Offliners Must Read Google Places Ranking Factors

If you are providing Local SEO / GP Optimization for offline customers this part 1 of 5 killer case study from the Guys over at bizible

This is definitely a must read and must follow. Although there are some good info on the topic here at BHW this is fresh statistical analysis post venice update.

Check it out

Summary

Google Places Optimization Today we published the first of five articles on Local Search Ranking Factors, Google Places Optimization.


Surprising Takeaways

During our analysis, we also uncovered the following:

• Having a physical address in the city of the search did not turn out to be a strong ranking factor, only distance from centroid seemed to matter. So, if you are just outside the city and your address is not officially in the city, this didn?t seem to hurt any more than a business whose address was in the city, but just as far from the centroid.
• Not having any Google reviews or having an average review score of one hurt ranking (as expected), although the incremental increase in ranking as the review score increased from two through five was negligible.
• The presence of a business description alone did not help ranking, but having the search category in the business description did help.
• As expected, getting your fifth Google review significantly helped ranking, although incremental reviews between one and four and above five had a very small impact on ranking. You have to get 100+ reviews to again have a significant impact on ranking.
• On average, for every mile away from the centroid, ranking dropped by 0.4 of a position. Note that this is the average across all 22 cities. In very dense cities like New York, this number was higher and in sprawling cities it was lower.
• Seven of the 484 queries did not have local results on the main page (we removed those 7 from our analysis). On average, there were five local results on the main page.

Thanks for this. Will follow. Would be nice if the information from Bizible was aggregated over to BHW. Give the membership here a bit more to comment on.

Great find.

thanks for the info. Its amazing how many ppl rush into methods, niches and strategies just to mess it up for everyone.