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Cleanup Time for Your Google Places Page and Site

December 8, 2011 4 Comments

I’m always telling you what you should add to your Google Places page and your website in order to rank visibly to local customers.  But what about the stuff you shouldn’t include?  What should not be on your Places page or website?

As perhaps you’ve noticed by now, getting visible in Google is largely a process of communication.  You’re trying to tell Google certain facts about your business, in order to rank as highly as possible in your local market.  If you communicate clearly, you’re more likely to get what you’re after.

(Of course, Google won’t do everything you hope it will: if you stuff your Places page and website with 50 keywords that you want to get visible for, you’ll be disappointed.)

Is your local visibility smothered in virtual garbage?So what you need to do is eliminate mess from your “local presence.  You need to remove online clutter that can trip up Google and hurt your local rankings or (worse) earn your listing a suspension.  There’s a lot of garbage floating around Google Places and the rest of the Web, and it can hurt your local visibility to customers.

The good news is cleaning up is easy and quick.  It may be all that’s necessary (a) to resolve any suspensions by Google or (b) to give you the visibility boost you’ve been looking for, or both.

Here are the areas I suggest you pay attention to and clean up if need-be:

To remove from your Google Places page / account:

  • Remove duplicate Google Places listings (that is, multiple listings of the same business).  If any duplicates show up when you’re logged into your “Dashboard,” get Google to delete them.  Then go to Google and search for your business by name, in order to find any unverified duplicate listings that you may not have known about (and probably never created personally).  Try to get those removed, too (here’s an excellent post that might help with this).
  • Kill off any extra phone numbers on your Places page.  There should only be one number on your Places page—and it had better use a local area code.  Don’t include additional phone numbers anywhere on the page (fax numbers are OK).
  • Remove city/town names from the name of your Places page (unless they’re part of your real DBA) and from your “Categories” fields.  Google sees the inclusion of these as a spam tactic.  Obviously, many businesses get away with keyword-stuffing, but I’ve also seen a number of listings get suspended for it.
  • Scrub out any extra search terms (“keywords”) from your business name.  As with the location names, search terms are OK to include in the “Company/Organization” field of your listing Google if they’re actually part of your real business name.  Otherwise, you risk getting your listing pulled.

Keyword-stuffing in Google Places business name

  • Get rid of redundancies between your “Categories” and your “Description.”  If you select “Landscaping Design” as a business category, don’t call yourself a “landscaping design specialist” in your description, and vice versa.
  • Remove or edit “Additional Details” fields that contain keywords or location names that appear in the “Categories” or “Description” areas of your Places page.

To remove from your website

  • Remove all crawlable phone numbers OTHER THAN the one you use for your Places page.  For instance, if you have a line of text that contains a phone number that isn’t the one you list on your Places page, you’ll confuse Google.  The only way you can include additional phone numbers on your site without gumming up Google’s bots is to add them as images—not as normal, “readable” text on your site (you know text is readable if you can highlight, copy, and paste it).  Of course, even if you include additional phone numbers as images, you’ll want to think hard about whether their presence might confuse would-be customers.

Multiple crawlable phone numbers = bad for Google Places visibility

  • Shorten any parts of your title and description tags that are LONGER than 70 and 155 characters, respectively.  Make your title and description tags fit within those character lengths, or else customers won’t be shown the excess parts in the search results.  I haven’t seen evidence that excessively long meta tags harm Google Places rankings, but the name of the game is to attract customers.  Customers are less likely to visit your site—whether it appears in the organic or the “blended” Google Places search results—if they can’t even read your entire title / description tags.
  • Eliminate repetition in your title and description tags.  Don’t have your title tag read “Austin plumbing, Austin plumber, plumbing company Austin TX” and so forth.  It doesn’t help your rankings in the least, and it’s just gibberish in the eyes of potential customers.  This is particularly true of the title tag: Fewer people will visit your site or Places page (sometimes the title tag appears as your business name in the Google Places “7-pack”) if your title tag is keyword mush.

Messy title tags

Also, I suggest you check the major third-party sites (Yelp, SuperPages, InsiderPages, etc.) and data-providers (particularly InfoUSA) and try to remove any duplicate or inaccurate listings that these sites have for your business.  These usually contain inconsistent info about your business, which can really ding your Google ranking.  Depending on the specific site, trying to get these unwanted listings removed can be even more of a hassle than trying to wrangle with Google to get unwanted Places listings removed.  Still, it’s something you always have to be patrolling around for and trying to weed out.

Oh, and one last thing: the items I just mentioned largely don’t even deal with the human element—that is, making sure your Google Places listing or website doesn’t contain any “junk” that might repel would-be customers.  (For more on this, check out The 1st Annual Google Places Freak Show and my 10-Point Maintenance Routine for Your Local Visibility.)

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Can you think of any other mess worth cleaning from your Places page or your site?  Leave a comment!

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Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Visibility – the Technical Side, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , , , ,

Sabotage Methods in Google Places

November 19, 2011 7 Comments

How competitors can sabotage you in Google PlacesMaybe you didn’t “do anything” to your competitor.  Maybe your competitor is struggling and simply wants more customers.  Maybe your competitor thinks your success online means less profit for him or her.

I don’t know what your competitors think—and you probably don’t know, either.

But I do know one thing: you don’t want your business, livelihood, and your family’s finances to depend on whether or not your competitors are ethical people.

Just as people can hurt each other in real life, they can hurt each other where it really counts online: Google Places.

Your competitors are probably honest people.  But there are always the bad apples.  Even the bad ones most likely can’t hurt you intentionally in Google Places right now—unless they’ve been studying up on it.  Some people are clever and knowledgeable but also dishonest and unethical.

There are specific tactics they can use to deprive you of local customers in Google Places and take a chunk out of your business and profits.  For any competitors to use any of these against you, they’d have to fall somewhere between savvy and ingeniously cunning.

Some of these tactics I’ve seen used, whereas others I haven’t seen anyone use.  But each one is a vulnerability that you should know about.

Disclaimer:  I can’t control who reads this, or what that person does with the info I provide.  I’m telling you about these tactics so you can prevent them from being used against your business in the first place, and so you have an idea of how to counteract them in case you do encounter them.

Here are the 9 nastiest ways an unethical competitor could sabotage you—ranked in order of least to most sinister:

9.  They upload malicious or unflattering photos to your Places page.  They don’t even have to be untrue or libelous; they could just be really ugly or irrelevant photos that turn customers off to you.  Sure, you could get them removed, but it will be a real nuisance for you—and some potential customers will inevitably see the photos in the meantime.

8.  They relentlessly use the “Report a problem” feature in Google Places to try to convince Google that you’re doing something wrong.

7.  They pepper your Google reviews with flags and reports of being “inappropriate”—and then get their henchmen to do the same.  If they succeed, your legitimate reviews might go the way of the dodo bird.

"Flagging" Google reviews

6.  They could get several people to write you a bunch of positive reviews.  Google may suspect you’re buying positive reviews (which some people do), and may pull your reviews or even suspend your account.  Your competitors could take it a step further by making the reviews sound really fake (though still positive), which could cause legitimate people who visit your Places page to flag the reviews as “inappropriate” or “unhelpful” and get you into trouble.

5.  They write nasty reviews of you on third-party sites and/or or on sites like PissedConsumer.com.  These are especially tough to combat because (1) it’s harder for you to keep tabs on a bunch of different sites, because (2) one person can easily create a bunch of different user accounts on these sites and write you a nasty review on each, and because (3) some third-party sites don’t give you much recourse even if your business is getting slammed unjustly.

4.  They write fake negative reviews, get their friends and family to do the same, and pay even more people to do it.  They’d get a bunch of people to write not only negative Google reviews, but also nasty reviews on third-party sites.  Most customers would know the reviews are cooked-up, but some would be convinced, and your Google Places ranking would most likely still take a hit.  You could counteract their efforts if you took enough time away from running your business, but don’t expect Google to step in and do anything.

3.  They set up fake Google Places listings for your address, using a different phone number from the one you use.  Long story short, Google views your phone number as the unique “ID” of your business.  If Google doesn’t have confidence that it knows what your real phone number is, your ranking will take a big hit.

2.  Alternatively, they could set up fake Google Places listings using the name of your business but with a different phone number and a different address from the ones you use.  Again, this would be an attempt to spread inconsistent info about your business and create “uncertainty” about your business in the eyes of Google.  Having duplicate listings in general isn’t good for your Google Places ranking, and it’s far worse if there is a bunch of inconsistent information about your business floating around on the duplicate Places listings.  The worst part is if your competitor lists an address that isn’t your real one, he potentially could receive the verification PIN from Google in the mail and actually “owner-verify” the fake listing.  Google likely would eventually conclude that it isn’t the right address, but your competitor still will have thrown a wrench into the system.

1.  Probably the worst thing a competitor could do to you is to use Tactic #2 against you and go to numerous third-party sites and create a bunch of fake listings for your business, all slightly different from each other.  Not only does your Google ranking suffer when you have a ton of duplicate listings floating around cyberspace, but it’s infinitely worse when the info in those listings (phone numbers, addresses, name of business) is inconsistent.  It would be extremely tough to manage the information that the most important third-party sites have about you—especially if an unethical competitor keeps peppering them with false info and maybe even claiming some of the listings.  Especially if this tactic is used in combination with any of the others, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.

So how can you avoid or counteract any sabotage?  A few suggestions:

  • Watch your Google Places listing like a hawk.  This means not only checking the Place page itself for anything suspicious or malicious, but also logging into the “Dashboard” area to make sure you don’t have any notifications/warnings from Google.
  • Keep an eye on third-party listings and data providers—including Yelp, SuperPages, CitySearch, and ExpressUpdateUSA.  Look out for duplicate listings and see if the info they contain is accurate.  If not, get the duplicates removed.
  • Set up Google Alerts for your business name and website name.  Doing the same for your competitors’ names is a good measure, too.
  • Read all your reviews—first and foremost on your Places page, but also occasionally on major third-party sites, like Yelp and InsiderPages.  If you see a suspicious-looking review, click on the username of the person who wrote it.  You’ll be able to see what other reviews that person has written.  If there’s a scathing 1-star for you but a glowing 5-star for your competitor, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

If prevention doesn’t work, contact the business owner.  First just mention what is going on, and ask in a non-accusatory way whether they might know anything about it.  If they’re dodgy, explain your reasons for thinking they’re up to something, and then ask them to explain what’s really going on.  Obviously, be as polite as possible and don’t lead off with finger-pointing—but also be firm and keep your BS detector cranked up.

Meanwhile (maybe before you even contact the business owner), use Google’s feeble but occasionally handy “Report a problem” feature to let the powers-that-be at Google Places know something’s awry.

(By the way, if you still encounter trouble even after all of that, feel free to contact me; I may be able to give you some suggestions.)

To a peaceful, fair, prosperous local market.

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10-Point Maintenance Routine for Your Google Places Visibility

November 7, 2011 16 Comments

In the real world, bad habits tend to be pretty fun.  People can’t resist ‘em, even though they generally know these habits will eventually bite.

But in the harsh world of Google Places, most people don’t even know what the bad habits are.  That’s because the bad habit in Google isn’t glamorous or fun: it’s plain old-fashioned neglect.  It’s neglecting to keep the good habits.

The result of neglect is your local visibility suffers—and so does your business.

How to maintain (and slowly grow) visibility in Google PlacesNot only can you maintain your visibility in Google Places by following the “good habits,” but to the extent you’re not as visible as you’d like to be, these habits also can help grow your local visibility over time.

Fortunately, a good Google Places maintenance routine is pretty easy to keep.  I suggest you do the following on a routine basis (at least every week or so):

1.  Check your Places page.  Just make sure everything looks OK and that all the info on there is accurate (and if it’s not, login to your Google Places “Dashboard” and make any changes as need-be).  Now, anyone can make edits to your Places page—even if it’s owner-verified.  Scary.

2.  Check up on your Google Places rankings for the search terms you want to be found for.  Preferably take screenshots and file them away.  It’s smart to keep track of whether/how your rankings change over time.

3.  Look at all the photos on your Places page.  All sorts of photos can wind up on your Places page—whether by fluke or by people’s intentionally uploading them to your page.  Just keep an eye on what’s in the “Photos” area of your page.

4.  Read your reviews.  Make sure there aren’t any fishy ones, and make sure there isn’t a negative or fake review at the very top of the list of reviews on your Places page.  If you see fishy reviews, flag and/or report them to Google.

If there’s a legitimate but negative review that just sticks out like a sore thumb, you should do two things: (1) write a polite response to the review, and (2) step on the gas and ask more of your happy customers for Google reviews, so as to put the negative one(s) in perspective for anyone who’s looking at your Places page for the first time.

5.  Look at all your competitors’ Google Places pages.  If there are any customer reviews that truly seem phony—as though your competitors wrote themselves some glowing reviews or paid someone else to do so—flag and/or report them to Google.

More importantly, just keep an eye out for good ideas: aspects of their Places pages or websites that you like and that you might want to use for your own business.  Always look for good pages to take out of your competitors’ playbooks—especially if they outrank you.

6.  Read the “Google Alerts” emails that you receive regularly.  Whoops…I forgot to mention that before you can do this, you need to go to http://google.com/alerts and set up some Alerts.  With Alerts, you’re telling Google to notify you every time specific information is published on the Web.  For example, if your company is Acme Dynamite Co., you can tell Google to notify you every time anyone writes about “Acme Dynamite Co.” anywhere on the web.  Then you can create a separate alert for “Wile E. Coyote,” another for “Roadrunner,” and for whatever other terms you want to monitor.

I suggest you set up Google Alerts for your business name, your given name, your website name, AND for the names of your local competitors, their website names, etc.  You’ll probably end up with 2-3 dozen Alerts—but you’ll be able to keep tabs of exactly what’s being said online about you and your competitors.  While you’re at it, you ought to check Twitter regularly for what (if anything) is being said about you and/or your competitors there.

There are also tasks that are every bit as important as the ones above, but that you don’t have to do quite as often.  Some habits I suggest you get into and do about once a month:

7.  Do a GetListed.org scan.  Make sure you always score “100%”—and if you don’t, get yourself listed on the third-party sites it tells you you’re not listed on.

8.  Check your listings on the major data providers: Acxiom, InfoUSA, and LocalEze.  More specifically, you’re checking two things: (1) you’re checking to see that your business is listed on all these sites (if it’s not, add it), and (2) you’re seeing whether all the info they have on your business is 100% accurate (if it’s not, correct it).

All this may sound daunting, but it’s quick and easy: The absolute worst case is you’re not listed at all and have to spend 20 minutes submitting your business this one time.  Or, if your business info isn’t accurate, it will take maybe 5-10 minutes to submit the corrections.  Of course, it’s just as likely that everything is A-OK and that you’ve only taken 2-3 minutes to check up on how you’re listed on these crucial sites.

9.  Make sure you don’t have any duplicate Google Places listings.  To check this, just log into your Google Places “Dashboard.”  Each physical business location should only have one Google Places listing.  Multiples will seriously damage your chances of ranking well; remove them if you see them.  (This check-up item literally takes 30 seconds, and removing duplicate listings maybe another 60.)

10.  View your Places page through the “Maps” tab.  First type in a local search term that you currently rank for, then click on the “Maps” tab at the top of the page.  Find your business in the left-hand sidebar.  Do you see a little excerpt of a customer review?  Read it.  Is it positive?  If not, many of the potential customers who find your business under the “Maps” tab are probably being scared away by it.  Again, the remedy for this is to make sure you keep positive Google reviews coming in.  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Check the review snippets under the "Maps" tab

 

11.  This wasn’t on the original list, but it’s an excellent checkup item that Mike Blumenthal himself has suggested (see comments): type your business name into Google and see what pops up on the 1st page of Google results.

Chances are you’ll see a bunch of results and info all over the page relating to your business:

  • the local map on the right, with a Google Places map pin denoting the location of your business
  • a horizontal strip of photos—on the right
  • some keywords under the “At a glance” heading—on the right
  • third-party listings of your business (like on Yelp)—in the organic results
  • possibly some sitelinks for your site
  • all kinds of other stuff

Take a minute to eyeball everything on the first page: do the photos for your business look weird or strangely cropped?  Is the map pin in the right location?  Is there a scathing review or inaccurate description from a third-party listing that’s visible in the organic results?

This is crucial, because when potential customers search for you by name, there’s a good chance they’ll become real customers.  They’re yours to lose.  Just make sure that nothing on Page One looks bad; it’s where you can and should shine.

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What does your Google Places maintenance routine look like?  Any items you’d add to either of these lists?

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Filed Under: Google Places 101, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , , ,

If I Had 1 Hour to Get Visible in Google Places

October 20, 2011 19 Comments

What would Bond do if he had 1 hour to get visible in Google Places?If I were James Bond and a dumpy little guy with a monocle and a white cat kidnapped me and demanded that I get his business visible in Google Places in one hour…the first thing I’d say is “You’ll never get away with it, GoogleFinger!”

After his henchmen handcuff my feet to a portable nuke suspended over a tank of sharks, the second thing I’d tell the bad guy is that it takes weeks or even months to get a business visible in Google Places—and that there’s no way I can do it in an hour.

The bad guy knows that.  As he walks away, he tells me that I have one hour to do all the things that will allow him to triumph…or I become shark food and the nuke goes off.

Bleep.  59:59…59:58…59:57…

OK, sorry if that’s a bit unrealistic (even for Bond movies).

However, if I were in the all-too-realistic situation of being a business owner who’s not visible enough to local customers in Google Places, who has no time, and drinks black coffee and Pepto-Bismol instead of shaken-not-stirred martinis, one lousy hour might be all the time I can (realistically) spare.

I assume you’re a business owner who has no time.  I also assume the reason you’re frustrated is you have created a Google Places listing, you do have a functioning website—but you’re still not connecting with local customers.  You’ve tried to get visible, you’re not visible, and you have very little time to change that.

Therefore, my suggestions aren’t the place to start if you’ve never heard of Google Places and have never even tried to get your business to rank well there.

But if you have tried to get visible, and feel you only have about an hour to spare for Google Places optimization, here’s how I’d use that one hour:

 

First 5 minutes: 

I’d log into my Google Places listing to double-check that all my info is 100% correct, and that the name of the listing exactly matches the real/official/legal name of my business.  I’d make sure I have at least one photo uploaded, and that I’ve chosen as many relevant “categories” as possible (perhaps with the help of the Google Places category tool).  Finally, I’d delete any duplicate Google Places listings that show up in my account.

 

Next 40 minutes:

I’d submit my business to the main data providers:

Acxiom

InfoUSA

LocalEze

I’d then list my business on just a handful of the most influential third-party directory sites:

AngiesList

CitySearch

SuperPages

Yelp

Obviously, I’d make sure to complete whatever owner-verification processes these sites ask me to go through.

If you want to do these submissions as quickly and easily as humanly possible, I suggest you follow these tips for fast citation-gathering.

 

Next 10 minutes:

I’d make two changes to my website (if necessary):

(1) Tweak the title tag of my homepage until it meets the following criteria: (a) contains 1-2 of the specific terms that best describe my business/services, (b) contains the city I’m located in and two-letter abbreviation of my state, (c) contains my website name, (d) makes sense to a human reader and doesn’t read like gibberish, and (e) is 70 characters or fewer in length.

(2) Add my business name, address, and phone number to the very bottom of every page of my site.  Also known as “NAP,” this needs to be crawlable text—as in not an image.  Here are some examples of what to add to the footer of your webpages.  Ideally, do this in hCard format.

 

Final 5 minutes:

I’d whip together a short email that I could send my customers to ask for Google reviews.  The email should be a polite, no-pressure request for them to leave you a customer review.  It should include a link to where they can go to set up a free Google account (if they don’t have one already) and a shortened link to your Google Places page.

I’d then blast off the email to every customer I could before the hour hand strikes.  By the way, make sure you personalize the emails and don’t lead off with a cheesy “Dear Valued Customer.”

Or if I didn’t have my customers’ email addresses, I’d print out or scribble down some instructions and mail them to my customers, Tweet to them, Facebook them, blast out a quick telegraph, or send them a homing pigeon.

If I didn’t have any customers to contact during the last few minutes, I’d spend that time putting together a really good email or materials that I could use to request reviews when some customers do come around.

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You’re done.  Of course, more time would be nice, and Bond could certainly get even more accomplished if he had more than an hour.  It may take a while for Google to digest the changes, but in the course of just an hour you did what you had to do to get visible.

Well done, 007.  Now you can hit the martinis and the baccarat table.

 

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Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Visibility – the Technical Side, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , , , ,

Great Infographic on Customer Reviews in Google Places

September 20, 2011 Leave a Comment

Here’s an excellent infographic on customer reviews and how they affect your visibility in Google Places, how reviews help you attract more customers, etc.

Take a second to look it over: you’ll probably see ways to get more and better reviews (resulting in more local visibility for your business and more customers, of course).

It was made by the local search specialists at 540SEO.com (thanks to Keith from 540SEO for passing this along).

It’s a great application of some of my data on customer reviews plus excellent info from Mike Blumenthal, David Mihm, and other really knowledgeable people.  Enjoy!

 

How reviews affect your Google Places visibility
Add this graphic to your site

 

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9 Secrets for Easier and Faster Local Citation Gathering

September 9, 2011 13 Comments

You already know citation-gathering is crucial to your local ranking in Google Places, and you know at least the basics of how to get citations for your business.  That’s not the problem.

Dreading citation-gathering?The problem is that getting dozens of citations is about as enjoyable as getting a colonoscopy.  You want it to be over with as quickly as possible, so that you can get back to running your business and enjoying life.

Here are some secrets for polishing off citations more quickly and easily:

1.  Keep a master spreadsheet that contains all your login info for every third-party site you list your business on.  It should contain all your usernames, your passwords, the email addresses that you used to sign up with the various sites, and any other info that you may need to log in with like (“secret answers”).  I like to use Excel for this.

The spreadsheet won’t take long to create, but it will save you from a world of pain if you have to log in and change your business info on these sites, change your passwords, or forget your passwords.

Obviously, you can organize the info in the spreadsheet however you’d like.  It doesn’t need to be pretty.  But if it helps, here’s an example of the type of spreadsheet I’ve used.

2.  Have a “status” and a “next step” column in your spreadsheet.  Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of where your listing stands on each site and what you have left to do in terms of getting your business listed, verified, etc.  In cases where you’re not able to get your listing completely squared away at once, jot down whether your listing is actually up on a given site, and (if it’s not) any next steps you’ll have to take in order to get your business listed.

3.  Include your business name, address, and phone number in the spreadsheet.  Having your “NAP” easily accessible in the spreadsheet helps you in two ways.  First, all you have to do is copy and paste the info into any fields that you have to fill out.  Second, you avoid typos because you’re not having to type.  Use the same formatting that you see on your Google Places page.

4.  Have a document that contains a long description and a short description of your business.  Some sites only give you a tiny blurb with which to describe your business or services, and others insist that you give them a bigger and beefier description.  I’ve found that one description should be 150 characters long (including spaces), and the other should be at least 300 characters long.  Because most sites ask you for a description, you’ll save time by having yours handy, rather than having to retype anything or hunt around for a version that you’ve already listed on another site.

5.  Have Google Autofill installed on your browser toolbar (if it’s not already).  It can save you time and typing.  Of course, you’ll still want to double-check all the fields to make sure everything’s been filled in correctly.

6.  Know exactly where to login to add your local business listing.  This sounds like a “duh” suggestion, but some sites are very unclear as to where you should log in to add your business: it’s NOT always from the homepage, nor can you always easily get there from the homepage.  When it comes time to add your local listing to the following sites, make sure you start at these pages (rather than at the homepage):

mybusinesslistingmanager.com (Acxiom)

company.angieslist.com (AngiesList.com)

citysearch.com/profile/add_business (CitySearch)

expressupdateusa.com (InfoUSA)

listings.mapquest.com (MapQuest)

business.yellowbook360.com (YellowBook)

By the way, if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll add these login/submit pages to your spreadsheet.

7.  Double-check your info religiously, right after you initially submit/complete each business listing.  Ideally, log out and log back into your profile on each site, to make sure all your info is there and that it’s all correct.  Do this ASAP, so that no incorrect info can spread to other sites (which often share data with each other).

8.  Keep any photos you’ll be uploading in an easy-to-find subdirectory on your computer, like Desktop.  Pretty much every site will have a “Browse” button that you’ll need to click on and use to navigate to the area of your computer where you store the pictures of your business.  It’s faster to upload your pictures you don’t have to rummage through half a dozen nested folders or subdirectory just to find them.

Take your time with citations - no need to do them all at once.9.  Personal suggestion: don’t try to do all the citations one sitting.  It’s easier to mess them up, and it’s even easier to get totally sick of citation-building and slow down to a crawl.  You can take your time: it takes weeks for your business info to get processed on each site and to result in citations that give your business a boost in Google Places.

Addendum:

I also suggest you use the Local Citation Finder to help find citations.

Obviously, I’ve been talking about how to save time on whatever citations you know you’re going to collect, and finding citation sources in the first place is a whole separate subject.  I’ll probably do a separate blog post on the best citation-hunting techniques.

Still, the Local Citation Finder can save you a ton time and hassle, so it belongs on this list.

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Got any personal tricks for easier / quicker / more pain-free local citations?  Leave a comment!

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Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Visibility – the Technical Side, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , , ,

The 2011 Google Places Slangbook

August 25, 2011 6 Comments

The 2011 Google Places SlangbookFine, so maybe it’s not yet a book of Google Places slang.  But “book” just sounds better than “compendium.”

Whatever you want to call it, I’ve written it for two purposes:

Purpose 1: To show that we Google Places visibility specialists aren’t just a bunch of geeks: We have our own culture—even our own language!  I’d like to take you on a cross-cultural adventure, to allow you to bask in the richness of another language, and…eh, who am I kidding.  The real point of it is:

Purpose 2: To clarify what these terms mean.  Some Google Placers (should that be a new slang term?) use this specialized slang more than others do.  Maybe you’ve checked some of their blogs, articles, or videos.  Much of it is excellent stuff, but the slang can occasionally hold you up—especially if you don’t spend all day grappling with Google Places and its nomenclature.

In other words, I’d like to help make all the stuff that’s written by and for Google Places obsessives a little easier for you to digest and apply to your business, so that you can get more visible to local customers.

Some of these terms are pretty new (circa 2010-2011), whereas others have been around for a while.

By the way, this is NOT a glossary.  I’m not going to define terms like “canonicalize.”  You can look up technical jargon easily enough.  I’m just dealing with the stuff that’s somewhat harder to look up.

In alphabetical order:

3-pack:  When people type in a local search term and see 3 local businesses listed on the first page of Google Places, they’re seeing the “3-pack” local results.  You typically see this in less-competitive markets, where there aren’t a ton of businesses competing with each other in the same local market.  But they could become more common in the future: As I wrote back in June, Google seems to have tested 3-pack local search results on at least one occasion.

7-pack:  That coveted list of 7 local businesses on the first page of Google Places.  It’s where you want your business to rank and be seen when local customers type what you offer into Google.

10-pack:  As you probably recall, you typically used to see 10 local businesses when you’d type in a local search term.  But in April of 2010, Google chopped it down to just 7 local businesses that rank on the first page of local results.  (That’s also when Google Places started being called “Google Places,” and no longer “Google Local Business Center.”)

Algo:  Short for “algorithm.”  As you probably know, this just refers to the giant, messy orgy of factors that Google weighs when determining how your business (and others) will rank.

Centroid:  I know it sounds like something you take for an upset stomach, but it actually means the geographical center of a city or town, as defined by Google.  How close your business is to your city’s “centroid” affects your ranking: all other things being equal, a business that’s located closer to downtown generally holds a ranking advantage over others.  Some people used to think that the “centroid” was the location of the downtown USPS post office, but this wasn’t and isn’t true.  Where’s the “centroid” of your city?  To find out, type the name of your city into Google, click on the “Maps” tab at the top of the page, and zoom in: the “A” map pin marks what Google sees as the geographical center of your town.

The city "centroid"

Google Love:  When the owner of a business / Google Places page sweeps Lady Algo off her feet by following her official guidelines, being a responsible category-picker, a sensitive citation-gatherer, a charming conversationalist, and someone who enjoys long walks on the beach.  Said business owner is then invited upstairs—up to a higher local ranking, that is.

IYP:  Short for “Internet Yellow Pages.” Any local-business directory sites, like Yelp, AngiesList, SuperPages, CitySearch, etc.

NAP:  Stands for “Name, Address, Phone”—which itself isn’t particularly clear.  It usually refers to the practice of including the name of your business, your business address, and your business phone number at the bottom of each page of your website.  This info should appear as crawlable text (not as an image!) at the bottom of your webpages exactly as it appears on your Google Places listing—and with the same formatting.  Even more info about NAP here.

One-box (also written “1-box”):  Any time you type in a local search term or search for a specific business by name and see only ONE local-business result on the first page of Google, you’re looking at a “one-box.”  It contains a website OR Google Places search-result for that business, the red Google Places map pin, links to the Places page, usually at least one photo that the business owner uploaded, and sometimes sitelinks.  It also used to contain a little map, but I haven’t seen this recently.  It’s excellent if your business shows up as a one-box when you type in a local-search term (rather than search for your business by name), but this isn’t likely to happen if you’re in a competitive local market.

The "one-box" local search result in Google Places

Places Purgatory:  When your Google Places listing supposedly is active, and should be highly visible in the search results, but instead is NOT—and for no apparent reason.  You don’t know what (if anything) you’re doing wrong, and the Google Gods have not descended to tell you how you must change your ways.  Mike Blumenthal describes Places Purgatory excellently.

Snippets:  Before July 21 of 2011, Google would grab little excerpts of reviews and other info from third-party sites (see “IYPs,” above) and display them prominently on your Places page.  The purpose of this was to supplement whatever info a business owner put on his or her own Places page with a bunch of info culled from other sites.  Google has since removed these because of the whole antitrust case that’s been brewing.

 

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I must have forgotten some terms.  Which ones am I missing?

Leave a comment and hit me with your best slang suggestions (and even your definitions, if you’re feeling generous).  If I like your slang, I’ll update this post to include it.  Just don’t bother telling me technical jargon: I know it, and anyone who doesn’t can easily look it up.

By the way, if you’ve coined any Google Places-related terms, do let me know.  Maybe this slangbook is where they’ll catch fire…

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How to Divide up Your Time for Maximum Local Visibility in Google Places

August 12, 2011 5 Comments

How to manage your time for maximum visibility in Google PlacesThe problem: you’re not visible in Google Places and are considering one of two things: rolling up your sleeves to try to get visible yourself, or paying someone else to help you do it.

In the first case, I assume you’d like to know how much time you’d need to set aside from running your business and devote to wrangling with Google Places.  In the second case, if you hire someone to help get you visible, you probably want to know what exactly you’re paying that person to spend time doing for you.

I can’t say exactly how many hours it would take you or someone else to get your business visible in Google Places.  It could be 2 or 12.  The whole process could take 2 weeks or 4 months.  It depends on many factors—like how competitive your local market is, how visible your business is today, the condition of your website, and (yes) your geographical location.

What I can tell you is how you or someone else should spend time trying to get your business visible.  Success in Google Places requires that you pay attention to many factors, not just one.  Time-management is crucial.  If you don’t divvy up your time properly, you can’t do everything you need to get done—and you’re that much less visible to local customers.

Unfortunately, too many business owners waste time on things that get them nowhere in local Google.  It’s not that these techniques are useless: more often it’s just that people spend too much time on the wrong stuff and too little time on what really counts.

I’ve got 4 pie charts for you.  Two of them show you a percentage breakdown of exactly how you should divide up your time to get visible in Google Places—based on my experience, at least.  The other two charts show how people usually do divide up their time—and how it goes to waste. (And those are the people savvy enough even to tackle Google visibility in the first place!)

Note: I’m NOT weighing the relative importance of each factor.  Just because I say you should spend only 2% of your time on a given step doesn’t mean it’s not important.  I’m strictly talking about the relative amount of time you (or someone else) should or should spend on each piece of the puzzle.

The pie charts should be pretty self-explanatory.  If you want to know more about any one of the factors, just scroll down to the section that’s below all the charts.

 

How business owners often DO spend their
initial “get visible in Google” time

 

How most business owners spend their “get visible in Google” time

Main reasons why this isn’t effective use of time:

  • Too much tinkering.  Too many people waste time constantly fiddling around with their Google Places listing, in the hopes that they’ll stumble across some magical keyword that when included on the Places page will please the Google Gods (AKA the “algorithm).  What’s more important is to make sure that you’ve deleted duplicate listings—i.e., that you spend more time on “data control.”  Make sure your Places page info is accurate, claim your listing if you haven’t already, and don’t spend more time messing with it.
  • Too many “website tweaks.”  Many business owners overdo this.  True: on-page website factors do matter to your Google Places ranking, but they’re only part of the puzzle.  So write title tags, H1s, etc. that are relevant to your services, but don’t keyword-research them for hours.  You won’t rank any more highly.
  • Overemphasis on social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) can help you reach more customers once you’re visible to them, but they don’t help get you visible in the first place.  They’re nice to take up later, but they’ll simply delay your local visibility if you devote significant time to them at first.

Now compare the above chart to this one…

How you should divvy up your time
when FIRST trying to get visible

 

How you should use your time when FIRST trying to get visible in Google Places

Main reasons why this IS an effective use of time:

  • You’re paying attention to more local-search ranking factors.  Google pays attention to many factors when deciding how to rank you.  If you’re taking the time to produce content and put it on your site, you’ll win points with Google, and you may even get linked to by other sites.  Plus, if you set aside a little time from the start to ask customers for reviews, you’ll have reviews working in your favor sooner rather than later.
  • More “data control.”  This isn’t just limited to making sure you don’t have duplicate Google Places listings floating around: you also need to make sure that third-party sites like Yelp and CitySearch don’t have a bunch of duplicate listings for your business, and that all that info is 100% accurate and consistent from site to site.  If you set aside a little more time to make sure that you don’t have duplicate listings on these sites and that all your info is correct, you’ll avoid having to mop up the messy data later (which can really hurt your ranking).  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

 

Typical time-management for
MAINTAINING visibility

 

Typical time-management for MAINTAINING visibility

Why many locally visible businesses don’t stay visible for long:

  • They try to fix things that ain’t broke.  Most business owners breathe a sigh of relief when they can see their businesses in the Google Places top-7.  The trouble is they sometimes get a little greedy (which is understandable) and try to grab a slightly better ranking by tinkering too much with their Google Places pages and websites.  Rarely does this actually help their rankings climb: constant tweaking usually accomplishes nothing or causes a drop in rankings.  The other time bomb is this: people usually don’t know what else they should do for Google Places once they’re visible there, so they tend to turn their attention to social media—which doesn’t influence Places rankings significantly.
  • They neglect customer reviews.  Too many newly visible business owners, customer reviews suddenly aren’t a priority.  It always takes a little elbow grease and shoe leather to ask your customers for reviews—even if you’ve done it a hundred times and know what you’re doing.  But if you’re not sure how to get started and you know you’re basically visible already, the determination to ask customers for reviews tends to go the way of the New Year’s resolution.

Compare this “typical” time management to what’s in the following chart—which is how I suggest you spend your “maintenance” time:

Best ways to use your time to maintain and
grow your local visibility

 

Best ways to use your time to maintain your local visibility

  • You’re setting aside a little time to produce content.  Few business owners do this.  I’m not talking about article-spinning or creating self-promoting videos that come across as little infomercials.  I’m talking about stuff that helps inform your customers and answers questions that only you, the seasoned expert, can answer.  It can be in the written word or video.  In terms of your Google Places ranking, good website or blog content kills a ridiculous number birds with a few stones (just contact me if you want me to talk your ear off about this).  If you’re already somewhat visible in Google Places, more good content is one of the very best ways to pull ahead of the remaining competitors and put some nails in their coffins.  But it’s got to become a habit: something you keep up with over the long haul, and always carve out some time for.
  • You’re taking the time to get reviews.  You must set aside time for it while you’re visible and the phone is ringing: I guarantee you won’t feel like it if you’re freaking out because your Google Places visibility just tanked.
  • You’re looking for more third-party sites to get listed on: the 10% spent on “gathering citations” should go to poking around online for sites specific to your industry (like The Minnesota Nursery & Landscape Association) or your local area or city (Austin360.com).  In the same way, you’re also spending a little time looking for ways to garner some extra publicity—like in blogs or the local newspaper—which can give you a boost in local Google.
  • You’re dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s: responding to customer reviews written on your Places page, brewing up coupons, keeping a foot in social media, etc.  You’re not getting OCD over any of these items because you’re spending time focusing on the big stuff (like original content and reviews).  You’ve turned your Google Places campaign into quite the lovely cornucopia.

 

More about the Google Places ranking
factors that compete for your time

Here’s a little more info about each factor, in case there were some you weren’t completely clear on:

 Researching your local market.  Before you try to get visible in Google Places, you need to find out whether the search terms you want to get visible for actually trigger the local search results, see how many local competitors you have, use the Google Keyword Tool to find the most relevant and searched-for terms, etc.  Look before you leap.

 

 Creating Google Places page/ Tweaking Places info.  This is actually the quick part.  If you spend a significant amount of time messing with your Google Places listing, you’re doing something wrong.  Google doesn’t like frequent changes.

 

 Gathering citations.  The tedious process of listing your business on third-party sites.  Crucial.

 

 Producing content.  It’s smart to get some in-depth, informative articles for your site or blog.  Good content can win you quality links without your even having to pester anyone.  Or you can put together some short, purely informative, non-promotional videos that a potential customer would find helpful (see “Creating videos,” below).

 

 Data control.  You need be on a constant crusade to remove duplicate listings, and to remove or fix any listings with incorrect info on your business.  To do this you need to keep an eye on the listings that show up in your Google Places “Dashboard,” and you also routinely need to check your listings on third-party directories (like Yelp) and on major data-providers (like InfoUSA) .

 

 Website tweaks.  Optimizing title tags, description tags, H1s, etc.  Business owners often hurt themselves by spending time trying to stuff keywords, or by constantly fiddling with these on-page factors.  Use a real light touch on the search terms you include, write them with your customers in mind (not Google), and for God’s sake don’t keep changing them around.

 

 Asking for reviews.  Customer reviews have become more and more important to your ranking—especially ones written through customers’ Google accounts.  There are a number of ways you can drum up reviews, but whatever method(s) you choose, you need to keep at it for the long haul.

 

 Uploading pictures.  It’s worth taking the time to put a few good ones on your Places page.  It’s not worth constantly changing them or laboring over them to death.

 

 Searching for links.  It’s a big Google Places ranking-booster to have links to your site from sites that are relevant to your industry and/or city.  To get good ones requires some poking-around, even once you’ve created the good content that you’ll need to be able to offer in exchange for the links.

 

 Adding coupons and/or “Posts.”  Coupons are always good, but extremely quick to create on your Places page.  Same with the tiny, 160-character Posts—aka “real-time updates”—that you can add to your page (you can do this from the top-right area of your Places “Dashboard”).  Still, neither of these is worth getting OCD over.

 

 Social media.  Good in small doses, but not worth too much of your time, especially if your goal is to attract customers through Google Places.

 

 Scouting competitors.  See where their customers write them reviews, see the videos they’re adding to their Places pages, see what content they’re adding to their sites and providing for other sites, etc.  Constantly type their names into Google, keep an eye on the Google Places and organic rankings, and above all see what you can learn from them.

 

 Creating video.  Short videos that serve as little nuggets of helpful info, not little infomercials.  They don’t need to be pretty, but they do need to be informative.  Upload them to YouTube, then to your Google Places listing and your site.

 

 Pursuing publicity.  I’m talking about keeping your peepers open for chances to write a short article for your local paper, do an interview in which you’re the “expert,” participate in a local charity event—anything.  Good publicity can win you links and/or citations, both of which can help your ranking big-time.  This needs to be an ongoing habit.

 

 Running tests.  Test coupons.  Test different ways to ask your customers for reviews.  Try other unconventional experiments.  This is how you find the best ways to stay visible and get the phone to ring more and more.

 

 Running SEO analyses.  You need to keep your site ship-shape.  WebsiteGrader.com is a good way to do this.  So is keeping an eye on Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools data.

 

 Responding to reviews.  You can log in to your Google Places listing and respond to reviews that customers have written through their Google accounts.  Reply to the positive ones, too, not just the duds.

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Time-management is tricky in Google Places.  On the one hand, you have to juggle tons of balls (and a few chainsaws and torches) in order to get visible to local customer, and especially to stay visible.  On the other hand, you can’t spread yourself too thin and neglect the items that really reward a little extra investment in time.

I hope the pie charts help you get more bang for your hour.  Or, alternatively, I hope they better enable you to breathe down your local-search expert’s neck and make sure you get your dollar’s worth :)

What factors would YOU add to the pie charts?  How would you tweak the size of some of the “slices”?  Leave a comment!

 

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Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Search Show-and-Tell, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: , ,

The Real Character Limit of Your Google Places Business Name

August 3, 2011 6 Comments

How long your Google Places "title" can/should beReady for your daily Google Places pop-quiz?

1st question: do you know the maximum number of characters you’re allowed to use in the “business name” of your Google Places page?

80 characters, you say?  Bingo!  The business name (AKA the “Company/Organization” field) can contain up to 80 characters.

2nd question: does that mean it’s OK to use up to 80 characters to name your Google Places listing?

The answer is NO.

According to Google’s official guidelines, your business name simply should be your DBA and should not include extra search terms (“keywords”).  I’m guessing that your official business name by itself is nowhere near 80 characters long.

Therefore, if you’re even approaching the 80-character limit, you’re probably trying to cram search terms into the business name—which also means you’re flirting with a suspended listing.

Google Places business name--aka title, aka Company/Organization field

Now for the $64,000 question:

Under what circumstances should you NOT use your official business name for your Google Places listing?

The answer: if your official business name is more than 40 characters long, you should abbreviate it to 40 characters or less before you use it as the “business name” of your Google Places page.

Why 40 characters or less?  You may know that a BIG factor in your Google Places ranking is whether or not your basic business info—name, address, phone number—appears uniformly on every business-directory site your business is listed on.

This means if Google Places.com has you listed as “Acme Dynamite Co.”, you’d better not be listed on Yelp, CitySearch, AngiesList, etc. as “Acme Dynamite & Booby-traps,” or “Acme Dynamite, INC.”  Your name needs to appear consistently, everywhere it appears on the Web, right down to the punctuation.  If it’s not consistent, you lose credibility in the eyes of Google, because there’s a little uncertainty about what your business is actually called.

It can be tough to get all your info listed consistently, because different sites have different rules regarding the name of your business listing.

But here’s the kicker: you can’t be selective about which sites list your business and which don’t.  These websites that list local businesses are like a huge gossip mill: whatever info one of them has about your business eventually gets spread around to all the other directory sites.

Therefore, you have to make sure your business name complies with ALL of these sites’ pesky little rules, or else inconsistent info about your business will float around in cyberspace.  This can hurt your Google Places ranking.

In terms of the maximum character length of your “business name,” you’ll be fine as long as you work within the rules of two sites in particular: AngiesList.com and Kudzu.com.  AngiesList.com has a 50-character limit for your business name, and Kudzu.com lets you use only 40 characters.

AngiesList = 50-char. limit on business name; Kudzu = 40-char. limit

Even if you never list your business on these sites, what can happen is they’ll receive data on your business from other websites, and will chop off the end of your business name if it exceeds 40 or 50 characters.

This is open for debate, but I’ve found that AngiesList.com seems to have more influence over Google Places rankings than most other sites do—including Kudzu.com.  That’s why you need to make certain the business name you use is less than 50 characters, so that you’re compliant with AngiesList.  And to the extent you’re dead-serious about getting as visible as possible, you should make sure your business name is less than 40 characters.

Keeping your business name 40 characters or less is easy, especially if you’re following the rules of Google Places and not trying to throw keywords in there.  But it’s also easy to miscount—so I suggest that you do a quick count just to double-check.

The other thing to keep in mind is this: even though Google says you must use your DBA as the name of your Google Places listing, that’s not quite the end of the story.  If your official business name for some reason happens to be more than 40 characters long, you’ll run into difficulty on other sites.

Cut characters off your business name until you're down to 40 or fewer

My advice is if your DBA is longer than 40 characters—even though it may be fine by Google’s standards—try to cut it down and get a 40-or-fewer character name to use in your Google Places listing and elsewhere.  It still needs to reflect your DBA as closely as possible; just make sure it’s also short enough that it won’t bring you heartache from other sites.  Pretty easy, but also easy to mess up.

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Business title character lengths: boring but important to local visibilityHave I bored you to sleep yet?  Did you get the idea after the first couple of paragraphs, and found my subsequent rambling totally unnecessary?

Good.  Character-length limits are boring subject matter.  Half of getting visible in Google Places involves taking care of nagging “housekeeping” items like this one.

In a way, local visibility in Google SHOULD be boring: You should take a little time to plow through material like this, do all this local-visibility stuff correctly the first time around, not have to mess with it again, and spend your time elsewhere while your highly visible Google Places listing hums along quietly in the background and delivers you local customers.

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Google Places Visibility as a Decathlon

July 26, 2011 Leave a Comment

Google Places = the Decathlon?I apologize in advance if sports metaphors annoy you.

But if you can tolerate them, I’ve got a good one: Getting your business visible in Google Places is like the Olympic decathlon.

(You know, that 10-event track-and-field challenge that’s as painful to watch as seeing someone eat a pack of Jolly Ranchers the day after getting a root canal.)

How is local visibility like the decathlon?  For one thing, both demand balance—being strong in many different respects.  You can’t win one event and win the decathlon.  Same thing if you want to get visible in Google Places: you must do many things well, not just one or two.

You win the decathlon if you rack up the most points—points earned by performing at a high level from the 1st event through the 10th.  Google has its “algorithm”: dozens of factors big and small that Google takes into account when deciding which local businesses get medals and which ones get a pat on the back.  Bottom line: you don’t have to win every event.  The winners are the ones with the most points overall.

Here’s how I’d compare each decathlon event to 10 of the biggest components of a top Google Places ranking:

Precision counts - in the javelin throw and in targeting the right local market

Picking the right city to market yourself in = Javelin.  Precision counts: you have to know exactly where you want to place yourmark.  Anyone can chuck spears downfield, but a skilled javelin-thrower visualizes exactly where he wants the spear to go.  In Google Places, you have to set your sights on a very specific local area: usually the one your business is physically located in.  If you just try to get visible in “greater San Diego” or “within 50 miles of here,” you’ll end up disappointed, and you’ll lose business to any competitors who plan their throws with more precision and finesse.

Picking the right business “Categories” = 100m sprint.  The 100m sprint is the first event in the decathlon.  “Categories” are one of the first things you specify about your business when you create your Google listing.  Both are quick and relatively painless, but if you screw up either one, you put yourself at a disadvantage.  (By the way, in a nutshell, the way to pick “Categories” well is to pick only the ones that are dead-on relevant to your services.  It’s easy, but many people screw it up.)

Only pick relevant categories for your Google Places listing

Listing your business on 3rd-party sites (AKA getting “citations”) = Shot put.  The shot requires brute strength, but also plenty of technique.  Likewise, you likely won’t get visible in Google if someone can’t muscle through the arduous process of submitting your business info to numerous directory sites (Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.).  But this also involves technique, in knowing which sites can help you the most.

Making sure your basic info appears consistently across the Web = Long jump.  Many business owners don’t know that their business is actually listed on sites they’ve never heard of.  You have to reach far and wide across the Web to find these sites and make sure all your basic business info—business name, address, phone number, etc—is listed 100% correctly there.

Name + address + phone (NAP) must appear consistently across the Web

Informative, useful, search term-relevant website content = 400m sprint.  A short but intense race.  Anyone can waddle a lap around the track, but to do it in less than 50 seconds is way harder than it looks.  Anyone can get “content, but it’s hard to get good, relevant content on your website that appeals to local customers and helps answer their questions: it takes a little time and effort to write good stuff.   It needs to be clearly relevant to the services you’re trying to get found for, but overloading your content with “keywords” will get you nowhere in Google.  But with a few bursts of focused, intense work, you can get winning content—stuff that Google can tell is relevant to your services, and that’s helpful and informative enough to win you local customers.

(Effective) on-page SEO = High jump.  The high jump takes technique and “feel” and is very tricky to execute properly.  Brute force won’t help you clear anything higher than a baby bar.  A typical SEO “expert” can apply simplistic tactics—like overstuffing your meta tags with keywords—but it takes more finesse and especially a light touch if you want to get visible in local Google.

Beefing up your Google Places listing = 110m hurdles.  Hurdlers have to contend with lots of obstacles (each hurdle).  Any one of them isn’t too hard to clear, but it’s much tougher to clear all of them smoothly while bolting full-throttle down the track.  You have to optimize multiple little areas on your Google page: your “Description,” photos, etc.  None is too tough, but you can’t take your eye off them, or else you get a scraped knee and lose ground to other people

Inbound links to your site = Pole vault.  You have a few attempts to fling yourself over a high bar. Similarly, it may take several attempts to get some good, industry-related or locally relevant links coming into your site.  It can test your patience.  But once you have some relevant, quality links coming in, you can take a deep breath (for a little while, at least).

Continually adding content everywhere = Discus…wait.  I actually don’t see how this is like the discus.  Kind of coming up dry here.  Anyway, what I will say is it’s important that you keep on the lookout for ways to add more and more relevant content to your site, and to add things like coupons, real-time “Posts,” and even videos to your Google Places listing.  Keep it fresh and keep it coming.  Google pays attention to activity and progress—and so do your potential customers.

Customer reviews = 1500m run.  The last and longest event.  You’re running on fumes.  You have your hands full with running your business, and drumming up customer reviews is probably the last thing you feel like doing.  But you’ve come this far and can’t quit now.  It takes endurance, because you have to keep the reviews coming in on an ongoing basis.  Like the 1500, reviews require you to pace yourself: if you try to get too many reviews at once, Google will likely conclude that you’re not getting them legitimately, and you’ll get nowhere fast.  Impatient jackrabbits lose.  Reviews can be tricky to get, but you’ll be glad once you have them—and you’ll enjoy watching your lesser competitors finish in tatters because they couldn’t hang on.

In the decathlon and in Google Places, it’s the big-picture that counts.  You can win even if you only manage to blow ‘em out of the water in a couple of events, and you can win even if you do downright lousy in one event.  But you will only emerge as a stone-cold butt kicker if you’re consistently strong.

Are there even more track & field events worth clobbering your competition in?  Yes: you’ve got the 800m run, the 5000m run…and many others.  Likewise, there are even more elements of getting visible in Google Places.

But if you shine in all of the above, you’re a regular Bryan Clay, and you’ll get that laurel wreath around YOUR neck—meaning more local customers coming through your doors.

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