Is it valuable for a local business to build links into its Google Place?
-
G'Day All, Almost all of my clients are geo-based small service-based businesses. I've noticed during my research that the google places for our competitors in 3 separate niches (3 different clients) seem to be the dominating results for almost all relevant keyword terms. I'm curious to see if anyone has actively tried to increase the ranking of a google place by building links into it. Is this something that anyone else sees value to for a local small business? I would love to get some thoughts. And for that matter I'm also curious to see if anyone thinks there might be value to optimizing a Facebook Fan Page or Yelp Business page. They all seem to be key drivers of traffic our client websites so I'm wondering how difficult it is to make them rank as opposed to a website. Thanks!
-
Thanks guys. Very much appreciate the feedback! I'll run a couple of them and see how they go
-
I feel that linking to the Google places listings from the company website is still something which you can drive benefit from you can also link to the places locations from various 3rd party sites.
Whilst linking to the places account provides benefit, I feel that other factors have more importance such as the number of reviews, the on site text targeting the page, huge number of citations from 3rd party sites, category's also if the domain name is a EMD (exact match domain) it can provide some benefit to the ranking which I have seen.
-
I have asked this question in the past and generally gotten the answer that it is not useful. I look forward to hearing other peoples opinions on the topic though.
One thing i have noticed in the last couple months with local SEO is that all the sites that really rank, actually really have quite a lot better page/domain/trust rank than the sites that don't rank well. It seems more than ever it is important to have good qaulity, high authority backlinks to your domain, in order to rank will in local. It seems citations are hardly that important at all anymore, but reviews still hold some weight, if you can get them to stick in a believable pattern.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What basics should we be looking at in Google Analytics?
We have GA set up on our site for a while now. However, we do not look at the data. We did today and it's quite overwhelming. Is there anything in specific we should start with? A top 3 items we should start to monitor each week and try to improve? Bonus Question: Is there a way to use analytics to find out who are competitors are?
Competitive Research | | IcarusSEO0 -
Should I get a link from a low quality directory?
While doing some backlink research of similar ranking sites I noticed that a few of them had links from a directory called Infignos, it has a moz DA of 37 and a low spam score of 3, so it doesn't look like complete junk. But the posts on it look terrible, like people are just putting keywords with a small description to get rankings. Should I bother posting something similar to be competitive or just move on? Any advice or feedback on this is much appreciated, I know some of these things are not quality sites but I was wondering the best way to filter that out. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | iwantclarity0 -
Via this intermediate link?
I'm doing some work on an ecommerce site for an electronics distributor and I've been seeing these "Via this intermediate link" notations from GWT under our "Links To Your Site" section. I understand how and why these notations would normally be displayed, however, these links are mainly coming from our direct competitors. Fearing that we might be a victim of a negative SEO attack, I looked into the situation and noticed that all of the links are from PDF's (technical data sheets) provided by the manufacturer that both we and our competitors use on our product detail pages. This still seems odd to me because, we download these pdf's and host them on our own site on our own servers under a completely different name (as I'm assuming our competitors do as well), yet, there still seems to be a connection between our sites through these PDF's. I've included a screenshot of some examples. Since we have thousands of SKU's on our site - with technical PDF's for nearly all of them - we're seeing a lot of links from competitors sites. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, I'm just trying to understand the situation more clearly. Has anyone had any similar experiences or some information from Google that might explain what I'm seeing here? fpWvB5T
Competitive Research | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Building a high-traffic website in a jobs-related domain
Hi, We are currently planning upon starting a website that’s targeted towards people looking for government jobs in India. Here are the primary / base keywords that we are targeting: Sarkari Naukri Government Jobs / Govt Jobs Latest Government jobs Banking Jobs Bank jobs Railway jobs Employment News IBPS SSC We’re confused that how should we go about ranking on top for these / long tail keywords around it? Because, we think that this is not a domain where you can write long and information-oriented posts (1400-1500 words) to crack SEO. People come to websites under this domain to look for latest jobs and that might or might not be around the high-traffic keywords mentioned above. Secondly, it might not be possible to write a lot of long & information-oriented content around these newer job posts. How do we go about building a high-traffic website in this domain? Thanks...
Competitive Research | | Shalin.TJ0 -
How much keyword density for Google?
I have several pages on one site which have gone down during the past few months. They keyword density on those pages, which is not unnatural, pleased Google for many years. it still pleases Bing. But Google now seems very picky. Based upon your experience, what is the ideal % keyword density for 2 and 3 word phrases, and should they be left out of alt tags even when proper to put them there? While Google dominates, we do not wish to alienate BIng/Yahoo. It is a huge mystery, and experimentation with more non-keyword-related text has so far not born any fruit. Thank you, GH
Competitive Research | | gheh20130 -
Is there a way to establish how old a link to a site is?
I wonder if anyone has any insight on the above question.
Competitive Research | | InTouchMarketing560 -
My Competition is using some Strange Achord Text and Inbound Links
I was doing some research and a lot of my competition are websites from Universities, but I got surprised when I saw that a lot of their Anchor Text where things like Buy Viagra , Play poker , Buy Cialis , a lot of their inbound links where about things like that , one of the sites I was doing research on was www.imba.ie.edu , this site was #1 for the keyword I want that is related to education. Also other sites on the #1 page of google for this keyword (universities websites) had the same kind of inbound links and achord texts. Whats going on here??
Competitive Research | | globalcampus0 -
Do links from a linkdirectory still matter
Hi everyone, I'm checking out some competition for a webshop and i found a website which was quite high in Google for a searchterm, when checking it's backlinks why it was that high in google (His Content was rubbish, so it wasn't that). I only found out that it has loads of linkdirectory links, does this mean it still matters these kind of links, or does it mean the competition is just rubbish? Regards, yannick
Competitive Research | | iwebdevnl0