Last week Google quietly changed the world, AGAIN! They have been planning and building their Google Places brand for the last year. Moving it through the annals of Google Local, Google Business and Google Maps until the all converged into Google Places around last May.
Anyone who has worked with Google Places in the past year for local service based companies is aware of the randomness in the algorithms since May. People have been complaining about all sorts of quality guideline violations without any clarity on why they have been rejected. These are not everyday people these are experts.
Google introduced a new $25 per month upgrade for your listing that they promise has no impact on your rating but for $25 I would buy the insurance. We have long been prognosticating that local search is the future of the internet and it’s not because we are really smart, it’s because Google told us!
Google has now capitalized on the trend and turned it’s big machine in that direction almost completely against the grain, mouth wide open just filling it with fish!
Virtually every search you do as of last Tuesday… As long as it is for a business category, generally business to consumer, that can be broken into small local services now has virtually the entire first page of their Google search as Google Places listings. SEO results have been pushed down to the bottom of the page in most cases. Google has wiped out a segment of the market overnight.
I have spoken with a few SEO companies that are a little scared. They can still focus on the non-service retail businesses and ecommerce providers but taking the local search out of the profit game hurts bad!
For this reason AdWords pricing is already starting to jump. We don’t have hard statistics yet but we don’t deal in them anyway. We focus on trend and wait for the statistics to prove us right. With the new Places Pages the sponsored links are now highly valuable, over night! I am seeing my budgets for clients run out at 12PM on accelerated campaigns that used to run almost all day!
So what does this mean for SEO? Is it really that relevant or has Google built in a way to profit from that market as well? Next column!
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