Unique Content

This has been a good rule of thumb since the advent of Google and other major search engines. It is even more so now. The days of looking at what your competitors are doing and emulating it are gone. Your content now has to stand out from the rest in order to be ranked.

Keep The User In Mind

The experience of the user on your website is being monitored. If users are bounced, pages load slowly, or ads are constantly assaulting them, your website will be ranked lower and lower until it is beyond irrelevant.

Socialize

Google has incorporated social media into its results. No ignoring now. Tweet, Link, create a Facebook buzz, whatever you want, just get going. The more often your business is tweeted or the Like button is clicked, the better your site will rank.

Market Yourself

You are your best advocate. You must market your company and services in order to create a brand and a buzz. Panda will recognize your business and place you higher in the rankings if you are mentioned more often across the internet.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to promote your business online without the help of an outside company. Marketing, social media, and branding are not within the scope of a single persons expertise. It may be time to shop around for the right search engine optimization group to improve your sales and web relevance.

The post 4 Ways To Take Advantage of Google Panda appeared first on LocalGiant.

URLs with Generic Content

This can be really bad for local directory sites. Many of them contain thousands of urls with generic content. Many have geo-specific categories like ”best L.A nightclubs”. Since many of these directory sites have the same content and a stated goal of Panda is to weed out generic content, many of these sites have dropped to catastrophically low rankings.

Website Not User Friendly

The Panda algorithm takes into account the user’s experience on your site. This could refer to many factors: page speed, ad density, user-interface design, average time on site, etc. If your site has a cluttered design, too many ads, and/or a high bounce rates, you will suffer in the rankings unless all of your competitors have the same issues.

Social Media

A social media strategy was a great boost prior to Panda, now it is a necessity. All major search engines now incorporate social media signals into the ranking systems.

Brand Recognition

For over a year now Google has been making a lot of noise about showing preference through its algorithm. The problem with most local companies and resellers is that they don’t have a brand or one that is not well developed. To Google a brand is recognized as links, mentions on third party authoritative sites, regular queries for your brand name, and social activity around your brand name among other factors. If no one is talking about your brand, it is very unlikely to be highly ranked.

Google’s Panda has shaken things up quite a bit in the page rankings. Some sites have dropped from the first page to utter irrelevance. You may need to hire a company that fully understands the algorithms nuances in order to recoup your ranking.

The post 4 Items Taken Into Account By Google Panda appeared first on LocalGiant.

Just this week, though, Google has clearly changed their mind about how they treat local businesses. The following changes were noticed:

1) The same business can now show more than one result.
2) Organic webpage placement no longer directly influence rankings.

A quick study of these new hybrid results seems to show that they are the same results that can be seen on the first page of Google Maps, but with the ranks on the first page of results altered. The strong bias of the near organic ranking algorithm had is no longer overpowering and the traditional Maps search results are shining through, again. This essentially re-opens the for local businesses and helps them achieve prime organic search results.

Aside from these change, Google is also displaying a lot more 7-Pack results at the expense of hybrid ones.

Observers have begun to call these changes collectively as the “Google Local Panda Update”, since they came so recently after Google rolled out their Google Panda search algorithm. However, it’s not likely that the new update has anything to do with these changes.

The post Google Hybrid Search Results Retaken by Local Businesses appeared first on LocalGiant.