Finding the Sunrise (Florists)
It's long been my belief that local florists should stick to and promote one e-commerce domain for their companies and avoid spreading similar information across multiple sites. This post from SEOmoz.com pretty much sums up why it's better to be big and popular than small and niche.
But when it comes to Google Local/Maps, it seems multiple sites from a single company can be a highly effective way to crowd out the competition in the Local One Box - at least for now.
I was following up on an issue where Google Maps had misplaced Sunrise FL and was displaying results of a suburb of Sarasota instead of the Fort Lauderdale area community. The good news is that Maps finally found Sunrise. The bad news for local florists is that a single company dominates all three spots in the One Box for the query 'florist sunrise fl'.
It appear there's no filter to suppress multiple results from the same address in the same business category if the phone numbers don't match.
A closer look at the listings in Local shows that the owner claimed 001Florist ('C' on the map) and appears to have moved the map pointer while leaving his other two results, Sunrise Florist and 1StopFlorist.com 'as is'. (Odd too that the address on the 001Florist site actually says the company is located at an entirely different place in Fort Lauderdale.)
I can think of examples of business categories where the same address should display multiple listings - like individual realtors working in the same office or individual doctors in the same medical center - but 'local florists' isn't one of them.
One of our fellow FloristBloggers is a florist in Sunrise, Fl. Her LBC listing does appear in the #2 spot if a user clicks through to view the "Local business results," but right now she's probably wishing she'd built a whole lot more sites and used different phone numbers on each of them.
On balance, Google Local/Maps has been a good resource for users and for local businesses like florists. Florist issues in Local/Maps have been the topic of discussion on several SEO blogs of late, including Mike Blumenthal's coverage of the Authoritative One Box and Convert Offline's Is Google Filtering Reviews or Reviewers.
Let's hope one of those guys has some thoughts on dealing with single companies dominating the Local One Box. Should local companies adopt the approach and build out more domains or should they put more effort into one great site? Maybe it's time I re-adjust my thinking.