Ephricon Web Marketing

Yesterday we talked about how Google is now merging the local listings and organic listings such that in many cases they are inseparable.  Similarly, we’re noticing several other interesting developments with regard to actual rankings of sites… not just what the listing looks like when it does rank.

Like most really cool discoveries I have in the world of SEO, I stumbled upon this (haha, “Stumbled Upon”) by looking at my analytics.   Our site produced 3 web-form leads in a 45 minute span yesterday which is well higher than the norm.  So this morning I was curious if they came from a particular referring site, a particular tweet, or a particular keyword.  I suspected they were not from organic search, since traffic from organic search tends to be more consistent over time.  Traffic from referring sites tends to be highly volatile – when a prominent blogger creates a new post and links to you you’ll see a ton of traffic for a day, maybe two, and then as that post drops down and is no longer the “new thing” you’ll see that referring traffic die down quickly.

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So we may have jumped the gun here as Google appears to be testing these changes to the SERPs, but if we waited until Google stopped testing things before commenting on them then we’d still be without Gmail accounts and most other Google products.

Korey and I share outline the recent changes and share our initial thoughts, below:

Anyhow, it appears that sometime yesterday Google started testing changes to how they show the “local” (map-driven) listings in the search results.  Specifically, they seem to be doing away with the “7-pack” or “one-box” format where a map is showing (typically with up to 7 listings) immediately above the organic results and below the top 3 paid results.  Instead, they are showing the organic results higher on the page, immediately below the top 3 paid results, but this time with the local listings and related info (reviews, link to the places page, map marker, physical address) all tied to the organic listing itself.

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