The #1 Reason – Local Listings Are Dramatically More Visible in Search Engine Results
Welcome to our series: “5 Scary and Exciting Reasons Why Local Listings Are Changing the Way People See Search Engine Results.” In this article we explain the #1 reason—Local listings show up in visually striking and noticeable ways in the search outcomes. This can be a very powerful advantage to a local business if used correctly.
Which Local Business Are You Going to Choose?
You’re busy. We all are. So when you’re trying to buy flowers for your wife, searching for a list of flower shops on your smart phone, looking for a store that might be on your way home from work, you want to get this task over with quickly and easily. You want to be moving onto more fun tasks, like giving your wife the flowers, seeing her excited face, and getting a hug and kiss from her. If you’re doing it make up for a mistake you made, which is likely, you may be in a real serious hurry—so get on with it mister!
Which business are you going to call first? Are you going to call the business that just looks normal and unnoticeable, or are you going to call one where you can see all those fancy stars next to it, and the phone number that is right there next to the name, so you don’t need to even “mess around” trying to find the contact page on their site?
Admit it! You want this task to be easy, right? You’re going to pick the most prominent listing in the Map Pack. Let’s be honest. You’re going to push the phone number on the Google search and order the flowers. You’re going to click on the address to get direction on your GPS. Get this done with and go apologize to your wife!
Other Listings Not From Google Also Look Noticeable
Google listings are just one example of local listings that show up prominently in your search results, making it easier to make buying decisions. Other listings for other sites also show up in similarly conspicuous ways. See below several listings for one of our clients: One is a site called Avvo.com, a site designed specifically for reviewing attorneys, the second is Google, a must for any business, and the third is Yelp, one of the most ubiquitous online review sites around: 
You’ll notice the fact that the company’s rating on each of these three sites are highly noticeable. Often you can actually actually see part of a review in the page description. Needless to say, these are highly click-able listings.
Google’s New “Local Carousel”
Google is also experimenting with another way of showing local results. When you search for “restaurants park city utah” you get the following view: 
There’s this really interesting black bar across the top, which Internet marketers are referring to as the Google “local carousel.” Now tell me that isn’t noticeable? You’ll see that the Google reviews are in bright orange-red. This is an interesting development that will be interesting to see if it increases in usage by Google.
Google Makes it Easy to Be Small – Run With It!
If you’re a small business owner, Google has given you every advantage in the world to beat the big guys in the search engines. They’ve given the map pack, a special prominent place with easy to see contact information for your business, which stands out and above other websites.
They’re giving you the Google Carousel, this very “in your face” feature to highlight your businesses customer service excellence, if you can deliver customer experiences that translate to online reviews (and that’s the key).
And they are now boosting the ranking of the countless of other local listing sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Better Business Bureau, City Search, Angie’s List, Lawyers.com, etc, etc., etc. These are all prime real estate for place key information about your business. In most cases this real estate is free. Many of these sites have paid versions of their profiles, but often the free listings are adequate. The only cost is the very small cost that of paying a marketing specialist to strategically add optimized content to these listings slowly and gradually month after month. There is a relatively small cost for the value that it offers.
If you don’t have a local listing campaign, it’s time to stop procrastinating and get going. We’ll be happy to get one started for you today at a very reasonable cost. It’s a no-brainer!
See the next part in this series, “The 2nd Scary and Exciting Reason Local Listings are Changing The Way People See Search Engine Results.”
Wade Mann, the author of this article, is an Internet Marketer at Holistic Web Presence.
