Google Places 101 | LocalVisibilitySystem.com

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!

Add this graphic to your site

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Search Show-and-Tell, Local Visibility – the Technical Side Tagged With: google reviews, infographic, reviews

9 Secrets for Easier and Faster Local Citation Gathering

September 9, 2011 18 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.

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.

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.

—

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

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Visibility – the Technical Side, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: citations, IYPs, local search ranking factors, third-party sites

The 2011 Google Places Slangbook

August 25, 2011 6 Comments

Fine, 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.

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.

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.

—

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…

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101, Just for Fun, Local Visibility – the Technical Side Tagged With: 10 pack, 3 pack, 7 pack, algo, centroid, google love, IYPs, local search ranking factors, name address phone, NAP, one-box, places purgatory, slangbook, third-party sites

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

August 12, 2011 6 Comments

The 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

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

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

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

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.

—

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!

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Search Show-and-Tell, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: local search ranking factors, local search visibility, time management

The Real Character Limit of Your Google Places Business Name

August 3, 2011 6 Comments

How long your Google Places "title" can/should be Ready 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.

—

Business title character lengths: boring but important to local visibility Have 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.

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101, Local Visibility – the Technical Side, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: business name, character limit, dba

Google Places Visibility as a Decathlon

July 26, 2011 Leave a Comment

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:

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.)

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.

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.

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101, Techniques for More Visibility Tagged With: business categories, google reviews, local search ranking factors, local search visibility, reviews, street address

The Numbers and Facts on Google Places Reviews

July 2, 2011 10 Comments

You may know that customer reviews are a big factor in how your business ranks in the Google Places local search results.

And I’m sure you know reviews are crucial for winning more customers—who often make buying decisions based largely on which local business has the best reviews.

But what facts do you have about reviews in Google Places? For instance, do you know…

—How likely you are to rank in the top-3 if you have the most reviews in your local market?

—How many reviews will you likely need if you want your business to rank on page one of Google Places?

—How many reviews does the average #1 business have?

I was frustrated at not having the facts. I constantly tell my clients to get reviews, and they ask me all kinds of great questions, which I can usually answer. But when they’d ask me basic questions like the ones above, I was only able to give them partial answers. I don’t want anyone to think I don’t know what I’m doing

But you couldn’t just poke around online and find the answers to these questions. Sure, there’s a decent amount of general info about customer reviews and their role in Google Places, but I wasn’t able to find a satisfying amount of real numbers or specifics.

I rolled up my sleeves and looked at 1000 local markets in Google Places. I saw 7000 different businesses in all 50 states, and a grand total of 181,718 reviews between them. My goal? To get some concrete facts about the relationship between reviews and top rankings in Google Places.

It took me a while, but I finally got some facts. The numbers confirmed some things I’d suspected for a long time, but also overturned some assumptions I’d been operating under.

If you’d like more facts than you have today and want a better sense of exactly how many reviews you’ll need to rank more visibly in your local market, read on.

“I want my business on the first page of local Google. What’s the ballpark number of reviews I’ll need?”

About 26. The average business on the first page of Google’s local search results has 25.9 reviews, based on my calculations.

As you’d expect, the numbers vary widely from this average: some #1′s have just a couple reviews, whereas some businesses ranked #7 have a couple hundred. But after looking at 7000 businesses in 1000 local markets, I can tell you that if you get 26 customer reviews there’s a good likelihood you’ll get on the first page.

(By the way, if you’re interested in looking at the raw data to see how I arrived at these figures, you can download the spreadsheet.)

**“Which “top 7” ranking had the most reviews most often?”**

In other words, which position most frequently had the most reviews in its local market? The answer is A: 25% of the time the top local ranking (A) had the most reviews.

“How often did the other rankings have the most reviews?”

Of the 1000 local markets, B had the most reviews 160 times, whereas C had the most reviews 154 times. So for all intents and purposes, B and C are tied: each one has the most reviews about 17% of the time. 34% of the time, either B or C has the most reviews.

End result: in any given market, there’s a 59% chance that one of the top 3 rankings (A, B, or C) will also be the one with the most reviews in that market. Therefore, if YOU have the most reviews in your market, there’s about a 60% probability that you’ll rank in the top 3 in Google Places.

The next four rankings (D-G) had the most reviews only 41% of the time. Here’s the breakdown of how often each ranking had the most reviews in its local market (of the 1000 markets I looked at):

Note: there were a total of 71 “ties,” in which two or more businesses were tied for the greatest number of reviews in their local market. In most of these cases several businesses had one review and the rest had zero. Because each ranking had similar numbers of “ties” (ranging from 22 to 31) with other rankings, I didn’t include these relatively unusual markets when calculating how often each ranking has the most reviews.

“Which ranking had the most reviews, period?”

C—AKA the #3 ranking. In the 1000 markets I looked at, I counted a grand total of 181,718 reviews. Here’s the breakdown:

A = 33,218

B = 30,488

C = 33,913

D = 23,643

E = 19,522

F = 19,375

G = 21,559

As you can see, A and B aren’t far behind. If I looked at 10,000 local markets (rather than 1000), maybe A or B would have had the most reviews. Either way, the top 3 rankings all have roughly the same share of reviews, in terms of volume.

The key thing to keep in mind is that there’s a significant gap between the top 3 rankings and the lower 4. A-C had a combined total of 97,619, whereas D-G had a combined 84,099.

The top 3 have more than the next 4 put together. That’s a big gap.

The bad news is the bar is pretty high to get into that A-C range. The good news is if you’re in the top 3 in terms of reviews, there’s a good chance your rank will float into A-C rankings in Google Places.

“I want to rank in the top 3. How badly do I have to squash my competition, in terms of getting reviews?”

My estimate is you’ll need about one-and-a-half times as many reviews as your competitors have on average. In exact numbers, the average business that ranks A-C has 33 reviews. The average business that ranks D-G (#4-7) has 21 reviews. You’ll have to outstrip those lower-4 guys by about 50%.

I assume you’d like to rank #1 in Google Places. The average “A” ranking has 33 reviews. The average B-G (#2-7) business has 25 reviews. Therefore, the average #1 business has about 33% more reviews than the 6 competitors right below him have on average.

Here’s what I suggest you do: figure out the average number of reviews that the top 7 businesses have. One-and-a-half times that number is what you should shoot for if you’re trying to outrank the local competition.

“That’s a lot to digest. Can you sum it up?”

Glad you asked! Here’s what I think all the numbers show, big-picture:

—They affirm what you may have known or suspected all along: that reviews clearly help your Google Places ranking

—If you can get 26 reviews or more, you’ll be above the national average for businesses on Page One of Google Places and will probably rank more highly than you do today

—In general, if you can get more reviews than the next guy, the chances improve that you’ll also outrank him

—To be more exact: if you can get 133-150% of the number of reviews your local competitors have on average, you’ll improve your chances of snagging a top 3 ranking

—There’s a big difference between ranks A-C and ranks D-G. The top 3 have more reviews than the next 4 combined. The average top-3 business in Google Places has 50% more reviews than the average business ranked 4-7. Plus, 60% of the time the business with the most reviews in its local Google Places market is ranked in the top 3.

“So what should my review strategy be from now on?”

You need a method for asking your existing customers for reviews. Maybe you have one already. I show you ways to do this in my free guide. If you don’t have it, download it. If you have it, apply the steps.

You need a specific goal number, at least at first. How? Look at the local businesses that show up on the 1^st page of Google Places (maybe you’re one of them), and figure out the average number of reviews those 7 businesses have. Have that number be your first goal, and then 1.5x that number be your next goal.

Keep the reviews coming. Don’t stop at the “finish line.” Your ranking probably won’t go up the day you hit your goal number of reviews. You have to get ahead of your competitors in reviews and stay that way. Google doesn’t like sudden changes, but it does reward long-term effort directed toward things like drumming up reviews: it shows that you’re trying to give potential customers as much information as possible from your existing customers.

If you’re already following this basic approach, hats off to you. In that case, just keep doing what you’re doing.

“By the way, what’s with the big gap between ranks 1-3 and 4-7?”

You may be wondering why there seems to be a gulf between the first 3 and the next 4, in terms of reviews. I have a few half-baked theories:

Theory 1: It’s possible that Google has run tests and concluded that spots A-C in Google Places get significantly more clicks. Therefore, it would make sense to make the standards relatively tough for businesses to get into the top 3, if it’s the case those positions get the lion’s share of the clicks and potential customers.

Theory 2: The top 3 may get significantly more visibility, more customers, and therefore more customers who end up leaving reviews—a nice upward spiral. The greater numbers of reviews may just be a byproduct of having a better ranking due to other reasons.

Theory 3: Google *may* be considering a 3-business layout for Google Places—in which only 3 local search results show up on the 1^st page. They did a brief test of it in early June (which lasted only a few hours), and on the same day I wrote about these possible “3-pack” search results. The tough standards for getting into the top 3 and the *possibility* of 3-pack Google Places results may have something to do with each other.

Possible ways to improve my analysis

My humble study isn’t perfect. Also, even though it was pretty ambitious and I wanted to “bite off” as much as possible, I didn’t want it to be more than I could chew.

Here’s what I think are the “boundaries” of my analysis:

I could have looked at even more markets. 1000 is good, but 2000 is even better. 10,000 is even better than that. Also, even though I examined probably 150 different industries and services, there are even more industries that are worth looking at. More data is always better.

I didn’t look at markets outside the US. I’d like to at some point, but I don’t expect to discover that Google handles reviews differently outside the US. Sure, other countries may have less-dense local markets, where it may be a bit easier to rank in the top 7 in Google Places. But the algorithms are the algorithms, and I doubt that there’s a different one in the UK, another in Australia, others in Canada and Japan, and so on. The specific numbers may vary from country to country, but the basic behavior of reviews probably doesn’t.

I didn’t factor in the quality of the review—whether they’re 1-star or 5-star. I’ve known for a long time that quantity matters more than quality, at least in terms of your ranking, and David Mihm’s “Local Search Ranking Factors” also supports this. (Obviously, you need good reviews or you’ll scare customers away, but that’s a separate discussion.)

I didn’t examine the behavior of reviews written directly on businesses’ Google Places pages versus those written through sites like Yelp, JudysBook, etc. For instance, I don’t know what percentage of #1 rankings have Yelp reviews, nor do I know how many different sites a top 3 business has reviews on. Again, I’d like to delve into this at some point.

I tried to avoid including too many statistical “outliers.”

Extreme numbers create too much noise in the data. For instance, in markets like Las Vegas hotels or casinos, the top 7 businesses listed in Google Places have an average of 2000-8000 reviews apiece. I’d have to look at these markets either exclusively or not at all, because the numbers of reviews in these markets are so far above average that they’d completely overshadow and outweigh the numbers for all the average markets I looked at.

It’s for the same reason that I didn’t include a bunch of uncompetitive markets in which the top 7 businesses all have zero reviews. Many businesses in small towns have absolutely no reviews, except for the most-frequented businesses in these areas, like restaurants and hotels. Maybe if I included the businesses with 10k reviews and all the goose-eggs my numbers would be slightly different—but only slightly.

The markets where the Google Places businesses have thousands of reviews or zero reviews are the exceptions, not the norm. I’m writing this for people who are in markets that are pretty competitive—but that aren’t bloodbaths like Vegas casinos or markets where you’ll rank well if you can fog a mirror. Maybe in another blog post I’ll look at the absolute extremes—but I wrote this one with average-to-tougher markets in mind.

The ABC’s of Local Search Visibility

June 10, 2011 6 Comments

The goal is simple: have your business appear more visibly in Google Places when local customers search for what you offer.

But there are all kinds of ins and outs and moving parts, big and small. They can be tough to remember.

You and I and everyone else forget all kinds of things; some of us are especially good at forgetting about household chores and anniversaries. But one thing we don’t forget is our ABC’s.

That’s why I bring you the ABC’s of local visibility in Google Places: 26 little blurbs devoted to the stuff you need to know to get your business visible to local customers.

How well do YOU know your ABCs? Do you know enough letters to spell your own business name?

Area code (that’s local)

Your business phone number needs to have a local area code–not an 800, 888, etc. Always use this local phone number for your business: use it on your Google Places listing, on your website, and on every other website you ever list your business on (Yelp, CitySearch, etc.). It’s important that Google and potential customers know you’re a local business—not some faceless chain trying to scoop up local business where it shouldn’t. Plus, it’s important that local people know you’re local, too.

Business “Categories”

On your Google Places listing, you can specify up to 5 “Categories” that describe your business. These influence which search terms you’ll be visible for locally. Try to pick as many relevant categories as you can—categories that accurately describe your business or services. Google may not have your specific category of business, in which case you have to choose at least ONE category from Google’s list. In this case, pick the one that’s *most* relevant (it may not be spot-on), and then I suggest you specify a couple of “custom” categories, using terms that really accurately describe your business/services. Simply type them into the fields.

Citations

You’re probably familiar with sites like Yelp.com, InsiderPages.com, etc. Any time your business is listed in the local-business directories of sites like these, that’s called a “citation.” Citations are a giant factor in how well you rank locally. They’re similar to links in the world of traditional “organic” search.

Long story short, you should try to get your business listed on as many as you can–the aforementioned ones, plus others like CitySearch.com, JudysBook.com, AngiesList.com, and many more. Oh, and make sure that all the business information you submit to these sites EXACTLY matches what you use on your Google Places listing: so, for instance, use the exact same business name, with the same punctuation and capitalization, the same address formatting, etc.

If you want more info on citations, I suggest this excellent in-depth piece by David Mihm:

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/general-marketing/local-seo-citation-is-new-link/

Data-aggregators

A fancy name for sites that collect your business info and distribute it to many other sites that list local businesses in their directories. ExpressUpdateUSA, EZLocal, LocalEze are examples of data-aggregators. Basically, you’ll want to go to these sites and list your business on them, and make absolutely sure that all the info you provide matches the info you use on your Google Places listing.

Excellent extra details

In the “Edit” area of your Google Places page you’ll notice some boxes where you can provide “Additional Details” about your business. You should fill it out with as much relevant detail as possible. But don’t just throw in a bunch of keywords: try to provide highly specific detail about your services: if you’re a doctor, indicate your specialties or say what kinds of injuries you treat. If you’re a roofer, specify whether you service residential vs. commercial buildings, or both, or whatever.

You probably get the idea, but here’s a good example of what I’m talking about:

Focusing on your city

Use Google Places to get visible in your immediate local area, first and foremost. Don’t use it to try to get visible in a city that your business isn’t physically located in. All too often, I see businesses in the suburbs trying fruitlessly to get visible in Google Places in the major city that they’re several miles outside of. They load up their Google Places listing and websites with the name of the major city in which they want to get visible, hoping that Google will pay attention to their repetitive use of location keywords. It rarely works, unless they’re in relatively uncompetitive markets or they’re one of only a handful of local people who provide a certain service.

Location is a really complex issue in local Google, but here’s the key point: if you want to be highly visible to local customers in (say) central Chicago, you’d better be located in the middle of Chicago. If you’re in the suburbs, your best bet is to focus your efforts on getting visible in and around your specific ‘burb, and then to use AdWords (not Google Place) to get visible to customers in any areas that are more than 1-2 miles away from you.

Google (Places)

Often unclear and inconsistent in making the policies you and I have to live by, and occasionally downright maddening to deal with. But Google is where the customers—including you and me—most often search locally. Some people talk about how social-media is what matters for businesses. That may prove true one day. But as it stands today, companies like Facebook are going through a noisy adolescence on their way to maturity: on the web in 2011, Google is still Big Daddy.

HCard microformatting

To make sense of “H,” you’ll need to take a look at letter “N” (lower down).

IYPs

Short for “Internet Yellow Pages.” Just a fancy name for sites like Yelp.com, HotFrog.com, and many other sites with big directories of local businesses. Local-search experts love this term (it’s pretty good, I have to admit).

J

I can’t think of anything that starts with J. Good thing we’re not playing Scrabble! (Please let me know if you can think of a “J”!)

Keywords

Often used interchangeably with “search term,” but there’s a distinction: “Pizza” is a keyWORD, whereas “pizza place” is a “search term,” because it’s multiple words.

Anyway, what most people don’t realize is that in Google Places you can’t necessarily get a high ranking for one keyword/search term and not for another: it’s hard to be surgical or deliberate about the search terms your business will rank for. You can’t really control whether you rank well locally for “plumber” versus “plumbing.”

And THAT is one reason you shouldn’t try to overstuff your Google Places listing or website with a bunch of repetitive keywords/local search terms, in the hopes that you’ll rank highly for them. In a nutshell, have a light touch in your use of “keywords.”

Links

We all know that good, relevant links matter to the “organic” ranking of your website. But, to a lesser extent, they also matter for your ranking in Google Places.

I’m not going to go into detail about how you should get links, other than to say that you should NOT just try to “buy” them or do an exchange with some worthless website that has nothing to do with your specific services or business. Oh, and don’t try to get links to your Google Places page: they won’t help you. Any links you get need to lead to your website.

Maps tab

Enter a local search term into Google and then take note of the local businesses you see. Then click where it says “Maps” in the top-left of the screen:

You’ll probably notice a slightly different assortment of local businesses under the “Maps” tab. I mention it because it’s worth knowing that Google ranks businesses slightly differently under the “Maps” tab, and because you should always make sure you know where YOUR business ranks there.

NAP

Stands for “name, address, phone.” You need to have the official name, address, and phone number of your business at the very bottom of every page of your website. This helps show Google that all the info you use in your Google Places listing is accurate. In fact, the NAP at the bottom of your webpages must exactly match the name, address, and phone number you use in your Google Places listing.

The formatting should be standard (as though you were addressing a letter to your business), meaning no crazy capitalization or punctuation. Do NOT use an image; the NAP has to be written in text—text that you can copy and paste. Otherwise, Google’s “spiders” won’t be able to read it, and your ranking may suffer.

Also, have your webmaster put your NAP in what’s called hCard format (the letter “H” I mentioned earlier). This is a little snippet of code that tells Google “Hey, pay attention to this little blurb, because it contains my business info.” Have your webmaster prepare your NAP in this way by using the free hCard generator at http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator

Organic search results

AKA the “normal,” non-local search results we’ve seen in Google (and Yahoo, and long ago in Lycos, AltaVista, etc…) since before the local search results ever existed. The organic search results show only websites, not websites plus Google Places pages. What many people don’t know is there’s actually a surprising amount of overlap between the organic search results and the local search results. What I mean is that your website matters to your local ranking: you benefit from standard SEO best practices, lots of original and informative content, and high-quality incoming links to your site (see letters K, L, N, S, T, U, W, and X). In other words, the practices you’d follow to get a good organic ranking generally also help you improve your ranking in Google Places.

Proximity (to downtown)

Let’s say you and I run two competing businesses in the same city…let’s say two cigar shops in Cincinnati. If yours is downtown and mine is a couple miles outside downtown (but still in Cincinnati proper, not the suburbs), your cigar shop will have a slight advantage in Google Places, and may rank a little more highly. By no means is this always how it works out, but proximity to downtown (aka the “city centroid”) is a factor. It’s more of a factor if there’s a great density in your local area of businesses like yours, but if there aren’t many others who offer what you offer, geography is less of a factor.

If you’re not located downtown, don’t try to fake your address just to pick up a slight ranking advantage. It doesn’t really work and it can confuse customers. First try to get visible in your immediate local area, wherever that may be: use AdWords if you want to get extra visibility outside of that.

QR code

Stands for “quick-response code.” QR-code stickers are pretty cool: they’re barcodes that you scan with a smartphone. Once you do, you’re taken to a specific website (the bars in the QR code are actually a link).

It’s possible to receive a decal from Google that contains a QR code for your Google Places page. You put this decal outside your store/office/location, and customers can scan it with their smartphones and automatically go to your Places page to write you reviews, read reviews about you, and look up information about your business. You can read more about QR codes and how to go about getting yours from Google

Reviews

Sooooo much to say about this one. Better restrain myself. First of all, reviews are a crucial part of your visibility in Google Places. You need real reviews from your real customers. Not a ton of them, and they don’t all need to be positive, but you do need a small trickle of them (maybe 1-2 a week). You’ll want a method for getting customers to write them directly on your Google Place page and through third-party (“IYP”) sites like Yelp and CitySearch.

The other thing to know is that Google’s handling of reviews is riddled with bugs. It used to be worse, but sometimes reviews for another business will show up on your listing for no reason. Or sometimes your hard-earned reviews will mysteriously vanish, as though beamed up by Scotty. The problems usually sort themselves out, but don’t be too alarmed if/when you encounter them.

Stick

Local visibility is useless unless it means that greater numbers of people who see you in Google Places actually become paying customers. Who cares if you’re #1 locally: do you know for a fact that your top ranking has brought you some of your customers? If

Casual visitors to your Google Places page need to stick around long enough to want to visit your website. Then they need to stick around on your website long enough to discover more about what you offer, be impressed by it, and maybe pick up the phone. You do this by providing as much specific information about your services as you can (exactly what you do, how you do it, etc.) and, whenever possible, how it benefits the customer.

Do this in the “Description,” “Coupon,” and “Additional Details” areas of your Places page, and especially on your website, where you have much more room to show potential customers exactly how you can help them. Do it effectively and people won’t just bounce off of your listing and website: they’ll stick and become customers.

Title tag

The title tag of your website matters to your local ranking. Not a huge factor, but a good one can help a little, whereas a lousy one can hurt a little. There’s a lot to say about them, but the most important thing is that you follow a few best practices:

Keep your title tags 67 characters or less
Only include 1-2 terms that are spot-on relevant to your services or business. Do NOT stuff “keywords”
Include the city you’re located in
Don’t include your phone number or address
Try to include the name of your business or your website name
Make sure it makes sense to a human reader; no gibberish
Try to use a different one for each page of your website

URL

You’re more likely to rank well in your local market if your website name (your URL) is phrased relevantly to your services and/or location. For instance, if you’re a plumber in San Diego, you’re somewhat more likely to rank well for searches for “San Diego plumber” if your website is “TopSanDiegoPlumber.com” rather than “PipeProsSanD.com.

If you’re interested in getting a new website name but aren’t totally sure how to pick out a good one, this flowchart might help.

Verify/claim your Google Places listing

One of the first steps to adding your business to Google Places. When you “verify,” you’re telling Google that you’re the rightful owner of the business you’re creating a local listing for. Until you do it, your business most likely will be invisible locally. Verifying also allows you to control exclusively what’s on your Places page; before it’s verified by the business owner, anyone can edit it. It’s also possible for some slimy marketers or competitors to “hijack” your Google Places listing—but they can’t do it once you’ve verified. Here’s more detail from Google.

If you haven’t verified your listing yet, you can follow the steps in this flowchart.

Website

You didn’t think I’d try to tell you what a website is, did you? Nope, I just wanted to say that your having a website is crucial to getting visible in Google Places. Your website contains a number of specific factors that affect your ranking (including your title tag, description tag, overall domain authority, and the relevance of your content/body copy to the services you’re trying to get found for). Plus, customers want and expect to see a website so that they can learn more about your services. f you don’t have one, you’re losing big.

XML sitemap

Your website should have what’s known as a “Google Sitemap,” which is written in XML format. This is simply a file you upload through “Google Webmaster Tools” that gives Google an inventory of all the pages of your website, so that it knows they exist. This can help your website rank more highly, and therefore can help your local visibility to customers.

Your webmaster should know how to put up together one of these sitemaps, but here’s more detail from Google if you’re a DIY type.

Yelp

A great site that’s crucial to your local visibility. Millions of users/active reviewers. If your customers can write you some reviews on Yelp.com, that’s good. Just don’t specifically ask them to log onto Yelp and write you a review (that’s against Yelp policy); simply mention it as one way they can leave you a review. The most important thing for you to do, however, is just to make sure that your business is listed on Yelp, that you’ve claimed your listing there, and that all your information is 100% accurate and current.

ZIP code

Make absolutely certain you enter your ZIP code correctly every occasion you have to enter it—that is, on your Google listing and every time you list your business on other sites. If you enter so much as one digit wrong, you could really screw things up, because Google will be receiving conflicting information as to what city you’re located in. Don’t bother with the extra 4 digits: the regular 5-digit ZIP code is fine.

—————–

Now was that tougher than the ABC’s you learned back in preschool?

Share on Facebook

Filed Under: Google Places 101 Tagged With: ABCs, local search visibility

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

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

Typical time-management for MAINTAINING visibility

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

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

“I want my business on the first page of local Google. What’s the ballpark number of reviews I’ll need?”

“Which “top 7” ranking had the most reviews most often?”

“How often did the other rankings have the most reviews?”

“Which ranking had the most reviews, period?”

“I want to rank in the top 3. How badly do I have to squash my competition, in terms of getting reviews?”

“That’s a lot to digest. Can you sum it up?”

“So what should my review strategy be from now on?”

“By the way, what’s with the big gap between ranks 1-3 and 4-7?”

Possible ways to improve my analysis

More Questions about Reviews

Area code (that’s local)

Business “Categories”

Citations

Data-aggregators

Excellent extra details

Focusing on your city

Google (Places)

HCard microformatting

IYPs

J

Keywords

Links

Maps tab

NAP

Organic search results

Proximity (to downtown)

QR code

Reviews

Stick

Title tag

URL

Verify/claim your Google Places listing

Website

XML sitemap

Yelp

ZIP code

Follow Me on Twitter (@PhilRozek)

Success Story

Download Your Free Visibility Guide

Get Google Reviews From Customers

Stay up-to-date via email

Stay up-to-date via RSS

Recent Posts

Categories

Archive

Local Citations: the Definitive List

Visibility for Veterans

Search this site

Want to Write a Guest Post?

Recommended Local-Search Experts

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

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

Typical time-management for
MAINTAINING visibility

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

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

**“Which “top 7” ranking had the most reviews most often?”**