Keywords in Reviews are Ranking Factor for Google Places Pages

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | No Comments

Despite the Hotels London Google Places page still being corrupted I’m pleased to see that it’s recently started to rank in mobile and map search results.

Reviews and citations are an important factor in getting these Places pages to rank as we know but consideration should also be given to the use of keywords in reviews.

I certainly wouldn’t advocate writing your own reviews or trying to influence the writer’s intention but if you can suggest certain phrases or if you’re in the lucky position of Google using some of the reviews from your own site then I would definitely recommend inclusion.

The following image shows a search in Google.co.uk Maps for ‘travel lodge’:

Hotels London Places Page is appearing in the map search result even though we don’t actually have Travelodge stock and don’t have a Travelodge landing page.
The reason we are ranking appears to be solely down to a few mentions of travel lodge phrases on the ‘London Carlton Hotel reviews‘ page.

Obviously these are misspellings and there is no gain for Hotels London in ranking for the phrases ‘travel lodge’. It is good evidence however of the use of keywords in reviews to aid ranking of Google Places pages which can be used to positive effect on optimised phrases.

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