Google Overhauls Place Pages, Emphasizes Reviews & Kills Citations

N.S., July 22nd, 2011 at 8:31 am ET:

Wow, this article is truly overwhelming, I used to work for a local search company, most of local businesses in the U.S are supported by Google maps and many of the tactics to promote these businesses are mentioned briefly in this article, i cant even imagine the impact it will have on the local SEO industry, i know for a fact that many business are obligated under a yearly contract with local directories such as Yelp , YP and more (its not cheap to have a paid campaign with these local directories)… part of the strategy of these businesses is just to gain more web pages, citations and reviews from these directories to their Google places listings…and now it will all be gone? this is shocking.
on top of everything, Google are planning to do more changes….this is very interesting!
Thank you Matt for this excellent post!

Jill Whalen, July 22nd, 2011 at 9:42 am ET:

As I just emailed back to the Localeze sales rep who keeps pestering me, it looks like their biz model has been nuked.

To which I say, nice job Google! I was kind of shocked that they were featuring their info so prominently.

Paul Mumford, July 22nd, 2011 at 9:43 am ET:

Citations have been removed from the Places page, but it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped using it internally for ranking purposes does it?

Shawn, July 22nd, 2011 at 10:47 am ET:

I’m with Paul on this one. If they begin to ignore 3rd party citations and reviews, their ability to verify the validity of business information as well as determine “prominence” becomes severely weakened. My guess is this change is primarily cosmetic and not algorithmic.

Matt Chantry, July 22nd, 2011 at 11:00 am ET:

We spotted this early yesterday afternoon and got a quick blog post out to our readers here: http://www.screenpilot.com/blog/2011/07/google-kills-95-of-your-hotel-reviews-what-does-it-mean-for-seo/

But SEL have done a great job of digging further into this news. I do disagree with Paul though. We looked at page rankings of some of our clients before the change and after and there is a slight difference to the algorithm. Nothing major mind, but certainly a change.

Michael Dorausch, July 22nd, 2011 at 11:06 am ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

I got my first notification of these changes when my phone started ringing mid yesterday. Several small business owners called, emailed, and tweeted throughout the day asking if I knew why their reviews had “disappeared”.

I have mixed feelings on the change but all we can do is adapt and continue moving forward. Certainly kills a significant amount of questionable business models, and that I see as a good thing.

Sam Beamond, July 22nd, 2011 at 11:25 am ET:

Great stuff here. I encourage my clients to use the reviews piece of their places page to build their reputation and help optimize the places page. Now they will find it easier to direct their customers. looking forward to what more changes are made to Google Places.

Matt Chantry, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:22 pm ET:

Also think that the influence of Google+ on googles decision for this isn’t being mentioned much. Their long running fight with TripAdvisor might be the main reason but Google+ was probably the straw that broke the camels back so to speak.

DK, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:33 pm ET:

Wow what a game changer! I believe they will continue to use the 3rd party reviews for ranking even though they dont feature them so prominently. Many sites in places have very few Google reviews.

Why is Google not allowing for a “Places Badge” html code that can be cut and pasted to your website in order to direct your customers directly to your Places page? Most customers who use the services of a company would never be able to find their places page in order to write them a review. Peculiar how Google does not make this easy.

Also, why is it that if you “boost” a places page, your sponsored link has an impactful 5 stars (if you have any 5 star ratings) over on the right side of that ppc ad ***** and then the places page link (this is really great and makes you stand out from the other ppc ads) but if you set up a legit PPC account and link the account to your places page via “Ad Extension” you get no such luck. Strange that you would be rewarded for using the basic product. Google reps have told me- “huh…that is interesting, not sure why it does that. Ill ask about that.”

Matt McGee, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:38 pm ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

Matt – curious to hear more about what you’re thinking there. How would Google+ have anything to do with local Place Page aesthetics?

Jill – also love to hear why you think Localeze’s biz model is nuked? They offer a valuable service that helps local businesses make sure their listings have consistent NAP data across local sites/directories. The need for consistent NAP data hasn’t changed. What were they trying to sell you — something different? (I may not be familiar with all of their product offerings.)

Nick Stamoulis, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:43 pm ET:
Premium member since 06/2009

Glad to hear that these changes took place. I am curious to see if people will leave many reviews and how this might be integrated with Google+.

Nadim Hossain, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:52 pm ET:

Google did the right thing by pulling the reviews that Yelp didn’t want borrowed. Customer reviews are highly relevant to consumers, and therefore highly valuable for SEO. For Google to take that content without permission to syndicate seems wrong (reviews that show up in Google Shopping are syndicated with retailers’ permission, for example). That said, for consumers’ benefit, I think such content *should* be syndicated openly as widely as possible. This ensures that users have access to helpful information at the point of decision-making.The underlying story, I believe, is that Google is evolving from Search to Social, and we’re seeing some growth pains in figuring out the rules. I write more about Google’s transformation here: http://blogs.powerreviews.?com/2011/06/01/google-1-la?unch-what-google%E2%80%99s?-social-reinvention-means-?for-facebook/.

Matt Chantry, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:55 pm ET:

Matt – Well its google accounts that are now making all the “relevant” reviews. Its just my belief that G want everyone on the web to run everything through google and the timing of this so soon after the launch of Google + makes me think it ties in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see +1's having a large say on review pages soon as well.

Matt Chantry, July 22nd, 2011 at 12:57 pm ET:

RobertKCole on TNoonz actually does a much better job of phrasing it all than me!

http://www.tnooz.com/2011/07/22/news/google-kills-web-reviews-for-hotels-on-maps-and-places/

Mary Bowling, July 22nd, 2011 at 1:33 pm ET:

IMO, the bully on the local playground appears to be flexing its muscles again, Matt!

Claudio Schapsis, July 22nd, 2011 at 2:48 pm ET:

The question is if they fixed the opening hours HUGE bug – pending for over a year…

Check the complains trail here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places/thread?fid=5f673deb5906b7ff0004a785e1336441&hl=en

Brian, July 22nd, 2011 at 4:40 pm ET:

This is an interesting development. I’m sure one our clients at HomeStars aren’t going to be too happy about. In an niche vertical like ours, home services, our clients build reviews slowly, and our reviews are curated to ensure validity and transactions. With Google reviews, there is much more minimal validity testing and if companies get a fake review, it’s tough, tough tough to get it off. It’s also much easier on Google to post the fake positive reviews and game the system. With an algorithmic system, the solution is algorithmic. With curated content, it’s much tougher to game.
Either way, I don’t think google wins. They don’t display the broadest, most relevant content, which is, and should be their end game.

O.M., July 22nd, 2011 at 5:17 pm ET:

I really think this change will place an even greater importance on SEO and the quality of the links and ratings associated with each business listing. With greater influence placed in the hands of reviewers, it will be important to link businesses with high quality sites that will thus provide high quality reviewers.

Jim Jersild, July 22nd, 2011 at 10:51 pm ET:

The most confusing part about this change is that my description and all my addition details are now gone as well, not just the reviews. I am not sure how that helps the “user experience” since the user is left guessing what my business is about.

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How To Build Multi-Purpose Landing Pages For Small Budget Advertising

For a long time, I thought utilizing a strong Landing Page Optimization program was only available to large companies with large budgets. The software to create landing pages on the fly by keyword is pricey, and the learning curve is significant.

If you have the time, budget and manpower to utilize a design team and software that builds a landing page for every paid, organic, social and email marketing keyword or blast you send — Awesome!

The reality is, most of us do have time and budget limitations. Getting permission to spend thousands on software isn’t likely, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on the idea. Think a bit deeper and build your landing pages for multiple purposes.

In the past, we would build a website, and send clicks to the homepage of that site. Then we got smart, and sent those same clicks to more relevant pages on the site. Then Landing Page Optimization was invented and we started hearing we needed a new page for every keyword, and the want vs. budget debate started heating up.

Limited budgets don’t mean you have to completely remove LPO from your marketing vocabulary. Think about it this way: if you can repurpose that page to give you Organic, Paid, Social and Email Marketing traffic and conversions, it makes the time investment a bit more manageable.

Then think about the reality that not every keyword needs a landing page. Many keywords are extremely similar, the same words in different combinations. Take this knowledge and repurpose your landing pages across multiple platforms.

Here are five steps to making sure your landing pages can be repurposed for multiple funnels.

There are quite a few schools of thought about how to frame out a landing page. Some blueprints say a large image and a call to action, some do include text. The best advice I can give here is just to simply start somewhere and test what you’ve done.

A great tool to help you mock up pages as you go, and save layouts you’ve done or want to try, is GoMockingbird.com. I use this to wireframe pages for SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, Facebook inclusion, etc. It’s also a great way to show your design/creative department your vision when it comes to page layout. If you know a UX expert, or have someone on your design staff that “gets it” be sure to use their knowledge and experience.

This tactic relies upon you having a very solid AdWords campaign. We’re going to use your AdGroup themes to set up your landing pages. AdGroups generally have very similar “like” terms and you’re testing ad copy and calls to action to see what converts best. Export your AdWords keywords and sort by AdGroup. Use this information to decide what landing pages you need to build for each set of terms. You can then use this information to build your Landing Page.

After you export your keywords by AdGroup, make a list of the landing page content you need. Each “Group” of keywords needs between 150 and  200 relevant words that are themed around those keywords. Do not stuff each keyword into your content verbatim, use synonyms, write naturally – bold your main idea and don’t be afraid to use bullets to list the benefits of your product(s).

Review your PPC ads and use the best performing ad headline as your call to action: “Book your Getaway Today” or “Limited Time Offer”. You can combine on-page testing via Website Optimizer with some PPC ad rotation testing to find the best combination of call to action and keyword group.

Sending multiple clicks to the same landing pages can make your tracking a bit tricky, but if you’re careful, you can see each portion of revenue a segment delivers. You can use a few tactics, Google offers different Analytics options and filters to help you out.

The best way, in my opinion, is to using source codes on the links and building custom segments in your Analytics platform. 

Remember, if you want these pages to rank organically as well, you’ll need to fit it into a logical place in your navigation, add content, build internal links and tie its existence in with the rest of your website. These landing pages aren’t meant to be an “add on” with no place to live in the architecture of your site.

Landing pages are designed to convert traffic, but they don’t need to be a one-hit wonder. You can combine Organic, Paid and Email Marketing tactics with your landing pages to get great results on a shoestring budget.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: PPC | In The Trenches | Search Marketing: Landing Pages

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3 Dead Excuses For Badly Designed Landing Pages

Landing pages almost have a tradition of bad design. After all, it’s easy enough to slap a headline, a few bullets of text, and an image next to a form and — voilà! — you have a landing page, right? “Landing pages” have proliferated as a check-the-box feature: sure, we do landing pages.

The problem is that most of these are bad landing pages.

By “bad,” I mean three things: (1) they look amateurish, lifeless or downright ugly; (2) they fail to provide holistically compelling content; and (3) they aren’t very effective in winning over customers. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it’s hard not to infer a relationship between these things.

For instance, take this example I recently showed in a session discussing the new Google Instant Preview for Ads:

Make you want to click? Didn’t think so.

But why are these pages so bad? And why are there so many of them?

One problem is that designers continue to be underutilized in conversion optimization. Part of that is the legacy of optimization, originally more of an analytical discipline than a design-oriented one.

Part of it is that search marketing — which has been a leading domain for the practice of landing page optimization — has non-visual roots in keywords and text ads. Search marketers tend to be more proficient at Excel than Photoshop.

But mostly, it’s because good design takes more time or money. And, unfortunately, it’s all too easy to confound cost with ROI. Just because something costs less up front, doesn’t mean it delivers a better payoff. But the wrong organizational structure or incentives can camouflage that truth.

One excuse for eschewing design talent that propagated through landing page talks for years went like this: “Google follows a minimalist visual aesthetic, Google is the most successful Internet company on the planet, therefore we should have minimalist landing pages.” If Google can get away with mostly simple text on a plain white page, then so can we. “Minimalist visual aesthetic” often became code for “no graphic design at all.”

Of course, that was always a false equivalency — Google’s user experience was designed (quite intently) for searching. It is a neutral, frictionless gateway to a plethora of possible destinations — cleverly crafted to be supported by advertising while not actually looking like it is supported by advertising.

In contrast, a landing page is a single, specific destination, tasked with the Promethean challenge of engaging a skeptical respondent with that company’s particular offering, in that particular context, relative to all the other competitors just a back button and a click away.

As I discussed in Compelling Landing Page Design Is Not Formulaic, good visual presentations have tremendous capacity to communicate a company’s unique value proposition in that situation, in ways that mere words cannot.

Those are two very different missions.

But with the grand unveiling of Google+, even this mistaken justification for avoiding design effort has been shaken.

Google+ delivers an incredibly rich user experience. As TechCrunch reporter MG Siegler wrote, “It looks great — Circles in particular — it was almost as if it wasn’t a Google product!” The Google executives he interviewed proudly responded that it’s because Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original designers of the Macintosh, was given free reign to “flex his creative muscles” within Google. Apparently Larry Page (historically opposed to lavish designs) personally signed off on this bold new direction.

For a dose of Google’s new design wizardry, check out the Google+ demo page:

Now that’s a high-design landing page. Minimalist visual aesthetic it is not. It’s engaging, creative, and ripe with compelling content. As it should be, as the point of Google+ is to move the search giant beyond being a gateway to other sites into more of a destination in its own right.

Google has made clear that this fresh take on design will permeate all their services. Witness the sexy black bar at the top of the Google homepage:

Yes, I just used “sexy” and “Google homepage” in the same sentence. So from now on, the answer to “What would Google do?” is: embrace the contributions of great designers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for saving money. Budgets are tight, and there are numerous competing demands for your resources, whether you’re a one-person shop or a Fortune 500 juggernaut. And design investments definitely don’t come for free.

You should vigorously optimize your spend. But you should optimize it for the outcome: what are the maximized results that can be achieved with minimized investments. It’s dangerous to drop the first half of that equation and optimize solely for cost reduction without weighing the impact on performance. (“Penny wise and pound foolish.”)

So for years, I’ve advocated investing more time and money in landing page design — one of the reasons I prefer to think of the mission more broadly as post-click marketing. Usually, my key exhibits are real-world cases where design-driven makeovers of landing pages have delivered major increases in conversion rates, such as this example:

In the interest of full disclosure — since my company sells software and services for such post-click marketing, these anecdotal examples are sometimes interpreted as a sales pitch specific to my firm. But we don’t have any proprietary lock on design skills. I’m the first to say that anyone can do this — good design principles can be adopted by any company that values having them.

Need more objective evidence?

Lance Loveday, the CEO of Closed Loop Marketing alerted me to the UX Fund, an investment experiment by the design firm Teehan+Lax. They took $50,000 and invested it in a portfolio of public companies that have demonstrated strong commitments to design and user experience:

The results show that 5 years later, this portfolio has grown by 123.39% — far outpacing the NASDAQ and the NYSE. In other words, at the market level, it pays to be design-driven.

The final excuse that’s held some marketers back is that the CMO doesn’t care about landing pages. They’re too tactical, in-the-weeds. So why invest in making them amazing, when you could, say, launch a high-profile, social media command center instead?

It’s true: any one landing page — or any one ad or email leading to it — is in the weeds. And you probably should have some kind of social media command center.

But these things are all connected to a bigger picture. Increasingly, that bigger picture has converged around two key CMO-level missions: (1) accountability for metric-driven marketing performance and (2) brand development and competitive differentiation through customer experience (CX) management.

CMO.com recently published 10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs that emphasizes these two missions. And so it goes from the CEO to the CMO to you. (With more or fewer layers in between, depending on your job title.)

Landing pages (or, more broadly, post-click marketing experiences) address these missions in the top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) and middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu) interactions across display, email, search and social marketing.

What happens after a respondent clicks? That is often the first critical touchpoint for customer experience. If you can’t impress and intrigue your audience after the click, why should they think you’ll do better after the sale?

Directly tied to these experiences, conversion rates for primary actions (e.g., leads, purchases, subscriptions) and secondary actions (e.g., social conversions via Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) are the quintessential metrics for marketing performance measurement.

It’s with these metrics that the value of design can be quantitatively proven in your own business. Before you champion a company-wide stampede to poach designers from Apple, start with a few modest post-click experiences. No need to make new hires out of the gate — work with a freelance designer to brainstorm better ways of presenting your value proposition to those click-throughs. A/B test these new ideas as challengers to your current landing pages.

When you report to the CMO, you can skip the landing page optimization jargon and talk to what really matters: how you’re improving customer experiences with better design and the metrics you have in place to prove it.

Yes, any one experience is in the weeds. But the collection of all the experiences you deliver to prospects and customers — and the operational capabilities you put in place to deliver them effectively — is at the very top of the C-suite’s priorities.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Conversion Science

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