Since the introduction of the normal algorithms into the local search game, there seems to be a lot of disagreement with regard to how important links can be to these local sites. In my opinion, local links are a strange introduction to the metric, considering that most of these positions (depending on the weight the metric is given), are going to be decided by just a few links.
At the moment, I’m running a couple of experiments worth noting. Since my company works primarily with State Farm insurance agents, my experiments are dealing with these agents to push their rankings up in their communities for simple searches like “insurance”.
Usually, when an agent comes to us, they are sitting on the second or third pages (if they are ranking at all) for keywords in their community. Usually, just by filling out their places profile, they shoot to the first page – sometimes to number one.
One of my most experimental clients is a State Farm agency in Plantation Florida. When she came to us, we couldn’t get the agency’s title to change. It took nearly 3 months for Google to recognize our newly submitted location data and get the title changed from what looked like SPAM to something that was readable. Her primary market is to Spanish speakers, and that’s how she represents her business in real life. She went from page 3 to page 1, and is now sitting at the bottom of that first page for basic local keyword searches.
The current experiment I’m running on this agency is adding linking into their actual page (not their places page) with keywords we are ranking them for, such as insurance 33322. Presumably, if this is a new addition to the metric, we will see a large uptick in positions.
What that means is links, like reviews, in addition to local directory submissions are important for both organic and local in a way that is unexpected. You see the picture today, at the moment, we are doing nothing else with that page. If the agency ranks higher, it’s a result of links.
Likewise, we are running another experiment on an agency in Jacksonville taking a look at geotagging photos. We have set up accounts on Flickr, Locr and Picassa, loaded up photos and then geotagged them to indicate they are from right within her State Farm Insurance agency.
Insurance Jacksonville
