Tag: localsearch

Photo Query Matching

Google Local Photos Match the User Query

What does this mean for your business? Well given Google’s penchant for wanting to answer a users’ query and their belief that they can pick a photo better than you, it means the same thing that it always has. It means you need to upload lots of great photos so that no matter which one Google chooses it is a good one.

But now it also means that you really need to be thinking about photos that reflect the broad range of products and services that you deliver and that users might be searching on. If you carry wedding bands and engagement rings and earrings and necklaces you will want to be sure that you have great photos of each. And that they are easily identified in the image.

Lead Gen Spam

When you dial any of the listings you are put through to a sophisticated automated call tree that asks the same qualifying questions each time: if you already have insurance or no if you have been continuously insured for 12 months or no what is your zip code which insurance carrier you currently have Based on the answers the system sends you along to an insurance agent that can sell you a competing product. The idea is that if you already have Allstate and are calling for “cheap car insurance” you must want a different brand.

Inventory on Google Maps

Onboarding to both local catalog ads and local inventory ads is now much easier for retailers of all sizes with the new local feed partnership program. The new program allows point-of-sale or inventory data providers, like Cayan, Pointy, Linx and yReceipts, to provide sales and inventory data to Google on behalf of merchants, so they don’t have to create their own local product feeds.

Maps vs Yelp vs TripAdvisor

Google could be the overall winner but its reviews content is limited and very often quite weak. However its maps are clearly superior to the others (Yelp doesn’t have its own maps of course). For its part, Yelp could be a very strong player and ultimately take TripAdvisor’s position other than for hotel-related planning. Yelp’s filters were very helpful in, for example, determining whether a business accepted credit cards (totally missing from Google and TripAdvisor).

Yelp extortion

Hey look, people are finally noticing that Yelp sells review placement. They called us a few months back with the usual shakedown request. Apparently you get a call once you have more than N hits. If you pay them a monthly fee, you get to put your “favorite” review at the top, get better search result listings, and get to delete “unfair” reviews about your business.

The yelp backlash begins. While their shakedown is silly and sad, crappy reviews are a problem that all sites have.