The Russia Effect

This post is intended for people in the Tampa Bay area. So if you live in Albuquerque, it may not be as relevant (to my knowledge, there is no Albuquerque in Russia), sorry!

But for you Floridians out there, I have an interesting experiement for you to try. Go to Google and search for st petersburg restaurants or st petersburg hotels. Go ahead - I'll wait...

Chances are, the map listings that come up in your search results looked something like this: Keen observers will note that every single listing is for St Petersburg, Russia! The organic listings seem to be a mix of Russia and Florida results. Muy interesante, no?

This is an interesting Google quirk, but perfectly understandable when you consider that St Petersburg, Florida has around 250,000 residents, and St Petersburg, Russia has almost 5 million, or about 20 times the population of our beloved little Sunshine City!

Taking this one step further, I've found that this "Russia Effect" has caused an interesting impact on search behavior. Even though the cities of Tampa and St Petersburg are roughly the same size, and have similar infrastructures and economies, users of Google and other search engines use "Tampa" as a geographic modifier far (like 10 times!) more often that "St Petersburg". Here are a couple of examples:


Term (#Monthly Phrase-Matched Searches on Google)

insurance tampa (18,000)
insurance st petersburg (1,600)
photography tampa (6,600)
photography st petersburg (720)

(Note: I suspect another contributing factor to this phenomenon is tourism - people from other areas of the country have been conditioned to think of this entire area as "Tampa" or "Tampa Bay" - but that's another blog post!)

Alas, we come to my point...What does this all mean for you as a local small business owner and internet marketer? A few thoughts come to mind:

1. If your business targets the entire Tampa Bay area, be sure your are using "Tampa" or "Tampa Bay" in your web content, title and meta tags, and other ad copy. You need not exclude other local references like St Petersburg, Clearwater, etc. - just don't make them your primary focus.

2. If your business markets specifically and only to St Petersburg, Florida, be sure to append "FL" or "Florida" to St Petersburg throughout your content, so that search engines and human visitors alike know which city you're in. Otherwise they may assume you're wearing one of those fuzzy hats and drinking vodka for breakfast!
3. If you have the opportunity to do so legitimately (i.e. you have an address and/or phone number in Tampa that can be tied to your business), consider setting up a seperate Google Places (Maps) listing with a Tampa address and phone number - you might be surprised how much more business it generates than a St Petersburg listing.

Until next time, Do svidaniya my friends!