Place + shop/service

Here’s an example of ‘photographers in Manchester’. Click to see a larger version.

The main sponsored links (the ones with the red background) are still at the top of the page, but it’s interesting to see a picture appearing under the title of sites in the main organic search pages. There’re also links to the right of these sites that lead to the ‘place pages’, small business-specific pages that go into greater detail about services and offers. All of these are new to Google’s SERPs. Because the organic listings have expanded, there are only either four or five organic results displayed without scrolling down.

I also did a quick search for ‘theatres in Manchester’ and the list of theatres that once appeared to the right of the map now appear in the centre of the page below the sponsored links. Here’s an example. Click to see a larger version.

This move by Google could be harmful for local directory listings, but could be a boom for local individual businesses with smaller websites.

The deal recently struck between search engines Google and Bing and social networks Facebook and Twitter could have potentially massive implications for businesses.

From now on, real-time messages posted on Facebook and Twitter will be included alongside the usual search engine results you find on Google and Bing.

As search engines place a high degree of importance on recency and the number of inbound links a particular piece of content has, it’s realistic to suggest that soon we will be seeing heavily retweeted tweets jostling for position with standard web pages.

So what could this actually mean for businesses? Potentially, if you search for “Manchester hotel” in the future, the leading results may not be the selection of big-name hotels you get now, but rather a review of a Manchester hotel recently posted on Twitter that has for one reason or another proven popular.

It will be interesting to how social search unfolds as there is a question mark over the relevancy of results that include user-generated, and thus potentially unreliable, information.

What it increasingly means however is that, whatever your business, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to participate and engage in social media. Not doing so and on in time it could be your search engine presence that suffers.