Google Says 3rd Party Review Sites More Valuable Than Google Places

By Guillermo Jose Ortiz  |  October 2, 2011  |  Local SEO

The customer lobby blog has highlighted an interesting snippet of information regarding Google Places page reviews and just who gets the majority of clicks when a searcher is poking through the search results.

From Google’s Response to their Senate Hearing:

  1. CLAIM: “Is a consumer (or a small business, for that matter) well served when Google artificially promotes its own properties regardless of merit? This has nothing to do with helping consumers get to the best information; it has everything to do with generating more revenue.”RESPONSE: In fact, most of the click traffic (roughly two-thirds of clicks) from our local search result pages goes directly to small business websites, and review sites make up the next largest percentage (about a quarter of clicks). Less than 10% of clicks from our local results page go to Google Place Pages.

This just goes to show that it is extremely important to claim your Google Places page, but it is possibly more important to properly seek out citations and aggregate your business data to different 3rd party sources such as Customer Lobby, Insiderpages, and other local small business listing sites.

Guillermo Jose Ortiz is Geek Powered Studio's Founder and lead geek. His passion for SEO & PPC helps his clients excel in their industry. You can follow Guillermo on twitter, @GeekPowered.