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Listening to what your readers are asking is the most effective way to: Brainstorm awesome link baiting ideas; Enhance your keyword research; Get new content ideas when you are stuck.

Oct 14, 2008 at 1:08pm Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Problems Continue With Google Local Business Listings What do the Google searches; Orlando Hotels, Miami Discount Car Rental & Dallas Discount Car Rental have in common? The obvious answer is that they are all local searches on popular phrases in major metro areas. A less obvious answer is that like the infamous Denver Florist search last December, they all return seemingly authoritative OneBox results on popular geo phrase searches in a major market, as in the example below: Orlando Hotels or the Marriott The searches demonstrate clear problems with Google's Universal Local OneBox algorithm. Certainly, "major city + service/product" searches should return a broad range of consumer choices and not an authoritative OneBox that limits the view to one highlighted provider of the service. Google returns the OneBox result because the ostensible business name in the result supposedly mirrors the search phrase and in Google's opinion provides strong relevance in relation to the user query. The problem with the above result is that the business shown on the map is the Marriott Orlando Downtown, not "travel.ian.com." The Marriott's business listing has apparently been hijacked. In fact, all of the listings returned on these searches have apparently been "hijacked" via Google's community edit feature and the business name of the listing has been modified from the original, Marriott Orlando Downtown, to match the search phrase. The URL's of the listings have also been modified to direct users to an affiliate link on an appropriate site. How? Through the use of Google's community edit feature for local business listings. Google's community edit feature has become the playground of black hat affiliate marketers and is sorely in need of more security. Of interest in this regards is that many of these listings are for multinational corporations. These are not small independent business that are t

Google Maps: relative value of a OneBox vs top organic results Category: Google Maps (Google Local) - Mike - 5:50 am Steve Espinosa has some interesting preliminary research on the relative click thru rates of a #1 listing in the Local 10-Pack and a simultaneous #1 listing in organic. The organic listing showed 1.6x the click thru of the the Local 10 Pack listing. As it is preliminary research and only looked at click thru not call in or other measures of action, it is an important piece of research but doesn't speak to ultimate customer action. According to TMP's Local Search Usage Study : Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%). If one works out the combined math of the two studies (a not very reliable number I assure you), in the end the top local ranking would still provide more client contacts either via phone or in person than the organic ranking. At the end of the day, Steve's research can not be viewed as a reason to not focus on local but rather as a call to action on the organic side. I think he would agree that, in the excitement around local, you can't forget organic's power and that in an ideal world a business would use every tool available to them. However, many times, due to the nature of a business, a business may not be able to legitimately play in the Local space and their only recourse is to optimize their website for local phrases. Another interesting outcome of Steve's initial research was "the fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under." As Steve pointed out, this could be do the greater real estate visible to those with larger screens and thus greater visibility of organic listings above the fold. It could also, however, be

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