Google’s Mind is on Local Search
Mary Bowling | 17 July 2006 |
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Last week, Google published information on 12 patent filings. Some of these technologies may already be in use, some are probably in the developmental stage, and others may never amount to anything. The most interesting thing about this batch of filings is that seven of them directly address features that would impact Local Search. Here are three that immediately grab my SEO-focused interest:
Local Item Extraction tries to determine if the address published on a web page is related to the business information on that page. For example, while a page about pizza may have a Biloxi Mississippi address listed at the bottom, it may or may not be about a place where you can find pizza in Biloxi. Instead, it may be a about how to make a pizza, how to eat a pizza, the history of pizza, etc., and the website owner may live in Biloxi and use that address on his pages. Google wants to be able to tell the difference.
Location Extraction hints that Google would like to be able to tell whether it should return regular web results or Local Search results for any given query, particularly those containing geo-identifiers. This could fully integrate Local Search into the SERPs, which is huge. With this in the algorithm, profiles of small local businesses without websites could possibly compete with the well-SEO-ed sites of big online players.
Authoritative Document Identification tries to identify which web pages are associated with a particular location. Then, it determines the “authoritativeness” of those documents. In this way, Google can establish authority sites for any given geo-location, be it a neighborhood, town, city, county, state, region, etc.
Other “local” patent filings address advertising, including pay-per-call, as it relates to Local Search, and ways of determining location when it is not obvious to the search engine.
We’ll have to wait and see which of these patents actually makes it off the drawing board and into the algorithm, but it does reaffirm that Local Search is very much on Google’s mind. It should be on your mind, too.
Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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July 17th, 2006 at 11:45 am
One of the obvious recommendations I would make is to ensure that your contact info is listed at the the bottom of your webpages, especially the homepage, in a standard format (name, address, city, state, zip + phones). Make sure it is standard text, not a graphic, which the search engines can’t read.
July 18th, 2006 at 7:03 am
Hi Mary,
Great Article!
It’s no secret that Google & YaHoo have been looking into how to build a local model that yeilds relevant results and is a revenue stream. DiscoverOurTown has been in conversation with both companies and the day of the virtual walk down main street is coming. People need more info than just name address phone number…they want details of what specifically that business offers…French Antiques / Indian water colors, etc…That too has been the success of our National Directory at DiscoverOurTown.com.
With Google the AdSense, ads are building revenancy and this to me is the first place they need to be successful…more “hometown” adverstisers. In our 2000 cities, we see on the lodging page of Little Rock, Arkansas advertisers in West Virginia…so they a far way to go …but the local market will be emerging over the next decade…as some people in business do not have web sites yet!!