This document discusses factors that affect Google rankings, including on-site factors like domain authority, name/address/phone consistency, and reviews; off-site factors like number and quality of citations and inbound links; and social factors like tweets and mentions. It provides tips for optimizing a Google Places page and website to improve local search rankings through elements like business categories, photos, descriptions, and structured data. Experiments show that campaigns to increase tweets, likes, and shares about a page can quickly boost its search ranking.

1. Factors That Affect Google
Rankings
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2. What is Google Rank
Google Rank is an algorithm used by the Google
web search engine to rank websites in their
search engine results.

3. Google works because it relies on the millions of
individuals posting links on websites to help
determine which other sites offer content of
value. Google assesses the importance of every
web page using a variety of techniques,
including its patented PageRank™ algorithm
which analyzes which sites have been “voted”
the best sources of information by other pages
across the web.

4. Some of the components
that impact Google Rank:

5. Factors That Affects
Google Ranking
Google Places Page:
Claim your Google Places listing.
A no-brainer but the majority of small businesses still haven’t
done this, and probably the majority of your competitors
haven’t either.
Set proper categories for your business.
Make sure you add the specific business categories relevant
for what you do. You can add up to 5, so make full use of them
if you need to.

6. Product/Service and location in business name.
Always include your product/service with your business name.
Add some photo’s.
You can add up to 10 photo’s, but Google likes you to add at least
5. These are to sell your business to potential customers when they
see your Google Places listing in search, so put some nice, high
quality photo’s that really showcase your business.
Product/Service and Location in Business description
As with your business title, make sure your product/services and
location are also included in your business description text.

7. On your web site:
Domain Authority of your web site.
Your web site authority is increased by (1) optimizing
your web site for Google to crawl effectively, (2)
external links and references to your business.
Business city, region in the title of the web page
your Google Places page points to.
If you only have one location you’ll probably have
your Google Places page point to your web site
home page. If you have multiple locations, you
should have a page for each location and your
Google Places page points to the individual location
page. Whatever your setup, put your City, Region in
the web page title of the target page.

8. NAP on web site matches NAP on Google Places page.
Name, address, phone number (NAP) should be consistent
across your web site and Google Places page.
NAP mark-up in hCard / Schema.org.
This is one for your web designer. hCard and Schema.org
and methods to tag your name, address, phone number so
Google can easily identify your NAP information.

9. Off Site:
Quantity of structured citations.
Typically these will be Yellow pages type listings, business
directories, data aggregators. Making sure your NAP is
listed and correct in these sites is critical to your Google
Places ranking.
Quality/Authority of structured citations.
The more authoritative the web site your business NAP is
listed in, the better. Note that Quality is below Quantity.
This is probably the only situation in optimizing your web
presence for Google where quantity does beat quality

10. Consistency of structured citations.
This means having the same NAP across all your structured
citations. Incorrect/inconsistent NAP information across citation
sources will hurt your ranking. Note that this will cause you some
headaches if you decide to move your business, change phone
number, etc.
Quality/Authority of unstructured citations.
Unstructured citations refer to mentions of your business in places
like blogs, news articles, etc.

11. Quality/Authority of inbound links to your web site from
locally relevant sites.
Local web sites that link to your web site gives makes your site
more trustworthy to Google for local searches. e.g. a local blog
or local news site that links to your website.

12. Reviews:
Quantity of Google Places reviews.
Customers can leave reviews on your Google Places page and
it’s the quantity that matters. Obviously you want good reviews
for your business credibility, but Google places much more
emphasis on the number of reviews you get than how high your
average rating is. ‘Encouraging your customers to add reviews
is a key strategy in boosting your Google Places ranking.
Product/service in review text.
You don’t have much control over this, but mentions of your
product or service in the review text help in your ranking.

13. Quantity of 3rd Party reviews.
This is the number of reviews on external review sites, e.g.
Qype.co.uk, Urbanspoon.com, Tripadvisor.com, Yelp.co.uk,
Yell.com. Google does use review data from these sites as a
ranking factor for your business. Note again that it’s the quantity
of reviews that matter.
Location in review text.
You won’t have much control of what reviewers write about your
business, but any mentions of your location will help.

14. Velocity of Google Places reviews.
This refers to how many reviews you get on average over time.
Note that if you’re looking to boost your ranking quickly, it’s
tempting to go all out and get a large number of reviews straight
away. This will be detected as a spam attempt by Google, so a
better approach is to start soliciting for reviews with your
customers and over time, they’ll start to grow organically.

15. US Ranking Factors

19. Experiments on Twitter & Google+ Influencing Search Rankings

20. Within a few short hours of the campaign kickoff, the URL was
tweeted 300+ times. As a secondary effect, the URL also
received a handful of additional Facebook likes and LinkedIn
shares.
The page ranked #2 in Google for its targeted phrase, “Assist a
Mom.” The URL reached #1 status by day’s end. As of this
writing it remains the number one ranked page for this target
keyword phrase.