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The Carousel

by sodomojo
4 replies
Does anybody do SEO for a franchise that has local search results show up in the carousel, like a hotel?

This is my first experience with the carousel, and I have to say, just from a user perspective I'm not too fond of it. It doesn't even really look like search results up at the top of the screen, and if you know that it is search results, and click on one of the listings, you expect it to take you somewhere, but it just slightly changes the page, and adds the Google Places page to the big box on the right, and then appropriate ads too.

So, for a local hotel franchise, who wants to drive people to their site, they are competing with corporate because everytime that you click on the carousel result for this hotel, it then shows PPC for them as well.

Then, the organic results (below the 1 box which is once again controlled by corporate) has nothing but Yelp, Tripadvisor, Facebook, Hotels.com, expedia, etc.

So, I am guessing that there typically isn't room for a franchise to have their local website show up in the serps?

It's for a smaller town, population under 100k.
#carousel
  • Profile picture of the author NateOlsen
    I have been marketing the carousel for restaurants and a few others but as far as driving traffic to the website this isn't going to help much, Google has been making it harder and harder to leave page one they don't like sending traffic anywhere besides there homepage.
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    • Profile picture of the author sodomojo
      Originally Posted by NateOlsen View Post

      I have been marketing the carousel for restaurants and a few others but as far as driving traffic to the website this isn't going to help much, Google has been making it harder and harder to leave page one they don't like sending traffic anywhere besides there homepage.
      So how do you provide an ROI if you aren't driving traffic? Are you able to measure the increase of phone calls in from searches?
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  • Profile picture of the author Arzak
    Larger chains usually take over the top spots from what I've seen. Besides optimizing G+, get a lot of high-rating reviews and upload high-quality images to G+. Most chains have both. They get ton of reviews because, well, they're more popular.

    If you can start by uploading high-quality photos (since only those will be shown in the carousel), it'll help even if you don't have that many reviews. Then focus on getting more.
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