Local SEO citations: Do business description text variations matter? If yes how important is it to vary them?

[Raydon]

I would like to see what is the consensus here about this stuff as virtually any automated service, be it yext or yahoo, will use one description text and use it for every available listing in their ecosystem.

In general what is your take on varying this business description text? of course, I would personally put a safer bet on avoiding any duplicate text between listings and the domain of the business in any case. but my questions is more between listing vs listing.

THIS IS BAD - WHY?

THIS HAS NO IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER - WHY NOT?

and in conclusion and hindsight, would one need to watch out for duplicate content across non-domain assets used by the business so long as none of the content is duplicated from the business domain? I tried my best googling this, but did not find a straight answer anywhere.

I would really appreciate some experienced and insightful comments on this one

[eTundra]

I agree with what Miriam stated, but to play Devil's advocate, it would be interesting to do a study to see if things changed up (unique descriptions for each) would improve local rankings.  I get that it could be on the IYP/directory to make the changes to better their site, but wouldn't it be on the business owner to have unique content there to ensure their listing ranks higher than others that are using duplicate descriptions?

For example, I work with an eCommerce company that sells over 50,000 products, most of which are on other affiliate marketing channels.  Currently, our team members that run those channels pull the generic content that we're given from the manufacturer.  As we're going through updating our content to be unique for our individual product pages, I've asked them NOT to pull that content through the feed (our developers have helped them manage this part).  One of our team members, who's interested in SEO, asked me what would be the best way to help improve his listings on Amazon.  In my opinion, he could keep the generic content that hundreds of other competitors are using (they also pulled it from the manufacturer) or he could write unique content for Amazon and maybe, just maybe, have a better chance of those pages ranking higher than competitors because it is unique content, i.e. it's the business taking the initiative here.

To take this back to local SEO, that unique description for top players in the IYP/directoy realm could potentially bring in better results.  Again, this is only theoretical, I don't have solid proof around this, hence the reason for a study, but the person/company that does the study needs to think objectively here.

Great question by the way, I was wondering what others thought about this too, which is how I stumbled upon it.

[Whitespark]

Omid,

You could experiment with your own business. Build citations with varied descriptions to start, let it simmer for 4 months and record your local rankings. Then, go through and edit all those descriptions on the different sites to be the exact same. Let that simmer for another four months, and then check rankings again.

This will also be flawed because there are hundreds of other variables that you're not controlling for, but it might give some insight if there is a significant change in rankings.

[MiriamEllis]

My pleasure, Omid! And I'd love to see a post like that come through our YouMoz queue. I get to take the first look at all our submissions and would be happy to take a look at what you come up with if you do end up doing a study.

[Raydon]

Oh wow! You are awesome Miriam!

I think I will go ahead and conduct a study on this anyway, this presents a perfect opportunity as i have two clean and fresh slates to work with, one, for a client which I will do varied to be perfectly safe, and one for our own redesigned website to be launched soon, which I can take all the risk for and just do one single copy and see and compare the effects. Although it will be apples vs oranges due to totally different industries, but I doubt one ever gets to compare the two routes for the same type of business unless you are lucky enough (or shady enough) to have access to competing clients data...

I really do appreciate your post and time spent, deserves all the thumbs ups I can give it and may well get me to do this albeit somewhat flawed study.

Not sure if I will have the time to setup a fully controlled study... but it will be nice to get some idea of how this works. Hopefully i can report back soon in a youmoz post. Thanks again

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Omid,

I'd love to see some in-depth testing of this topic done, but to my knowledge, I've never seen anyone delve into this deeply. Nevertheless, I've seen lots of people ask about this. Here's the basic premise:

We know Google doesn't like duplicate content, yet, when we publish a business description on a local business listing, there is a high likelihood of that description getting replicated across the web due to the way data is shared within the Local Search Ecosystem. Does Google care about this type of duplication? Can it harm rankings? Can having varied descriptions help?

My personal opinion is that duplication is baked into the local search ecosystem and is largely unavoidable. After all, your business NAP (name, address, phone) is duplicate content when it is published across multiple platforms and logic dictates that Google has no problem with this.

However, as I've said, I don't know of any real studies of this but your question prompted me to have a brief chat with Darren Shaw and Andrew Shotland  and we were in pretty solid agreement about this.

Darren says: I have heard many people suggest that there are benefits to mixing up your description on your citations, but, it's unrealstic to imagine doing this on EVERY citation ... Maybe making 15 different versions and spreading those around.
I have not seen any evidence to support that there are benefits in doing this though ... just speculation

Andrew says: If anything, it's the IYPs that need to worry about it, not the businesses ... basically the same as a bunch of ecommerce sites having the same SKU description

I think Andrew raises an especially valid point! If there were to be ANY penalty associated with duplicate descriptions (which I highly doubt) it would be something for the IYP/directory who is publishing the content to worry about...not the local business owner.

So, my take on this is that it would be very interesting to experiment with whether varying the business descriptions as much as you can had any observable positive effect on rankings, but that I highly doubt duplicate descriptions have any negative effect - certainly not on the business owner.

That being said - you Local SEO researchers out there - if you're looking for a study to do, this would be a fun one! Hope this helps, Omid!