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Which Awards Grow Your Local-Search Stature?

February 13, 2012 2 Comments

How decorated and distinguished is your business?Every now and then I stumble across a business in Google Places that has a sweet “best-of” –type award sitting right at the top of its Places page.

I don’t run across these awards too frequently—but when a business has one, I notice it.

More often than not it’s a “Best of CitySearch” award, but sometimes I see other types.

Example of an award highlighted on a Google Places page

For a few years I’ve wondered how many “best local business” awards are out there and (more importantly) which ones can help a business attract more local customers in one way or another.

I did a little research and found some distinctions that can help your local visibility in some or all of the following ways.  These are awards that:

  • Google will showcase prominently at the top of your Places page,
  • You can take a picture of and upload as a photo on your Google Places page,
  • You can feature prominently and “talk up” on your website,
  • Earn you a link from the site that awarded you the distinction, or
  • Increase your visibility and reputation to customers on local-business sites other than Google Places.

Here are some of the most visibility-enhancing awards you can win (depending on your industry):

Angie’s List Super Service Award (see example on Places page)

Best of CitySearch (see example on Places page)

Gayot awards (see example on Places page)

MojoPages: MojoAwards

OpenTable: Diner’s Choice (see example on Places page)

TravelandLeisure awards (see example on Places page)

TripAdvisor: Traveler’s Choice

Vitals: Patients’ Choice

Take a look at this spreadsheet for more info about each award.

Chances are your business is eligible for at least one of those awards.  But not necessarily.   It depends largely on your industry.  Just look into the ones that seem as though they might apply to you (that’s why I made the spreadsheet).

What if you try hard to get recognized as a “best-of” but don’t end up winning the blue ribbon?  Well, you’ll still come out ahead.  In order to pursue the award in the first place, you need to get tons of positive feedback from customers—often in the form of glowing reviews.  Those third-party reviews can help your Places ranking hugely (as you may know).  You’ll also boost your prominence or rankings on the site where you’ve been pursuing the award, which will mean more visibility to potential customers who use that site.

Most likely you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results of your push to win—and you’ll get a snazzier-looking Places page, a good link, more bragging rights, and probably more local customers out of the deal.

By the way, please leave a comment if you know of any really good local-biz awards that aren’t on my list.  Extra kudos if you can find awards that you’ve seen highlighted on someone’s Google Places page (and that aren’t on my list).

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9 Known Ranking Factors of Reviews in Google Places

November 28, 2011 10 Comments

Maybe your business has 2 reviews and sits proudly atop Google Places.

Or maybe you’ve busted your butt for 40 customer reviews but still toil at #13 on page 2 of Google.

Perhaps your competitor is outranking you…even though he has 3-star average rating and you have a 5-star average.

You’re well aware that reviews influence your Google Places ranking.  That’s as true as ever.  So what gives?

Simply this: a review is not a review.

Numbers do matter—a lot.  So does your average rating.

But Google looks at many aspects of your reviews when deciding how to rank your business in Google Places.

Why should you care?  Well, because you need a rough idea of whether your reviews are helping, hurting, or having no affect on your Google Places ranking.  That tells you whether your current review-solicitation strategy is right on the money or needs serious tweaking.

9 factors distinguish good Google Places reviews from lousy onesAt least 9 factors seem to determine how your reviews influence your local ranking.  I’ve noticed these on my own, and David Mihm touches on most of these factors in his excellent “Local Search Ranking Factors.”

It’s impossible to tell which single factor is the most important, which one is second-most important, etc.   But what is clear is that the more of these qualities your reviews have, the more likely it is you’ll outrank local competitors in Google Places.

Anyway, without further ado, the main review factors (in no particular order):

  • Total number.  The grand total of all your reviews on all the sites where customers may have written reviews for you—Google Places, CitySearch, InsiderPages, etc.

Factor: total # of reviews

  •  Total number of “Google reviews.”  Long story short, Google pays somewhat more attention to its own “brand” of reviews.  All other things being equal, you get more ranking benefit from 10 Google Places reviews than from, say, 10 SuperPages reviews (in my experience).

Factor: total # of Google reviews

  • Total number of reviews on third-party sites.  In other words, how many customer reviews you have on sites other than Google Places.

Factor: total # of reviews on third-party sites

  • Average rating.  Newsflash: a 5-star average is better than a 4-star average.
  • Relevance to services.  Your reviews help your ranking more if they contain phrases that are relevant to the services you’re trying to get found for.  A review that says “Best dentist in town” is more beneficial than one that says “Dr. John Doe is the best!”

Factor: keyword-relevance to your specific services

  • Relevance to location.  One of the big “questions” that Google tries to determine is whether your business is, in fact, local.  If reviews seem to confirm that you are located in the area you claim to be located in, Google’s more likely to rank you well.  So, to go back to my previous example, a review that says “Best dentist in town” is not as good as one that says “Best dentist inCleveland.”
  • Velocity.  AKA the speed at which you receive reviews.  If you get 5 reviews in 5 weeks, your Places ranking is more likely to improve than if you get 5 reviews in a year.  Receiving reviews at a healthy pace is one indication that you run a fully operational business, and that customers emerge alive and well and willing to write you reviews from time to time.  To Google, it’s just another sign that you run a quality business.
  • Diversity of sites.  Do you only have reviews on MojoPages, or do you have them on MojoPages, CitySearch, InsiderPages, YellowPages, and Google Places?  The more sources your reviews come from, the better.

Factor: diversity of sites where you have reviews

  • Prominence / authority of third-party sites.  20 customer reviews on a well-established site like CitySearch will probably get you more Google Love than if you had 20 reviews on some dinky little site nobody’s ever heard of.  (Note: Yelp reviews used to influence over your Google Places ranking heavily, but ever since July 2011, when Google stopped using Yelp’s data, Yelp reviews haven’t seemed to pack as much of a wallop).

There are some other aspects of reviews that may influence your Google Places ranking, but that I haven’t seen as much evidence for.  To some extent, I’m speculating.  Anyway, consider these 4 “maybe” factors:

  • Who writes the reviews.  It only makes sense that a Google review from a customer who’s written 20 reviews for other businesses would count for more than a review written by someone who’d never written a Google review and just opened a Google account 5 minutes ago.  I haven’t verified that this is the case, but it makes sense that the history / activity of the reviewer’s Google account would matter.
  • Pace.  I’ve noticed that businesses seem to rank most highly when they can get a steady stream of reviews.  If you get 30 reviews in a weekend and then none for a month, the alarms are likely to go off at Google.
  • Age of oldest reviews.  In the organic SEO world, “domain age” (how old your website name is) gives you a slight advantage in the rankings.  Similarly—all other things being equal—if you have reviews that are 3-5 years old, I’m sure Google gives you a slight edge over (say) a competitor whose oldest reviews are from earlier this year.
  • User feedback.  If people consistently visit your Places page and flag your reviews as “inappropriate,” I imagine that those specific reviews—be they 1-star of 5-star—would influence your ranking less.  Of course, if they’re flagged enough, Google may remove them entirely.  Similarly, the extent to which people rate your reviews “helpful” most likely affects how much influence they have over your Google Places ranking.

I think you could draw one of two conclusions from all of this:

Conclusion 1:  “Holy $#!%, I totally underestimated Google!  I’m going to have to put in overtime in my laboratory to conjure up the kinds of reviews that Google ‘likes’!”

OR

Conclusion 2:  “Google’s is just trying to determine if my reviews are real, written willingly by my customers.  I’m just going to keep it simple and ask a bunch of my customers for reviews.”

The best thing to know about these factors is you can’t control all of them: you really cannot and should not try to cook up the reviews, nor should you be too heavy-handed in ask customers where, when, and how to write the reviews for you.

Instead, if you ask enough customers for reviews, over time you’ll cover all the bases (the “ranking factors”).  And that will ensure that your reviews, as a whole, will have the one quality that Google can’t detect but that will win you the most customers: authenticity and sincerity.

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Any interesting stats, tests, or case studies that I should know about?  Any review factors that I forgot to include, or that you think belong on the “maybe” list?  Leave a comment!

By the way, here’s a one-page “tip sheet” I slapped together a few months ago on best practices for asking customers for reviews.

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Filed Under: Attracting Customers - the Human Element, Local Visibility – the Technical Side, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , ,

Unorthodox Strategy: Testimonial Photos on Your Google Places Page

November 9, 2011 4 Comments

Do you have hard-earned testimonials that you feel don’t get enough exposure?  Do they just sit contently on your site, largely unseen by potential customers?

Try adding your testimonials as photos to your Google Places page.  Just take screenshots of them and upload them to the normal “Photos” area of your Places page.  Or maybe you already have photos of them—all the better.

I’m not talking about customer reviews.  Obviously, reviews are crucial to your Google Places ranking and to your ability to attract customers in general.  Rather, I’m talking strictly about the testimonials that customers have already written for you.

Why bother shoehorning your testimonials into your Places page?  Well, because the whole point of testimonials is to have potential customers see them.  This builds trust.  If you have them on your website, great.  But you can take it a step further by making your testimonials visible to the local people who find your Places page.

Here’s an example of how a testimonial might look when uploaded to your Places page:

I’ve never seen this done “in the wild.”  However, there must be some business out there that has its testimonials viewable on the Places page.  I’m sure I’m not the first to think of it.

By the way, that’s why I call this strategy “unorthodox”: businesses just don’t do it, even though they can and (I would say) should. You will be the first in your local market to leverage your Places photos in this way.

A couple of suggestions for the testimonials / photos you upload to your Places page:

- Make it clear that they’re testimonials.  You could just include a bold header in the actual picture that says “Testimonials” or something like that.  Ideally, this would be readable as a thumbnail—so that visitors / potential customers can tell that you have testimonials without actually having to click on the slideshow view of your Places photos.

-Have the testimonial photo(s) be among the first 3-4 photos uploaded to your Places page.  You’ll want at least one of the testimonial photos to be visible in the new Google Places “preview” area to the right of your Places listing.  You’ll also want to have some of the testimonials to be visible as thumbnails to anyone who’s on your Places page.  In either case, if people can tell from a thumbnail that you’ve got some testimonials, there’s a good chance they’ll click and see the nice full-sized testimonial.

- Include your customers’ first and last names. Otherwise your testimonials might come across as phony.  (Obviously, you should double-check with your customers first to make sure this is OK.)

- Mention that there are more testimonials to be found on your website (unless, of course, you’re able to stuff all your testimonials into the “Photos” area of your Places page).  You can do this by editing your photos to include a little caption or watermark that says something like “More customer testimonials at www.example.com”.  In addition to building cred with your potential customers, one of the main goals of including the testimonials on your Places page is to get people to go your website.  That’s why you need to leave them little trails of breadcrumbs that lead to your site.

-Don’t overdo it, of course.  If 3 of your Places photos (out of the total of 10 you can upload) contain customer testimonials, that’s plenty.  The rest of your photos should highlight all the other great aspects of your business that are worth showcasing in your Places photos.

By the way, the pictures of the testimonials don’t need to be pretty.  But if you want to spend a few minutes dolling them up, I suggest using SnagIt.  (I’m not an affiliate; just a raving fan.)

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If you do apply this unorthodox strategy, I’d really like to hear about it.

And of course, please let me know if you spot a business “in the wild” that does this.

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Filed Under: Attracting Customers - the Human Element, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , ,

Google Places Scavenger Hunt: Find Me a Blended Review

October 12, 2011 9 Comments

The Google Places Scavenger HuntWhat’s a “blended review”?  It’s where a customer writes a review of a business and uploads photos to that business’s Google Places page—which results in the review and pictures being “blended” in the review area.

I discovered “blended reviews” last week.  Here’s the LONE example I’ve been able to find so far—for Mike’s Pastry in Boston (my all-time favorite):

Challenge: find a "blended review" in Google Places

I want to learn more about these “blended reviews”—who has them, the kind of customers who leave them, how they’re ranked within the Google Places review area, etc.

Trouble is, I just burned out  my eyeballs by spending way too long looking for another example of one.  I came up dry, and will probably need to go buy a pair of Coke-bottle glasses after this.

That’s why I’m offering you a bounty.  If YOU can send me a link to a business in Google Places that has at least one “blended review” (as described above), I’ll give you a free Google Places review handout or a “Best Ever” review handout.

Two caveats: (1) you can’t simply send me a link to your Places page (where it’s easy enough to get a non-customer to upload a review and photos), and (2) you can’t send me a link to a business that you reviewed and uploaded photos of.

In other words, it’s got to be a “blended review” that occurs in the wild—like of a business you’ve been to or stumbled across in Google Places.

Bonus: if you can find me a naturally occurring blended review that is NOT for a hotel, tourist attraction, restaurant, or any place that sells food or drink, I’ll give you a free Google Places review handout AND a handout for getting “Best Ever” Google reviews.  What I’d love to find is a business in a service industry (landscaping, roofing, plumbing, etc.) or a profession (doctor, lawyer, etc.) that has a blended review.

Up to the task?  In the words of Cosmo Kramer…giddy up!

Special thanks to Linda Buquet and Nyagoslav Zhekov, who clued me in to the extreme scarcity of blended reviews.

–Update (10/14)–

We’ve actually found a few more examples of blended reviews.  Eric Marshall of ZCreative.com found this one.

I also found a couple of others (by the same user who did the blended review for Mike’s Pastry) here and here.

Notice that the blended reviews consistently rise to the top of the list of Google reviews.  Sure, obviously Google considers them relevant reviews, because of all the bold keyphrases/sentiment fragments in the actual text of the reviews.  And yes, Google does tend to put the more recent reviews at the top of the heap.

But based on even this little “core sample,” it’s pretty clear so far that Google gives blended reviews a spotlight.  They’re inherently super-prominent just because they contain pictures—and Google is making blended reviews doubly prominent by featuring them at the top of the customer-review area.

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Filed Under: Adapting to Google's Changes, Announcements, Attracting Customers - the Human Element, New Stuff in Google Places Tagged With: , ,

19 Species of Google Places Photos – Good and Bad

September 29, 2011 5 Comments

Photos don’t directly affect your ranking in Google Places, but they’re mighty important to your local visibility.

All customers who find you in Google Places will see at least one of your photos.  Your photos sit near the top of your Places page.  Your main photo sometimes shows up on the first page of the local results (assuming your business is on the 1st page).  They’re always visible to customers who are combing through local businesses in the “Maps” tab.

Photos are front-and-center in Google Places.  Bad photos can repel customers, but good ones can win you some phone calls.

But how do you tell good photos from lousy ones, other than by trusting your gut?  Don’t look to the Google Places photo guidelines for help with this: they just tell you the photo can’t be larger than such-and-such dimensions, can’t contain violence or nudity, etc.  Not exactly news to you.

Here are some photo types that are likely to attract customers—and some photos that are better at repelling them.  (By the way, all the photos below are ones I actually found on real Places pages.)

Great photos to add to your Places listing and website (in no particular order):

  • A group photo of you and your staff—either outside or inside your building.  If you don’t have a staff and instead run a “mom and pop” type of business, maybe include a photo of you and your spouse (or whomever) at your building.
  • Human faces are great.  I suggest you have at least some pictures of your face and those of the people who help you keep the business chugging along.  Your customers would rather buy from other people, not from some faceless fat-cat corporation.  Just make sure there’s context, like having the picture taken in your office or on a job site, or else you’ll just look like a really mature-looking high schooler in a yearbook photo.
  • Your main service or product in all its glory.  Obviously, it kind of depends on what your service or product is, but that’s why our brains are blessed with the Judgment Lobe.
  • Front sign.  Make sure you capture a little bit of what’s around the sign (AKA some background), so that the sign doesn’t look Photoshopped or as though it doesn’t actually exist in the real world.
  • Your storefront or office.  Try to take the picture on a sunny day (might have to wait a few months if you live in Seattle or here in New England).  If possible, try to take it from far enough away that people might say “Hey, I know where that is!”
  • A photo of you “in action.”  Same caveat as above: it needs to appear candid, so that you don’t look like you’re on a photo op.  It also has to be obvious what you’re doing.  Roofer up on a roof = good.  Person sitting at a desk with a bunch of papers = bad.
  • Awards your business has won.  Blue ribbons, plaques, certificates, or a picture from a website that gave you some award worth mentioning (like “Best of CitySearch 2011).  Anything that bolsters credibility.  It doesn’t matter if you haven’t been featured in Forbes yet: just use whatever you’ve got.
  • Pretty much any of the above pictures with captions added.  Captions attract people’s attention.  “How do I add captions to photos in Google Places,” you ask?  Well, you can’t.  So you have to add the wording to the picture itself (which you then upload as you would any other picture).  I like to do this in SnagIt Editor, but Photoshop or most other editing tools work just fine.
  • A picture of your Better Business Bureau rating—if you have one, and assuming it’s good (A or A+).  Thing is, you need to make it clear that your rating is actually real.  That’s why this is an ideal picture to add a caption to, in order to tell visitors exactly how they can find your business on BBB and see your rating first-hand.
  • Coupons or special offers that just can’t fit in the “Offers” area of your Google Places page.
  • Credit cards you accept.  Customers have to know how they can pay you—like whether they have to bring their checkbook or stop by the ATM.  Especially now that you can’t specify “payment types accepted” on your Places listing, it’s smart to let customers know about accepted payment types sooner rather than later.
  • Late addition:  a picture of your logo (especially if it’s a nice one).  This is a relatively common practice, but a good one.  Thanks to James for suggesting this one.

 

Lousy photos—to avoid using on your Places page:

  • Blurry photos.  Everything but a cotton ball looks worse when it’s blurry.
  • Red eyes.  Just take 5 minutes to remove them (with Photoshop or whatever program you prefer).
  • Stock photos.  These are often cheesy—like a bunch of “employees” high-fiving each other above their cubicles, smiling for no apparent reason. It’s also a lousy feeling when you stumble across another business that’s using the exact same stock photo you paid good money for.
  • Tiny photos.  Obviously, only thumbnails are visible to customers, but if people click on a photo, that means they want to see a larger version of it.
  • Pictures of you without your staff.  Unless you’re truly a one-person operation, this can appear egotistical.  And don’t say “Well, we’re always getting new receptionists.”  Your customers won’t be able to tell if Ruth at the front desk doesn’t work for you any more.  But if you’re OCD about this kind of thing, just another picture when your staff changes.
  • Really old photos.  If the people in your photo are sporting mullets and parachute pants, it may be time to take a new one.
  • Abstract photos.  If you’re a landscaper, a picture of a single blade of green grass just doesn’t add anything to your Places page.
  • Not too behind-the-scenes.  For instance, if you’re a dentist, don’t use a picture of you smiling in your dentist’s chair while you stick a drill in a patient’s face.  Or don’t take a picture of the waiting room or your office where a bunch of dental tools are in the sink waiting to get cleaned (I’ve actually seen this done, unfortunately).

You can add 10 photos to your Google Places page, and as many as you want to your site.  That sounds like a lot of room for all kinds of photos.  But if you’re serious about attracting as many local customers as possible, you’ll always need to pick every photo wisely.

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Can you think of any keepers/stinkers that you’d add to either list?  Leave a comment!

(By the way, if you haven’t seen it already, there are plenty of examples of bad photos in the blog post I did a while back, the 1st Annual Google Places Freak Show.  You’ve seen the good and bad—and this is where you can see the ugly.)

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