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The other day I was having a series of conversations with some friends about Montreal restaurants – the good, the bad and the downright pretentious. As a lark, I googled “pretentious restaurant Montreal” expecting to get blog rants, various foodie forum discussions and the like. (I did.) But, imagine my surprise when Google Local Business listing served up some pretentious restaurants for my viewing pleasure.
I understood the location-based aspect of the Local Business result, but surely, the restaurants weren’t entering “pretentious” in as some of their keywords for the business listing description? I suspected it was tied to the reviews that were being pulled in. But best to try this again just to make sure. How about “worst restaurant in Montreal”? Why, yes, once again Google Local Business pulls through.
How about "worst customer service Toronto”? Bingo!
To confirm my suspicion that these results were triggered by a mix of location (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) listing keywords (restaurant) and keywords from consumer reviews I double-checked with some colleagues, Martin and Xurxo at Bloom Search Marketing (the experts in paid search) and Dev Basu, a leader in SEO, SEM and local search marketing. They agreed.
Companies take warning: This is the power of consumer-generated reviews. Right now it’s a high concentration of hotels, restaurants and travel. But as user-generated content continues to grow, it will influence your ranking - not only for the keywords you used, but for other unintended keyword queries. More than ever, companies need to monitor what is being said about them so they can address service issues and correct the problem at the source.
Resources:
Google Business Listing Quality Guidelines
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two comments:
Kevin - 12.02.09
Thanks Kevin! I had fun writing it. I was a little worried about including the screenshots. My aim was not to ridicule any companies, but rather to show the effect of user-generated content on search. Earlier this year, eMarketer reported that by 2013 that “155 million of US Internet users will consume some form of user-created content, up from 116 million in 2008.” (Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Ema..)It’s a brave new (must-be-monitored) world!
Charlotte () (URL) - 12.02.09