Saturday, June 22, 2013

Ranking on Google Places

I currently own an Edible Arrangements store in Manhattan and found that about 1/3 of the customers call the store to place an order.  Some of the customers may get the number from the Edible Arrangements website but many get it from googling "Edible Arrangements NY" or "Edible Arrangements" if they are in NY while searching and have the location detector on their phone turned on.  When they do the search, the google results has a section that says "Edible Arrangements near New York, NY."  In that section is a ranking of Google Places that are relevant to the search.

The listings in Google Places are of the different Edible Arrangements stores in New York with their addresses and phone numbers (all link to the same national website if someone wants to buy something online).  As an independent franchise owner, I obviously want the customers to call my store rather than other Edible Arrangements stores in NY.  However, no matter how often I search or where I search from, the ranking in Google Places does not change.  My understanding is that the rankings of Google Places is based on relevance, distance and prominence.  The stores are the exact same franchise brand so I figured relevance is not a determining factor between store listings.  That leaves distance and prominence.  I have pushed customers to write reviews and added much more content to my google places page than the other stores and have the highest star rating.  However, I can't seem to improve my ranking to the top.  Even if I do the google search from WITHIN my store, I always show up below the St. Marx store which happens to always show up first. 

Google does not release its algorithm but I am really curious to understand better ways to optimize listings on google places as many people now use google as a yellow pages expecting to get phone numbers and addresses on the first page of results/
 

No comments: