The Biggest Thing in Local Search Since the Upside-down Tear Drop

The Biggest Thing in Local Search Since the Upside-down Tear Drop Using Schema.org and Micro Data to Boost You Google Places Rankings One of the most underutilized secrets in the world of local SEO is the influence of micro-data and schema.org encoding on Google Places rankings. If you don’t work in SEO you are thinking to yourself, huh? What the heck is this kid talking about? Fair enough – let’s start from the most logical place; the beginning.

Local SEO; what is it?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing a Google Places listing so that it appears at the top of Google’s results pages for keyword queries with local intent. For instance, if you live in Colorado Springs and you want to find a local roofer, you would search ‘Colorado Springs Roofer’, or something similar. If you own roofing

business in Colorado Springs, you would want your company’s Google Places listing to be displayed on the first page for these queries, for obvious reasons.

So, how is this type of optimization accomplished? What indicators does Google use to determine what listings should be ranked the highest on the page? The primary and most important indicator is the number of instances of the business's NAP (name, address, and phone number) appearing across the web. The simple term for this is a citation. Google’s web crawlers like to see many citations for a given business as an indicator that the business is well established and popular.

How Micro Data and Schema.org encoding Communicate With Google’s Crawlers Getting citations from trusted sites such as Judy’s Book, Manta and Yelp are great for establishing your business as a legitimate one, and one that Google should consider when ranking local businesses for relevant search queries. But what makes these citations particularly impactful is that they automatically encode your business's NAP in microdata, which makes Google’s job of determining relevance very easy. Here is an example of what a business citation in Yelp looks like to Google:

This is an example of microdata encoding. The words that I have placed in a red box are actually communicating directly to Google’s crawlers, saying “hey, this is a ‘street address’; this is a ‘postal code’, and this is a ‘telephone number’. Compare that with a business listing that is not encoded using micro data: While Google’s crawler is still seeing the business citation, which is a positive ranking factor, it is not as influential as the Yelp citation, which specifies using the microdata coding exactly what the information relates to.

Schema.org encoding: Schema.org encoding is relatively new, but it is proving to be a powerful local SEO tool. Here is an example of what that coding looks like in Google’s robotic eyes:

The same idea applies here; by using this encoding you is literally holding Google’s hand as it crawls your business information, telling it exactly what it is looking at.

How to Use Schema.org and Micro data to Boost your Google Places Rankings When it comes to external websites listing your business, there is really no way to make sure they are using micro data or Schema.org encoding. However, you can and should implement them on your own website. Here’s how: MicroData: Go to http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator and enter your business information, exactly how it appears in your Google Places listing.

The creator will spit out the HTML code in microdata format Copy the code and paste it into your website. To get the most out of it, paste the code onto the page that you’re Google Places listing links to. In other words, if you have a specific page on your website for your location, and you have that page in your Google Places listing, paste the code there.

Schema.org Go to http://schema-creator.org/organization.php and enter your business information, exactly how it appears in your Google Places listing.

The creator will spit out the HTML code in microdata format Copy the code and paste it into your website, just as I explained above.

For further information on how microdata and schema.org encoding affect Google Places rankings, check out this local SEO Hamburg by SEO Organic.