Google Places – Analysing the Competition

The competition for every Google places listing will be different as there are many factors that affect how the listing will rank. Two of the main factors are the type of business and location, for example a marketing company in London will have a lot more competition than say a local tradesman or local shop in a small town or village.

To get the best possible ranking in Google places, especially if you want the number 1 placing, you need to find out how good of a job your competition is doing with their listing.

To analyse your competition you are going to enter your keywords into Google one by one and make notes about the place pages of the 7 listing on the first page of google, if you haven’t got your keywords or not sure about listings check out my google places keyword research post.

First you need to note down if their place pages are actually claimed and verified.

The reason for this is many businesses already have a places page that was automatically generated by Google without them even knowing. This was done when Google decided to populate its search engines as best it could with all the businesses it could find and then try to encourage businesses to claim and edit their listing.

The way to tell if a business has claimed their listing is to look in the top right hand corner of the place pages. If you see the words owner-verified then it is claimed:

This is an example of an unclaimed listing.

Next note how many Google reviews they have. Getting over 5 reviews actually makes the review stars appear beside your listing on the results page and is very desirable as it attracts more clicks.

Make a note of how many pictures and videos they have uploaded. Pictures and videos are very important part of the listing as they are one of the limited places we get to use our keywords in the application form.

The last bit of information to note is about citations, which are listed just below the Google reviews on the place page. 

 

What are citations? The easiest way to explain them is that they are reviews of a business on other directories sites around the internet. Google now refers to citations as review from around the web. For example if you have an account with a business directory like Yell.com, and you have filled out your profile with your business name and address, Google will register this and count it as a citation for your business.

Citations have a big impact on your listing and in  most instances the more citations you have, the higher your places’ listing will be. The reason it is important to find the citation information of your competition before creating your list is that Google will only look for citations around once a year. The first time it will go and search is when you actually create your Google Places listing. The second time can be up to a year later.

So if you want to rank well from the start, it is important to know how many citations your competition have, so you know how many you need to get before you apply for your listing. This way as soon as you submit, Google will go off, search for and pick up the citations you have already made. If you make them afterwards it could be up to a year before they are counted.

It is recommended you make a list of all the citation sites were your competitors are listed as this will give you an idea were to get your own citations.

Now you have all the information needed to give you a general overview of your competitors. Now lets do a bit a analyzing:

Claimed or unclaimed

This bit of information gives you an indication of how active Google places is for your business type in your area. If there are more claimed listing, the harder it will be to rank and vice verus if there are more unclaimed listing, the easier it going to be to rank.

Pictures and Videos.

If there is alot of pictures and especially videos on place pages it indicates the listing has been optimised. This implies that the business owner is/was activally invovled in the listing or has paid for their listing to be done. If there is just a few or no pictures and videos this implies with a bit of optimisation on your places page you will clean up.

Citations

This is were most people get confusssed but its pretty simple, you need to get more citations then your top competitor. So if the top number of citations is 5 you got to get 6 or more, 3 you got to get 4 or more.

Building citations is not always nessary. If for instance you have less than 7 competing businesses on the first page of the search results then it is quite probable that you will get into the 7 box without building citations first, but if you want the number 1 place and keep it you are going to need citations.

Right we are nearly there, time to learn how to get citations and the final few preperations you going to need to do before applying for your listing.

Google Places – Getting Citations and Final Preparation