Will an address near the city center help with local seach optimization?

October 10th, 2006 · 1 Comment

If you look at the results returned by Google on a query for ‘house cleaning in denver’ at the top of the ‘organic’ section you’ll see the Local Results. If you looks closely you can see they give a ‘distance number’ This distance is actually the business location’s distance from the center point of Denver. I am not sure if each local search engine uses the same center point, but on Google you can find the center point used simply by typing a city name into Google Maps. For instance the center point in Denver seems to be the State Capitol of Colorado building on Sherman St.

My theory is if a local merchant can obtain an address as close to the city center point as possible they may have a better chance showing up in the ‘Local Results’ section since they are so close distance wise to the center point. I might try this with a few clients who are not listed in Google Local yet to see what happens. Obviously this would only work for a local business of which location is not particularly important. For instance using a pseudo address for a retail shop or auto repair center would be a terrible idea however for a cleaning service or any other type of business that comes to you, it may make sense.

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New patent from Google on local search | Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog // Dec 1st 2006 at 12:33 pm

[…] Bill Slawski posted an excellent summary of a new patent application from Google which discusses how an SE ranks websites for a ‘local’ search. My lesson from this patent is that the center point method of calculating proximity in local search may now be obsolete. The new method which appears to be highly reliant upon references and a few other items. Here is a quote from Bill’s post The patent describes how it might associate a query with a certain set of geographical locations based upon such things as postal codes, or alternatively it might take the latitude and longitude of the map window when the search takes place while the searcher is looking at a map of the area in question. After that, it might look at factors such as: […]