Google Local Search: ‘What’s Around Here?’ Ranking Factors

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Google has released a beta version of it’s new feature for local search, the ‘What’s around here’ wildcard. Now this is nothing new from the ‘*’ wildcard search that a savvy internet user may use, but in marketing terms it will open up a significant opportunity to catch the tourists, business persons who are in town for a day or two, the spontaneous couple looking for a new place to eat, the ‘guy in a rush’ who needs the most convenient solution now, and a whole heap of other characters.

The sheer volume of competitors that the wildcard brings up is a tough one to crack, and the results are interesting.

Leading the wildcard results for my local area of Summertown in Oxford, with unanimous strength, are local education institutions. These completely wipe the floor with other businesses around the area for the top spots.

Outside of this group we start to see some other businesses rank; namely Cherwell Boathouse, The Oxford Centre and Best Weston Linton Lodge Hotel are our first ‘non-education’ winners.

So what is affecting these local search results? If we’re going by the traditional organic search algorithm, then we’d assume the strength of the .ac.uk and .sch.uk (educational TLDs) has a profound influence on the listings. The domain strength carried forward from ox.ac.uk is clearly notable – the top two listings, Wolfson College and St Anne’s College taking the top spots (both bearing the aforementioned domain).

In third spot, Cherwell Boathouse. A privately-owned company sandwiched between two educational TLDs. At first glance, it’s clear that the accumulative influence of social proof is evident with the 43 reviews that ‘support’ the argument for the boathouse being amongst the top ‘places of interest’ in the area.

Some of the local search ranking factors that have an influence on your business can be found through the link. Interestingly, a refresh of the page actually generates a different set of results. The core businesses who are well-optimised stay around the top, but essentially the results are juggled around slightly. This supports the evidence suggesting that your businesses proximity to the centroid (of a search location) has a profound impact on your ‘relevancy’ to a user. One could argue this places an unfair advantage on the businesses who can afford a central location. Others could argue that somebody looking for a restaurant in oxford would presumably be interested from ox1 outwards, whereby the algorithm assumes the position of the user is right in the very epicentre of the city. Of course, this is complicated further by the introduction of ‘current location’ technologies or geo-location that is now able to pinpoint your exact location using GPS triangulation on everyday gadgets such as your phone, watch or digital camera.

The direction of local search seems to be heading rapidly towards a mix of traditional SEO and social media. The SEO is needed to ‘help’ the search engines recognise exactly what business you’re in. The social media/proofing is to justify the recommendation and act as a prerequisite for the top suggestions. After all, the voice of the masses makes it that little bit harder to fool the search engines. This is more about reputation management than simply adding a few keywords.

Tagged as: Local Search, ranking factors