Google Local versus Organic Blended listings

[sip]

i have a couple of clients who are top of the local results with a + blended listing. however they are not appearing in the organic above. a couple of times they have jumped from the local above the two organic listings with a (what i refer to as ) full blended listing of organic g+ and local listing above everyone else. but then they drop back down to the local listings again

any advice on getting these up permanently?

 

[sip]

any ideas?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi sip, missing your earlier post, sorry.

If they rank high in organic AND don't have any Places dupes, violations or NAP confusion AND are in the centroid (which is not city center) then they'll rank in what we call blended - which means the pack.

If they rank high in organic but have a problem on the Place side of the house (Places dupes, violations or NAP confusion or are not in the centroid) then they'll disconnect and show in pure organic ABOVE the pack.

The reason listings with no Places problems sometimes pop in and out of the pack is Google changes the centroid (which is not city center) or widens the map radius.

Sure you want to be on top? Advantage is higher, little bigger and meta shows.

But then their reviews don't show and now that we are getting bright orange stars in the SERPS those stars are going to boost conversions if your client has enough reviews to show stars.

 

[sip]

hi

I have seen quite a few times now where (what i was calling a blended listing) appears at the top of the organic search above the two natural organics and the pack. so there was my site at #1 directly under the ppc with G+ pic showing local listing with stars showing and the click went to the website homepage.

this was followed by 1 or 2 other organic listings and then the pack under that.

its just a little irritating that at the moment several of m,y clients who used to have good both maps and organic listings now seem to have either one or the other only.

i need to get back to a #1 listing organically as maps never give as good clickthroughs historically on these sites.

Any other thoughts on how i might achieve this?

 

[sip]

anyone?

 

[Linda Buquet]

its just a little irritating that at the moment several of m,y clients who used to have good both maps and organic listings now seem to have either one or the other only.

In what I call the blended (in the pack) both will merge together into one listing.

It could be that for awhile your listings were showing the "old" Places algo, which still shows up sometimes but not as often. With that algo you get 2 separate listings so can rank in organic and also in the pack.

If she's changed to the blended algo... deleting the Place page would get you back to organic BUT Google will not longer let you delete Place pages if it's a viable business PLUS then they have nowhere for reviews.

One thing you could try, but it does not always fly, is change the Place page URL to a different page of the web site. Then if the home page is what ranks high in organic, it will show in organic and that internal page will tie to the Place page and show in blended. However if that page is not as strong as home, it may not rank well.

 

[Dave]

Sip:

I'm with you. I've had those top of page rankings. At some points they are PAC listings with a pin, and then there could be other organic rankings and then below it, the pac.

My simple experience is that the higher on the page the more traffic the site gets. So I like them. On top of that, whether within the PAC or not, I get higher rankings, and customers that become buyers do tell us they read reviews.

If people are in a buying mode, they'll work their way around your site, different available information and to review sites. If they like what they see they'll buy.

We get more traffic when we sit on top of the page. We have gotten the most traffic when we had situations with a #1ppc ad, one or more organic and/or organic/pac rankings on the top. The benefits are huge.

To check on that, we've been able to use ppc campaigns that tell us how many impressions there are for certain phrases, and then we can total up our clicks. We can direct count the ppc ones. We add the organic for those phrases (when people aren't signed into gmail, and we create a formula to spread out the (not provideds) to all the organic traffic.

How to get there??? SEO JUICE. Its on page and its outside links, at least in my experience.

There are other factors in my experience. What I've seen over the past several months for some sites whose visibility floated between above the PAC with strong organic rankings or #1 in the PAC via a blended result of Local and organic strength...is that google seemingly has floated these types of sites back and forth a bit.

I just looked at one of those smb's using two different terms for its service with city name (city name first)

city name/(service described one way) and city name/(service described a second way)

This particular smb has had a strong ranking for its service/city for years.

In one variation it was at the top of the PAC. For the other variation it was above the pac, as one of two sites. The other was a well known directory and it sat above the directory, and then below those two organic sites was the pac.

In the case where it was at #1 in the pac on google.com it also sat at #1 using the classic version of google maps. In the other case where it was in a separate organic ranking above everything else it was ranked #11 in classic google maps.

The business is a type with multiple vendors in every city. (this was a search for a major city location). Generally the businesses in this industry don't have killer killer link profiles. This one does. It has links from strong pages that generally businesses don't get. It used one of the variations on a strong link effort that has been published in the past. I've used that also when I can in situations where I can get similarly strong links.

I should probably go back and do an exhaustive study on the smb, looking at many factors, including on page seo, deep link research and comparative citation sources to give a full report.

In sum though I can tell you the business is getting a lot of traffic and has been for years as its position in google.com is always strong regardless of whether in the pac or above the pac or both.