Google Local Listings & TripAdvisor

Hi,

Google local listings is a tough one because it is still a very grey area and the ranking factors are still unclear. Some important things to remember:

Make sure your listing is 100% complete

Make sure you choose appropriate categories for your listings, preferably keyword rich ones.

Make sure the information in your listing such as address and telephone number are the same as those on your website and those on your Google places listing and the citation sites that Google is pulling information from.

Aside from the above continual growth in reviews, both quantity and quality wise and obtaining new citation sources will help improve your rankings.

I also wrote a local search article in my blog (see signature) which should help you in the right direction.

Hope that helps

Hi Robert,

When it comes to Google crawling another website for local listings, keep in mind that this goes the other way too. We have had to work with Trip Advisor before for comments as one our client is a hotel client where we help to manage these listings (plural) because the process goes well beyond Google.

Whether it is Trip Advisor or any other website (e.g. Yelp, Citysearch, etc) you will find that they also push their information via a feed out to other websites (including Google). In other words this process goes in both directions. We know this because our client had comments posted from Trip Advisor to their listing and it had nothing to do with them. Won't go into all the details here, but the end result is what I want to confirm with you.

The other thing to remember is that these interactive yellow pages are free to a businesses. I think we need to set our expectations accordingly in terms of what these local listing websites will do and more importantly "when" they will do it.

Consider expanding your efforts beyond Google and Trip Advisor to make the network of local business listing websites work for you.

If you want to talk more let me know.

Dear Danny

Thank you for your reply. I have ensured that everything is complete, in fact we even have videos on our listing which our competitors lack.

All we can do is wait I suppose for Google to be kind and crawl tripadvisor and recognise that we have nearly 60 super reviews to be included. Part of me thinks, that Google probably suspects that we are posting these reviews on tripadvisor ourselves (which isn't the case) BUT, because G thinks why does this hotel get a review every 2-3 days, it probably labels this "unatural"!

thanks for the info so far
any other tips?