Month: February 2017

Google’s Travel Time Patent

Can the amount of travel time someone might take to get to a place be a good indication of the quality of that place? That is the assumption behind a recently granted patent from Google that focuses upon local SEO.

Travel time in the patent is referred to as a “time investment a person may be willing to make to visit a specific location.” The travel time patent provides more details with the words:

Quality measures for locations are often based on one or more reviews related to the locations. For example, user reviews and/or professional reviews may be utilized to determine a quality measure for a given location. The quality measures may be associated with the given location in a database and may be utilized by one or more applications and/or provided to a user. For example, a user search for restaurants in a particular area may return search results for restaurants that are ranked based on the quality measure and/or that are displayed in combination with an indication of the quality measure. Indications of the quality measure may include a numerical rating, a number of stars, etc.

Continue reading “Ranking Local Businesses Based Upon Quality Measures including Travel Time”

Google was granted a local SEO patent this week to enable them to check whether people are following recommendations in search results to visit geographic locations – to see how many people actually visited those places. And it’s probably good for many businesses to have Google recommending that people visit them.

For example, people living near a certain restaurant may be recommended as a place they might like to go; and the patent determines whether or not people may be following those suggestions.

The patent provides a summary of the steps that it takes in ranking recommendations based upon whether people actually visit the places being suggested:

Continue reading “Google May Check to See if People Go to Geographic Locations Google May Recommend”