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?

Tags: google, local search, seo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.