Wil Reynolds from Seer tweeted this link from Michael Gray’s blog earlier today, which basically answers the question of whether hCards are actually beneficial to SEO with “probably not”. Now, I’m not in a position to really argue based on anything I’ve seen (and my official position is that I agree with Gray), but we did see something last month with one of our clients that made me wonder about whether hCards were beneficial to our local search visibility, and I’d been meaning to post about it.

The rundown is this: We’re currently ranking well for a fairly competitive term in the Philadelphia region. Our organic positioning is in the top 3, and our local business positioning is generally #1 out of about 5 “top” results. However, for the past week or so, we’ve noticed that our client has become the only local business result for the phrase, despite there being very clear competitors who are also engaged in SEO.

To illustrate, the local results used to look something like this:

Google Local multiple results

And now, it triumphantly looks like this, at least from when and where I’m searching (identifying information removed):

Google local single result

One of our changes at the start of this month was the implementation of hCard formatting for their address, so I’m wondering if that change has given us a leg up on the local results. It’s quite possible that there are other factors at work here, but it was enough to make me wonder. Any thoughts?

Over the years, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have been soured on search optimization due to a bad experience, and even some who don’t “believe” in SEO because it’s always been explained to them in an abstract, condescending, too-complicated-for-you-to-understand kind of way. Those of us in the industry know how effective SEO and conversion optimization can be because we see the results on our own sites and in the leads and sales we generate for our clients. However, I recently took on an SEO project that hit close to home for me, and I thought it would make for a nice little story that would highlight the impact a good SEO campaign can have.

My family owns a banquet hall in the heart of Northeast Philadelphia that my grandparents built up from scratch, starting with a small corner tavern in the Kensington section of the city and eventually growing into an event hall capable of holding 600 guests. It’s a regular reality TV show of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins trying to keep the doors open and the guests happy without strangling one another.

Although the hall had seen prosperous times in the 80s and 90s, the past few years have proven to be difficult for business. The declining economy in Northeast Philadelphia – coupled with a few antiquated business practices – was causing a drastic drop in revenue, and it was clear that something had to be done to revitalize the business.

I decided to put Context to work building a new website for the banquet hall and implementing an SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to the site.  We paid attention to our landing pages and optimized for local search, and the results were stellar.

With their old site and no SEO, they saw maybe 1 or 2 leads per month coming over the web. However, thanks to our efforts, they now receive an average of 4 to 5 leads per day. In fact, I just checked the analytics, and 9 leads were generated in the past 24 hours. Their website is now a core component of the business, and things have started to completely turn around.  With this new source of revenue, they’ve been able to renovate the banquet rooms, which in turn is generating even more business.

I guess the moral of the story here is that SEO works. More importantly though, SEO can go as far as to revitalize a struggling business. And while some people may think to themselves, “this is probably a ‘results not typical’ kind of situation”, I’d have to respond by saying that I have yet to find a client who didn’t see direct benefits from our efforts in search optimization and site optimization.