Google OneBox Mantra: Localization, Localization, Localization
May 1st, 2008It never gets any easier.
Competition, that is.
Competition for customers. Competition for search-engine return position. Competition for clickthroughs. Competition for the most important item of all, dollars.
If you’re a local or regional-based professional, tradesperson or retailer who depends on your website to help generate business, competition has just gotten tougher thanks to Google’s decision to increase the number of listings shown in each Local OneBox from two or three to nine or ten.
The Local OneBox, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the mini Google Map with names and locations of businesses that pops up in the number one position on an ever-increasing number of returns for search queries which specify a geographic location — “Chicago plumbing”, for example.
What makes the Local OneBox particularly tough competition for brick-and-mortar businesspeople with a strong web presence is the bizarre fact that companies don’t need a website to get in it. Thanks to the Local OneBox, a “Chicago plumber” without a single web page or even an email addy can get his name, address, phone number and a map to his location listed at the top of Google’s so-called natural returns ahead of dozens of competitors with robust sites detailing what services they offer, what rates they charge and other extremely useful and (to steal one of Google’s favorite words) relevant factoids.
Only Google can explain why — among the more than 100 factors it claims go into determining search-engine return positions — having a Yellow Pages listing is better than having a Yellow Pages listing and a website. But the fact is that it must be: Many businesses with OneBox (aka “Ten Pack”) listings are in the phone book, but not on the web.
There are at least two theories about this. One states that Google is trying to drive traffic to Google Maps by encouraging people to click the OneBox map to see a bigger image that will steer them to the listed businesses more precisely. The other says the OneBox expansion (a recent search for “Chicago plumbers” found paid listings and the OneBox covering over half the opening screen) is a tacky attempt to make returns less useful and force webmasters to buy more Adwords.
Whatever the reason, and we should stress that we have no evidence that either of the two theories cited above are either true or untrue, the OneBox Ten Pack is a reality and so is the growing importance of local search.
How important? According to respected web metrics analysts like the Kelsey Group and comScore, between 15 and 20 percent of all search queries now include geographic modifiers such as city, state, region (i.e. Southern California), zip code, or area code. In Google terms, that percentage translates to more than 1.5 billion searches a month. And in much of the U.S., the first return those 1.5 billion searchers will see is OnePage.
The upshot of all this is obvious: If you have a business that relies on local customers, you should do everything you can to optimize your site to either get into the OneBox or onto the return list as close to it as possible.
First, we would suggest making sure your Yellow Pages listing is under the most likely web search term for your business. Logic — if such a concept is ever applicable to the black art of SEO — says that when Googlebot is looking at the Yellow Pages to decide which “Chicago plumbers” to reward with a OneBox position, a listing under “plumbers” would rank ahead of one under “plumbing contractors.” (The number one OneBox return for “Chicago plumbers,” falls to number 8 in the “plumbing contractor” OneBox.)
Also, there is some circumstantial evidence that OneBox is biased toward urban businesses. If you’re on Chicago’s far north side, for example, you might consider buying a one-line listing in the downtown directory if the price is right.
(Note: We have tried, and utterly failed, to determine whether businesses which buy listings in unofficial Yellow Page directories get more OneBox play than those which only list in their local phone company’s book.)
Next, pay attention to the amount of localization on your site, particularly your home page. Six of the ten OnePage listees on our recent (late-April 2008) search for “Chicago plumbers” did have websites. Clearly, there must have been something that separated them from the dozens of other Chicago plumbers with both phone numbers and websites.
Again, we don’t pretend to know what Google is looking for, but these are all things that can’t hurt and may help.
– Change phrases like “expert plumbing services since 1988″ to “expert Chicago and Chicagoland (insert your city name here) plumbing services since 1988.”
– List your full address, including your zip code, on your home page.
– List your full phone number, including area code, on your home page.
– Make sure your site’s metatags — keywords, title and description — contain geographic descriptors.
– Expand the geographic references in your text. For example, “one-hour drain clearing throughout the North Side” could become “one-hour drain clearing throughout the Chicago North Side including North Town, etc. etc.” (Just to prove OnePage hasn’t yet conquered the universe, a search for “Chicago North Town Plumbers” produced only natural returns.)
Last, but definitely not least, if you haven’t already done so, localize your links. Add more local businesses and advise them to include the fact that they are local in their anchor text. To go back to our plumbing example … a reciprocal link from:
A1 Contracting
We stay wired for Chicago
is better than:
A1 Contractor
We stay wired for you
It also goes without saying that you should include localization in all your anchor text.
Even better, consider using LinkManager’s exclusive LinkBlog’s to add references to the cities and communities you service and keywords that might help your localization efforts. Such as: “Chicago’s oldest and most reliable plumbers, serving all Chicagoland, including downtown, the near north side, south Chicago and the Chicago suburbs. We also sell fixtures, click here for a map to our showroom.”
(With LinkBlogs you can easily offer a map just like Google does.)
Unlike the God of all creation, Google — at least as far as any of us know — does not watch every sparrow. But it does weigh, analyze and tabulate every metatag, body copy and link word. To improve your odds of getting a fair share of hits from those 1.5 billion monthly geographic searches, you’re well advised to localize, localize and localize some more.