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Does anyone recommend a particular keyword research tool or tools for geographically modified keywords? i.e. Web DesignerF Fargo.

I often find that searches focused on services in the area we serve does not get the traffic volume Google's keyword tool needs to provide me with a number. I know the traffic is there, because I see it coming in via analytics.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

If nothing is showing up at all in places, then my inclination would be remove both listings from your account and start over.

Only other thing I can think of is to raise a hue and cry in places help, and see if you can get the attention of a Google employee or a top contributor (who seem to be able to raise the attention of employees).

It should remove it from your account right away if you select the "remove from account" option. I just tried it with an old listing that is out of business on one of my accounts. It disappeared right away.

If it's not, hrm, tough one. Going to need to try a new account, or see if you can raise something in the help center (never had much luck myself).

If I understand your response correctly, you're the business is not being displayed at all when you search? (search for business name and also try a separate search for the phone number) Even with incorrect information?

If so, what's actually happening when you delete them from your account? Are they still showing up on the dashboard?

How is the business appearing in the results right now?

Are the two dupes both showing up as unclaimed listings? Are there other dupes that should be dealt with as well?

Depending on what's currently showing up, a flat-out "remove from Google maps" probably isn't your best solution. If there's conflicting data that Google is pulling from, at best it's going to be a temporary solution that will pop up the instant you tell your client "all fixed". At worst, it might suppress too many things, or suppress the wrong data.

I'd track down all the dupes that exist, AND where the upstream data that's causing them is coming from first. Then figure out whether there's any relationship between the pending listings and what's showing up (i.e. did someone attempt to claim already existing duplicate listings, or did they create them manually?). Once you've done that you should have a pretty good idea of what is what.

Unless you can get a miraculous intervention from Google Places help, removing them from your account and claiming already existing listings is probably what you'll end up doing. After you've cleaned up the upstream issues that messy data is causing.

Edits by users could be used to make sure the information on duplicate listings is completely identical. That's the one way I've managed to get Google to review duplicate listings and merge them via the "report a problem" link.

If you're looking for general monitoring across multiple platforms, I'm a fan of social mention. You'll probably need to figure out how to filter some of the junk out in your searches, though.

You get 50 report points for Hoostuite pro (at least I do for the cheapest $5.99 pro package). You can pull together a decent report with that. I believe you need to pay for extra points if you want to make more in-depth reports.

The Google FAQs about places and rich snippets (which you're going to generate by adding schema.org markup) says that they will not negatively or positively impact rankings. But...

I'm going to suggest that it almost certainly seems like they will, -if- you can get Google to pick them up from your site and add them to your places listing.

Obviously, the number of reviews that Google can pull from other local-portal sites is a ranking factor. In May, Mike Blumenthal wrote a blog post which identified places listings where he had seen Google including hreview testimonials pulled directly from the business's own website.

I'm skeptical that Google is going to treat these reviews differently from reviews from other sources, and somehow exclude them from their ranking algo for places. If Google didn't believe that the reviews are valid, then they wouldn't include them in the first place, because it would make for a really poor user experience. If they're not excluding them for user experience reasons, I doubt they'll exclude them from being a ranking factor.  Which means, to me, that (if you can get the picked up) they'll have a positive impact on rank.

I've noticed a decrease in brand-focused searches for our site, but for our actual terms, no, no changes. Entry pages have definitely switched up, however.

Did your ranks end up getting negatively effected by the recent switch-ups, or are different pages literally being switched out at the same ranks?

That's pretty much what I'm seeing. Definitely a mixed bag.

In my case, links to the deeper pages did exist, though certainly not in the same numbers as to the homepage.

I'm doing a bit of research now to see if there's anything else that might have influenced Google's decision. Looking at some of the backlinks on majestic, I'm beginning to suspect it's a partly because they're pages that are better targeted to the keywords, and have more closely matching anchor text.

Thanks for the responses Dejan and davegr,

Are you finding that the rank of the newly indexed page is similar to the old page, exactly the same, or different?

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages.

In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages.

I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own.

Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise.

Anyone else noticing similar changes?

In addition to the resources already listed, I'd also recommend checking out the learning center at http://getlisted.org/resources/

Specific to the, "Any surefire ways to get more citations there?" question...

Check out your competitors places listings, too. See if they're getting any citations from local sites, resources, or lists. If Google is indexing these citations for your competitors and adding them to place pages, it will probably tie them to your places page too, if you can get listed.

Thanks. Somehow I missed it in the original post.

Hi Felicity,

Are you using a plugin, such as all in one SEO pack, for your site?

Thanks, Ryan.

Seems like Rand concurred back in 2009:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Useful stuff. About halfway down the comments on the above link Rand mentions needing specific analytics code to track things accurately. Anyone have experience with Google Analytics and # symbols?

By the way, Ryan, that link you posted is being flagged by Avast as containing malware. No idea if it's real or not.

I agree with Dignan99's initial thoughts about the ability of SE's to connect the dots.

I've also found the on-page targeting of the geographic terms to be crucial. I've found a lot of value in getting a link for, say, "IT Services" and pointing it deeper into the site to a page that targets "IT Services Boston".

In terms of actual places to get links, I've always felt that getting links that are not only topically relevant, but also geographically relevant is important in that sort of campaign. I tend to go for good quality regional or local sites.

I agree that the answer lies in how many people take it up.

I think that one of the biggest deciding factors is going to be how easy the most popular CMS's make integrating this. If WordPress can get this done natively, for instance, a way to write a post and, via dropdown, select what type of data each line/paragraph is? I think that'd be huge, and it would explode.

Personally, I've always been interested in getting Google's rich snippets to appear. I think it can have a huge influence on clickthroughs. And, I think that schema.org indicates that such content will become more and more commonplace. I've managed to get it to happen for one site, which had the majority of its content focused on recipes. We definitely saw an uptick in traffic without a ranking change.

I'll be continuing to keep my eye on it, at first glance it seems like a huge task. In the end, I think it will definitely be something that we add into our work. The big search engine's partnering on this is too hard to ignore.

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the response!

My interest isn't so much about visitors being able to follow the backlink or not, but how the SE's will index them. When a SE crawls a site with URL fragments, my experience has been that they do a good job discarding them.

What I'm seeing is two possibilities:

1. The SE's will discard the fragment when they crawl, and simply index the page as if it didn't have a fragment on the end, meaning a backlink with a fragment is identical to one without. Or,

2. They won't discard the fragment, and we'll end up with duplicates in the SERP's, which would, in part, be dealt with via a canonical tag.

It's great that you've used a similar service with TYNT.com Do you have any experience in how the SE's behave when crawling a link from TYNT and indexing that page?

Cheers.

So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser.

It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment.

But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link.

What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?