Friday, 06, May 2011 09:44
One of the hardest areas of Google's search engine result pages (SERPs) to optimise for is the Google Places segment of geographically specific searches.
Location is clearly an important factor in determining rankings in this part of the SERPs - the section that appears at the top if you include a place name in your query, with results labelled A, B, C etc and displayed on a map.
However, a post on the Hubspot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog suggests that there may be some ways to target specific search terms and improve the position of a given result in the list.
Jeffrey Russo, inbound marketing consultant for the firm, explains that simply mentioning a company - even without linking to its Places page - could be enough to raise its ranking.
"Many believe that reviews and simple mentions of your business across the web are of equal or greater importance [than links]," he writes.
This is on top of the usual on-page techniques, which can be applied on Google Places, such as ensuring company descriptions include target keywords.
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