• Internet Marketing Service
• Marketing Consultant
• Marketing Agency
• Advertising Agency
• Consultant

We started this way to research our local region in order to determine:

• Broad competitive landscapes
• Category aliases or synonyms, and
• What might be niche areas to jumpstart local returns.

Obviously if you are ranked 454 out of 460 "consultants" that may not be the best use of one category but at the same time it pays to research.

The next step is redeveloping your categories purely on user define principles without an suggestions from Google… again this is for research value and not necessarily targeted to categories you ultimately desire.

Part 1 – Describe your businesses in single phrases. Continuing on with our SEO example:

• Search
• Internet
• Marketing
• Advertising
• Consultant

…and make these you categories. The idea here is to make as many plausible search phrases out of the broad singular terms like:

• Search Consultant
• Internet Consultant
• Marketing Consultant
• Advertising Consultant
• Search Marketing
• Internet Marketing
• Internet Advertising
• Search Advertising

…among other 3 word phrases… Search to see if local search in available and where you are positioned and compare your findings with your previous results.

It’s worth mentioning that you are not just interested in positioning well for these but positioing well for phrases that searchers use and click on the results.

There are a few interesting nuances here to be mindful of but we’ll cover each one in separate articles. It’s important to mention that these nuances require a little testing; trial & error development it order for you develop a "best match" for your local search traffic.

Google has many pre-labeled category names like Internet Marketing Service that also appears when you start typing in aliases or synonyms like search engine marketing, online marketing, SEO, or search engine optimization. This suggests that if you are any of the latter using the former ensure you list for all such aliases or synonyms.

Prelabled Categories

It would be best to attempt selecting as many pre-labeled categories that define your business "first"… to determine all the aliases or synonyms Google has assign to your targeted industry. Using the previous noted example (revolving around SEO) I selected:

• Internet Marketing Service
• Marketing Consultant
• Marketing Agency
• Advertising Agency
• Consultant

These are not necessarily directly targeted to an "SEO gist" but the idea is to understand the competitive landscape and what Google has defined as your aliases and/or synonyms.

It’s also noteworthy to mention the category "words" are interchangeable. Using the previous category words it is equally plausible to be listed (and ranked) for Internet Consultant, Advertising Consultant, Advertising Service, etc.

This means you don’t necessarily want to just define a set of categories – you want to test a marketing mix of terms and see how they perform in both ranks and traffic.

Physically doing this may not be cost effective (downtown office space tends to be at a premium) and while a virtual office may indeed get you much closer to a theoretical center of town inexpensively… before you jumpstart this premise maybe we should take a closer look at the overall foundation.

My first question to an expert would be: “How does Google determine city center”?

Google certainly doesn’t just guess at it – there must be some overlying criteria. 

A fixed point on some map based on centrical circles could be a possibility but what actually defines a “center”? Where city hall is? Where the residents of the community classify as “downtown”? …which can be in many coastal cities at the extreme edge of the city.

An interesting point of principle here — local search is primarily based on geo-targeting; thus by design, the center ‘point’ isn’t based on any fixed geographical landmass but the specific computer system that is doing the browsing as well as its local Internet access provider’s location. That may indeed be “downtown” but it can be everywhere else and in large cities in multiple locations.

It is true that if your primary customer base is physically located downtown – their Internet access provider would also be in the geographical vicinity and then the original premise might well be correct but if downtown is not full of residential communities and you are a retail outlet – closer to downtown may indeed be the worse move you could ever make.

It’s also noteworthy to mention that if your business (and ISP) is located at an edge of a major city you are much closer to the ring of smaller communities and suburbs than providers on the far side and you’ll rank exceptional better in these areas.

So while geo-location is a factor if there is need of a shift – being in the same building of your best customers’ ISP would be the correct location.

While many marketers claim you can enhance your local search ranks by augmenting your legitimate Company/Organization name with keyword phrases you wish to rank well under; this is a complete fallacy (likely based on their understanding of organic results enhancements as it relates to the title element). Local search is not organic search.

There is absolutely no correlation between the use of keywords utilized in the Company/Organization name and rank changes local search positioning.

Setting aside research for the moment, let’s look solely at common sense.

Had Google seriously considered making the Company/Organization field keyword sensitive they would have likely considered this scenario:

Do you seriously think Google had this nuance in mind?

Google’s desire is to be the new Yellow Pages – but if all business are merely a keyword – what’s the point.

In the real local search results for Austin Internet Marketing a real business Company/Organization name beats all the keywords… which kinda refutes that overall philosophy.