If you were pestered with a dozen or more phone calls a day from people in your locality asking what was on your menu for the day, or inquiring about the delivery of their order, and you were definitely not the local Thai Kitchen but just an innocent guy or gal, what would you do? Well, you'd listen to Danny Sullivan in this program. Journalist and the Editor-in-Chief of SearchEngineLand.com, Danny makes a short passage on how to claim or correct your listing on Google's local search, while discussing why local search is such a difficult task, and what some of the major obstacles are to implementing it correctly.
Data issues such as wrong phone numbers and address listings are one thing that make or break local search. Another is usability: the categorization of listings, the workflow for claiming a listing, or deleting one needs to be more intuitive.
The most important of all concerns is that of privacy. Local information is perceived as personal information, and thus local search, to some extent, is thought to be an infringement on the privacy of individuals and local establishments. Some people do, and some don't wish to be listed in local search. Some owners do not wish their buildings to be mapped in Google StreetView. Google StreetView has caused enough controversy in various parts of the world due to privacy issues.
Finally, location based services have had mixed impact on the lives of their users; in some cases, they have been handy in detecting the culprits in the case theft of the device.
Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.
Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.
Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.
Danny currently heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief, which covers all aspects of search marketing and search engine news. Danny also serves as Third Door Media’s chief content officer, which owns Search Engine Land and the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. Danny also maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter: @dannysullivan.
Resources
This free podcast is from our Where Conference series.
For The Conversations Network: