Just prior to the session starting, Bruce Clay, the session’s sponsor, told Stephan Spencer and I that he had some pages where he’d used multiple schema/markup types on the same page along with the data highlighter—simultaneously—with the result that Google is displaying different rich snippet presentations, according to the type of search query. For instance, showing review stars on one query, author markup on another, etc. Interesting! I’m not surprised that different types of keyword searches might invoke different displays.

Stephan Spencer is up first. He reveals that RDFa’s current version is 1.1. Stephan completely blasts through over 60 slides, mentioning many types of rich snippets and markups without delving deeply into any one.

I’ll regurgitate the things he mentions in terse bullet points below.

Rich Snippets:

• Rich snippets boost clickthrough on your Google listings
• Author headshots
• Video thumbnails
• Star ratings
• On product pages
• On category pages (based on aggregate ratings)

Benefits of Google+ Authorship Markup:

• More clicks
• Additional listings show up if the searcher hits the back key after visiting the page!

There are misfires with Google authorship. Example: multiple authors of Stephan’s co-authored book, The Art of SEO, were mentioned on Stephan’s Search Engine Land author page, but resulted in Eric Enge’s photo showing up for the author page instead of Stephan’s.

How to get nice video thumbnails – add one of the supported formats to the on-page markup:

• Schema.org/VideoObject (recommended)
• Facebook Share
• Yahoo’s RDFa

Other tips:

• Validate the code using Google’s Structured Data Testing tool after implementing.
• Add Facebook Share Video Markup.
• Submit a Video XML Sitemap.
• Leverage Schema.org Rich Snippets:
  • Reviews (Ratings)
  • Aggregate Reviews
  • Product/Offer
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Events

Ratings & Reviews:

• http://schema.org/Rating
• Not always shown in SERPs, depends on trust
• Improves visibility, trust, and CTR

One clever use of Microformats is to use Aggregate Reviews.

It works with http://schema.org/AggregateRating.

Product/Offer:

• Product http://schema.org/Product
• Offer (selling a product) http://schema.org/Offer”>schema.org/Offer
• Gives engines a lot more product related data
• So far only additional display in SERP is price
• Prices in SERP display can increase CTR

Breadcrumbs:

• http://schema.org/WebPage”>schema.org/WebPage
• Adds Breadcrumb links to SERP
• Makes your listing stand out
• Adds more links to your site to SERP
• Potential for higher CTR

Events http://schema.org/Event

Location Schema (for Businesses or Attractions)

How-To Use Google Data Highlighter:

• Found in WMT > Optimization > Data Highlighter
• Used to create semantic markup in WMT only
• Adds no code to page
• Competition can’t see your markup
• Good for non-techie clients and sites
• Hard to scale for large sites (though you can build “page sets”)
• For articles, events, local businesses, movies, products, restaurants, software apps, TV episodes

How–To: Google Structured Mark-up Helper

• Found in WMT > Other Resources > Structured Data Markup Helper
• Marks up same data types as Highlighter
• Outputs actual HTML code
• Can work for web pages or emails
• You can play around with it for any site
• Page by page basis
• Useful for small sites or building examples of code for developers

Open Graph Markup

• For marking up data for Facebook
• http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
• Cool new feature based around location markup
• http://searchengineland.com/seo-for-facebook-open-graph-search-150772 for more info
• Adds Facebook pages for each location when a location page with OG markup is “Liked” (this is very cool!)
• Allows easy build out of location pages for FB

Which Type of Semantic Markup to Use?

• RDFa or Schema.org Microdata?
• Schema.org created by the engines to be search friendly
• Schema easier to understand
• RDFa conforms to W3C standards
• Newer RDFa Lite basically mirrors Schema
• Read this then decide:
• http://manu.sporny.org/2012/mythical-differences/

Stephan says he thinks RDFa Lite is probably the most compelling choice.

Stephan’s predictions: what’s next?

• More and more data types to be supported in Schema
• More integration of semantic data into the SERPs
• Engines displaying more data directly in the SERPs
• How can you add value to data, not just provide the data itself?

Now What?

• What can you do tomorrow that will improve your site’s SEO? Write down 3 things. Get ‘em done!
• Remember: you eat an elephant one bite at a time
• Just pick one thing out of his list and get it done and you’ll be ahead.

Marcus Tober is up next.

Marcus says the Web is filled with a lot of useless stuff (shows a slide of garbage). He shows a bar graph charting over time of how many pages/sites has had yearly over time.

Amazon.com doesn’t use schema, but Google knows the structure of their site, so Google displays it with rich snippets.

Marcus segues into some “Pimp My Snippet” recommendations.

He first compares sites with movie reviews and product/prices that have slightly different displays in the SERPs. Then he shows examples of different recipe markup integrations, using “apple pie” search.

At Searchmetrics, he analyzed over 60K+ keywords from 415K+ domains.

Less than 1% (0.27%) of U.S. domains are without Schema integration.

They analyzed the SEO Visibility of sites with or without Schema integration. 69:1 sites were more visible with Schema than without.

Schema is distributed according to content types:

Highest penetration of schema types is one or two elements used on the page. (Number of schema types displayed in the SERPs).

The statics for the average ratings for content shared:

• 4-5 stars: 63.42%
• 2.5-3.5 stars: 31.16%
• 0-2 stars: 5.42%

The Average Ranking with Schema: #22. Without Schema: #25. Higher rankings could be due to larger brands incorporating Schema, but it could also be due to higher visibility.

On average, content will have 3 positions worth of higher rankings if Schema is incorporated.

Julia Gause is up now, to relate her experience with recipe-rich snippets for major food/recipe sites (Food Network, Food.com, Travel Channel, HGTV, etc).

In 2010, Google contacted Scripps Networks Interactive and others in the food category to add hRecipe microformats to their recipe pages, and they gladly joined in.

Why did Google want to add the markup for recipes? Her answer: Food porn! It made sense for Google to take advantage of that, what with people wanting to take pics of their food and share it online.

She shows some examples where the recipe snippet shows along with image search results.

She comments on one example of a hybrid recipe/author markup page, saying that she thinks that the author markup detracts from the recipe. (I’m slightly dubious when she states this, because the one with the author markup ranks in #1 position, vs. the other items).

She shows another example SERP where they have three pages ranking for the same query on the same SERP.

Incorporating rich snippets increased their traffic around 42%.

FoodNetwork.com saw a 10% increase in CTR in the first 60 days.

They used both hRecipe and Schema simultaneously for a while. After switching totally to Schema, they saw no change in display of snippets in Google. No increase in traffic from Bing, Yahoo nor Google. Yahoo!’s display is different—the specialized recipe features their pages, while the inline listings in search results do not.

Google is hungry for rich snippet markup.

Scripps has implemented other Schema markups, too.

For video, they’ve seen inconsistent rich snippets appearing—with thumbnails in some cases, and some not. In some cases, Google is pulling in the Facebook OpenGraph code image.

They’re using person schema for show hosts, competing with their personal website pages for rankings. They’re seeing their images featured prominently in Google’s Knowledge Graph search results with a link to the bio page.

Changing from microformats to schema for their recipes seemed to make no change to their traffic. Incorporating Schema for the videos and persons did seem to help traffic and rankings to those pages on their sites.

Summary

From my perspective as a search marketer who has incorporated structured data markup from the earliest days, it’s very challenging to try to come up with innovation within the constraints that the search engines have provided. To a large degree, it boils down to either choosing whether to incorporate the structured data markup (or help Google to interpret the data using their data highlighter).

Even so, there were some notable highlights from their presentations:

• Stephan’s revelation that additional listings appear with author snippets when one hits the back key is very cool! I have to remember this one when trying to persuade a publisher client that they need to go with authorship markup.
• Misfires can be addressed by adjusting structured data to optimize the results.
• Aggregate Reviews schema is potentially very valuable for category or index pages that contain more than one item. For instance, the main category page for “Thin Screen TVs” on a retailer site, or the listings page for “Hotels” on a local accommodations website. Main category pages often are challenging to get ranking well because they’re navigational or interstitial types of pages, and they frequently don’t have rich snippet markup. Aggregate Reviews could be one schema that would work really well for them.
• In the past, people were unsure as to whether to just stick with using the older Microformat markup, RDFa or to move to Schema (Micro Data), or to use both simultaneously. It seems clear that Schema is now sufficiently well-supported that people do not need to worry about whether it’s finally safe to fully transition. It is.
• Marcus’s presentation makes it clear that Schema markup is highly advantageous, and for some particular types of content it may be table stakes for achieving rankings and performance.
• Julia’s presentation opened my eyes to the fact that Schema use appears to be increasing the chances for content to appear in Knowledge Graph and image search results as well as in the carousel of images above recipes in Yahoo! SERPs:
• There may be edge cases where one type of rich snippet could be more valuable than another, depending upon the type of page and content. In such cases, site publishers may need to carefully weigh the relative advantages and attempt to control SERP presentation through selectively using one Schema over another.
• I was slightly dubious when Julia opined that a blog featuring author markup in a SERP was not as good as Food.com’s recipe rich snippets, because the blog page with the author markup was ranking in the #1 position, vs. the other listings. However, she may be right—the snippets featuring food thumbnail images along with recipe details may be much more attractive to click through upon verses those that show an author’s name and face. However, I’ve demonstrated that Google will display a hybrid of Recipe + Authorship simultaneously. Google keeps changing how these hybrid snippets appear, and I think they’ll likely evolve those to work, making it advantageous to rely upon them to choose the display presentation, rather than trying to manipulate it by only using one markup option over another.

I’ve been approached by many small-to-medium businesses seeking help with various degrees of penalization as a result of these updates over the past year, and some of the commonalities to me are striking — primarily, the degree of ignorance about online marketing behaviors that can result in Google penalizing your website.

The chief “sin” among these behaviors often involves link building. It’s not surprising that this has happened, given the overwhelming number of articles out there advising businesses on how to increase their inlinks in order to improve their rankings in Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search results.

If you’re a newbie, you might not realize that Google’s original PageRank algorithm ranked pages based largely on how many other sites and pages linked to them, taking into account the relative importance of those linking pages. Fast forward to 2013: Google rankings continue to be influenced by links, but there are many additional factors or “signals” by which Google determines the relative popularity — and, therefore, rankings — of webpages.

Over the years, I’ve written articles and provided advice about link building, though I’ve always tried to lean heavily toward the conservative side of this practice, recommending methods that should play well with Google’s rules.

Forget Link Building

Even so, it’s become very clear to me that it may be highly counterproductive to try to teach small businesses how to conduct link building. They don’t understand the best practices necessary to perform the development while simultaneously staying on Google’s and Bing’s good side. They take shortcuts. They make novice mistakes. They attempt to blatantly manipulate Google through building a linking scheme of interlinked microsites, purchasing numerous keyword domain names, spamming links onto sites or forums or blog comments, or by purchasing links.

And, more frequently than not, they get into real trouble — resulting in their websites being penalized and their listing getting suppressed or removed from Place Search or Maps.

Frankly, the key problem for SMBs in link building is that Google and Bing don’t want you to do it at all!

The search engines are looking to see sites’ backlink profiles expand primarily via natural growth. For instance, if someone’s writing a blog post and mentions your site/business, that’s when they want a link to appear — as a sort of heartfelt, real endorsement of your site.

Google has become so sophisticated with link analysis that there’s not much point in attempting to “trick” or manipulate them through link development practices (at least for relative novices).

So, this leads me to a simple premise: small-to-medium businesses would be better off simply in focusing on quality and working on good content over time, rather than involving themselves in the arcane practice of “link building.”

Instead Of Link Building…

If you’re an SMB desiring to improve your search engine rankings and attract new customers, what should you be doing instead? I think you should really be ambitiously creating content and involving yourself in social media.

Some people have coined a trendy term for “creating content” — they’re calling it “content marketing,” and the name has been gaining steam over the last year or two. But, there’s nothing new about content marketing. Quite simply, ignore the potentially intimidating phrase and look toward areas where you can be frequently producing content in an ongoing basis, whether it be through writing, posting images, or posting videos.

Quite a few of us have pushed blogging for local businesses for years, as this results in unique and often shareable content that is search engine friendly. It also creates a great basis for Twitter postings and Facebook status updates, along with other social media sites. If your business lends itself to beautiful or interesting visuals, look towards posting stuff on image sharing sites like Flickr and Pinterest.

In terms of social media, simply posting your own stuff all the time really isn’t enough. You need to be working to increase your engagement and influence, since these sorts of nebulous factors are increasingly influential with the search engines as part of the overall ranking mix.

Local businesses still need to have first laid the groundwork for their online presence by getting their business listings to show up in all of the major online business directories (such as Internet Yellow Pages) and local search engines. That can easily be done by tapping a service like Universal Business Listing or Neustar LocalEze to distribute the information to many directories (or you can simply do it manually).

Either way, once the basic listing information has been distributed, the best source for local citations — i.e., “mentions” of your business online in places that search engines may notice — will be through social media work.

So, ditch the link building! Live stress-free! Work on developing interesting stuff and engaging with your customers and with the public. Do that, and the rest will follow… naturally.

Up Close Coverage From SMX Advanced 2013

Recently, I attended the SMX Advanced session, “Authorship: The Deep Dive“, moderated by Elisabeth Osmeloski, and featuring speakers: John Carcutt, Advance Digital, Janet Driscoll Miller, Search Mojo, Mitul Gandhi, seoClarity, and Mark Traphagen, Virante, Inc. There were a number of interesting takeaways.

Mitul Gandhi is up first.

He quotes Eric Schmidt of Google as saying that authorship could become the most important factor for ranking. First, Mitul examined whether Google+ was appearing in SERPs and he found that there was a huge rise in visibility on Google+ pages in SERPs since late last year. And, they were frequently ranking well. They then did random sampling and found 13% of all pages ranking in SERPs had author markup. They had a higher chance of ranking in position #3 through #8.

For some keywords, there is a much higher importance for having author markup.

Tech sites adopted author markup earliest. Shopping sites have a lack of adoption.

Mitul asks “Does it help rankings?” He states that it’s the wrong question – the right question is “Does it help increase my traffic?” “Clickness Matters,” he says – how clickworthy is your result.

Bing is kinda different – “Subjectship”, “Inferred Entity”… Bing is good at identifying subjects in some cases. In other cases, they randomly use images to represent listings (he shows example of clip art showing as author avatar for his homepage in search results).

Is Yahoo! using author markup? Comparing similar keywords that show authorship in Google, Yahoo SERPs do not show it. Bing, in fact, doesn’t show the author markup in SERPs, although Bing representatives state that it will be coming soon.

It’s worthwhile, so take the deep dive soon and incorporate author markup. Mitul Gandhi’s complete presentation is below:

Mark Traphagen is up next.

Mark asks “Is AuthorRank in existence – is it in use now? (Ranking authors by authority around certain topics for related keyword search – Google patents have been registered for this algorithmic method.)

Mark shows an eyetracking/clicktracking heat map study showing that author markup listings in SERPs attract more attention. Analytics show a higher number of clicks for author marked up snippets.

Even Google+ profiles with relatively few followers can outrank other popular pages for keyword searches.

So, one might think that “AuthorRank is turned on.” But, top Googlers state that Authorship is not a direct ranking factor, although they’re experimenting with it, but there’s no direct confirmation of it being in use.

Strikes against author rank as a present reality:

1. Low Authorship adoption (not being used by major verticals)
2. Social signal parsing infancy (still working to understand social signals)
3. Mis-attribution (many mistakes still being made – high doubt factor about content author)

So, what’s up with the higher click rates.

AJ Kohn says that it could be due to CTR feedback – clickthrough rate may be in use as a ranking factor, although Google could correct for that and normalize for the particular result. So, this is inconclusive – we don’t know if they’re using it for rankings.

Secrets:

Profiles Have PageRank – Google+ profiles themselves had toolbar PageRank early on, but it appeared to later disappear. However, the toolbar PR disappeared due to how the URLs were formed – research has since shown that the PR is there. Google+ has internal PR from interlinking within Google+, but there’s also PR on those pages due to inlinks to the Google+ profiles.

Mark cites an anecdotal example where he used Google+ promotion to improve rankings of 3 posts on high PR blogs, improving their rankings from page 8 to page 1 for keyword search.

He recommends www.prchecker.net for checking the rank of pages.

• Authorship vs. Non-Authorship PR – pages with authorship seem to have higher PR on average.
• Authorship is Link Building. G+ profiles pass PageRank!

Janet Driscoll Miller is now up.

Janet is talking about tactics and strategies as well as public relations.

Google is inferring authorship in some cases and in some cases doing so incorrectly. She shows an example from her website with a video snippet – later, Google started showing her face with authorship markup, even though the rich snippet testing tool proves there’s no authorship markup on the page itself. But, it showed because within the page she had “presented by Janet Driscoll Miller” and she was listed as the author for the site. To revert back to the video snippet, she had to remove the “presented by” text.

She later showed a hybrid of video snippet and authorship:

Google infers authorship from content but does not infer from meta data.

For Word documents, “By” may not be the only way Google infers authorship via content. It can be inferred from the end of a document, such as from “about the author ” sections within a document.

PowerPoint also has authorship. Even images like vector art can show authorship. For PowerPoint, Google infers from text, not meta data.

Google Books does not show authorship yet!

Be thoughtful about authorship and how you implement it. Suggestions:

• Only the first author will show in the rich snippet.
• Be sure you get the snippet you want (watch for “by” in text followed by a name). Even editors or commenters can get picked up as the author – so, watch for that type of text.
• Author will only appear once on a page of search results. Example for site search of SearchEngineLand.com for “Danny Sullivan”, and Danny’s face only shows once in the results.

What does authorship mean for traditional PR and SEO?

• Traditional, offline methods for choosing a reporter to work with may not generate the best SEO. Make sure you work with people who have authorship to get that benefit in the SERPs.
• Does the site allow for authorship?
• Does the author have a Google+ profile? What sites are listed in their “Contributor to” section and other links under About.
• To check: search “site:URL” followed by author name. Ex: site: “nyt.com david pogue”
• Weigh the SEO value – does the author have ‘cred’ with Google?
• Weight the readership value. Realize the value in readers finding your content that contributes to SEO.
• Recognize the level of authority of the publication.

Here’s Janet’s complete presentation:

Finally, John Carcutt is up to give the publisher’s perspective on Authorship.

John’s sites publish many of the top news sites such as Syracuse.com and nola.com, etc. His firm does all tech architecture, training, social for these sites. They use a content strategy team to develop stuff like implementing authorship markup. Then the technology services team implements it. Then they go to the publishers and get them to buy-in and get their writers and editorial staff trained on why it’s important and get the authors – over 1,000 authors that have to be setup to use authorship and to use Google+ as part of their daily routines!

Their challengers were:

• Early adopters – they get caught up in early issues with products. Photographers loved Google+. Writers hated it. Email verification was a major problem. Since articles have both by-lines for photographers and writers on the same page – so, photographers sometimes had the author credit in rich snippet markup, instead of the writer.
• Tech Implementation – It took about three-quarters of a year for it to get implemented.
• Mass Training – 1,000 authors to train on it. They do annual in-person training and monthly internal newsletters.  They added creation of Google+ account training, connecting their accounts to the publisher sites, how to manage their “Contributor to” links, having good Google+photos, pushed the effectiveness of Google+ Communities, and training in how to use Google+, overall. They also trained the writers on “why this matters”.
• Author Pushback (Google+ indifference) – adoption has been slow. John stated that he’s happy if 20% are active with it, and he expects increasing adoption over time.

There are some negative factors that they’ve encountered.

Syndicated content – associated press authors can get very high author ranking, based on their articles.

Selling AuthorRank is already happening. John expects this to work for a while, but not for long.

When an author leaves the organization, what happens to their authorship? Their policies:

• They never change by-lines.
• Policy strongly suggests no “Hybrid” account names such as “JimDuncanTP.”
• Authors that have moved on will continue to build their AuthorRank, improving the publisher’s sites in the process. The publisher will continue to benefit from their career development after they’ve left the organization.
• At some point Authorship/AuthorRank will become a hiring consideration.

Summary Takeaways

There were a number of interesting takeaways from the session. Mitul Gandhi’s finding that author markup might be more important for particular keyword phrases strikes a chord with me – I can easily see this being the case.

For instance, a search for “HTC Android stores” might not be desirable for author-marked pages, whereas “HTC Android reviews” well could be. There are some types of sites or pages where authorship doesn’t make sense, compared with subjects that lend themselves to articles or blog posts. Also, the point is well-taken that “clickness” matters – increasing CTR is just as desirable as improving rankings.

I agreed with Mark Traphagen’s exploration that CTR could be the factor involved with authorship that might be influencing rankings. I’ve seen an extremely high correlation between CTR and rankings with a number of instances I’ve researched, and it seems clear that author rich snippets frequently improve CTR by a significant percent. Regardless of the explanation, Google+ profiles can have, accrue and convey PageRank, so they are a valuable tool for the search marketer and a compelling reason to adopt Google+ as part of the overall mix.

Janet Driscoll Miller’s examples of the hybrid video/author rich snippet, and her experimentation at controlling which would be presented in the SERP, was very interesting to me (particularly since I’d recently demonstrated a hybrid rich snippet between recipe/author rich snippet).

Also, her findings that authorship is also showing up for other types of media such as Word docs, PowerPoint presos and such – is compelling and obviously shows that there are a number of types of content that are not widely exploited for grabbing attention in the SERPs at present.

Additionally, the instances where Google may incorrectly choose attributions is important to note – I think people will need to check the SERPs after they create pages to see how the page is represented, and possibly adjust as she suggests to insure the correct person is attributed as the author if needed.

Finally, John Carcutt’s experiences with implementing authorship across large sites was highly informative, since I’ve encountered questions that probably a number of search marketers have also faced when recommending authorship adoption for their clients – “should we do this, since authors could subsequently leave the organization?” – “aren’t we promoting the authors more than the organization?”

His organization’s policies around this are likely to become the foundation of best practices for implementation for publishers. Authorship is a case of co-promotion where both entities will benefit and continue to benefit later, even if the writer leaves the organization, because as they develop their careers, their attribution with all the publishers will continue to provide exposure over time.

Thus far, the new version of Google Maps is pretty much in beta, rolled out by invitation or to select user groups. So, some parts of the design may still be in flux for a while.

However, the direction of the development is likely crystallized sufficiently to be able to make a number of observations and deductions.

Many of the changes are not all that earth-shattering and are minor improvements to the established Maps design. Colors have shifted a bit — previously yellow streets are now white, and the lettered, upside-down teardrop-shaped pinpoint icons for locations are being replaced by red dots and red-numbered squares.

When moused over, the familiar teardrop pinpoint reappears and an information “card” about the business is displayed. Street view images of top local attractions and businesses can be displayed in a row at the bottom of the map, and various other icons and text have been tweaked some as well.

Probably the most significant change in the interface is the suppression of the left-hand column where business listings have long been displayed in a directory-style list.

Challenge For Address-Less Businesses

I find this change highly concerning for “address-less” businesses. Since its inception, Google Maps has seriously marginalized businesses like plumbers, house painters, roofers, locksmiths, electricians and other traditionally independent contractors that don’t have (or need) brick-and-mortar storefronts.

Initially, Google made no provision for such businesses, declaring that they only wanted to display entities that had specific place location points in the map interface. As map-based searches or “local search” began to replace traditional yellow pages interfaces, Google evolved their concept to grudgingly allow such local businesses to coexist with pinpoint-able places in the local vertical. But, the interface has never seemed to lose this entrenched bias. (See my article from a couple of years ago on Investigating Google Places Hypocrisy For Address-less Businesses for more history and context.)

Google’s Places for Business does allow business owners to suppress their street addresses, and such businesses can still appear in Google Maps based on the service area(s) they’ve indicated — currently, they display with a round dot that has no specific pinpoint (see below).

But, many believe that such listings have an inherently lower ranking potential. The Google Local Search algorithm takes citations into account (citations being any indexed listing of your business name, address and phone number); so, these address-less businesses will naturally have fewer citations to lend ranking weight.

Example of how an address-suppressed business listing currently appears in Google Maps. The “J” icon appears to float in the map area, with no specific location pinpoint.

My fear with the new Maps interface is that the presentation may be even less optimal for address-less businesses, and not having businesses listed on the left-hand side will further reduce their visibility in the map-centric display. In my initial testing, I also found inconsistencies in the mouse-over behaviors of the location icons associated with address-less business listings. This could be due to some loose ends that need tying up in the beta interface, but one can still surmise that these listings are obviously of lesser significance to Google’s development team.

Challenges With New Visual Paradigm

For all local businesses, there are additional concerns with this new visual paradigm.

These changes further reduce the visibility of businesses that are not ranked in the top results, because one is less able to browse additional listings as easily as in the existing interface. As you may recall, Google recently removed the “more results near…” link from the local searches conducted in their regular search interface. So, this new Maps iteration would appear to be continuing that trend of reducing additional consumer choices as “unnecessary clutter.”

There is a link to “Go to list of top results,” where one may access the directory-style list. But, by pushing the directory listings away by a click, they become “out-of-site/out-of-mind” and will be less used by those searching in maps.

Google is undoubtedly making these changes based upon their usage data showing that fewer people are using the pagination options to view subsequent local search results; but, I’m a bit cynical about this since it costs Google virtually nothing to maintain more options. Even if the percentage of overall use is lower, in the context of Google’s search numbers, even 1% of their total searchers would represent many tens of thousands of people.

The features enabling users to filter search results based upon top reviewers’ ratings or recommendations from one’s Google+ circles is yet another concern for small, local businesses, at least for now.

Heretofore, I’ve said that ratings are not a direct ranking signal, as I mentioned in “Should You Count Ratings Out In Google Local Rankings?” Back when I wrote that article, Google personnel declined to officially confirm my thesis that rating values are not a ranking signal, because it could be used by searchers to filter search results, and would therefore could be considered a ranking value in that situation.

Also, tellingly, they told me that just because it wasn’t currently a ranking factor did not mean that they might not use it for rankings in the future. I now think that feedback hinted at this sea-change. The new interface more prominently features the option to order search results according to reviewers’ values — meaning that businesses will now have to obsess about reviews harming their ability to appear in search at all. Up until now, they’ve mainly been concerned that the values could just impact conversion rates.

This change will be unfortunate because I think it will inspire an increase in false reviews as a result. The increased prominence and influence will tempt more businesses to attempt shill reviews for themselves and will also tempt unethical businesses to try to post negative reviews against competitors.

Google+ Influence On Local Search Results

The increasing prominence of Google+ influence on local search results is also problematic because of Google’s undelivered potential in their social media property thus far. While usage in Google+ is surely increasing some, it’s still not commonplace for the general population. As such, many businesses have tried using Google+ briefly, didn’t see a lot of uptick nor methods for engaging and building an audience there, and then they sort of abandoned their pages. As things currently stand, most businesses will probably assess that their target customers are not in Google+ at this time.

Local Marketing In Google Maps

Here are a few takeaways based upon this analysis:

• For address-less businesses, it’s still possible to appear in Google Maps with the floating circle “pinpoint.” The display may not be ideal for you (if the mouse-overs are inconsistent), and the lack of a listings column likely reduces your visibility. So, make sure your icon is located at least within the clump of where most businesses appear for your area — or, consider establishing a brick-and-mortar location. It’s a step backward in technology to do such a thing just to have a chance to appear prominently in Google local search, but this is our reality. (See also 5 Ways To Rank Outside of Your Physical Location in Google Places)
• For all local businesses, rankings are becoming even more important! Familiarize yourself with how to rank in Google Maps, and consider whether you need to step up your game to compete more effectively in this arena.
• Focus on ways to get more positive reviews, since this could increase your chances of ranking in the new interface when users opt to filter by reviews, even if you’ve been ranking lower than your competitors up until now.
• Make sure you include photos with your Google listing — you can do this through the Google Places dashboard (it allows up to 10). Add pics into your Google+ Local page as well. Since photos are being more prominently featured, I’d say that the more photos you have associated with your company, the more likely your business may attract attention from consumers.
• Even though Google+ is still not heavily populated with consumers, you should still attempt to engage with it some to position yourself well if it does eventually take off. It’s fairly certain that Google will continue pushing that service — and when Google pushes, it’s more likely to cross the threshold into reaching a critical mass. Having a growing audience in Google+ will possibly enable you to reach more people in search over time. I believe you need to be active in other popular social media sites as well, such as Twitter and Facebook, and you can organize that work to replicate it in Google+ with minimal labor.

Stay tuned for more analysis and ideas for local marketing in Google Maps once the dust from these changes settles!

Compare a closeup detail of one of the leaked images on the left, with a screengrab I just took of the map portion of the results page showing up this morning on the right:

As you can see, the map location icons are white circles around red dots with white squares in the middle. Also, the leaked image map colors are parallel as well.

As Mike noted, these new results can be seen for a Places search by adding  “&prmdo=1&tbm=plcs” name/value parameters onto the search URL querystring. The above result map I got on the right was a search for florists in Dallas, TX.

The other indicators that these new results may be related to the leaked images include more prominent photo images for the businesses listed:

I’m sure we may know more as the I/O developer conference progresses, and Search Engine Land will post additional coverage of the event.

Also, I intend to provide some analysis on the ramification of these potential changes in my Local Search article here next week. Stay tuned and hold onto your seats!

Unfortunately, that’s not the only industry where this mindset persists. In order to achieve better sales, attract more potential customers, and, yes, improve your search engine rankings, you need to incorporate “Conversational Marketing” as a primary tactic.

The Cluetrain Manifesto came out in 1999, after the commercialization of the Internet had been active long enough to identify a number of commonalities and trends.

In that manifesto, authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinberger said that markets were historically places where people had conversations, up until a period in the early three-quarters of the 20th century when mass media took hold and was controlled by large organizations. During that mass media period, marketers promoted products more by “shouting” at consumers, who had no forum for talking back to companies (or each other). When the Internet gained steam, however, that situation changed in a massive way.

Business Consumer Interaction

Unfortunately, many traditional industries have been very slow to realize that the days of one-way-only promotional messages are pretty well over. Various Internet media channels now allow individual consumers to rapidly connect with many other consumers; these channels also provide consumers with a means of speaking directly to businesses and potentially being heard by the general public when they do.

Blogging, email lists, forums, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and many other channels not only provide options for communication but also enable a consumer’s voice to become magnified — sometimes to the point of having just as great an impact as the public relations arm of a major corporation.

There are so many examples of this effect that you don’t have to look far to understand how it works. Just a few choice examples include:

• The Kryptonite blogstorm that erupted in 2005, after people discovered (and shared) that Kryptonite locks could be picked by using a Bic pen
• The YouTube video created in 2009 by musician, Dave Carroll, to express his displeasure over United Airlines breaking his guitar during a trip and then failing to remunerate him for the loss — his music video detailing the events went viral was heard by over three million afterward
• Just this year, when both FTD and 1-800-FLOWERS took heat from hundreds of complaints about messed-up orders posted on Facebook and Twitter

Conversational Marketing

From assessing many small, local retailers, I can see that many are continuing to utterly ignore conversational marketing, despite well-publicized, dramatic episodes which have accelerated via social media (as in the examples above).

Zeno Group’s Digital Readiness Survey showed that over one-third of CEOs fail to consider their company’s online reputation when making business decisions. Additionally, more than 10% of organizations will not take any action to address a damaging article or social media post, and smaller firms are much less likely than larger companies to ignore social media.

Why You Need Social Media

Avoiding social media doesn’t actually make your business invisible to online consumers, nor does it keep you from being a target of potential negativity online. All it does is leave you vulnerable to a situation in which top-ranking pages for you brand name are dominated by Web properties you don’t control.

Even if the necessity of proactive reputation management does not motivate you to incorporate social media more fully, there is another reason why your company should engage: the search engines are paying attention to the dialogue that is the basis of the conversational marketplace.

Trying to keep your social media presence on the down-low — whether it’s because your CEO doesn’t get it, you don’t want to spend the money, or some other reason — will only result in stunting your ability to achieve strong local search rankings.

Social Media Can Boost Local Rankings

The question of  whether or not social media is good for business has generally been answered; almost without exception, it is! Aside from the fact that active social media use allows you to engage in conversational marketing and manage your brand reputation, both Bing and Google have acknowledged that they consider social media signals as a factor in search engine rankings. Because of all this, marketers generally recommend that businesses — even small, local ones — incorporate social media.

These days, the mere act of having a blog and accounts on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter will not cut it. Many businesses that have begun using Facebook and Twitter are still approaching it primarily as a means for shouting out promotional messages to consumers — not likely to help your business achieve high authority in search engines.

Google’s patents around Author Rank and Agent Rank indicate that they may now be assessing how influential specific individuals are — the more authoritative and influential, the greater their impact on search rankings for pages they have endorsed. Without taking the time to make your online presence more conversational, as opposed to merely broadcasting, your social efforts may bear little fruit in terms of aiding your rankings.

In a similar vein, while citations or mentions of a business are something we like to attain in hopes of improving a local business’s rankings, not all mentions are alike. The days of just getting static webpages and online directories to list your business as a means of obtaining citations for ranking purposes may be coming to an end. If those business listings do not have other social signals associated with them to indicate some level of interest and popularity, Google may be counting these less and less.

Conversational Marketing Tips

If you find yourself in the category of being weak at conversational marketing, here are a few basic tips:

• First, ask yourself if your company has a presence in all the top social media platforms that are relevant to your industry. Consumers are looking for companies on Facebook and Twitter more and more, so those may be table stakes.
• Having a blog makes sense for most companies, even if you are unable post frequently. Not only is it handy for providing your business with a place to communicate if a reputation crisis occurs, it can also serve as the foundation for connecting all of your other social media presences.
• Businesses whose product or service offerings lend themselves to visual content may find it worthwhile to develop a presence on sites like Pinterest, Flickr, and Instagram.
• Social media sites can be used as channels for distributing “press release”-type posts and promotional messages; but realize that it should go beyond that. Are you listening for posts mentioning your brand? Are you posting things that are of interest to your audience? Are you discussing engaging topics with your audience in addition to beaming out ads and other self-promotions?
• Try to develop your influence. Activities that encourage responses from your followers are beneficial for this, as well as actions that increase an interested, engaged audience.
• Monitor your work in this arena– there are a number of analytics tools that are useful for this. You can also check how influential your social media presence is with ranking systems like Klout and Kred.
• Don’t leave it to the youngest, newest or lowest-paid employee in your company! That may seem like an easy solution, but less experienced and less responsible can make disastrous mistakes in this arena. There are too many examples of interns damaging the reputations of companies to risk going this route. Your social media representative effectively becomes the voice/face of your organization online — make sure they represent you in a mature, professional manner and that they know how to handle customer interactions.
• If you seek training, make sure the training includes a public relations component and not just the mechanics of how to use social media software.
• Consider hiring professionals to handle your online presence if you don’t know how to do it or don’t have sufficient time to devote to it. Remember, a high level of familiarity with social media is necessary to avoid getting tripped up by simple mistakes.

If you haven’t being incorporating social media into your marketing plan — or haven’t been doing so in a conversational manner — then it’s definitely the time to evolve. Not only is it valuable for your online reputation management, it’s also becoming increasingly vital for your local search rankings.

While I have a reputation as a local search optimization specialist, but I consider myself to be broader in that I am a marketer, period. As such, my philosophy is that companies should promote themselves within as many channels as they reasonably can afford, and they should also go with what works.

Local SEO definitely works and works well, but my back-of-the-napkin math indicates that targeting local search results rankings has its limits for a great many of the SMBs out there.

In larger metro areas and for more popular business categories, there can be hundreds and thousands of businesses that vie for the same customers. If you’re a hotelier, florist, attorney, accountant, plumber, or contractor for instance, you may be trying to capture consumers’ attention along with hundreds of others in your field.

For instance, there are around 600 florists in Miami, 1700 accountants in New York City, 390 Web designers in Seattle, 475 plastic surgeons and dermatologists in Los Angeles, and a whopping 6,000 attorneys in Dallas! (Estimates of numbers of companies in various category/market combinations vary by business directories.)

However, there’s only a limited amount of exposure available in search engines. In Google, most users see the default of up to seventeen organic/non-paid listings per page, including a few choices from the Map Search results.

If consumers click through to view more map results, they might see three more results in addition to the up-to-seven local results they already saw embedded in the regular keyword search. Since most consumers don’t click to view beyond the first page of search results, that’s just about twenty local businesses they might see out of the hundreds available!

Okay, so your business might have more chances to be seen via other search engines as well — even if you’re not first in Google, you could be on the first page via Bing/Yahoo. (Although, the majority of users are searching from Google.)

Still, that means that only a few dozen businesses may have exposure in the first page of search engine results from industries that have many hundreds of providers — mathematically, this means only a handful of companies for any given type of business have sufficiently beneficial exposure in search engines.

If you’re not on the first page of results for various of your top keyword combinations, it’s possible that a paid search campaign could give you more business referrals and make up the difference.

Top Reasons Why Pay-Per-Click Could Benefit Your Local Business

Even for businesses that do have top rankings, there are a few reasons why paid search could be beneficial.

• It can make up for those many companies that don’t have top rankings.
• Paid Search can provide increased revenue stream while you begin to up your SEO game. Even if you implement changes to help your natural search rankings, it may take some time to establish significant gains. PPC could increase your income until the SEO has a chance to take effect. Even for sites with great rankings, PPC could provide additional revenue — and more money is always good, right? Even with a #1 ranking in organic, PPC can increase your clicks/referrals.
• Studies have shown that PPC can augment SEO. It appears that using both paid and organic search marketing simultaneously may have a synergetic effect in that doing both can result in more combined referrals than the total of both separately. Just on the basis of probability, the more “real estate” you can occupy on the first page of search results, the more likely that a user’s click will land upon your content versus another’s.
• There are occasional hints that paid search might help bolster a site’s natural search rankings. I don’t believe there’s a direct correlation, but I can see a few ways that clicks and exposure from PPC might help improve rankings over time, as nearly any promotional activities around a business help to raise its overall profile and associated prominence factors.
• Paid search is often less costly and faster to implement than SEO. So, the risks are pretty low and controllable.
• PPC ads can get you on page one of popular keyword search results! So, it provides a sort of second chance at rankings if your SEO game lags behind competitors.
• You may not realize that you can set up PPC ads to just appear for people in your city. When someone searches for “plumbing,” it’s possible to geographically target or “geotarget” your ads to only appear for your area locals. It can be done to allow targeting state-wide, or by city and ZIP.

For all these reasons, consider doing some PPC advertising, if you are not doing so already. Pay-per-click can be set with small budgets initially if you want to get your feet wet, and smaller campaigns can be run do-it-yourself, although there are enough options involved to consider hiring a professional to at least set up a program efficiently for you.

So, what are you waiting for?

First of all, businesses have been propelled toward being involved in social media because marketers are attracted to any channels or arenas that large swaths of consumers gravitate to. As the usership of various social media services has grown, the rule-of-thumb is that their worth as a promotional vehicle has grown as well. Advertisers want eyeballs.

Where Are The Eyeballs?

According to Experian Hitwise, Google and Facebook are both the top websites in terms of number of visits:

And, according to comScore, users have been spending a lot more time in Facebook, too:

Does Social Media Have Value?

No one particularly questions the value of Google as a source for customer referrals to businesses; (although, some debate the ROI of PPC advertising for some companies/industries), however, almost everyone wants to be found in the organic search results to one degree or another. And, Facebook is clearly right up there in its volume of visitors.

Of course, just the fact that a service has a huge audience doesn’t automatically equate to worth in business promotions. For instance, a video game service isn’t going to be as worthwhile as a search engine where people are trying to research products and services, selecting the companies that provide them.

So, there’s a valid criticism that some social media services and the activities taking place on them will not lend themselves to some types of business promotions as readily as for others.

What Are The Gripes?

Most of the conversations I’ve had with those questioning the value for small businesses center on criticisms around a few common gripes:

• No sales. They don’t see direct sales arising from social media activities. Most people are not using Facebook or Twitter to find products or services, so there’s no purchase intent involved.
• No traffic. Their analytics are not showing much direct referral traffic from social media services.
• Work invested in social media is like “sharecropping.“ You can put all that time and effort into some services, and the content is “owned” by them, and the value can evaporate at the whim of the social media companies. For instance, quite a number of companies developed large audiences on Facebook only to recently have those audiences “held hostage” when Facebook last year began demanding advertising payments in return for exposing new status updates to followers of business pages.

Are The Gripes Valid?

From my perspective, these criticisms are sometimes skewed and are not showing a complete picture.

First, the “sharecropping” metaphor seems like a straw man argument to me. Quite a lot of promotion work is ephemeral in nature, providing benefit for only a limited period of time. Just because it could evaporate tomorrow doesn’t negate its worth today. For that matter, you could build your shop in a particularly popular neighborhood only to have highways change and traffic directed away from your district. Point is, there are risks involved with business and promotion channels, but we don’t close down and go home because of it.

It is valid to consider that your business might not see sales and website traffic directly from your activities on social platforms. Although, this is by no means a foregone conclusion. I had a client in an esoteric service industry just a few weeks ago who thanked me profusely for recommending Twitter to him, because he immediately gained a new customer who found him due to his Tweeting activities.

While my client’s target demographic is well within that of Twitter users (he caters to technologists), all sorts of businesses can gain clients from their social network promotions to some degree, if they know what they’re doing. Merely spewing self-referencing mentions or a barrage of ads is probably going to result in irritation for the social audiences and frustration for the business owner who sees no ROI arising from the effort.

Those complaining of lack of sales and site traffic might not be doing effective social promotion work to begin with. As Derek Edmond points out in his article on How B2B Marketers Can Develop A Better Social Media Plan, it can take a while for a company to learn how to use a social channel properly and to promote through it — over 50% require from seven months to four years to “get it”!

So, if you’ve experimented around with a social platform for only a few months and throw in the towel, it’s possible you haven’t given yourself a chance to master the medium.

Indirect Benefits Of Social Media

But, even if a particular social platform doesn’t lend itself to your business through sending traffic or sales prospects, there may be substantial indirect benefits that should be taken into account. Here are the main ones:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Social media activities provide signals that can help sites rank better. Google and Bing have both acknowledged that they’re now using social activity signals in the mix. While we don’t know the exact methods they use, it doesn’t stop us from integrating social media work in order to extract ranking value.

With 200+ ranking signals in an algorithm, it’s difficult to isolate the influence of any one factor, but I’ve seen enough anecdotal evidence to believe good social media development over time does, indeed, provide some ranking benefit. Particularly if your competitors are not doing it.

There are only a handful of “prominence” signals that we’re certain of — external links, citations, business listing interactions (clicks on maps, driving directions, clicks to website), frequency and volume of user ratings and reviews, and — social media interactions. Do you think you can afford to throw away one of those?

Proactive Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Being involved with a few of the more popular social media services provides a level of insulation from attacks on your reputation. The profiles of social media sites and status updates or other activities on them can rank in Google search results, making it harder for any negative webpages to appear when your name is Googled.

Without enough content ranking on your name, any dissatisfied customer, competitor, disgruntled former employee, or random crazy can say something bad about you, and it could appear prominently in search results. So, social media work carries a benefit that’s similar to insurance — if you get hit by a false claim or exaggerated criticism, your bottom line could take a substantial blow.

Availability

It’s possible that making your business available through some of the higher ranking social media platforms could be a sign of your relative stature. Not that it’s a status symbol, so much as a subtle signal to consumers that your business is important enough to merit having a presence in places where they “live” online.

Facebook’s rollout of Graph Search for instance, could push users into searching for businesses more. (If you’ve opted into Graph Search, try searching for “restaurants my friends like.” This sort of search capability is ultra-strong for many types of business where endorsements from a consumer’s social circle can heavily influence decisions!)

Being available for this type of search is likely to become more important over time, and signaling that people can communicate with you through the platforms they’re comfortable with is likely beneficial as well.

Social Media Can Be Worthwhile

So, while it’s true that many businesses may not see as direct of a return on social media development work, there are a number of significant indirect benefits that make it worthwhile. This does not mean that a company needs to be involved with every large and small social media platform, and it doesn’t mean that large quantities of time must be spent on social media activities.

Different businesses are going to be more or less relevant to audiences at particular social networks. But, assess the bigger ones carefully: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and LinkedIn.

In terms of the amount of time spent, there’s usually some amount of time savings if you’re engaging with multiple social platforms, if you’re using good management tools to do it, and if you understand how to go about it.

Just because you may not see direct or immediate benefits fresh out-of-the-box when you begin using social media does not mean that you are not getting some benefit. Over time, the slow accrual of SEO benefit alone may make it a necessity for you, while proactive reputation management and consumer engagement may also be compelling reasons to be present and active.

For years now, I’ve provided recommendations on how to improve one’s local business rankings in Google. (Your business listing with name, address and phone may appear embedded in the regular keyword search results along with a small map on the right — this is sometimes called the “7-pack” or “local pack.” Or, you can see the business listings when performing searches in Google Maps.) See also my tips on how to rank higher in Google local searches.

Most of my recommendations have been around doing things like choosing advantageous business categories, adding photos, writing good descriptions, and obtaining citations.

Other strategies include performing various promotions to further distribute the business information, often resulting in signals that Google may interpret to indicate greater degrees of popularity and interest in the business.

But, there are many local business operators who are unfamiliar with the best practices, and they end up doing things that are against Google’s rules.

Common Issues & Penalties Within Google Local Listings

These practices can include things like fabricating street addresses, attempting to use P.O. box addresses as street addresses, setting up an 800 number as their primary phone, adding location keywords to free-form category names, placing shill reviews, or spamming the directory with fictional extra listings for other area towns. (See 9 Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings in Google.)

Some things businesses do are within the rules, but are merely contraindicated, such as actually moving their physical address to a city’s centroid in a ploy to achieve higher rankings.

Probably the most confounding issue remains the situation around local businesses that do not have a storefront location. Google’s guidelines now clearly state that such businesses should specify that they provide services at their customers’ locations, and they must select the option to *not* display their address on the Maps listing.

Local service providers like electricians, locksmiths, plumbers, contractors and others would prefer to set their listings up in this way — unfortunately, doing so appears to coincide with significantly lower rankings in most cases. (I theorize this is because Google then finds it challenging to associate the business’s citational listings/mentions in other directories, or perhaps it reduces the apparent relevancy to local searches in some way. An alternate theory could also be that it’s carried-over prejudice from Google Maps’ earlier days where they obstinately refused to list address-less businesses for so long.)

So, this situation results in companies attempting to use home addresses or P.O. box addresses, selecting the options to display the address while claiming to offer storefront service.

Many of these businesses then get penalized by Google, and their businesses no longer appear for local searches or in Google Maps search. (See Investigating Google Places Hypocrisy For Address-less Businesses.)

Okay, so penalizing local listings for going against Google’s rules isn’t all that remarkable in and of itself. After all, Google must take steps against those who would spam up listings, rendering local search unusable.

It’s not necessarily all that remarkable that innocent, bona-fide businesses get caught up in this along with those who create false storefronts and such, since this sort of thing happens with websites in the regular keyword search results as well.

But, what is remarkable is that unlike the regular search, once a business has its listing-change flagged (the listing is shown in Google Places Dashboard with the Status label, “Needs Action ! This listing does not comply with our policy of allowed terms”). In this case, it can simply stay there in limbo with no method available to request a review.

Supposedly, if you then change the “Needs Action!” listing to comply with Google guidelines,” it will go into queue awaiting re-review. Google’s help section states that it can take around four weeks for this to happen. However, I’ve had clients who made changes, and six weeks could go by with no change at all — seemingly never getting reviewed or accepted. It seems clear that in some cases, this flag may indicate permanent blacklisting.

In other cases, when a listing update hasn’t properly refreshed, Google personnel recommend “poking” the listing — meaning they suggest you login to Google Places dashboard, click to edit the listing, and hit submit — a signal to reprocess the listing information.

This situation merely adds even more confusion because a business owner isn’t told what they may have done that’s “wrong,” aren’t told exactly what they need to do to address it, don’t know whether any changes they’ve made could have satisfied Google, and then don’t even know for sure whether Google has reprocessed the changes in order for it to take effect.

It’s flummoxing that there’s not clearer messaging about whether the listing is still awaiting review once you’ve changed it, if it’s just been forgotten, or if it has been reviewed and found wanting yet again. After many years as an online marketer, I can theorize that this opacity is at least in part purposeful — Google obfuscates their actions, in some cases, so that the evil spammers cannot reverse-engineer their methods. But, for the many other benign, unintentional rules-infringing businesses, this is intensely frustrating.

A second and more serious level of penalization where the listing is outright rejected (the alert in Google Places Dashboard states, “Needs Action ! Rejected”) more specifically signals that the business listing itself could be banned. There’s apparently no way out of this level except for adding the listing anew and starting all over again, hopefully not doing the naughty thing you did the first time around.

Even that may not be successful, however, because it seems as though some of the identifying features of the business can carry over like the search engine equivalent of the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” A newly added listing that includes the business name, phone number, URL or possibly even the street address of the previously rejected listing could cause the new listing to get immediately penalized as well!

Yet another layer of penalization involves the blacklisting of the administrative account used to login and make changes to claimed listings. Google states that “if more than one of your listings does not adhere to the guidelines, we may suspend your account.” This is indicated by a big red banner across the top of the dashboard reading “Account Suspended.” Once this happens, your login account cannot ever get back into the good graces of Google. It’s game over. The login account is burned.

For a business that didn’t know what it did to begin with to get their listing rejected, if they add it back anew and attempt to claim it with their main admin account, I’d guess the chances of their account getting suspended entirely is probably around 85%, because they’re likely to repeat the same mistake they made the first time around.

The solution for an account suspension is to abandon it. You have to try to set up a whole new account, establish or claim your listings. It has to be done with a completely separate email address. This poses yet another logistical nightmare for the small business owner who may not have a lot of technical savvy and who is probably already challenged with trying to keep up with one email address.

Separate Google Local & Webmaster Tools Dashboards

This whole deal is actually in stark contrast to Google’s regular keyword search results — if you get penalized for doing a no-no in the main search area, Google might notify you in Google Webmaster Tools in a clearer fashion, and once you feel you’ve cleaned up your issues, you can file a reconsideration request to get back into the natural rankings.

For SEOs who already thought that process was a bit rough to navigate at times, it’s nowhere near as purposefully confusing and frustrating as the Google Places process.

Yet another level of confusion is caused by Google having separate Webmaster Tools and Google Places dashboards. A local business could get penalized for having bad linking practices, yet their listing and business information show up okay in the Google Places Dashboard.

The Google Places listing and account notifications page and the Google Places quality guidelines don’t even mention Webmaster Tools, or going over to Webmaster Tools  to see if there are any notifications that something might be wrong. I know there are lots of businesses that have Google Places accounts that do not have Webmaster Tools set up.

Google Reconsideration Request Form from Webmaster Tools. Also referred to as a Reinclusion Request.

Google Places once had a reconsideration process, but that went away in early 2012. Ostensibly, Google must have thought the current process was superior in some way — not all that surprising that the process would evolve into a mystifying maze of non-intuitive sequences since Google doesn’t properly test out the places administration tools with end users prior to deployment (as a Google product manager admitted to a number of us local search marketers a few years ago at an SMX conference).

Getting Customer Service From Google Local Is Tough

Now, many businesses default into using Google’s Help section for assistance. The “Google and Your Business” product forum is actively monitored by Google employees, and this has become one way to get attention on an issue and have it addressed rapidly (if you eventually get their attention sufficiently to inspire a human to help you).

The forums sometimes function in a way as to be a defacto reinclusion request at times, although this is, at best, haphazard. I don’t think I’ve heard of many instances of rejected listings being restored, nor suspended accounts reinstated. But, resubmited listings hovering in limbo and persistent listing errors could call for human intervention.

I heard Greg Gifford, Director of Search & Social for AutoRevo, speak recently at a Dallas / Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association meeting about navigating the issues in merging Google+ Local pages, particularly navigating the merging of new Google+ Local pages with old Google Place listings.

He recommends using Google’s help request form for incorrect listing issues, although this doesn’t have an option for requesting review/help for penalization or suspended account problems. (Be sure to catch Greg’s upcoming presentation on Google+ Local at SMX West in March!) The addition of the Google+ Local business profile pages has added yet another confusing layer to the mix — all the while the older Places legacy issues have remained unresolved.

I’ve heard that some of the Google Local engineers came up with their penalization methodology some years ago, based on the theory that they would disincentivize bad behaviors. The philosophy may have worked where search marketers are concerned, although I’ve run into enough cases where a marketing firm has burned a business’s presence in local search results and then they just move on to the next client, never learning their lesson since it’s the client that’s left holding the bag.

But, where small, local businesses are concerned, the methodology is definitely not working if it was intended to “teach lessons.” Small business owners cobble together websites and their online presence, in many cases, using the help of inexperienced amateurs.

SMBs don’t have the time to read all the guidelines before integrating with Google or building their websites — they’re not even aware that perhaps they should. They have no intention to do wrong nor any idea when they have — they’re often completely mystified as to why their listings abruptly drop out of sight.

It further exacerbates the issue that merely applying a valid edit to listing info can result in screwing up your rankings. For instance, if your business moved just a few blocks away and you update the street address, you will lose all the goodwill (i.e., ranking power) invested in the original business listing, and you will lose the hard-won consumer reviews associated with it.

How Can Google Local Be Saved?

I’d argue Google’s system for handling local businesses is very poor in comparison to general websites. Google has increased communications with webmasters through Webmaster Tools, provided more and better communications around Web search penalizations, and provided a reconsideration process.

For Google Local, though, the reconsideration process went away, and communications are insufficient. Account suspensions create additional problems for businesses, and a lack of communications leaves business owners confused and frustrated. And, the list of outstanding system bugs just seems to grow and grow, proving that Mike Blumenthal’s post declaring it a “train wreck” is anything but hyperbole.

Is anyone at Google Local / Google Maps / Google Places listening?!? When Google assigned its visionary vice president of product Marissa Mayer to be in charge over Google Places/Maps development, we all had hopes that things might be poised to turn around. However, she left that role not many months after to become CEO of Yahoo.

Quite a few of their local product management people have left in the last couple of years — a possible trend that could hint that there’s dissension or a demoralized feeling in the team behind the local products. Whatever the case, the lack of cohesive vision and attention to quality must surely create a significant risk that the leading local search product could decline, allowing competitors to erode its marketshare.

Google’s local listing administration should probably be folded up into Webmaster Tools, better standardizing and unifying the place where website owners and businesses can manage their information and receive feedback from Google. A reduction in the complexity for small business owners would equate with better usability. Until then, businesses seriously need to get the help of a professional to come out of a rejection of their listings, or to establish a whole new account and listing in the case of a suspension.

While special markup likely may not directly improve your rankings in search, it does apparently increase clickthrough rate or “CTR,” as consumers are more drawn to your site’s listings. The increase is reportedly 15% on average, and potentially higher!

Just this increase in CTR alone could benefit your rankings over time, as clickthroughs can influence rankings; so, there are a few reasons why semantic markup is worthwhile. Semantic markup optimizes for Google, Bing, and Facebook search, too.

If you think most Microformats/RDFa/Micro Data/Schemas don’t apply to your local business website — think again! While only a few of these may impact your listing in the local 7-pack or in Google Maps, your site can also attract customers via the regular, keyword search results pages; and, regular listings can and do appear on the same results pages as the 7-pack!

So, check to see if you’ve added the following semantic markups to your local website (if applicable). Improving your traffic, even on search results which are not directly related to something you sell, can help benefit all the rest of your website as your overall popularity becomes augmented.

13 Semantic Markup Strategies For Local Business Websites

1.  Authorship Markup

The number-one, best semantic markup is likely authorship — it allows your personal photo to appear with pages you author, and your website, when they are listed in search engine results.

For instance, check out listings of articles from Search Engine Land, and you’ll frequently see icon pics and names of authors paired up with their article listings.

For local search, this may be even more compelling in Google, making your listing appear far more interesting and professional in the 7-pack. In the search below for personal injury attorneys in Seattle, the first two listings sport pics of the attorneys:

To enable this to happen, you must have a Google+ profile for the business proprietor, link to it from your website including a querystring with rel=author:

<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

Then, link back to your site from your Google+ profile in the “Contributor To” section. It’s also a good idea to have a good author photo for Google+.

2.  Local Business Schema and Geotag

Schema.org provides a few different types of semantic markup that I’ll be listing in this article, and the prime one is for describing local businesses. Essentially, you can use this to markup your address and contact information on your site, although there are additional fields you can include such as hours of operation, payment types accepted, and more.

Example markup:

You can also geotag your location (or “Place” in Schema.org lingo) by including your geocoordinates with your LocalBusiness code. As I’ve noted before, if you’ve been using hCard Microformat for this purpose, you can continue to do so, although Schema markup has become more preferred.

If desired, you can use both simultaneously, such as what I’ve done with my business address on my homepage at Argent Media. For LocalBusiness Schema instructions, go here.

3.  Testimonial

Testimonials on a business website can often aid in persuading visitors to become customers.

Because of this, Google allows local businesses to disclose that they have a testimonial by using semantic markup for reviews, and Google sometimes will display that information in conjunction with the business’s listings in SERPs. I believe tagging your testimonials can increase their chances of being displayed in the snippet text beneath your listing, and in the sample text callouts shown variously in the cached image of your webpage.

For instance, check out the EagleLift foundation repair company in Los Angeles which has a testimonial page marked-up with the Schema for testimonials — and that testimonial text now shows up in both the description snippet and the cached page callout:

4.  Breadcrumbs

Many sites I run across neglect to use breadcrumb navigation, despite it being highly useful, according to usability experts. Even on relatively small sites, breadcrumbs can help a user orient themselves in the site’s hierarchy, and provide them with related pages that they might wish to visit. For this reason, Google began bubbling-up this data to display in rich snippets as additional links beneath the hyperlinked page name.

Simply from a statistical perspective, having additional links to your site on search results pages increases the odds of you having users click through over time — so, breadcrumb links are highly desirable! Google does a fair job of automatically detecting these, but there are times when a page’s breadcrumb code isn’t interpreted successfully by them in order to be displayed in the snippet. To increase your chances, use the breadcrumb markup on your site pages.

For local sites targeting a few local city names or with multiple offices around a metro area, breadcrumbs are very worthwhile. For example, here’s a breadcrumb from my company site:

Once you’ve coded your page, check the code in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, which should reflect the breadcrumb links properly. The tool shows a search listing preview for my page at Argent Media, in addition to the extracted structured data.

5.  Events

If your company participates in some events or provides special services at different times/dates during the year, you might consider incorporating the Events Schema markup. If you are too intimidated to do structured data on your site, or you don’t feel confident at doing the coding necessary, Google does give you another option for Events at this time.

In your Webmaster Tools account, Google has provided a beta service called the Data Highlighter for Events. Using this interface, you can highlight elements of events and tell Google which data item is which event element — Name, Date, Venue, Address, URL, etc.

*If Google deems the Data Highlighter to be successful, they’ll likely expand it to include other types of rich snippets as well. I hope they do — this would be a great boon for small business websites!

6.  Coupons/Offers

If you have coupons or special offers, use the Offer Schema. It’s not clear to me that Google or Bing does any special snippet treatment for coupons or offers at this time, but they included it in Schema.org, and it would make sense for them to consider incorporating it more visibly at a future date, since they’re obviously interested in it, and it would be the sort of thing that end users would like a lot.

7.  Videos

Google recommends that you use the VideoObject Schema to help them to better interpret and represent your video content in search results. If you’re not using videos on your site, you should — video listings in search results take up more room in search results and are more attention-grabbing.

Consumers apparently like seeing videos of products or of businesses providing services, so this can help with conversions as well. Here’s an example video page listing in search results from the Wasp Barcode Technologies company in Plano, Texas:

8.  Recipes

Recipes get tons of searches on the net, and for that reason search engines highlight the presentation of their listings in search results.

Most local businesses don’t feel that they really lend themselves to food themes, so it might not occur to them to show a recipe or two on their site and mark it up for search engines. True, recipes may make more sense for a restaurant, hotel, caterer, or even a coffee shop, but there’s no reason why a business couldn’t publish some favorite recipe and get some extra traffic and ranking power by doing so.

For instance, a lawyer recently made headlines by filing a Freedom of Information Request with the government in order to obtain President Obama’s beer recipe (“White House Honey Ale”). The lawyer was likely satisfied that the recipe is now published on the White House’s website, but he’s missed out on the opportunity of publishing the recipe on his own website and marking it up for search.

The White House’s recipe is actually very non-optimal, because it was published in a couple of images instead of in text, and it won’t look as pretty in search results as recipes at the Food Network or AllRecipes.com.

Your reason for publishing a recipe doesn’t have to be dramatic, though — just do it to interact with the Web community more and your business may benefit.

9.  Individuals

I’ve written before on how highlighting your employees can help with local search rankings. In addition to displaying author information, you can also mark up information about executives and employees on your site as well by using the Schema for a Person.

10.  Tables & Bulleted Lists

This doesn’t really require any special semantic markup — but, if you have tabular data or content that lends itself to presentation in a list, providing this on your website can again make your listing in search results get more attention, and it affords you the opportunity to display more info about your products and services before potential customers have even reached your website.

Example — rental cabins in Gatlinburg, TN: The Cabins of the Smokey Mountains webpage presents their rental properties and features in a table, and Google has featured that below their listing. To enable this to happen, consider whether you have any information that might lend itself to a table or bullet list format, and create a page for it.

For example, this could work great for many restaurants, if they put their menu in an HTML table — preferable, compared with the Flash/PDF/image formats that many eateries use instead.

11.  Products

If your business sells products, seriously consider incorporating data about them on your site and marking it up with the Product Schema. The product markup can enable your listings to show price, ratings, and availability in the search results: Note that the Product markup can be particularly effective in combination with breadcrumbs! (Shout out to Zachary Palmer for reminding me of this one.)

12.  Meta Descriptions

While it doesn’t involve Schema, Meta Descriptions have been one of the earliest and longest surviving semantic markup elements. They’re possibly the most-influential as well, since they often appear as the entire snippet text in search results.

Despite all this, the Description Meta Tag is still frequently neglected on many small business websites. The Meta Description should briefly describe what a particular page is all about, incorporating good keywords. You should not use the same description for all pages, or even more than one page on your site!

Don’t just parse the first sentence of a blog post into the description field, either — make them custom, describing the page. Twenty-five words ought to do it. Check in your Webmaster Tools and see if any changes are recommended, too — warnings about being too short or duplicated tags should alert you to adjust.

13.  Facebook Open Graph

Instead of cooperating with the search engines to make life easier for millions of webmasters and developers, Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol. To help ensure your site’s pages are presented well in Facebook search and various interfaces, incorporate Open Graph for local businesses as I suggested previously. Use it simultaneously with Schema.org protocol — the two do not conflict with one another.

Each time you insert semantic markup, be sure to check it using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool (previously called the “Rich Snippet Testing Tool”). I’ve seen many instances where designers and programmers think they’ve incorporated semantic markup, but instead it’s incorrectly configured and erroneous.

So, go through this checklist and add any of the semantic markup options you can, and it may help you achieve a very rosy year for your website and business in 2013!

Postscript: Regarding Testimonials, I made a mistake in citing the EagleLift company’s testimonial page and suggesting using the “Schema for testimonials”, which doesn’t exist. I realized after seeing a number of comments around this that it was confusing, and the page I provided as an example actually has a mistake in their structured code which Google’s Structured Data Tool did not catch when I looked at it. Their code referred to an item type for “http://schema.org/testimonial“, which is nonexistant. I had found the example, and the Structured Data Tool appeared to validate it, and I’d unintentionally recommended it.

To clarify, as I stated earlier in that section, “Google allows local businesses to disclose that they have a testimonial by using semantic markup for reviews” on their website. That is correct guidance. Use the review schema at: http://schema.org/Review