We noticed a change today in the way Google results are being displayed for local searches. Instead of the typical format of the map being shown above natural results and pushing the organic listings down, Google seems to have changed it in favour of moving the map to the right hand side and pushing the paid listings down instead.

Google Local Search Results

The format choice is interesting as it seems to be implying that Google is putting the natural results in a more important position than the listings which advertisers are paying for. This is quite unusual for Google, who never usually lower the prominence of ads which make them revenue (only kidding – we love you Google)!

The change in design also seems to draw the eye to the natural results which have a Places page, with those listings being highlighted with the map symbol and user review stars. The contact details for that business is also pulled in from their Places page, meaning the user doesn’t even have to click through, they have your user rating, description and contact details right there on the results page.

So what does this mean for companies looking to appear for local searches? Well there are a few implications of this change in design:

1. Relying on paid search is no longer enough – you’ve been pushed down the page, so now the first Adwords listing is below the fold. Big impact, even in the top position.

2. You need a website – before this change, the map featured alongside it a list of Google Place pages, which meant even if you didn’t have a website you could still feature on the local listings by optimising your Google Place page and getting in the “7 pack”. Now, you might still be in the map, but you’re not in that crucial ‘top of page 1’ position in the general search listings.

3. You need a Google Places Page – if you have a website and are not on Google Places, despite being highly optimised and in a great position on page 1, you may be ignored in favour of a result further down that Google is highlighting.

I’m pretty sure paid advertisers will be kicking up quite a fuss as a result.

It does make you wonder whether Google has some more big plans for Places. The latest change is even more reason for advertisers to use Place pages, so maybe it’s paving the way for some kind of revenue generation on there as well?

Watch this space.

SEO is a key tool that we can use to attract visitors to your website. As digital marketing experts, we know that. But how do we explain it to people who aren’t au fait with the whole concept?

When it comes to making complex things really simple to understand, I’m a big fan of analogies. So I thought I’d share an SEO-related one with you.

SEO…it’s just like fishing

Imagine you’re sitting on the bank of a river. There are loads of fish swimming down the river…all the time.

Further upstream, there are a few more fishermen – with various sizes of fishing net.

Your net is pretty small. And it has a few holes in it. That, plus the fact that you’re sitting downstream, means you’re not catching many fish…and some of those that you do catch escape through the holes in your net.

Most of the fish are being caught in the nets further upstream…and many are swimming straight past your small, holey net.

So how do you catch more fish?

• Move further upstream
• Mend your net
• Make your net bigger

How does this relate to SEO? Well – people are out there, right now, constantly using a search engine to find information. They are the fish swimming down the river. Someone (your competitors, the upstream fishermen) will ‘catch’ those searchers before you by being at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). And your small net? Well, that’s like your site only appearing for a small number of searches keywords. So…

Move further upstream – this is akin to optimising your site for the keywords that the searchers are using. By doing so, you’ll move further up the SERPs – further upstream.

Make your net bigger – adding content to your site (making it bigger) will allow you to attract people searching for content that you didn’t previously have.

Mend your net – once visitors do eventually arrive at your site, you don’t want to lose them. (Don’t let the fish escape through holes in your net!) So, make sure your site is easy to use so it fulfils the searcher’s needs. Search engines are starting to take usability into account when determining your position within SERPs – so make sure you keep them once you’ve caught them!

But remember - all the fishermen on the river will be moving further upstream, mending their nets and making them bigger! So don’t rest too long on your river bank chair!

What do you think? Leave a comment to let me know!

The launch of Bing, Microsoft’s new ‘decision engine’ (which is essentially a rebranded Live Search) was talked about as the search engine to rival Google. But it seems there’s more hype than substance. Much of what has been done is take a concept that already works, made little tweaks to ‘improve’ it and then shout about it from the rooftops.

Some features have been used by Microsoft as Bing’s USPs, but none of these appear to be new or foolproof:

Categorisation – Bing is able to categorise your results into web groups such as images, facts, quotes, etc and display these sections within your results and in the LHS menu. But there are only a few industries where this has been implemented and the category headings are easy to miss. These web groups are intended to help the user in their need to drill down but most people will search in more depth using their own words, especially when they find out that this clustering is really just another version of the related search suggestions which are also on the page.

Instant answers – apparently Bing is a mix of Google (search) and Wolfram Alpha (decision engine) in that it will serve you links but should also be able to answer your query on the page in some circumstances. Again, great in theory but sadly lacking in accuracy at the moment.

Prime Minister search on bing.com

Prime minister of England results are ok – the information up front followed by some useful links. But how up to date is the information? Let’s try a forumla 1 search…

Who won Forumla 1 on bing.com

This might be a true fact from 2007, but what about the 2008 winner? Or the F1 winner from this weekend?

Scrolling image search – if you’re looking for images on the web, Bing’s ability to carry on scrolling down the page seemed like a great idea. No more waiting for the page to reload as you go from page 1 to page 2 and onwards. However, users quite often find an image they like but carry on looking to see if they can find a better one. On Google you can go back to page 11 and retrieve your image, with Bing, the reduced scrollbar and lack of numbering means a user has no idea where to go back to in order to find that image.

Hovering page snippets – one feature which could do well is the hovering page snippets.

Hover-over page snippets on bing.com

Bing takes more content from the landing page and delivers it in a hover-over next to each result. This gives the site owner the potential to get more information into the results rather than just the meta description. However, the hover-over only appears when the user’s mouse gets near to the RHS of the listing, so it will be interesting to see how popular this is with searchers ie how many people actually find it and use it. It definitely highlights the importance of an inticing first paragraph on every page though.

There are more features such as the travel search within the results, search history (also available with Google), shopping search and the changing background image (not a hugely important USP), but I have serious doubts that any are big enough to cause a stampede of users away from Google.

Well…except maybe the heavily reported video autoplay feature on Bing. This is apparently proving very popular with people looking for sites they might not want to appear in their browser history…