Seeking a Local Business Website on the Internet? Good luck with that!

I just finished doing some research for a client… trying to find how their website is positioned in the search results, by carrying out a fairly typical “local search” i.e. business name town name format

The amount of GARBAGE results dished up was astronomical… and extremely surprising!

It makes you wonder whether anyone can actually FIND a REAL local business WEBSITE on the ‘net these days???

The table below outlines the Top 60 Results (of 27,100) found on 15th July 2012 when I went searching for…

westside medical centre port macquarie

at google.com.au

Comments follow regarding these results and colour groupings…

Website #
Pages		 Rank Target Page Content
White pages 3 1
2
3		 Centre listing
Regional listing
Listing for other business at address
Google + 1 4 Generic address/map page for centre
Local Newspaper 4 5
6
7
8		 Story April 2010
Business directory listing
Story May 2012
Minor reference June 2012
Yellow Pages 4 9
10
11
12		 PAID listing
Category Page #1
Category Page #2
Category Page #3
Local Directories 6 13
14
15
16
17
18		 PAID listing
Listing for Doctor in Centre
Listing for another Dr in Centre
Competing listing, centre ad on page
Regional category page#1
Local category page#2
Nth Coast GP Training 3 19
20
21		 Info re the
medical training
available at Centre
Whereis 3 22
23
24		 Address listing
Doctor Listing
Category page
NSW Health Education & Training Institute 1 25 PDF file on doctor training
Aubiz 1 26 Generic phone book listing
GP Vacancies 1 27 Centre info
HMGPN 2 28
32		 PDF on Internships
PDF on Internships
All Doctors 1 29 Unclaimed generic listing
Facebook 1 30 Generic business page
Local Directories (child site) 1 31 Category page
Yellow Pages (again) 2 33
34		 Category Page #4
Category Page #5
Doctoralia 1 35 Category page
Local Newspaper (again) 3 36
37
38		 Business directory category page
DATED RESULT – news category page
Minor reference July 2010
Health Directory 1 39 Category page for other Dr in centre
White pages 1 40 Regional page other bus @ address
Australian Medical Students’ Association 2 41
42		 PDF on Internships
PDF on Internships
Yellow pages (YP – child site) 3 43
44
45		 Category Page
Category Page
Category Page
Local Directories (child) 1 46 Regional category page
Virtual Medical Centre 2 47
48		 Category page
Category page
Our Patch 1 49 Generic listing for WRONG business
Trulocal 1 50 Competing free business listing
Zen Alliance Natural Health Directory 1 51 Listing for doctor in centre
Nth Coast GP Training (again) 1 52 PDF on doctor training
Yellowpages (Findlocal – child site) 3 53
54
55		 Competing free business – related link
PAID listing
Category page
Westside Medical Centre 2 56
57		 Home Page
Sub Page
1 Australia 1 58 Generic listing for centre
Health Pro Finder 1 59 Unclaimed generic listing
BuyBusiness.com 1 60 Unrelated page


Of the sixty results reported above… only 20 pages – or 33% – are what you might regard as “normal” web pages, and shown in the RH column above as grey, green and white:

  • Ten pages related to the medical training offered by the centre.
  • Two relate to the actual centre’s website at Position #56/57.
  • One “real” directory listing for one of the doctors in the centre
  • One “real” directory listing (at the local newspaper) for the centre itself and a “Category” page linking to the listing
  • The other five results are for newspaper stories (3) or references in stories (2) for the same local paper.

The other 66% (the 40 pages highlighted in light yellow above) are best described as Phone book style pages.

If you regard the three “paid” listings as “normal” pages… there are still 62% of pages with nothing more than fill or fluff!!!!

There are 25 pages dished up from the MAJOR TELEPHONE COMPANIES that are NOTHING MORE THAN BASIC PHONE BOOK, NAME AND ADDRESS LISTINGS!

I’m not counting the 3 PAID listings in that, nor does it include another 12 “generic” or “unclaimed” pages which have probably been “scraped” from them (a disturbing trend in itself!).

But if you did… up to 66% of the TOP 60 RESULTS shown above are what any normal person would regard as bloody useless 🙂

Certainly useless as far as a consumer actually LOOKING for some decent info about their search query!

And IF that consumer even got as far as page 2 (of a normal 10 results/page search)… they would not really have been any better off!

LOL Are YOU feeling lucky?


By now, I was wondering if…

Are other medical centres in the same locality any better off?

I did a more “generic” local search for medical centre port macquarie… and I hope you don’t need to find an actual doctor’s web site to help you decide!!

Apart from TWO actual “real” results in the “local” map section at the start… all you will see a lot more yellow, white and truelocal phone book listings… and their MANY “child” sites… along with hotfrog, startlocal, familygp, health engine and more.

And… would you believe… au.totaltravel.yahoo.com (@ #55) and even eatability.com.au (4 results starting @ #65) ???

Come On!

TRAVEL and FOOD websites???

Crikey!

Now I’ve heard everything!!!

Why they would be “diversifying” into such totally unrelated areas is a little disturbing!

And just maybe… if Google is going to “Crack-down” on anything… they should take a very serious look at these phone book style websites that are reporting garbage – especially since most of them ARE the BIG NAMES in the industry 😉

But I really can’t see THAT happening due to the amount of advertising $$$ they spend. Oh well…

Regards
Stephen Spry

P.S. Admittedly my client has NOT done much linking as the site is fairly new. I am hoping that once a little bit of that happens, that their actual website will appear a LOT further up the results pages at Google.

I have also included a link or two to the Westside Medical Centre site from this page… every little bit should help.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed… but I’m not going to hold my breath in anticipation 🙂 I will however document what linking I do to see what impact that has.

P.S.S. For some reason, my Firefox browser reports a slightly different set of results for the same initial search. The actual centre website is 10 places worse off at Position #65 – mainly because there are even more yellow and local directory results being shown. Triffic!

By Stephen Spry · Filed Under Directories 

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