Oh oh. Changes are afoot when it comes to Google Local Listings, and while I haven't had an opportunity to employ and thus take advantage of relative keywords, I'm wondering if anyone else has and if they've noticed any changes in conversion?
To wit: Google has recently and sporadically introduced clumps of ten (10) local listing results complete with business name, address, URL and phone number, no less. (See and click below.)
Unless Google has generously supplied a (trackable) phone number to each of the 10 listed companies, conversion metrics are lost, even for the organic and while the companies are the big winners, how does Google win when the user need not even venture further into the search given adress (ergo proximity) and phone number are supplied.
Google doesn't generate click revenue in this instance.
Intriguing, particularly from a starting position of organic results generally being clicked more often than paid listings.
Obviously a test... but what exactly could be they testing?
I'm open to suggestions.
Have a good one.
~The (SEP) Guy
A friend at SEOmoz has done some usability testing and found people clicking. I think it’s a comparison against the 3-site maps insertions we were seeing earlier.
As to phone #s, there’s much more to a company than that. Andrew Goodman advises against using your PPC ad space for that and hasn’t seen many calls arise from it. So I doubt it’s hurting CTR.
While I would be inclined to agree with it as a “waste” of valuable PPC space, I’m not so sure I agree with your point of it hurting CTR. I would think quite the opposite as Business name, URL, address and phone are included.
Given a choice of 10 possible and clustered alternatives, I think I would be inclined to direct dial the most efficiently (descriptive) proximate listing.
But that’s just me.