Influencing - People Talk About On Map Results

[MattCarter08]

Hi guys,

Just wondering if anyone knows if you can influence the tags/keywords under "People Talk About". So in the below example the tags are "fast service" "cheap eats" "tofu curry don". From my understanding and research (specifically this article: Google Maps Update Australia July 2013)

It seems it may be difficult to do so, since its based on the algorithm.

The reason being is I'm finding a lot of irrelevant tags appearing for some of our stores.

 

[Phil Rozek]

Google mostly grabs those snippets from reviews - particularly Google+ reviews.

 

[chadkimball]

@Matt you would need to flood the social sphere with repeated mentions of the actual keywords that you want to appear. Obviously you can't post fake reviews (legally) on actual vertical directories, but think creatively of opportunities in social to get the keywords you want out there.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

The Google Places Troubleshooter still has an option to report "At-A-Glance" terms, which is what I believe they used to be called.

I doubt it would work, but maybe worth a try.

https://support.google.com/business/#topic=3450784&contact=1&ts=3054546,3141891

Great insight from Phil and Chad.

 

[Adam Steele]

I totally agree with Chad and Phil.

I am curious though, if there are any map maker pros here, does map maker offer any ability to offer up suggestions for this area?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@MattCarter

The best way to approach the issue of "keywords" in reviews is just to tell customers, "Hey, we love detail. No need to keep your review short."

@Adam

I'm no MM pro, but I've never seen a way to influence the At-a-glance snippets there. They're just extracted from reviews. It's a totally automated process. Which is why they're gibberish half the time.

Google seems to be retooling them, though. The "At a glance" label seems to be gone. Google's trying to weave them together into a coherent sentence. Check out any page that has the snippets and you'll see what I mean.

 

[Kristen]

We have a client who has no reviews on Google and one review on Insiderpages. Their 'People are talking about' words aren't anywhere in the reviews, but they are words that are prominent on the website and also blog posts. Just thought I'd share in case recent blog posts might be part of the equation.

 

[MattH]

Bill Slawski wrote a very insightful post about how Google chooses the "known for" phrases, based on a patent they filed.

How Google Finds 'Known For' Terms for Entities

 

[Adam Steele]

Yah, totally. Though I can't claim I have ever seen it (never really looked hard), I can believe it. It reminds me when I was doing my research on the "more reviews" section, it was often pulling data from unstructured, blog style websites where no reviews existed. Very interesting stuff, and worthy of looking into IMO.

 

[a11c]

I've asked Google Support about moderating and removing certain "known for"/"at a glance" terms and I was told they cannot moderate the terms as they are automatically determined.

There advice was to remove any mention of that term on our clients marketing.