sliver of the digital marketing space: how to improve your ranking in Google Places. While Yahoo Local and Bing Local remain important areas of visibility for any business owner, based on responses from previous surveys, none of the experts felt there were any specific techniques to rank in either of these two search engines that differed from those used to rank in Google's Local results.
It is my hope that this study will help small business owners confused by Local Search, or those strapped for time, to prioritize their marketing efforts.
And boy, did Google's Local results get complex this year-- specifically in October 2010 with the launch of "Blended" Place Search, which shows a hybrid of Place-related and website-related snippets on the search engine result page. Based on the responses from this year's survey, it appears that beyond just the difference in interface, the weighting of signals Google uses for these Blended results differs significantly from the that of it more traditional Local results (the so-called "7-Pack" or "3-Pack"). For more on why Google might choose to show a Blended vs. a Pure Result, see this addendum.
Other key developments at Google this year include the rollout of its "Hotpot" rating and review system (now formally a part of Places), the continued increase in the influence of social and personalized signals in its organic results, and the public announcement of the time it takes your website to load as a ranking factor. Do the local search experts feel these signals have been incorporated into the Place Search algorithms yet? You'll have to read on to find out.
This year's edition of the LSRF contains responses from 33 prominent bloggers and practitioners. It differs from previous years in two key ways:
1) Rather than rating the importance of particular criteria on a sliding scale of -5 → 0 → +5, this year featured a drag-and-drop numerical ranking system in an effort to make the survey results both more precise and easier for the participants to complete.
2) With the introduction of Blended Place Search since last year's survey, I felt it was essential to ask participants about any possible differences they perceived between the two algorithms. Thus, responses are presented in a "split-screen" format below to allow for an easy comparison.
As a result of these two changes, while it's still possible to compare the relative change in the importance of individual factors from year-to-year, there are no longer any absolute values to assign to each factor.
For further background on the Local Search Ranking Factors, you may also want to read the introduction to last year's results.
