Dave,
It’s so odd – since I wrote this post, things that were bringing up a map now aren’t and one of the things that was a 3-pack is now a 10-pack. Major changes.

Unfortunately, we’re not getting to do as much work for the client as I’d like to (a perpetual issue with small businesses, eh?). The organic rank is good, but getting to do more keyword expansion, testing and studying probably won’t be possible.

Thanks for your comments, gentlemen.
Miriam

First of all, congrats on the high organic rankings. I ran a query a couple of different ways with slight variations and your client was turning up first organically, in some cases with a map and some cases where there was no map.

Are you monitoring traffic and search phrases for the client? That would be very telling as to the impact of maps, whether a 3 pac or ten pac.

As to why you aren’t among the top three when a map appears for an organic search, I’d look hard at geography, ie, the distance between your client’s location and a napa, ca, designated center point.

I suppose if there were any clue on this situation, I’d go back to what I believe Will Scott pointed to with regard to the denver florist question, and how the other site commanded an authoritative onebox for a phrase that on face value, without seo work would seem to fall to the florist with the title, Denver florist.

Dave

Here is my post.

Here is Matt’s post.

I think though that Bill captured the technical issues best in his post on Location prominence.

The simple answer is that the two queries (the one in Orgainic and the one in Maps) use different map scales, and possibly a slightly different centroid based on the scale and possibly the mechanism for defining the centroid based on that area.

Mike

1) Okay, that makes sense to me. And, it’s important to understand that age may have something to do with this…a sort of sandbox thing, just to use a word.

2) Why do they do that? Why would the center point be different? Is this something you’ve written about, Mike? If so, please scatter links freely
Miriam

1)There is a time gap between the appearance in Maps and the organic reindex that is required for it to appear in the main search results. This delay may be also due to aging being an issue to make it to the front page.

2)Sometimes you see differences between the 3 listings ranking and the Maps listing because the two queries are using a different center point to the map that is being displayed.

Mike B

I guess I’m struggling with forming a picture in my mind of what influence, if any, websites have on Maps. How authoritative does Google consider them, in comparison to data they might scrape from, say, Yelp?

And, do website have much more of an effect on a one box, 3 or 10 Pack than they do within Maps?

Thanks for stopping by, Dan. I appreciate you chiming in.
Miriam

That leads me to a second question, though. If organic has no impact on local results, then do websites have no influence on local, either?

I can’t feel sure about that yet.

It’s good to know I’m not the only one who is wondering about mystery #2.

Thank you so much for stopping by Matt. It’s so nice to see you here.
Miriam

As for #2, that’s one of the all-time unanswered mysteries.