I recently read a light-hearted post on searchengineland.com and was reminded of my own experience where my unflinching trust was placed in Google’s palms. For those that are unfamiliar with the aforementioned article, Matt McGee refers to the St. Rose of Lima Church in New Jersey which has suffered from a misrepresentative positioning on Google maps, along with a misleading search query suggestion that directs patrons elsewhere. Rev. Michael Trainor explains that in some instances the map discrepancy led to mothers of the brides getting lost and causing delays to the start of wedding ceremonies.

My story does not involve coffins being delivered to wrong funeral services or brides marrying the wrong grooms but, at the time, the stress levels were comparable! Alex Wares and I had organised a client lunch meeting to discuss the progress of the project and had asked the client to suggest a suitable restaurant. The suggestion was Nottingdales; an Italian style café-restaurant local to where the client is based in Notting Hill, West London. “No problem”, we thought.

The evening before, I printed out a map for myself, got the post code from the London Eating webpage and forwarded it to Alex as we were coming from different directions. Both Alex and I have smart phones (being the tech savvy new media types that we are!) and assumed that if we got lost en-route we could Google Maps ourselves out of trouble.

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So what is Quality Score? According to Google:

“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.”

Quality Score, as the name suggests, is a quality scoring method for Pay per Click Ads. It is an assessment by Google AdWords (and now other search engines) of an individual keyword and its ad, which, in combination with the bid amount determines the ranking of the ad relative to competitors.

The primary factor for determining Quality Score is the click through rate (CTR) for each ad, but Google also considers the match between the keyword and the occurrence of the keyword in the ad copy, historical click through rates, and the engagement of the searcher when they click through to the site as well as the speed at which the page loads.

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I’ve read before how ideas tend to spread like germs, often occurring to people around the same time, independently of each other. The discovery of DNA and the Theory of Natural Selection were both arrived at by different scientists independently of each other. Anyway, these lofty pretensions are just meant as a preamble to introduce the fact that Rand Fishkin blogged about this subject last week, while I was preparing my own post and I immediately became Alfred Russel Wallace to his Charles Darwin.* Regardless, I have pressed on and tried to add to the discussion and avoid any overlaps by focusing on keyword strategy and therefore addressing PPC as well as SEO.

Marcellus Wallace didn't get any customers from search engines.

Search as a marketing channel is so attractive because it enables companies to get in front of prospects who are already looking for their products. However, does that mean search is redundant when there is no one looking for your products?

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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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Here’s something that I have been speaking about quite a lot of late:  The impact that getting it right with local search can have on a business.

As Google evolved and developed its universal search methodology, opportunities arose for small businesses to compete with well established organisations for SERP positions on competitive keywords. Google Maps (now called “Places”) allowed local businesses to generate overnight exposure from historically competitive terms, delivering qualified, targeted traffic. Naturally, as awareness increased, keyword spamming and rule bending became rife as businesses sought a competitive advantage. This was most evident in trade service industries (plumbers, electricians, locksmiths etc) i.e. companies that could exploit Google’s maps to highlight areas that their service is offered in, rather than where their company is physically located.

Initially Google, perhaps pre-occupied with making public examples of household name rule-benders (Ocean Finance, BMW, for example), was slow to penalise map spammers. However, Google is always as keen as mustard to protect the integrity of their results pages, so the question of penalisation was always “when” rather than “if”.

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