Trusted Reviewers Impact on Google Maps / OneBox
December 21st, 2007 by
A Case Study of Trusted Reviewers’ Impact on Google Maps Placement
David Mihm, a local SEO in Oakland CA recently pointed me to a post by Tim Coleman of Convert Offline who offers Search Engine Marketing help for small business entitled “Is Google Filtering Reviews or Reviewers”.
Tim’s post suggests that trust is an issue in map ranking as well as general listings. There’s some question whether age of the review has an impact as well (from Small Business SEM author Matt McGee). Mike Blumenthal of Understanding Google Maps has a wealth of knowledge on the subject and made some valuable contribution to the discussion.
I thought that we needed something a little more concrete and decided to do an experiment specifically focused on reviewer trust.
Google Maps and Local are notoriously slow to update so this experiment may take some time to reach a conclusion.
As it turns out, we have relationships with 3 providers of the same health / wellness service in the same metro area, none of whom are currently represented in Google maps (I’ll be storing screenshots dated for archival purposes).
We have asked, and the practices have agreed, to begin asking their patients to go online and write reviews.
In the interest of controlling the experiment we’ll use only InsiderPages. There are a few challenges selecting the review engine of choice:
- Despite multiple universities our area is NOT tech-savvy
- No review site has significant local depth
- Few reviewers on Insider Pages have profiles which would indicate trust
- On Yelp, the highest power reviewers are from out of town
Considerations and methodology:
- None of the websites are in the OneBox or on page 1 of map results.
- None currently have reviews
- None have been heavily promoted (on a scale of 1-10 for internet promotion they represent a 1, 3 and 5)
- All are seemingly equidistant from the Google centroid
- Reviews for 2 of 3 will be from virgin reviewers
- Reviews for the 3rd will be solicited from already active reviewers
- We will make contact with power-reviewers and ask them to visit our test subject
- We will not attempt to influence editorial content
- In the best case each practice will have the same number of reviews.
Additional comments to the original were:
- Miriam Ellis has written a very understandable follow up deconstructing Google reviews.
- Cathy of Avant Gardens points to what can happen when the discussion goes negative.
- Mike Muntz expresses concern that the de-emphasis of reviews may be in response to deceptively negative posts.
Some questions for anyone who wants to collaborate:
- Should I showcase the sites and current standings in question at the risk of skewing the results?
- Does the proposed methodology seem sound?
- What am I missing?
This exercise is going to take some patience and I’ll update every two weeks at a minimum. In the early going I’ll be sure to indicate once we’ve got the reviews in place.
By starting from scratch I hope we eliminate the “age” question and are able to focus solely on “trust”.
I hope this is instructive because I think it’s critical we find a way to effectively combat all the map spam that’s cropping up.
Tally ho!
Will, Looking forward to seeing the results. I can’t think of anything you’ve missed; the methodology seems sound.
That looks like an excellent experiment. I’ll look forward to finding out about the results
Hi Will,
Boy, am I adding you to my feedreader! I’m really looking forward to your followups on this experiment.
One metric I’d be interested in seeing added to your spreadsheet of the 3 clients would be the age of their websites. In trying to determine exactly how a trust rank of sorts figures in all of this, I keep wondering if, in addition to the trustworthiness of the review, local rankings might, in some degree, take into account the age of the site – just as organic rankings do.
Thanks so much for linking to my Google Reviews Review. I had fun writing that.
Miriam
Miriam,
It’s my pleasure. I try to demystify this stuff as best I can and your post did that elegantly. You made a tricky concept approachable without “dumbing”.
To your question above:
Subject 1: June 17, 06 (seo: medium well, though untouched for a while)
Subject 2: February 9, 06 (seo: medium rare)
Subject 3: December 7, 06 (seo: still in refrigerator)
So, they should all be out of the sandbox, with none crusty enough to really blow the curve. Since subject 3 is at an SEO disadvantage, we’re going to throw a little on-page her way for free for talking part in our experiment.
I hope to make future posts worthy of your reader 🙂
Hi Will,
Well, that’s pretty good…it’s only a scale of 11 months between all 3 sites, so really, not any huge gap anywhere. Great test subjects, really. And wonderful that your clients have agreed to participate. I can hardly wait to see what you come up with on this.
Miriam
This is awesome Will, like Miriam, I will immediately add to my reader, so as to miss anything.
Miriam, believe it or not, I think the age of the phone number (listed date with telco) is more important than the age of the site. At least until other factors… links, reviews etc…. kick-in.
Tim,
Thanks a lot for dropping in. I’ve been enjoying your posts and the recent discussion on your blog.
And, I love the premise “Convert Offline”. It’s easy to see the online conversion. I click submit, you ship a widget. But for so much of the core Yellow Pages customer base yet to make the switch to internet marketing it’s all about proving the conversion offline.
Keep up the good work and I’m glad to have your input on this project — spawned by your investigation.
I’m just bummed that we can’t start in earnest until after the New Year!
And, to your point above, given the core dataset is Acxiom or another traditional listing source you’re probably right. In fact, it was you who posited AllPages.com is most authoritative given their only update mechanism is those traditional sources. Hopefully we’re getting past that.
Will
Thanks Will… you’re exactly right with the widget thing, that’s much of I what I see written about. Less is written about local service businesses. And these businesses are getting squeezed by fragmentation online and off!!!
Keep up the good work.
Hi Tim,
Hey, that’s very interesting about the phone number. Is that something you’ve written or read about? I’d like to read up on that!
Miriam