In the second half of 2010, Google began to roll out notable changes to Google Places. Some of these I have touched upon in my previous post and deserve a little deeper consideration. Some changes seem to be purely for the benefit of Google’s users, others seem beneficial to Google Places registered websites and some changes are unclear as to whom they benefit. This is all well and good, but over the last few months I’ve noticed, in many of my PPC accounts, CTRs dropping noticeably from location based keywords that have an average position of below 4. Why is this? Could this be related to the changes to Google Places? Firstly, let’s revisit the changes. To trigger Google places results, a user must search for a location based keyword, a good wintery example being “boiler repair London”.

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“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you” Excerpt from If by Rudyard Kipling A sudden loss or drop in rankings can be a very stressful time for people in SEO whether in-house or at an agency. For many businesses it can mean an immediate loss of revenue and most business owners will look straight to the SEO experts to rectify the situation immediately. Often, the question of blame (implied or voiced) will fall on the SEOs even though many parties are contributing to the site and the cause could lie anywhere. Here are our tips on what to do should you find yourself in this situation. There are essentially 3 stages: understanding what has happened; understanding the cause; identifying the solution.

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In the early days of quantum mechanics, physicists first gazed into atoms and realized they were witnessing something for which there was no language to describe it. “Something unknown is doing we do not know what”, said Sir Arthur Eddington in his book The Nature of the Physical World. The behaviour of sub-atomic particles simply couldn’t be explained with conventional language. An erudite fellow, he suggested invoking Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky to explain them, describing electrons as “slithy toves [that] did gyre and gimble in the wabe”. These words were as good as any for describing a brand new concept to the world. Thankfully, few things are as complicated as quantum theory. SEO can be pretty confusing at times, sure but then we can use analogies to get us out of any conceptual rabbit holes. Analogies are useful and even fun ways of explaining new or tricky concepts to a layperson. In SEO we often come across this need whether it be selling a strategy to a client or telling someone at a party what we do for a living.

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