Google Places is a free business listing for businesses with a physical location that matters. Service providers and retailers that serve a particular geographic community should care about Google Places. When folks navigate to Google and search for that service or product, Google Places spits out all listings in their geographic area – usually on the first page.
I’m going to use the example of a Cheyenne Technology small business client. Comfort Systems Heating and Air is located at 1515 East 13th Street Cheyenne, WY 82001. When Internet-savvy folks want heating and air services in Cheyenne, they browse to Google and type in something like “Cheyenne heating and air.” If they don’t type in the word “Cheyenne,” Google will make a best guess at where they actually are and Google is pretty good at figuring it out. Comfort Systems want’s to be at the top of that Google Places listing.
The Google Places results list includes all Cheyenne heating and air businesses registered and validated with Google. An example is shown below with Google map icons and information to the right of each listing.
Understanding the importance of such a Google listing to Comfort Systems, we registered the company with Google Places, validated the listing via the post card route and waited for the company to show up at the top of the Google Places listing. This did not happen.
Instead, the listing was buried on the second page of the Places block, drastically lessening the company’s chances of getting business from the listing. We were confused given that some of the businesses showing up on the first page of the places listing weren’t even in Cheyenne. So we did a little research. According to Google, businesses are prioritized in that Places listing according to relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance
Relevance has to do with how relevant the company’s reported services and goods are to the terms entered by the user into the Google search bar. So if a user is searching for heating and air and the business includes that search term prominently in its Google Places description, this is the right first step. Researching this topic more, we discovered that Google Places also looks for keyword matches in the company’s associated website content and other online listings as well. We had that covered of course being an SEO-savvy organization. Other experts recommend that you upload images within your Google Places listing and name those images with the same keywords. So for Comfort Systems, relevance wasn’t the problem.
Distance
As the title suggests, the distance criteria equates to how far the business listing is from the location term used in a search (i.e. “Cheyenne heating and air”). If the person searching for the service or product didn’t specify a location in their search, Google calculates the distance based on what Google knows about your location. The distance criteria turned out to be an important one for us. While we had the Comfort System’s street address listed at 1515 East 13th Street Cheyenne, WY 82001 with Google Places, that address was NO WHERE TO BE FOUND on the Comfort Systems website. Why? The Comfort Systems shop is not where customers go to find them. That’s just where the business has equipment shipped and where they pound sheet metal. So while we had email addresses, local phone numbers, contact forms and the term “Cheyenne heating and air” all over the website, we didn’t have their actual Cheyenne street address.
As it turns out, Google looks for address cross references in the company website and other online references when ranking the Places listings. Our remedy was to add their street address to the footer of every website page. We also surrounded the address information with hCard microformatting tags so that Google would be crystal clear that this was, in fact, their physical address.
Prominence
Prominence is based on information Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). When it comes to prominence, time and a lot of hard work go into the establishment of relevant back links and there’s no short-cutting this step. With Comfort Systems, we’re targeting the key phrases such as “Cheyenne heating and air” and we’re back-linking from Facebook, Twitter, blogs like this one and partner websites whenever the opportunity arises.
In conclusion, we recently tweaked the client’s website, Facebook fan page and other online sources to reflect that physical address. Now we’re waiting to see what happens when Google picks up on our changes. I can assure you that that you’ll see us trumpeting our success all over Cheyenne when the ranking rises. And Google, did I mention that Comfort Systems is located at 1515 East 13th Street Cheyenne, WY 82001?
