Over the past few months I've started doing SEO work for local businesses (and one business, in particular, that I actually work for) and have noticed that, many times, local SEO is an uphill and seemingly futile battle. This is not because I wasn't able to get their site well ranked in the organic listings; on the contrary, for many keyword phrases, we're one or two spots from the front page, and for other, more specific long-tail searches, we're on the first page or even the first result. My issue is with the sites that are above us, preventing me from getting my client the well-deserved space on the first page. Sites like Superpages, Yellowpages, and various other local directories (including, in some cases, paid directories such as SearchBoston.com) are above us and most of our competitors. In fact, four of the five organic listings on Google are for directories providing the results that searchers came to Google to look for, forcing searchers to either muddle through a pile of crap searches to find actual businesses or click through to a secondary source. This made local SEO efforts less rewarding, since there is little chance of me besting well-established sites like Superpages or Yellowpages.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking: "But Greg, that's what Google has LOCAL listings from Places in search!" Yes, that's true, and those results ARE better for this purpose. But not as good as you'd imagine. In searching for Boston area health clubs (my client is a health club, by the way), I get results for hotels with health clubs included in the results, and long-tail searches such as "health club with pool" return results for health clubs without pools, health clubs that are national chains in which some may have pools, or pools that are operated without being attached to any health club. Obviously, approaching this from an SEO perspective, I would be less satisfied with the Places listings; they're less easy to "SEO-ify" than organic listings.
But the point remains that Google had to add Places listings for one simple reason: their organic search is terrible at giving semantically relevant local listings. Superpages, Yellowpages et al. shouldn't be higher ranking for local searches than the businesses people are looking for. And for those of us in a highly competitive industry, we rely on organic listings as well as Places results to bring in customers. The Places listings in search results are a band-aid; Google should try and fix the actual problem instead of relying on patches to make results appear more relevant.
It's also the case the Places listings do not show semantic content from the site's page; if I'm looking for "health clubs with swimming pools in Boston", my site may have content with those keywords in them, which are highlighted and displayed in Google organic results. In Places results, in shows a list of businesses, not even always the correct business, and usually doesn't pull information from the site itself to display to the searcher.
In other words, it's a crippled user experience compared with organic search. So an SEO's bitterness aside, I stand by my claim: Google should fix local search and search in general.
