Negative Reviews in Local Search: A Survival Guide for Businesses. Online reputation management has been a hot topic around the web for some time. This can take many forms, including: Sites with negative things to say about your business showing up in the SERPs for searches on your brand name. Negative suggestions showing up in Google Suggest (e.g., "your brand scam"). Negative reviews showing up for your business in the local search results. Each of the above scenarios require significantly different steps to resolve. For example, consider the following set of reviews shown on the Google Places page for a restaurant near where I live: For the record, I enjoy this restaurant and think it does an excellent job. For many business owners this can be quite distressing to see.
You might also reach out and challenge the reviewer, call them a knucklehead, or outline in detail why they are wrong. Keep in mind that most of the people who will read your response are potential customers, not the person with the complaint. This is absolutely the place to start. List Your Business on Google Maps, Qype, Yelp, and More | GetListed.org | UK. Google Places Ranking Factors - The PhD Version. Bizible, a start-up that makes local marketing software for SMBs, approached me recently* to preview the results of a Google Places Ranking Factors study they had conducted and I was intrigued enough by their findings to share some of them here. Bizible’s team is made up of former Bing AdCenter guys and counts a PhD and a stats expert on their staff, so their study is a more scientific attempt to figure out what’s going on with Google Places than your typical “here’s what some SEOs think” kind of thing.
For methodology, they studied 30 potential ranking factors by querying approximately 20 cities across approximately 20 local categories (about 400 search terms), looking 30 results deep in Google Places rankings. They looked at each factor in isolation and then looked at them in combination to see if there were any multiplier effects.
So what did them fancy PhD-types discover? Some interesting stuff. Top 3 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages In Integrated Results Other Interesting Nuggets. How to Optimize Your Google+ Local Business Page. As a note, this blog post was supposed to publish last month around the announcement of Google+ Local. Unfortunately, I’ve been expecting Google+ to magically fix itself and update our currently blank profile image to one of the images we submitted. We’re still waiting. From what I hear, we’re not the only ones suffering. Even though Google is still working out the kinks of integrating Google+ Local with the rest of the social network, the following local business optimization tips will help you prepare for when the search empire finally get their Death Star fully operational.
What’s New With Google+ Local? [emailoptin type="social"][/emailoptin]Besides making your local business profile page look exactly like a Google+ Business page, the biggest change you’ll notice is the integration of the Zagat 30-point review system (Zagat joined the Google family last fall and now they’re doing everything to stick it to Yelp). How To Find Google+ Local Pages You know what really grinds my gears? A Brief History of Google Places [Infographic] | David Mihm. SEOs tend to work themselves into a frenzy over every minor news announcement that comes out of Mountain View–and one could probably say Local SEOs lie on the extreme end of the spectrum.
In some respects, it's understandable. Our space is constantly evolving, and to ignore these announcements can put us at a significant disadvantage relative to peers who are paying closer attention. At the same time, this frenetic pace can lead to a bit of information overload, and an inability to see the bigger picture–both in terms of Google's algorithm itself, and more broadly in terms of where the company is headed as it tries to stay ahead of its many competitors. I focus exclusively these days on a very small niche of SEO–Google Places– and even in this tiny little sliver of the online marketing world, I've found myself struggling to keep up over the past several months.
. + PDF Version (8.5" X 11") + PNG Version (1600px X 1200px) What do you think? David Mihm January 3, 2013 Portland, Oregon. Closing an Old Google+ Local Listing vs. Editing It. I have been getting a lot of questions lately about what a business should do if they have moved to a new location, or if they re-branded themselves in regards with their Google+ Local listing. The options are generally two: 1. Edit the old listing and add the new information (duh…) 2. “Close” the old listing and create a new one with the new information (duh?!) I know that if you’ve never had to deal with Google and if you are newcomers to the world of local search this topic might look completely silly to you, and you might be saying to yourself “Isn’t it more than obvious the correct answer is 1?”
- If the listing gets closed, all the reviews for the business will stay there forever. “You’ve moved locations. . - The old listing might have been ranking pretty well in the local search results and the business might have been getting a lot of new customers out of it. Unfortunately, the situation worsens. Why does Google do that? The Solution Have you had to deal with such cases?