Legal Marketing Guru - Dan Hynes Blog

It is extremely important that your business have a google places account (Or multiple ones if you have multiple offices). These listings will often appear high in search engine results. We can help you set up your place account. Besides filling in your profile information, different things can affect how well you rank.

Research has shown the following to be important factors in a high ranking:

Top 3 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages In Integrated Results

1. Places page category matches a broader category than that of the search (search for “pizza”, Places category = restaurant). This only applies of course if there is a broader category. This applies for both primary and secondary Places page categories.
2. The search category appears in the business name (“Rocky’s Pizza” for a “Seattle pizza” search).
3. The search category appears in the “at a glance” section.

Top 5 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages Not In Integrated Results

1. Having 5 or more Google reviews.
2. Location term in “at a glance” section. (Seattle in “Seattle pizza”)
3. Category term in Google review content. (pizza in “Seattle pizza” is in the contents of the Google reviews)
4. Category term in business description.
5. Category term in “at a glance.”

• Having a physical address in the city of the search did not turn out to be a strong ranking factor, only distance from centroid seemed to matter. So, if you are just outside the city and your address is not officially in the city, this didn’t seem to hurt any more than a business whose address was in the city, but just as far from the centroid.
• That said, for every mile away from the centroid, ranking dropped by .4 (4/10ths) of a position.
• An average Google Review score of 1 or less significantly hurt ranking (as expected), although the incremental increase in ranking as the review score increased from 2->3->4->5 ranking was negligible (interesting, no?).
• The presence of a business description did not help ranking, although having the search category in the business description did help ranking.
• Getting your 5th Google review significantly helped ranking, although incremental reviews between 1 and 4  and above 5 had a very small impact on ranking (you have to get 100+ of reviews for it to help ranking any more than just 5, so good news for much-loved businesses and review spammers).

Source: http://searchengineland.com/google-places-ranking-factors-the-phd-version-114839

If you noticed your website took a huge hit within the last few days in its google ranking, and you use a certain SEO marketing company, you may now know why. Google has just de-indexed (removed from the search engine) links from a major link building services company. One of the companies, build my link, said this to its customers: "Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012."

So, if you used either them, or a company that heavily relied on them, expect to see dramatic negative results for your ranking. Fortunately,  for our customers, the legal marketing guru uses a variety of different methods, which are white-hat. Some of our customers rankings have increased in the last couple of days, as their competitors have gone down.

If you use a cheap seo company who does things the easy way by just making links to lots of blog posts, you may have spent your money for nothing. By hiring the legal marketing guru, we use many different sources and help you with quality links. While it is impossible to predict what google will emphasize in the future, we are always staying up on the trends to do what works best.

There is no easy solution to getting a good ranking site. It takes time and effort. Building quality content is a process. Do not expect overnight results. And do not use unethical companies or you may lose your ranking overnight.