Over the last few days I’ve noticed that on some queries on google.ie there new feature added to the SERPS. Now certain search results will result in blending in a listing of local businesses. These have already been active on google.com and google.de for sometime now, and it’s great to see their roll out in Ireland. Right now Google Business Listing are under used in a selection of queries that would lend themselves to listing actual local businesses, see this example for [doctor cork].
Business Listing
So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.
Hotels in Dublin
List your business on Google Local Business Listing
Here is a quick run down on how to get your business listed on the google local business listings:
- Go to the Local Business Center
- Login with your google account
- Select Add New Listing
- Enter your business details and link to your website
- Select your business categories and add opening hours
- Verify by phone/SMS/post
When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.
For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.
The Bad of Google Business Listing
Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]
Spam in the Business Listings
Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.
Edit : Thanks to JohnMuller from Google I found out how to report SPAM on google maps.
There are plenty of examples of good SEO, but what about those examples where companies have clearly gone too far in the wrong direction? While doing some competitor research over the weekend I came across some obviously bad SEO, which even has the potential to get the client a google penalty. This site clearly has had someone do some onpage SEO because nested in the footer, you can see the following code :
<div class="footer-seo"> many links </div>
The site in question is HarleyMedical.ie has a really nice design and decent navigation, site structure.
above the fold view
But let’s have a look at the full page view:
full page view (click to view)
There seems to be some large port of text at the bottom of the main page. The big worry is that they have have over 280 links on their home page. And on the sub-pages it averages closer to 160 links per page.
These links are clearly targeting keywords and it doesn’t appear that they are using them as a navigational aid. We all know links are important. Of course you should link to your some of your more important internal content from the home page, but basically having a keyword stuff sitemap at the bottom of the page really won’t help you rankings. In fact it could possibly have negative effects.
Here is a zoom in on those famous links:
200+ links in the footer
Currently it doesn’t seem like they have a penalty from google, they are ranking well for [cosmetic surgery] on google.ie and some other terms. Also they have around 150 pages in the index. We would see this SEO tactic as “high risk SEO” which would have the potential to have a domain banned from google.
A further SEO look
As for off page SEO , HarleyMedical doesn’t have many links, but they have gone the route of submitting some “basic press releases“. These types of links can be helpful for new websites, but what you really need is some good, relevant, trustable links.
There is also a potential issue with having similar content on their .co.uk domain, and it does appear that at least one other domain has taken a copy of their content as well.
And one final tip, fix the canonical URL issue 
For SEO reasons you may not want to add your blog roll to every page on your website, but sadly it’s not so easy to do on WordPress. Having the blog roll links on every page, can really zap your link juice, and overall such site wide links generally don’t help the sites you are linking to.
Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default WordPress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file.
<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>
Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited.
Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>
The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code.
Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate your sidebar, then this method might not work.
Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>
This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.
