Google Maps search results are based primarily on relevance, distance, and prominence. These factors are combined to help us find the best match for your search. For example, our search technology might decide that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer. Here’s more detail on what relevance, distance, and prominence mean:
Relevance: Relevance is how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for. A complete and detailed listing in Places can help us better understand your business and match you to relevant search results.
Distance: Just like it sounds — how far is each potential search result from the location term used in a search? If you don’t specify a location in your search, we’ll calculate distance based on what we know about your location.
Prominence: This describes how well-known or prominent a listing can be. This is based on information we have about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and we try to reflect this online as well. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be more prominent in search results.
Google Maps and Google Places are free services, so there’s no way to request or pay for a better ranking. In addition, we do our best to keep the details of the algorithm confidential in order to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.
Service Marketing Strategies Going Mobile
If your website is not built for smart phones contact us @ Service Marketing Ideas 801-903-1033
Read MoreAdding Value To Your Local Service Business
As a small business owner there are some core values and tools that you use to help you succeed. One of these, is adding value to your product or your service.
Read MoreGoogle “Source” and new SERP experiments add change to search results.
Google has confirmed that they are testing a new query results on google searches. Essentially what Google has done, is gather additional relevant information about a particular search and added it to the right side bar. See example Below
[Screenshot via Cyrus Shepard
The beat feature displays relevant information about the search result in the right side of the result page. What you can see is Wikipage information, album information, biographical information, twitter information, discography information, similar artist ect.
While you may not care, or even know who Rihanna is, you should be able to see the possibilities of the new results. This would do wonders for businesses, information results, and other similar searches. Google could possible even tie this result into cell phone/Droid information or Google plus information which would basically adapt searches to your lifestyle, personality, and preferences.
While this is still in Beta mode and when it will go web wide no one knows. It should be another notch in Google’s belt.
Read MoreHow Does Google Places Rank Pages?
In their own words-
Ranking of listings
Twitter and Service Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
Twitter can be an effective local marketing too if used correctly.
When you setup your twitter account you need to take it easy and not go on a following spree. It is important that you need to connect to your customers. Don’t just tweet and jump off the web, stick around, connect and engage future customers.
You only get one chance to make a good twitter first impression. Make it a good one.
Let people know what you are about in a few short words and complete your profile completely with links back to your website or Google Places Page .It is important to remember that consistency is more important than huge bursts. Huge bursts of tweets bring spikes but consistency brings followers and customers. Make sure that your twitter feed or link is tied into all of your sites i.e. Websites, Facebook Pages, Google Places Pages, and any other pages that you may have.
Twitter is just one part of your ongoing information flow.
1.Your website, specifically your landing page, should be the hub of your information city. All of your other sites (including twitter), coupons, flyers, mailers, text messages, emails, QR codes, and fan pages should point back to the main hub. In doing so you will increase your traffic and your ranking on Google, Bing and Yahoo.
2.Twitter is searched by the search engines, but does not affect your ranking the same as other sites do. We won’t give you an extended lesson on SEO,SEM or any other acronyms, but understand that those types of things will change your business for the better.
3. Don’t mix your personal and business Twitter accounts if you have multiple accounts. Like a mullet keep all the business in the front and the party in the back. Keep your Twitter accounts separate.
4.It is good to listen to people before talking. It is the same with twitter, listen to what your local twitter followers are saying, that way you have a good way to respond to them and others that may come into the conversation on twitter.
These are just a few of the ways that you can use Twitter to build your small business.
