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Victoria & Vancouver SEO

Ranking Organically and in Google Places on Page 1

Google Places | 9 May 2012

Seeing Double?
My audience is typically comprised of SEO professionals (I use professionals loosely) who like myself are reading to find out anything that will give them an edge in the local space.

What has surprised me recently though is the amount of times I am asked “Can I have an organic ranking and a Google Places ranking on page 1.” Doesn’t everyone know this? Guess not.

Since being asked the first time I have likely explained how to achieve this a dozen times and today will be my final, and 13th time.

The first thing you need to understand, and for many of you this is common knowledge, is that there are two types of Google Places results: blended and pak. I am not going to explain what each look like. Lots of resources online that will explain.

Where your keyword triggers blended results, the URL that you have chosen to represent in your Google Places listing will merge with your Google Places listing. They will become 1 entity for those keywords that trigger blended results.

In pak results, they will not merge, leaving you an organic ranking and a Google Places ranking.

I won’t dig around for it, but I heard from a very credible source that Google is moving further towards a blended result, and currently about 70% of local keywords trigger blended. So what does this mean to you? And what are some best practices for getting twice the presence on page 1?

As explained, in blended results, your Google Places listing will merge with your organic listing. Typically, most folk use the home page as the URL to be represented in Google Places. That being said, your home page, for local keywords, will be a Google Places result more times than not. They will be merged.

Therefore, in order to get double visibility, 2 listings on first page, your best bet is to rank an inner page alongside it. Simple right? I think so.

Don’t forget, you should be ranking internal pages anyways, giving off the appearance of more natural link building ;) . That is, you don’t have 10k links to your home page and none to your inner pages.

Better yet, on those keywords where pak results are triggered, you are going to have 3 listings on page 1. Holy cow that is a lot of visibility!

Now I have not done any tests to see how much more traffic doing this pulls in, but who cares. It’s going to be a lot cheaper this time around now that your home page has authority and is lending it to its inner pages. You can now stuff your URL with your keywords, and so much more. In short, why the heck wouldn’t you?!

Now when someone asks me this question I am just going to give them the link to this page : )

Related posts:

  1. Google Places Page Optimization: Google Local in Review
  2. Delete or Transfer Ownership of a Google Places Page
  3. On-site Optimization: Google Local in Review
  4. Tips to Rank in Google Places
  5. Goodbye, Farewell Google Places Phone Verification…

3 Comments

  • Linda Buquet

    Great post Adam. Except that image made my eyes go kookoo and gave me a headache.

    WARNING don’t stare at it too long like I did. Really weird I still can’t see straight.

    Anyway, really good tip.

    I had a Dentist suffering from proximity lockout and I was trying everything I could think of. At one point I built a /city dentist page and linked his Place page to that page. That didn’t break the lockout so I linked to his home page again.

    BUT once G dropped the prox lock out his city dentist page ranks #1 organic AND he’s got the A spot in blended too. So he totally dominates top of page.

    OK I’m off to add your post to Scoop.it!

    • Adam SteeleAdam Steele

      Great way to temporarily battle against prox lockout. Gotta do something right? Nice bonus at the end too!

      I have this one client where we have 1 organic ranking, 1 places ranking, 1 ppc ranking and 1 video ranking all on page 1. Soon I hope to have an article and insider page listing on page 1 too.

      Amazing what you can do when you have a bit of budget to play with.

      Thanks for stopping by Linda!!

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