Introducing Descriptive Terms in Local Search Results
As of Monday the 13th, Google Maps search results rolled out in US and UK a new algorithm which now allow a place to appear in the SERPs while being searched with “most frequent terms” like “the best places …”, “a goof cup of coffee in..”, “the worse pub at…”
These phrases association will be collated from many different sources around the web.
What do I think about this?
It is clear that a change like this will particularly affect the travel industry, which is one of the biggest players into the “local search” area. However, I won’t be surprised if sooner these associations will apply also to offices and off-street shops.
If customers haven’t a local presence and they haven’t claimed their profile in Google Places yet, it’s a good time for the SEO firm to remember them doing this. At the same time, it is important to cross-sell customers a PR service, to guarantee them a decent online visibility rich of comments that will boost this new online presence.
If you would like to cover more in detail the Local Search Results, just follow the link.
Site Names vs. URL’s
It appears like Google is testing a new look for search results, which now remove URLs at the bottom of the snippet, replacing it with the name of the site itself. It is not clear yet if this is one of the many experiments Google does regularly, or perhaps a change they are rolling out in a short term.
What do I think about this?
URLs have been in the past year a big component of the SEO optimization process and ultimately a decisional factor used by searchers to understand the relevance between the result proposed and the query.
If Google plans are to remove the URL, inevitably part of user experience may be compromised. However, this does not mean that SEOers need to stop optimizing the URLs, keeping them shorter and keyword-rich.
Why certain web sites rank better than others
In a recent video, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed why some web sites like Amazon ranks frequently better even than the company / product web site.
He pointed out the finger to the savviness of the company directions, which often fails while proposing content, omitting to publish detailed rich pages which can attract both search engines and users.
What do I think about this?
Google re-instated more than once that content is the King. Publishing periodically fresh and new original information helps the web to be a better place where user can satisfy their knowledge needs. It could be a good chance to remember our customers to spend more on content copywriting (to be of course previously SEO optimized).