michaeldorausch.com

If you’ve ever done a city-based search for a local business anywhere in the United States, you may or may not have noticed that results are often located near the center of town, and sometimes they’re not. This can be massively confusing for business owners hoping to have their locations listed properly among searches conducted using Google Maps. It can be especially frustrating for businesses that are in major metro areas like New York City, Miami, Dallas, San Diego and others. Since I live and work in LA, I’m using Los Angeles as an example for viewing the map centroid.

Los Angeles Google Map Centroid

To find a centroid for the city you may be researching, go to Google or Google maps, and type in the name of the city. After you hit search, you should get a map that you can click on. This may not be the case for areas of lesser population, but for midsized and large metros, the results should be there. Look for the red place marker with the letter A (as an example there is a marker in the above image right next to the words “Los Angeles”). I added a little bubble where I live in Venice Beach, which when viewing at this level, does not get listed on the map.

Los Angeles City Hall near centroid

Zooming the map in a notch we can see that the centroid for Los Angeles is located near City Hall. At this level, no other cities are listed, but we begin to see transportation information (Los Angeles Union Station), downtown Los Angeles areas of interest (Civic Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, El Pueblo De Los Angeles Historic Monument), and downtown LA business information (Edison, Philippe’s French Dip, Ahmanson Theatre), as well as street names and nearby freeway information.

Los Angeles Fire Department and Los Angeles Police Department

Taking our magnifying glass and zooming in an additional notch we can now see outlines of building architecture. We also see business information, transportation information, and municipalities that were not appearing in the previous view. Not only do we see Los Angeles City Hall located near the centroid, we can also see that the Los Angeles Fire Department and Los Angeles Police Department appear very close to the centroid. In fact, it looks like the centroid for Los Angeles is at the address of the downtown LA Police Department.

Notice in the image above there’s more business information listed as well. Besides highlighting the LA Fire Department, I circled a well-known LA business, the Los Angeles Times. If you look carefully you may also see Pitfire Pizza and Curry House Take-Out Store. Not surprisingly, when I search Pizza Los Angeles or Los Angeles Pizza, the pit fire restaurant located right near the center of town appears as the top result in the map seven pack. However, the results are not similar when conducting a map related search for Curry Los Angeles or Los Angeles Curry. Go figure.

Los Angeles Health Insurance Quote and Computer Repair?

One more zoom in and now things really get interesting. Can you say map spam? I wasn’t expecting this, but it’s a reality, so we may as well cover it. We see that the centroid is near certainly listed at the police department downtown. We still see some transportation information (the bus icons), but additional businesses are also listed. I know the downtown Los Angeles area well, as I use to have a chiropractic office located on Spring Street. The pizza place and the curry takeout restaurant are real businesses located in the downtown area.

The Computer Repair Los Angeles business stood out being that it was in all-caps. I was beginning to think that this business didn’t really exist where it was being listed. Take a look for yourself using street view. Funny enough, street view shows the address for this business basically in the middle-of-the-road at the intersections of Main Street and 1st Street (you don’t get much more center of Los Angeles than that). It appears that there is no actual business located at Los Angeles Flowers, LA Health Insurance Quote, or even Los Angeles Garage Door. Knowing downtown Los Angeles is extremely popular for commercial flower purchasing, I thought there may actually be a flower business at that location, sadly all I could see via street view was a bus stop. One other listing, Los Angeles General Services Department, is for real, as it is a city government office.

I was not expecting to see what appears to be four different map spam business listings located so close to the city centroid, but I’m not surprised. After researching a little bit further, I saw several other clear examples of Google Map spam, which included a number of different business categories. The sad thing is these listings are likely affecting the map rankings (and incomes) of legitimate business owners in the city of Los Angeles, and unfortunately the majority of them are not even aware of it.

In summary: The centroid for Los Angeles appears nearest municipal buildings like the police department, fire department and Civic Center in downtown LA. Zooming in provides users with useful information regarding local related businesses, services, and places of interest. Zooming in further and staying near the city centroid, results in map spam.

Think Local SEO is easy? Think again. I recommend every business owner take the time to do some research on what businesses appear nearby their city centroid using Google maps. I also recommend reading Matt McGee’s post on Local SEO being harder than you may think.

Last week I presented at the 2009 PubCon Las Vegas conference. I was on the Local Search panel, which had more people in attendance than I’ve seen in a long time for a local search (maybe the time for local has come), and to top it off it was the first session of the day.

I posted a copy of the presentation to slideshare and have embedded it here for viewing…

Viewing the slideshow presentation doesn’t get as much information as having attended the event, but you may find something useful in the presentation nonetheless.

I talked about convergence of the desktop shopper and the cell phone user, the increased activity we are seeing in wireless, and how local search is appearing in the SERPS.

I asked a few questions on twitter about the use of mobile applications in finding places to eat locally and received some pretty interesting responses. A few of those were posted and appear in the slides.

When I talk about SEO for local search like it’s 1999, I don’t mean spamming guest books with links. Link building is obviously important, but for local search, the basics still rule. I did a presentation earlier in the year on granular data , which is also related to the area of local search.

Thanks to all those that attended the presentation live in Las Vegas, I know it can be tough to be awake and at the conference center at 10 o’clock in the morning, you guys rocked!

I’ve been meaning to post this presentation since I spoke at PubCon Austin earlier this year. I was on the local search panel and my topic was Going Granular with local search.

On the Chiropractic Blogs site I’ve talked about granular data and location information quite a bit. It amazes me how many people to this day still don’t invest the extra time into things like filling out fields completely or including detailed information related to the topic they are blogging on. Getting very detailed with the information you are delivering can provide great benefit, especially with long-tail search results.

If you want to view the slideshow presentation it’s 19 slides long. I covered more in the talk but at least the slides offer some basics on the topic.

One of the last slides simply says “True Story” and it refers to a case where I used granular data in a blog post that resulted in a client calling my chiropractic office. That client was seeking specifically what I covered in the post (down to the model number of equipment used) and since has referred a half dozen+ other clients.

Cheers!

I’ve been holding off on posting a lot of tech related content on my chiropractic web sites because most of its just not suitable for the audience. I currently work out ideas on a huge Whiteboard in my home office but I want to begin posting some thoughts publicly in hopes of getting interaction, advice, and wisdom from those facing similar projects. I figure here is as good a place as any to begin.

I am volunteering some local SEO gurus into my brain trust. My early list includes Andrew Shotland, Mike Blumenthal, David Mihm, and Matt McGee. I’ll add more as I expand on my thinking and project development.

Here’s my thought of the day…

Develop a Central Address Database Strategy

This may appear really simple but I’m currently stuck on how to best implement for ease of use. Each day I come across address, phone, and URL information for chiropractic offices across the United States. Some come by e-mail, some I discover on web sites, some are on business cards, some get written on note paper and handed to me at conferences (basically there are lots of sources on any given day).

My thought is to assign the development and management of the database to one person so that I can cut-and-paste or scan and e-mail info and be done with it. I vision a simple web-based interface were someone can administrate records to be added and/or modified for the day. That database would be readable by any directory web sites I own or choose to partner with, would integrate with local WordPress blogs, and basically be readable by any sites I’ve allowed on the administrative end to pull local address data.

I imagine there are some pre-existing solutions but I prefer to think this out in advance to avoid the most limiting blocks to achieving the goal of providing consistently updated information across a network of sites and online properties.

If there are any contributing thoughts, I’d appreciate reading them.