I’ll be speaking at 1pm on “#winning with Google Places”. Come learn how to get your Google Places listing to the first page of Google for your most important keywords.

There’s great content throughout the day, and at only $119, it’s quite a bargain.

But, I can make that bargain even better. If you put the coupon text EM95 in the Discount Code field during registration, you’ll get a price of only $95!

Tuesday, November 8th

10:00am-11:15am: National Company – Local Focus, Salon C (panelist)
11:30am-12:45pm: Google Places & Hotpot Optimization, Salon G (panelist)
1:30pm-2:45pm: How Do You Optimize For Universal and Personal Search?, Salon A (panelist)

Wednesday, November 9th

1:00pm-3:00pm: PubCon Labs

Thursday, November 10th

10:15am-11:30am: WordPress SEO & Installation, Salon G (moderator)
1:30pm-2:45pm: Protecting Your Brand – Competitive Intel, Salon B (moderator)

Note: Locations are subject to change, so check the schedule there.

See you in Vegas!

It was to be the first published survey of eye tracking patterns as applied to local search techniques. We planned to publish the research under a Creative Common Attribution 3.0 license.

Twelve days ago, however, Google released Google Place Search, and completely changed the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for local queries. One could argue that this invalidates our hard work.

“No so fast!” I retort in my best Lee Korso voice.

There are currently multiple page types for local queries. One of them draws much of its structure from the old 7-pack. It’s reasonable to assume that many of our findings apply to this new SERP as well.

And our most surprising finding certainly still applies. The conventional wisdom has been that the map itself should be one of the greatest draws on the page. Our research found that the map actually receives very little attention. Most people hardly notice its presence at all.

If anything, this should be even more the case with the new SERPs. Google has moved the map to the right, where paid advertising usually languishes. Most users have spent the last fifteen years learning to ignore that part of the page. I believe it is unlikely to be noticed now.

So, even with the changes, we’re publishing our research report and the heatmaps:

• Research Paper (.pdf, 11.1MB)
• Heatmap One (.jpg, 147KB)
• Heatmap Two (.jpg, 152KB)
• Heatmap Three (.jpg, 135KB)
• Heatmap Four (.jpg, 127KB)

This research and this report are © 2010, ionadas local LLC and Sentient Services, LP.

They are being published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, allowing businesses, organizations and individuals to download, use and reproduce the data in their own promotional and research efforts providing proper attribution is made.

Proper attribution means listing the above copyright statement and including links to www.ionadas.com and www.sentientservices.com for web usage. For other uses, the copyright statement, www.ionadas.com and www.sentientservices.com must be listed.

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from ionadas local LLC.

It’ll take some time to tease out what exactly they’ve done, but at a high level it appears that the new ranking algorithm is a combination of the old Google Maps and organic algos. This is great news if you have strong organic optimization. You’re probably seeing improved rankings today.

If you’re targeting local queries without a local presence, however, life just got harder for you. For most queries, I’m seeing only a couple of organic listings above the fold. This is about the same as for the old page structure, but additional organic listings are multiple clicks down the page now. You’ve got a grand total of four spots on the first page of results. Good luck.

The seven local listings are now spread out down the page, with only one or two above the fold. This greatly increases the need to be at the top of the Google Places listings.

So, get to work building citations and encouraging your customers to place reviews!

Information tagged in this manner is easier for Google to categorize, and can show up as a citation in Google Places, or even a more prominent link.

Mike Blumenthal has a great write-up on why hCard Microformat is important.

All indications are that this is a very limited test at the moment and there’s no way of knowing whether it will become generally available. But the implications of such a change would be huge. For certain types of queries (i.e. those that tend to return the map today), traditional SEO efforts would no longer be of any value.

Only AdWords and Google Places listings would matter.

I doubt the screen capture the linked article shows reflects what Google would use in the long run, as it seems fairly clumsy. There are only 2.5 listings above the fold, with a great deal of wasted space.

But we certainly could see something like this in the near future.

Hat Tip to WebmasterWorld for pointing this out to me.

This is especially welcome for home-based businesses, who might not want to list their home address on the internet for all to see.

Businesses owners should realize that there is a significant disadvantage to this approach, however. A large part of Google ranking calculation is based upon the Citations a listing has received. Citations are pages that Google has found that list the company’s name, phone number and address (and are trusted by Google).

Yes, you can list your home-based business with Google and prevent the address from showing within Google, but you’re going to have a harder time building citations. You can try listing just your company name and phone number, but those citations tend to not be as strong.

So, do you use your home address or not? At the end, it comes down to a value judgment, but you need to be aware of the pros and cons of various approaches.

Being in Austin, Texas, an offer for this advertising program popped up in ionadas local’s Google Maps management system this morning.

“Learn More” takes you to Google Help pages. If you “Preview and select a tag, the following dialog box is shown:

You have the option of highlighting coupons, photos, videos or your website. If one of these is not available in your Google Places, it won’t be offered for tagging.

Here is what the ad looks like, in the 7-pack, the 3-pack, and the 1-box, respectively.

It’s too early to tell if this will result in an uptick in traffic, but watch here for updates. In the meantime, here’s the dashboard the advertisement adds to your management system, although it does not have any data yet.

ionadas local will be attending and speaking at PubCon South 2010 in Dallas the second week of April. CEO Brian Combs will be speaking on the “Personalize Search – Universal Search – Life Goes On” panel with Michael Gray and Dr. Amanda Watlington.

Brian’s panel is at 1:30pm on Wednesday, April 14th, and he will be discussing developments within Google Maps and other local search engines as they pertain to universal and personalized search.

If you’d like 20% off your ticket to PubCon South 2010, use the code “rc-7200720″ when registering (coupon expires April 9th at 5pm central). We hope to see you there!