I notice there are a lot of seo guys out there guaranteeing first page of google places to their clients. I know it all depends on competitiveness and a guarantee is only a guarantee but really how long do you guys think guarantees like this will be able to made? What happens if there’s 30 people competing for a first page spot? If someone is selling these services should they be worried of backlash in the future?
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There is no grantees when it comes to search engine ranking. Take this example: I know a website with 0 backlinks and its in the top spot for a mild competitive keyword. Content is key.
That on its own is meaningless, because it says nothing about the context. I mean, if you give your site a long, unique title, and then (after a while) search for that title in Google, your site will most likely come up an #1 on Google. Woohoo! But it says nothing about what will happen when people type in relevant keywords and phrases.
Unless the SEO guy says “We’ll have you on page 1 for xxx keyword”, the comment has no meaning. But as said, it’s a claim that can’t reliably be guaranteed.
To be more specific tho, i am referring to google places, for finding local businesses, like if you type in auto repair it’ll give you an alphabetized list. I know a little about seo but nothing about google places
The first page of the Google can be guaranteed if the site contains quality backlinks and unique content. work for the site must be regularly done with the equal time gap.
You can never guarantee something you don’t control. My rule is simple: build your site for it’s experience, optimize for seo when it makes sense, but never focus on just one source. Things change.
Buddy i think you are wrong here as i am agree with the ted that you cant gurantee some one that you will get their site in the top page of google even if the site is good in content and have unique back links. As other people also do seo for their site there is lots of competition in the market so you have to survive you can give ur best efforts bt its not sure that you will bring the site at top for sure.
Thanks for all the input but nobody is answering my question! I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT ORGANIC RESULTS!! IM TALKING ABOUT GOOGLE PLACES!! My question is how GOOGLE PLACES works, and the competitiveness in the present and future.
That means you are talking about ad spots on the page - in which case it is simply a matter of always offering to pay a little more than the competition in order to claim the top spot.
No, the listings for Google Places are organic and free, just like the regular listings - Google have emphatically said that Places is NOT about sponsorship.
Stevie D, you are the first person to realize what im talking about. Still tho no one has been able to give any insight. How does google control which local businesses are shown at the top of their places results? IM NOT TALKING ABOUT ORGANIC RESULTS, SPONSORED RESULTS OR ANY OTHER GOOGLE SERVICE!! GOOGLE PLACES IS WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT.
Places are still organic listings although they are not webpage results. From what I’ve read and what Google says on the topic, place rankings come from proximity, popularity [of the business], reviews, and depth of content for matching.
Thus what you end up with is different elements but very concepts to that of listings: the right content, the right phrase, and the right relevance. You can’t guarantee these spots any more than you can other rankings and in fact I would assume proximity plays such a big factor [if I want a dry-cleaners the 5-star one 4 miles away is much less relevant than 3-star one across the street] that while you can optimize, it’s only able to take you so far.
It seems like the place to start is with the updated frequency and completeness of a listing (similar to content). Insuring it’s referred too in other directories also seems to help (similar to backlinks) as would keyword matching.
Thanks Ted, that was exactly what I was looking for.
So that part of your statement was misleading since Google Places are organic results. Therefore if you are not talking about organic results then you have eliminated Google Places from what you were talking about.
That’s why it was so difficult for you to get a meaningful reply since your question contradicted itself.
Thanks Steven, I see what you mean. I know google places are organic, but everyone kept over looking the Google “places” part of my question. The problem is that people are not paying attention to what i’m asking and me not putting “places” in quotations.
Any good company that works on SEO won’t guarantee you the top spot in the rankings. I think the best thing that they could say, sugarcoating included, is that they can help you reach the top of the search results for your choice of keywords, may it be in the “organic search results” that some know, or in the places results. Helping and guaranteeing are two entirely different things.
I don’t think that anybody can guarantee for the first page of google places as there are huge other websites and you cannot predict the work done by them.
Yea I find it hard to guarantee anything when youre at the mercy of google, but there are many people out there making claims that they can do it. Im trying to get into optimizing “Google Places” listings for local businesses. I guess the best way to deal with competition making these false guarantees is to discredit them with quotes from all of you lol. Anybody know of any good material for optimizing “Google Places” listings?
Thanks
Looks like the question has been pretty well covered. If there’s sub themes or a new opinion by all means please open up a new thread.