Archive for August, 2010

26 Aug

Don’t Be Fooled By Yelp’s Absence

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Citations, Google Places, Links, Ranking Factors, Reviews, Yelp.

Much has been said about Yelp’s removal from Google Places as a review/citation source. It’s unfortunate, because Yelp’s review system is unique and assures quality reviews from quality commentators. Google Places offered great exposure for Yelp; people see the reviews, along with a link to the business’s profile page over on Yelp. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of reason for a user to click through to the original review. Also, there’s no real SEO value to the link itself. Yelp’s corporate staff weighed the advantages and disadvantages of allowing Google to repurpose their content and decided against it.

I suspect, however, that Google still recognized Yelp as an incredibly authoritative review source, and just because they don’t appear doesn’t mean they aren’t being considered as a citation and review source, insofar as ranking in the Google Local SERPs is concerned. Don’t neglect your Yelp profile!

20 Aug

Checkin Wars: Claim Your Business!

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Checkins, Facebook, Foursquare, Ranking Factors.

Big news this week coming from Facebook:  Checkins! The checkin wars have officially begun.  Google Places will probably have something similar as well.  It’s only a matter of time before checkins become a huge factor in local search ranking.  Let’s see who comes out ahead, but for now, there’s going to be another required verification stop for any business owner – the list just keeps growing longer…

If you haven’t already, claim your business on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Foursquare, Yelp, and now Facebook.

17 Aug

Radically Different Local SERPs Found In The Wild

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in IYP, Paid Advertising, SERPs Layout, Uncategorized, Universal Results.

Mike Blumenthal has been doing some great work today exploring the different test SERPs layouts that Google is testing out.  If you’re just joining the conversation now, here’s what the new layout looks like (Thanks for the screenshots Mike):

New SERPs (maybe)

Basically, what Google is doing here is meshing the organic results with the local results.  While Google used to simply stick their 7 most relevant local results at the top, above the 10 organic results, Google is now giving those local listings much more screen real estate, pushing the bottom seven organic results off the page and onto the next page.  As many industry watchers are saying, this is bad news for the IYPs.

A few interesting things to notice here:  For the first time, Google is actually altering the organic results.  If you showed up organically at #1 for “NY plumber,” and you ALSO had a local business result in the top 7, you lose your organic result.

There seem to be a massive amount of paid ads on the page.  In one screenshot, I counted 3 on top and eight down the side.  I’ve never seen 11 sponsored links on one page before (I’m no expert on this – correct me if I’m wrong here).

Bearing in mind that this is just a test SERPs page, and Google may or may not decide to implement it for the mainstream searchers, it does give us a nice insight as to where Google is headed with Local Search.  They definitely seem more confident now in the accuracy of the Google Maps results, and feel that providing business listings from maps is the correct (most relevant) answer to a business+location query.

16 Aug

Cool Trick for Advertising on Your Competitors’ Place Pages

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Google, Google Places, Paid Advertising.

You may have noticed on the center right part of your place page that Google runs some ads.  This is a great place for ads – anyone who is looking a plumber’s Place Page, for example, is probably a pretty good potential customer for any other customer.  Here’s how you can run ads exactly in that spot.

Great spot for ads!

Go to adwords.google.com, follow the instructions to create a new account (unless you already have an account).

Create a new campaign, for the “networks” setting select Display Network only, and click the setting for “Relevant pages only on the placements and audiences I manage.”

On the next page, when you select managed placements, select ONLY maps.google.com.  This will show your ad on your competitors’ Place Pages.  Clicks on the Display Network are frequently only 1/2 to 1/3 the price of a Search Network click, but visitors from these pages are usually just as high quality, if not higher. Nice!

Added bonus – besides maps.google.com, experiment with other business directories that serve AdSense ads, like InsiderPages, JudysBook, or something specific to your industry.

15 Aug

Google Throws Solutions at a Wall to See What Sticks

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Google, Google Places.

Google’s been catching some criticism over the last year or two for ignoring small business owners concerns and being notoriously hard to reach, particularly over in our little corner of the search-o-sphere, Local Search.

If you need any sort of customer service when it comes to Google Places, try posting to the Google Maps help forums and hope for a good response from somebody who knows what they’re talking about.  Good luck resolving any merger issues, and forget about reporting any obvious map spam that you’re competing with.  Even the community edits feature it frustrating – users report making changes, and waiting a month for it to take effect, if it ever does.  Now there are reports of Google actually verifying every community edit by phone, an annoying and cumbersome process.

In the last couple of weeks Google seems to be making more of an effort.  They’re allowing business responses to customer reviews, which is a plus (though why not allow responses to non-Google reviews?).

They just announced a small business blog, which I find long overdue.  Until now, the go-to place for Google places related info was the Lat-Long blog, which has always been Google’s hub for all maps related news, and Google Places (or the Local Business Center, as it was known back in the day) definitely fell under that heading.  However, any marketing guy or small business owner who went there for information was probably annoyed at it’s techie, aw-shucks, look-at-these-cool-new-features attitude.  Too much “Better resolution maps! Cool volcano ash pictures!  Bike trail mapping!” and not enough help for small business owners hoping for more visibility online.  Hopefully, that’s where the small business blog will come in, which was actually announced on Lat-Long, in between breathless pronouncements about the floods in Pakistan, and new hi-res images of the Sphinx.

Another dart thrown at the SMB dartboard this week is the Tools for Online Success website.  I’m still not sure what to make of it yet.  It’s a pretty static site with a few helpful videos (though not to anyone who’s not a total Local Search newbie).  Perhaps “site,” is too strong a word – it’s more of a glorified YouTube channel.  Here’s hoping they get some better and more frequently updated content up there soon.  But for now, I’m still recommending GetListed.org as my go to source for do-it-yourself SMB marketers.

12 Aug

This Week in Local Search – August 12, 2010

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Roundup.

The brand new Google Small Business blog announced the brand new Tools for Online Success.  Yawn.  It’s like a corporate, not-as-helpful, trimmed down version of GetListed.org.

Matt McGee shows off a new tool he discovered that organizes all the citations in the 7-Pack for a given keyword+geoterm.  Exactly the sort of tool which could have been useful in the Tools for Online Success, but is obviously not going to be there.

Google makes it easier than ever to search from a mobile phone with Gesture Search.

And finally, Google shows how the new click-to-call option on their mobile ads reduced one advertisers cost per acquisition by 30% – numbers that could make or break a small business’s online advertising budget.

Share

11 Aug

Spy On Your Competitors’ Citation Profiles

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Citations, Google Places.

Matt McGee discovered an interesting tool for finding your competitors’ citations, and it’s not a bad one.  The folks over at Ontolo have put together an automated version of their citation tracking by phone number method.  Basically, the way it works is like this – the phone number is the one absolutely unique element of any business.  A company name could be repeated, or even an address in an office building.  But by Googling a phone number, you’re guaranteed relevant results for the business you’re searching for.  In fact, when you Google a phone number, the results are a complete listing of that business’s online presence…otherwise known around here as a complete citation record.

The tool automates this process, and generates a list of unique domains, sorted by the frequency they show up in the citation profiles of the 7-pack listings.  So now you just need to duplicate your competitors’ efforts and add a few of your own, and you’re all set!

The only additional feature I wish for would be a way to go deeper than just the 7-pack.  Why not show citations for the top 20 (or 200) businesses?

10 Aug

Keeping Your Review Record Healthy and Spread Out

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Uncategorized.

While citations are important for local search, reviews shouldn’t be neglected.  David Mihm has his theory of citations being the new links, and I’d like to add a corollary – reviews are the new link profile of the sites linking to you (it’s a bit of a mouthful, but it works).  In other words, just like a site that has a hundred sites linking to it still won’t rank well if none of those sites have links to them, a citation in Google Places isn’t as valuable as a citation that comes with reviews, showing that the citation represents an active online presence for that business.

It’s not a perfect rule, especially considering that some citation sources don’t have the possibility of reviews at all, and also the fact that a citation without reviews is still a much more powerful ranking factor compared to a link from a linkless site.  But it’s a pretty good rule of thumb.  Basically – you want reviews.

Show Google a healthy Review Profile:

Step 1: Look at the other businesses in your sector that are ranking well in Google Maps.  Check out the reviews they have on other sites, and pay attention to what’s being pulled in by Google Places.  For example, if you’ve got a restaurant, it’s important to have good reviews on Yelp, UrbanSpoon, and Zagat.  Add TripAdvisor to that list if you service the tourists.   These are the review sites that you need to pump your reviews into.

Step 2: Create a review hub page on your site.  It should be located at yoursite.com/reviews.  The hub page should be a series of links to other sites that you have profiles on  - the list you created back in Step 1.  Order some business cards with the express intent of giving them to customers AFTER you’ve done the work for them.  If you’re a restaurant, you can put it with the check.  The business card should have a short message about your business, some contact information if they ever need you again, and most importantly, ask the customer to leave a comment or a review on yoursite.com/reviews.

If you have your clients’ email addresses, drop them a line soon after you do business with a link directly to that page.  The point is, you want to be driving traffic to that specific page of your website.  As time goes by, change the order of the links, or add or remove different sites as your review profile needs curating.  If you have 100 reviews on UrbanSpoon but none on Zagat, move it down the list.

Step 3 (optional): For the programming ninjas out there, set up a redirect on yoursite.com/reviews to your citations that you want to generate reviews for.  You can stagger the redirects so that not everybody is redirected to the same site.  For restaurants, try something like 40% Yelp, 30% UrbanSpoon, 15% Zagat, and another 15% to something local.  Pay attention to how your review profile develops, and adjust the redirects accordingly.

If you do this right, you’ll soon be seeing a nice healthy review profile growing across a diverse field of sites.  Good luck!

Share

6 Aug

Weekly Local Search Roundup – August 6, 2010

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Google Places, Links, Reviews, Roundup.

I think it’s probably a good idea to do these roundups every week, and I’m certainly going to try.  I plan on doing these every Thursday, but got a little distracted yesterday by the Jerusalem Wine Festival, so my inaugural Weekly Local Search Roundup is going to have to be a day late, and slightly hung over.

The biggest news this week has probably been Google Places’ newest feature:  Respond to Reviews.

Mike Blumenthal breaks the news first.

Miriam Ellis is thrilled at the good news she can now share with her clients (as am I!)

David Mihm claims that this change propels Google Places down a Facebook Fan Page intercept path, and promises an in depth future post on this – which I’m definitely looking forward to.

Andrew Shotland also weighs in on the impact Facebook is starting to have on Local Search marketing strategies, and writes up a great in-depth look at comScore’s 2010 stats.

Matt McGee welcomes the new Google Small Business Blog, something that’s been a long time in coming.

Perhaps the most overrated news this week (and I also jumped on that bandwagon) is the fact that Google will now be calling local businesses to confirm location and DBA details.  A closer look at Google’s message is that this is only relevant to verifying community edits, making this not that big a deal at all (it’s not a broad reverification campaign), but I’ll be keeping an eye on this story to see how it develops.

Share

5 Aug

Google Places: Respond to Reviews Feature Could Be Better

Posted by Menachem Pritzker in Google Places, Reviews.

Responding to reviews is a critical feature for reputation management, and now Google lets you do precisely that.  The benefits are enormous – business owners finally have a voice to combat malicious or even fake reviews, and even just say thanks to great reviews.

Here are a few features I hope we’ll see added to this one:

The response is basically a comment on the review.  Why not allow anybody to comment on the review, ala Facebook style?  It’s basically a more informative alternative to the “Was this review helpful?” feature Google Places has already had for a while.

Responding to reviews should be an option that’s available to all reviews, pulled from all sites.  Not just the reviews generated on the company’s Place Page!  C’mon Google, this one’s a no brainer.  If reviews on InsiderPages or Yelp are important enough to be shown on the Place Place, why should they be treated any differently re: responding?

Share

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.