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Cold Hard Numbers on How Third-Party Reviews Help Google Places Rankings
Customer reviews are crucial to your local rankings and overall success in Google Places, as you may know. You need reviews that customers write directly on your Google Places page, and you need...
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The Local Business Reviews Ecosystem
In the offline world it’s hard to figure out exactly how your business gets a certain reputation, or exactly how “word gets around.” But online this is something you can actually figure out pretty...
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IYP Ranking Factors: Getting Visible in Local-Biz Directories
IYPs – short for “Internet Yellow Pages” – get a bum rap. Some of it is true: Yes, they’re directories, not search engines. Yes, some of them are mere flies on the windshield of Google. Yes, we often...
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An Overlooked Way to Report a Crooked Local Competitor
A recent conversation with my buddy, Darren Shaw of Whitespark.ca, led me to wonder: what is the best way to report a business that’s using a fake address or fake DBA to get ahead in the Google+ Local...
View ArticleBrightLocal Webinar on Local Reviews
Today I had the pleasure once again of speaking on a webinar put on by BrightLocal. It’s part of the InsideLocal series of webinars that’s been going since July, and that will continue through the end...
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Business Categories Lists for Major Local Search Sites
Categories are the forgotten child of local SEO. Though they don’t get much attention, categories do get respect: “Proper Category Associations” is the #1 “Foundational Ranking Factor” listed on...
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Google Helpouts Didn’t Have Time to Bleed
Google Helpouts and Jesse Ventura’s character in Predator have much in common: They both showed early promise, but got killed off way too soon. Well, on second thought, I guess that’s all they have in...
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How to Use Wildcard Searches for Local Keyword-Research: Lightning Round with...
Two little characters – the asterisk ( * ) and the underscore ( _ ) can help your keyword-research. Simply add them to various search terms you type into Google when researching keywords, and...
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20 Local SEO Techniques You Overlooked (Almost)
We local-SEO geeks talk about the same old basic principles a little too much: clean up your citations, don’t get penalized by Google, be mobile-friendly, earn “local” links, create “unique” content,...
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Which Local Review Sites Are on Your Side?
Not all review sites play games with customers and business owners. In that way, Yelp and Google+ are outliers. Reviews there are important, of course. But if you run into difficulty getting reviews...
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Who Can Write You an Online Review – Besides Customers?
Tricky question. Let’s start with the obvious gold standard: your customers write openly about their experiences with you in online reviews, and you did such a good job for them that those reviews...
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Lipstick on a Pig: Google Places “Report a Problem” Requests Now Rejected...
A couple days ago, Colan of Imprezzio Marketing reported that the next-to-useless “Report a problem” feature in Google Places had been revamped. I was excited. After all, Google made it easier to...
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Pasting or Embedding Google Reviews on Your Site: Will They Get Filtered?
For a few years now, people like me have told clients and others that it’s probably not a good idea to copy their Google reviews and paste them onto their site as testimonials. The concern is that...
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Hauling in More Local Customers…Even When Your Wheels Are Spinning
That’s the name of the talk I gave at MN Search yesterday. I covered 25 quick wins for attracting more local customers when you don’t know what to do next. Some of my suggestions are for local...
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25 Principles of Building Effective City Pages for Local SEO
So you want to create “city pages” to attract local customers in places where you don’t have an office. How can you make those pages attract customers rather than repulse them, rank well in the...
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Best Search Operators for Digging up Duplicate Local Citations
To claim your seat at the Local Feast, your citations need to be more or less correct. But you can’t fix those listings if you can’t find them. Tools are unreliable. Even the excellent Moz Local...
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20+ Depressing Observations about Yelp Reviews
I’ve seen Yelp from many angles: as a local SEO-er, as a local-reviews madman, as a consumer, as a two-year “Elite” reviewer, as a concerned citizen, and as a business owner. That means I’ve got a...
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How to Change Your CitySearch Business Categories without Breaking a Sweat
The categories you pick for your non-Google local listings also matter. They influence your rankings within those sites, and seem to influence your Google Places rankings at least a little. I’ve...
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How to Know If Your Local Reviews Strategy Works
Your review count and average ratings are just the tip of the iceberg. Your business might have 200 reviews and a 5-star average and your review strategy could still be a flop. That’s because lots of...
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Updated for 2015: How to Write a Google Review of a Local Business
Google has changed the steps for writing a Google Plus review…again. Unlike 3 years ago, this time Google made the steps a little simpler for customers, clients, and patients. The new “Collections”...
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