Great news when I was looking at my rankings last night, Google was doing a shake up on page one and I was bouncing back and forth, from experience I knew I'd wake up this morning with a brand new shiny page one ranking, and from further experience I knew I was looking at position two or three (although page one was good enough at this point).

This keyword is quite important to me as it's the main keyword phrase for one of my businesses that returns a nice portion of my income.

Google, you've disappointed me;

Google has introduced a new way to display their business listings, when the engine thinks you are looking for local results (this will depend largely on what market you are in) it will return local business listings. 

This means that the top two results are at the top of the page and you have to scroll quite a way down to get to position three, and that's where my ranking settled   Last week I would have been ecstatic as this is quite a competitive term.

Google has been doing this for a long time, but the new results are much larger and they have longer descriptions, they have even put a google map at the top of the sponsored listings! 

I always thought that the local listings were for local results ie when you type in 'wakefield photographer' or any search term appended with a term specific to an area, but my keyword phrase is targeting the whole of the UK (although people may prefer to use people nearby (hmm interesting) ).  I feel a little cheated and I need to rethink my strategy for this part of my business, but I always enjoy the learning curve balls that Google throws, afterall they are the daddies of online advertising

What this means to me:

1. I used to aim for a listing in the top three positions, with the new business listings, I now need to aim for position one or two (the business listings start at position three).
2. I need to pay more attention to Google Business Listings and make sure that I appear highly for these.
3. My PPC marketing has to be a little more aggressive as Google is putting their maps at the top of the sponsored links, we all know if we want the majority of the traffic we need to be as close to the top as possible.  At the moment if I'm in position five I will get clicks.  If this is a precedence for things to come (it might begin to affect more markets), if there is a great dirty horrible map taking up the top five spots, then this is going to affect my PPC stats.

Overall, I can't complain, because I should be aiming at the top spot anyway, this is just going to motivate me to do more than necessary to get the rankings.  I have been putting off optmising for google business for a while, so this is going make me want to learn more about how to get the best spot on Google Business.  Not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but I'm pretty good at PPC marketing anyway, so it probably won't affect me that much apart from having to share some of the traffic with business listings.