Google Local Maps Now Offer Refine by Ratings

Writing by Brick Marketing on Saturday, 23 of February , 2008 at 11:19 pm

It looks like Google local maps is now allowing users to sort their results by ratings. This was reported by Mike over at Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local Search. You can see screen shot examples of this new feature on his blog.

There has been much discussion in the local community about the impact of reviews and review star rating on local rankings. In research done last year, it seemed that the quantity of reviews had significantly more impact on ranking than the quality of reviews.Recently however Google Maps has added a new option in Maps Text View mode that allows searchers to limit listings by the quality ratings, at least in certain highly reviewed categories like restaurants and hotels.

What does this mean for your local business? Start getting satisfied customers to go online and give you a smoking review! Most people are going to be looking for the best of the best, so they´ll be clicking most often on the four star reviews, which means you need to get your rankings up there in order to show up on the refined search!

Making sure that your happy customers are willing to give you a good review is just the beginning. You have to make them happy, too! Offer great service, great prices and they´ll start writing you up and giving you higher ratings that will in turn boost your ranking on Google Local Maps.

Category: Google Local

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