Phil

BrightLocal Webinar on Local Reviews

September 25, 2013 by Phil 6 Comments

Today I had the pleasure once again of speaking on a webinar put on by BrightLocal. It’s part of the InsideLocal series of webinars that’s been going since July, and that will continue through the end of the year.

The one today was all about reviews.

Here’s the video, and below it is the slide deck.

Enjoy!

Insidelocal – Reviews & Reputation Management for Local Businesses – Presentation from Myles Anderson

Thanks again to Myles Anderson for inviting me, and to Don Campbell (fellow speaker) and Linda Buquet (Q&A moderator) for a great job.

Any questions? Thoughts on review strategy? Feel free to leave a comment on Linda’s forum, or right here.

How to Add Your Business to Factual

September 24, 2013 by Phil 22 Comments

Why does Factual matter to your visibility in the local search results? Because it feeds info on your business to a bunch of other important sites.

David Mihm recently made that fact pretty clear, in his update to the Local Search Ecosystem infographic:

Image source: https://moz.com/blog/2013-local-search-ecosystems

Apple Maps ace Andrew Shotland has also explained that Factual is a major source of business info (AKA data-supplier) for Apple Maps.

So that makes it official: Factual matters to your visibility in local search.

The good news is that, as of this writing, it’s easy to get listed there. Here are a couple methods.

Update 10/1/13: You can also skip ahead to the comment kindly left by Bradley Geilfuss, the Senior Product Manager at Factual.

Method 1. Send an email to datacontributions@factual.com. Include your business info and ask (politely!) to be added

Darren Shaw described the process in a little more detail in a comment on the recent post I did on his blog. Here’s what he said, in case you missed it:

Factual doesn’t have an “add your business” feature. To get your listing added, you email them and they’ll create a listing for you.

Before emailing them, I’d suggest first checking closely to see if you’re already listed by searching here: https://www.factual.com/data/t/places. If you are listed, you can login and additional details to the listing – look for the little “edit” tag on the right side of the map. It’s cool how they show you the sources of the listing data under the “Crosswalk” section.

If you’re not listed, look at all the other listings to see what fields they accept and make sure you include all the applicable fields when you email them.

When you’re sure you’re not already listed, and you have gathered all the information needed for your listing, email them at datacontributions@factual.com to request adding your business to their database.

Method 2. Fill out the form at https://www.factual.com/contact. Your request will end up at the same place.

By the way – just to get back to Darren’s point about how you should check first to see if you’re listed – here’s what you’ll see if you search for your business at https://www.factual.com/data/t/places and find that you’re already listed:

Here’s what your listing will look like:

I’ve submitted requests for a few clients who weren’t already listed on Factual~~, and if anything noteworthy or unusual happens, I’ll update this post~~. Update 9/30/13: Based on what I’ve seen so far, it takes 5-7 days for Factual to approve and add a new listing, if you use either of the above methods.

Any experience with Factual so far? Leave a comment.

Top Local SEO Myths

September 17, 2013 by Phil 75 Comments

It may not be springtime, but it’s time for a little housecleaning. Local SEO – like its organic cousin – is filled with myths.

By “myths,” I mean misinformation and other junk that’s piled up over time.

One reason for the myths is local SEOs can be superstitious. Many among us are like pro baseball players – who believe they won’t play a good game unless they eat Taco Bell the night before, or who must wear the lucky pair of underwear they’ve worn since Little League.

The other big reason for all the misinformation is that local search is complex. It’s hard to separate what actually helps a business get visible from what doesn’t. “Scientific” tests are a red herring. (Correlation doesn’t equal causation, remember?)

Pretty much all we have to go on is experience. The good news is that can be extremely useful – provided we get insights from others’ experience and not just from our first-hand observations.

If you round up enough people who wrangle with local search all day and every day, you can get some insights – which you can use to help your business get in front of more customers.

That’s why I’ve asked my fellow local-search aficionados what they think are the myths that hurt businesses.

Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling, Linda Buquet, Don Campbell, Greg Gifford, David Mihm, Mike Ramsey, Darren Shaw, Andrew Shotland, Adam Steele, and Nyagoslav Zhekov were kind enough to weigh in.

Here are what some very knowledgeable people consider the top local SEO myths:

(FYI, I’ve ranked the responses in the order I received them in. My thoughts are at the very end, because I’m a big procrastinator :).)

Mike Blumenthal – Blumenthal’s Blog

Myth One-

When you verify your listing data in Google (Places, Places for Business Dashboard, Google Plus) you are claiming your page.

Fact: Google views local as a syndicated service that uses local data stored in and retrieved from a canonical record in their Knowledge Graph. The data that you provide to them is stored in that record along with data that they get from MapMaker, Community Edits, third party sources, web scrapes of your website etc etc etc.

The data that your provided them may or may not be considered the authoritative data in this scenario and the page that you thought you owned may show data that they think more trustworthy than what you provided.

Google will take any of the authoritative data that they have in this canonical record and show it where they think it makes the most sense. Some will show on the front page of Google search results, some will show on the Google Plus Page for your business, some will show in Maps, some will show Glass. What shows is determined by them.

Moral: Your local data is seen in Google’s main search results seen many orders of magnitude more often than your data shows on any other Google local output. In fact it might be more than the total of all of the other views in their other products and services. Thus you should focus on what your data looks like there.

You own nothing in this environment, least of all “your page”.

Myth Two-

When you verify your listing in the Places Dashboard (old or new) it creates a Places page and when you verify it in Google Plus it creates a Plus Page and somehow these are viewed differently by Google.

Fact: As noted above Google syndicates data from their Knowledge Graph to the many local services they provide via software. The page about any given business that shows in the Google Plus is viewed by Google pretty much the same whether it was claimed via the Places for Business Dashboard or via Google Plus. The only differences are whether the page also shows videos, a social stream and a verification mark. Regardless it is a Google Plus Page for the local business.

Moral: A business listing is a business listing at Google Plus. It is either claimed or unclaimed and may have social features but it is still just a Google Plus business listing. And these days, it is one that very, very few people ever see directly.

Myth Three-

That Google reviews are somehow worth more than reviews at (insert your third party site here).

Fact: Google is data agnostic in their evaluation of a business. Google looks far and wide to gather as much information as they can about your business and that includes reviews. A read of their patent language would indicate that review site diversity is equally if not more important of a ranking factor.

Certainly having at least 5 reviews at Google leads to stars showing on your business and that visual eye candy can’t hurt click through rates. There is some research that indicated that hitting the benchmark of 5 reviews also correlated with a single position gain in ranking. That same research indicated that having more than 5 reviews showed no correlation with any additional ranking gain.

Moral: focus on garnering reviews at sites that your clients are comfortable with not the ones that you think are important.

Myth Four-

Data changes to your business listing in MapMaker are faster and more powerful than data changes from the Google Dashboard.

Fact: From early 2012 until now Google has been in the process of first changing the underlying architecture of their local data and then changing both the UI front ends garnering that data on their site AND upgrading the pipelines that fed that data into the canonical local record in the Knowledge Graph.

MapMaker was one of the first products that received both a UI refresh and a pipeline update in early 2012. As such at the time it was faster at updating a listing than data coming from the old Places for Business Dashboard.

However with the rollout of the Google Plus Page for Local and the subsequent rollout of the new Google Places for Business Dashboard meant that those two products now have the new improved data pipeline that can update listing data in hours not days. One of the advantages of these products is that it is likely that the changes will be moderated more quickly than in MapMaker.

Moral: If you are still in the old Places Dashboard using the old, slow data pipeline then yes using Mapmaker will speed data changes. However so will data changes made from either the new Places for Business Dashboard or the Google+ Pages Dashboard.

Darren Shaw – Whitespark

1) Claiming your Google+ business page will help your rankings. You might notice that the people with claimed listings tend to rank better, but that’s just because people that take the time to claim their profile are going to be more active in all areas of their online marketing. Claiming will give you the ability to enhance your categories, which WILL help, but just the act of claiming won’t make a difference to your rankings.

2) Address formatting on your citations must be 100% consistent everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, consistent citations are super important, but you don’t need to worry about minor discrepancies like Suite vs Ste, Street vs St., or Northeast vs NE. Google will normalize the addresses it finds around the web to a standard version before trying to associate it with your business in the local cluster. This tool can help you see what kind of discrepancies still normalize to your correct address: https://aus-emaps.com/bulk_geocoder.php

3) Call tracking numbers are always bad. They’re USUALLY bad, but if executed properly, they’re not going to cause problems. The best way to implement them is to display the call tracking number on your site in an image, and then put the real phone number in the image ALT attribute. Google won’t see the tracking number and it won’t get scraped and distributed all over the web. The second best way is to load the number on the page with Javascript and put the real number into a <noscript> tag. While Google can and does parse Javascript, in all cases I’ve seen, they are not picking up tracking numbers obfuscated through Javascript.

Mary Bowling – MaryBowling.com

Your website doesn’t matter in Local Search. While this is still true in non-competitive markets, if you expect to rank in Local Packs in competitive niches and locations, you cannot ignore the quality and domain authority of your business’s website.

You should use an exact match domain name for your website in order to rank well. This tactic used to work like magic, but Google will not reward your website with good rankings, even with an exact match domain name, unless it also has unique, useful content and good quality links pointing to it.

You should do internet marketing through your local phone company or newspaper. These are both dying industries that are trying to survive by transitioning into internet marketers. Unfortunately, most of them are much better at making sales than they are at understanding how search works and adapting to the on-going changes in local search. In fact, some of the tactics they use can actually hurt your local search marketing and make you dependent upon paid advertising going forward.

David Mihm – Moz

You should worry about NAP details like “St.” vs “Street”, “Ave.” vs “Avenue,” etc. in an effort to make your citations consistent.

The fact is that Google has gotten very smart about clustering business information. They’re smart enough to realize the similarity between these types of abbreviations. You should focus on higher-level inconsistency issues (such as different business titles, street numbers, or ZIP codes) and then move onto other priorities.

Implementing Schema.org will improve your rankings.

Schema is really intended as a mechanism to increase the confidence in the authoritative NAP info for your business. And associating that NAP with an authoritative (canonical) domain. While at some level increased confidence at Google will improve the rankings of your business, schema primarily makes it more likely that your information will be shown correctly, and may give you an expanded search result visually, much more than it will improve your rankings.

Claiming your page at Google Places for Business will ensure that the data you enter there appears at Google.

The reality is that your Google Places for Business (or Google+ Local) account is just one of many datapoints Google uses to surface information about your business. 99 times out of 100, Google will trust the information provided by the business owner, but if it sees other authoritative data sources (such as government entities, major data aggregators, utility companies, etc.) providing different information, your trusted information may become subsumed by these other trusted sources.

Don Campbell – Expand2Web

Myth #1: The one with the most reviews wins.

Online reviews help with rankings and conversions. So the more the better, right?

As turns out, it’s not the number of reviews that matters so much. What you are really looking for – and what Google is looking for – is a diverse, natural review profile. You should be consistently getting reviews over time, from a variety of sources that matter in your industry. This type of review profile performs much better in terms of search results and conversions.

Myth #2: The one with the most citations wins.

It’s common knowledge that you need “citations” or mentions of your business name, address and phone number throughout the web to get good local search results. And your information should match across all of these citations.

So some businesses go to work building as many citations as they can from as many sites as they can. This is time intensive, labor intensive work.

But in many cases, having one really good high quality citation from a locally relevant site can make all the difference in your rankings. My advice is to look for that “killer citation” and spend time getting that before trying to obtain tons of citations from medium quality sources across the web.

Note: This is after you’ve claimed your business in Google and the other key citations for your type of business.

Myth #3: Having lots of websites is better than having one website.

Imagine having a network of websites, all linking to each other, providing tons of traffic and back-links for your business. How cool would that be?

Well, that’s great – if you have the resources to pull it off. But most small businesses simply do not have the resources to build and maintain lots of websites. Heck – most businesses don’t have the resources to maintain one website properly.

For each website you build, you have to cultivate and maintain it if you want it to be effective. This means creating unique content regularly, obtaining links into the site and interior pages, and maintaining it with backups, security updates, etc.

I’ve seen so many businesses create a ton of low value sites only to leave them sit out there and stagnate. Better to create one website and focus your energy and resources on making that site great – by publishing new content regularly, building quality links over time, and keeping it backed up. Create a page with great content for each product or service you offer, for each location or area that you serve, and update it regularly by blogging about the questions your customers ask you.

That site will be far more valuable to you than a bunch of thin sites that never get updated.

Greg Gifford – AutoRevo

Myth 1) Links are the most important ranking factor.

We’ve had dealers outrank competitors who have 5x the links with solid content and awesome citations.

Myth 2) Domain age is powerful.

A guy called us asking how his competitor is outranking him, assuming it’s because he’s only 5 months old and competitor has been around for years. Turns out it was because his citation data was messy, once we cleaned it up and added a few, he jumped ahead.

Myth 3) Bounce rate is a ranking factor.

Motorcycle dealer in Minnesota was/is obsessed with it, and was sure that his high bounce rate was hurting his rankings. Turns out it was incredibly messy citation data (he had changed his business name 3 times in the last 2 years). Plus, his site very clearly pushed customers to call, so many times he got a call off the first page visit – customer got exactly what they wanted, and he got the conversion, but it registered as a bounce.

Myth 4) Having your address and phone number on your home page is all you need to rank locally.

You’ve got to have NAP on every page of your site, not just the home page… and not just in the content, you need city/ST in the title tags, H1, and meta description as well – if you get a page to rank, you want to boost your chances of ranking higher and getting more clickthroughs by doing everything possible. Putting your address and phone only on the home page and trying to rank locally is like entering the Indy 500 in a beat up Prius.

Myth 5) 800 numbers are better for local businesses because of call tracking!

Local numbers are one of the most important elements – your number has to be local, and it’s got to be all over your website. That local area code is a huge signal of local relevancy – if you care about ranking locally, a local number is much more important than tracking calls.

Myth 6) Your business will only show in local SERPs if the person searching is within X radius of your business.

If you’re in Austin and you’re wanting someone to see you in local results in Dallas, you’re out of luck… but if you’re in a suburb, it’s totally possible to outrank businesses that are closer to the user if you’re highly optimized for that city. It’s all about relevancy, so if you’ve got great citations, awesome content, and a few good links, you can blow away guys that are “closer” to the user.

Myth 7) You don’t have to do social.

If you have any doubts left about social, check out the 2013 Local Search Ranking Factors by David Mihm. Social plays a huge part – but even outside of whatever effect it has on local ranking, you NEED to do social. Your customers are there, and your customers turn to social media before making a purchase. Just because you personally don’t use social media doesn’t mean your customers don’t… Maximize every avenue and get in the social game!

Andrew Shotland – LocalSEOGuide

1. Google+ Pages can’t pass Page Rank.

G+ pages are similar to other Web documents. They can absolutely pass PageRank (or at least the Google+ version of PageRank) and help your rankings

2. Posting a lot on Google+ will help your rankings.

Just like G+ pages are similar to other Web pages, building up their ability to affect rankings is the same as building up any URL’s authority. Even if you get thousands of followers on Google+, if they are “low quality” followers (i.e. inactive, don’t have a lot of connections, etc.) and your posts don’t attract interest inside of G+ (e.g. +1s, shares, etc.), your G+ efforts will have little effect on your rankings.

Mike Ramsey – NiftyMarketing

Myth #1: Local SEO is easier than Organic SEO.

Fact: Local is usually more difficult because not only do you need to have your Name, Address, and Phone information correct across the local search ecosystem but you also need to take in account most organic factors as well. For a business that cares about local you can’t get away with just dealing in maps or just dealing on the website or with link building. You need them all.

Myth #2: Google has really bad support for Local.

Fact: This used to be the case. Now, Google not only keeps the forum full of Top Contributors but they have phone and email support that is quite responsive and helpful compared to most free products. While there is always room for improvement local support has came a long ways.

Myth #3: All that matters in Local Search is Google Places for Business rankings.

Fact: Local search marketing is much more than just a Google map listing. Companies can take advantage of a local organic strategy, local AdWords advertising, reviews, and local outreach. People search in more places than just map listings.

Linda Buquet – Local Search Forum

Myth: The “centroid” is city center and proximity to city center affects ranking.

I need to give credit to Mike Blumenthal for blowing this myth wide open during our 1st InsideLocal webinar. He explained the centroid is not always city center as most assumed. It’s the center of the wherever Google determines the cluster of the most prominent businesses are – in that particular industry and city.

(Example screenshot here.)

If your client was a Dentist located near city center in Atlanta or just south of downtown, they would have a hard time ranking for “Atlanta Dentist” as they would be out of the centroid radius for that particular search. Very obvious when doing car dealer searches in most cities as dealers are normally clustered in an area away from downtown. (Thanks for giving me inspiration back in July for a myth to share today, Professor!)

Adam Steele – LeanMarketing

Myth: Organic SEO isn’t important in influencing local rankings. Blended or not, organic is a part of the local algorithm. Sure, in some small cities, and non-competitive niches you can get away with little organic, but in today’s landscape, that is rare. It has long been my opinion: 50% organic, 50% local. Regardless of the dominant algo at play for your keywords, you should put forward a strong, equal effort.

Myth: Citations are local business directories. If you search for the definition of a local citation, you will quickly realize that is hardly exists in the confines of a local directory. A local directory is simply the most popular example of property to submit a citation to. It was somewhere between testing Scrapebox to blog comment NAP, and my review citation research that this really hit home. Consider this, whenever you are asking for a link, submitting a link, guest posting, or whatever it may be, why wouldn’t you include your NAP?

Myth: Local SERPs are updated in the same manner/frequency as organic SERPs. I can update a title tag, or build a backlink, and my client’s website will move organically. However, if I build a citation, make an edit in the Google+ Local dashboard, or remove NAP from website (just some examples), my Google+ local profile won’t move today, probably not this week, and maybe not for at least a month. I am not sure I am qualified, or understand the specifics, but Google updates their local index much more slowly than their organic index.

Not-Myth: Google+ local pages have domain authority. No, perhaps not in a Moz sort of way, but in a history sort of way. Similar to an aged domain, an aged listing is a trusted listing and is something that tends not to come quickly. Protip: if you are creating a new listing, and are a new business, spend some time building up your citation profile. When you create that listing, you do not want Google to try and connect the dots (ie. find that you have no citations). What signal do you think that sends them? Give them a reason to trust you, and you will gain trust quicker.

Myth: Keyword rich reviews do not help rank. By no means am I a proponent for writing, and publishing your own, keyword stuffed reviews, but it wouldn’t hurt to point your customers in the right direction when they are writing them for you. Suggest that they be specific. What service did you perform? Tire repair? Bookeeping? In what city?

Nyagoslav Zhekov – NGSMarketing

Myth #1: You can rank only by using citations (similar to: “you don’t need a website to rank high in local”).

Many people seem to think that getting a bunch of citations can still rocket you to the top. While this worked for some time in the past, it doesn’t anymore. You need a combination of strong website, strong citations profile, and strong social profile in order to achieve positive results in local nowadays. In this sense, citations are just one piece of the puzzle.

Myth #2: You need to have your city of business mentioned everywhere on your site.

This is really unnecessary and could even be harmful. I sometimes see sentences such as “Our Chicago law firm helps people in Chicago get their Chicago cases successfully closed (in Chicago).” You need to think of Google as if it was a human user of your website. Think about how many times, or even better – how, your business location or the city where your business is in should be mentioned in order for a user to understand it, without getting annoyed of the repetition.

Myth #3: You need to have meta keywords on each and every page of your site.

Please, stop it.

Myth #4: Your location needs to be next to the city center in order to rank high.

This, or at least some version of this, had been the fact for some time and this is the main reason for this myth to still be discussed around the community even nowadays. Unfortunately, there are still people hiring virtual offices or using post office boxes to try and get an “advantage” by making Google believe they are closer to the city center than they are.

Myth #5: Your NAP should be EXACTLY (with a big stress) the same everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, your NAP must be as accurate as possible. However, it is not necessary to sweat too much on differences such as St vs. Street or # vs. Suite. Google is too smart to see that these two are the same.

Myth #6: You must have a local phone number for your business.

This myth is so popular nowadays that there are even people that buy local phone numbers just for the sake of using them for their Internet marketing (these numbers just forward calls to their regular phones, which are mobiles or toll-free). Mobile phone numbers and toll-free phone numbers are perfectly fine as long as these are the actual phone numbers used for business.

Phil Rozek

Myth: you need a lot of citations.

Reality: consistency matters more than anything else. Get your listings right on all the big sites and you’ll be OK in the citations department. We’re talking about a few dozen, not a few hundred. Quality over quantity.

Myth: “local SEO = optimizing a Google+ Local listing.”

Reality: when you’re working on your Google listing, you have two jobs: (1) don’t break Google’s rules, and (2) pick out as many categories as describe your business. Aside from that, there’s not much to optimize; your rankings will come down to the other factors.

Myth: you can rank well locally if you just work hard enough.

Reality: yes, you’ll probably need to work at it. But it also takes time. In fact, I suggest you work on it a little more slowly than you might be tempted to.

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A huge thank-you to everyone who weighed in. You guys and gals rock.

Any questions or thoughts on the local SEO myths? Conclusions you’ve drawn from seeing all the myths? Leave a comment!

Don Campbell on the GetFiveStars Tool for Getting Customer Reviews and Feedback

September 11, 2013 by Phil 19 Comments

Don Campbell is a smart guy – and busy. For at least as long as I’ve been in “local,” his company – Expand2Web – has been hooking up small-to-medium business owners with affordable, solidly built, professional WordPress sites. He knows his local SEO, and has contributed to the Local Search Ranking Factors study five times.

Don is also as much of a customer-reviews nut as as I am (well, almost :)). He’s built an excellent tool called GetFiveStars, which can help you get reviews from your customers – and save you a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the process.

We had a great pow-wow about reviews a couple of months ago, and will both be speaking on BrightLocal’s upcoming webinar on – you guessed it – customer reviews. This interview is part of that ongoing conversation.

If you have any interest in getting more in-touch with your customers, getting more and better customer reviews, developing a product, or just building your business, read on.

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Phil: What would be your “elevator pitch” for GetFiveStars, to someone who might be pretty new to reviews in general?

Don: Here’s our short version of what GetFiveStars does:

GetFiveStars.com is designed to let a small business or an agency working on their behalf easily implement a customer feedback/review management process based on tried and true best practices.

The product automatically solicits and tracks feedback, prevents bad reviews, pushes testimonials out to the business website and encourages happy customers to leave reviews across the Internet.

Phil: And how would you describe it to a “reviews geek” like me, an SEO / marketer, or someone else who digs all the technical details?

Don: In the industry we all know how important online reviews are in terms of both ranking and conversions. The trouble sometimes, is getting busy small business owners to be proactive about them. Most of the time it’s because they don’t understand how reviews work and don’t have a process in place to follow up with their customers.

What we’ve tried to do with GFS is to automate this as much as possible, making it easy for the business owner to collect feedback and engage with their customers. The result is more positive online reviews, less negative reviews, and happier customers who are referring you to their family and friends.

We also built the system so that it can be white-labeled by agencies that manage many businesses and want to provide their clients with a feedback and review management system.

Some SMBs are fearful of engaging in the review process. Our system frees them from worry and provides a process that allows them to interact with every customer without worrying about whether they will leave a good review or not.

We use an intelligent process that adapts to the customer’s feedback. For example, customers that are less-than happy will be directed to a page that thanks them for their feedback, and sends an alert for the business owner to follow up and resolve the situation.

Customers that leave very positive feedback are taken to a page that thanks them, and encourages them to leave a review on one of the popular online review sites. The business owner gets to define which sites show up here and in what order they are displayed.

We are using a sophisticated email delivery system on the back end to ensure no spamming goes on, and we get the highest delivery rates.

The software is built, maintained and updated by experienced Silicon Valley software veterans, and employs the latest web frameworks – such as Twitter Bootstrap – to ensure we have an elegant, responsive interface that works on all devices, including iPhones, iPads, Android devices, etc.

This means that a business owner could add a new customer and send the feedback request right from their iPhone. Or they could approve a testimonial to go live instantly on their website right from their tablet.

The Testimonials Widget allows businesses to automatically feature testimonials from their customers right on their website. It employs a “graceful degradation” approach so that it can work on any website, whether you are using WordPress, PHP, or just plain old HTML. These testimonials are marked up using the Schema.org review format that Google crawls and understands (more info from Google here), which results in SEO benefits for the business’ website.

We also have some pretty cool internal apps for monitoring the system and allowing us to tweak the product in real-time as necessary. Our product development process allows us to turn things around very very quickly.

Finally, we take customer support very seriously. We use HelpScout to track all support requests coming in to support@GetFiveStars.com. This ensures we follow up with every customer request quickly without stepping on each other’s toes 🙂

We are a very customer-centric company. Our role models are companies that place customer service at the top of their priority list – like Amazon.com and Zappos.

Phil: There are at least a couple of other good tools for getting reviews. Grade.us and ReviewBiz come to mind. What would you say to a business owner who has trouble deciding which tool(s) to try – besides “test several and see what works best”?

Don: Yes, there are a lot of different reputation management tools out there. Many of them are very good.

My advice is to look for a tool that focuses on helping you deliver great customer service by proactively engaging customers and building word of mouth referrals vs just building review counts.

Our approach has been to create something specific to the small business owner who wants to truly listen to their customers and build their word-of-mouth referrals.

We’ve created a unique method of helping the business connect with their customers and ask them for feedback. We don’t just help them monitor or get online reviews. We are helping businesses build better relationships with their customers.

By the way, I’m not comparing us to the other solutions you mentioned, just trying to share our approach and philosophy on this.

Phil: What types of businesses is it best-suited for – or not so good for?

Don: GetFiveStars works best for any type of service oriented business – one where you have customer visits and want to build a relationship with them to encourage repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals.

It is not as good for product review sites, or websites with many products to review (like Amazon.com, for example) since the feedback requests are more geared for customer experiences or visits than products.

Phil: How does GetFiveStars fit in with what you’re doing over at Expand2Web?

Don: Expand2Web provides tools and training to help businesses succeed online. We help businesses make the transition to an effective web presence that delivers new customers.

GetFiveStars fits very well within that vision, and automates a process that we’ve implemented manually with many clients to help them follow up with their customers and build word of mouth referrals.

My background is as a software product manager. Working at companies like Interwoven and Microsoft, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some very exciting products. So this is a very special project for me because I can really see that value and results for the businesses we are working with. We’re having a blast working with customers, seeing how they use the software, and continuously improving it.

Phil: What kind of demand, or requests, or questions did you get from Expand2Web customers or clients that made you conclude, “This is how we should build GetFiveStars”?

Don: We received a lot of really good feedback from our early customers that helped us shape the usability of the tool, and new ideas on reporting too.

One example of something that came from a customer request was the ability to automatically send out feedback request emails to customers rather than doing it manually.

This customer had an existing email list of customers and uploaded it to GetFiveStars. He was looking for guidance on things like “how many requests should I send? How often should I send them? What should they say?”

We automated all of these steps so that the business owner doesn’t need to worry about them. The business owner just get email alerts once feedback has been left for them so they can review it and respond if necessary. Of course they can still do it manually, but this is a feature that almost all of our customers take advantage of now.

Phil: I know Professor Maps is another big brain that’s been involved in GetFiveStars. When he and I talked recently, he said it really fits in with his vision for how business owners should go about getting reviews. Where has Mike’s influence really come into play so far?

Don: Mike became involved very early on. Much of the product is based on his vision. He’s a thought leader in local search and online reviews, and puts a lot of research into how these processes work best to help businesses succeed online.

With GFS we’ve tried to implement best practices that really work with our customers, and Mike’s philosophy and vision on what the best practices are. He is very involved in the product direction and partnerships that we make as well. I feel very fortunate to have Mike involved in this project – he brings a ton of credibility and intelligence to the tool.

We both share a similar philosophy on how to help customers – it’s not just about getting as many reviews as you can or taking shortcuts. We’re out to help businesses build long-term relationships with their customers and build thriving businesses with happy customers and word of mouth referrals.

Phil: What’s been (or was) the hardest part of developing the tool?

Don: Getting the design and user experience right. We’ve set a very high bar for the user experience in the product. And it’s hard to get right. Small Business owners are typically very busy and responsible for many jobs at once. So this tool needs to be very easy to use and efficient – it needs to create a lot of value or else the business owner will not use it.

We were fortunate enough to work with an amazing designer with a background in UX to help us. And we are constantly refining the user experience with the goal of making it super easy for the end business user, or agency, to use.

I’d say that has been the hardest part. That and coming up with the pricing 😉

Phil: What was the biggest course-correction you made while developing GetFiveStars? Any ideas you ended up scrapping – maybe even ones you’d like to revisit later?

Don: Early on Mike urged us to develop an agency dashboard that would allow agencies, or anyone managing multiple business locations to see how all of their businesses are doing at a glance.

That required us to go back and rework how we thought about things. It was pretty challenging to do it right. It also complicated our messaging – we’ve had a really hard time figuring out how to describe the product and what it does to both SMBs and agencies at the same time.

I’m so glad we did that though, and think we have a much stronger product now because of it. Many of our customers are multi-location businesses and agencies that manage multiple businesses.

Phil: What is the best piece of criticism you’ve received on GetFiveStars – one that really made you stop and scratch your head?

Don: When some of our first customers got ahold of GetFiveStars, the first thing they wanted to do was import all of their Google and Yelp reviews into the tool.

They were really mad when we told them they couldn’t do this! But the problem is, if Google sees duplicate review content on your website, it may remove the review from the business’s Google+ page, which is not good of course.

It really highlighted for us the value of education in this domain. As you know, it’s very confusing for business owners how online reviews work, what the best approaches are, etc.

Phil: People who create stuff tend to be their own harshest critics. How would you critique GetFiveStars?

Don: I feel like we have a great product. I can honestly say I’m happy with the functionality and the user experience.

But the marketing and website are not what I would like it to be. I don’t think it reflects the enthusiasm we have – and our early customers have – about the product.

We are a small company with limited resources and have been so focused on the software that we haven’t done a good enough job describing what it does.

[Note from Phil: they have some helpful videos on the site.]

Now it’s time for us to focus on telling our story, and helping business owners and agencies understand what we can do to make their lives better.

We also have to do a better job about getting educational content up on our website. I like companies who do a good job of providing free, valuable tips and info to customers. Everybody wins – people get valuable information to help them, and it builds trust and credibility in your brand. That worked very well for us with the SmallBiz theme, and now we need to do a better job of that with GetFiveStars in the form of tutorials and videos about customer feedback and reviews best practices, commonly asked questions, etc.

Phil: What’s a “pro tip” about how best to use GetFiveStars?

Don: I love the “pro tips” idea. I am always looking for “pro tips” whenever I take on something new, like learning photography, or using a new iPhone app or even playing a new game or sport.

Ok, here are a few “pro tips” for getting the most out of GetFiveStars:

Use the “automatic” mode for sending out feedback requests. We added a feature based on customer feedback that automatically sends out feedback requests to your customers on a daily basis. This makes their life easier, and ensures that they get a nice and steady flow of customer feedback and online reviews over time.

Customize your feedback request emails. We provide some nice templates, but there is no substitute for personalizing the emails that go out to your customers. You know your customers best. Making the emails personalized and friendly will result in more responses and ultimately better engagement and reviews.

Immediately follow up on less-than-positive feedback. One of our early customers told me she didn’t want to upload her email list and send out feedback requests to everyone. When I asked her why, she said “what if I get some bad feedback?” I told her, “that’s exactly why you want to send them out!” If you have a customer issue, don’t you want to know about it? If you know about it you can respond, and resolve the situation. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an unhappy customer turn into one of the business’ biggest champions because they took the time to listen to them and address their concerns.

Phil: What are some features you’d really like to add?

Don: I’d like to add more and better reporting. I want to keep raising the bar on usability, and I want to do a great job of balancing new feature requests with maintaining simplicity in the product.

For example, I used to work at Microsoft, and one of their popular products was Microsoft Project. The product was updated an evolved over years and many features were added. At some point the product became too complex, it had hundreds of features that nobody used and the product became very hard to use.

Then along came a company called 37 Signals, who developed a lightweight, online project management tool called BaseCamp. They had a very interesting approach – they built a very simple, elegant and truly useful tool by tightly managing the feature set of the product. It was a pleasure to use, and they were very successful with this approach.

I like that philosophy – great products are simple to use and implement the key features that provide the most value really well. That’s the approach we’ve tried to take with GetFiveStars.

Here’s an example of a new feature I want to add soon – I admire the way tools like Trello and HelpScout have notifications inside the tool that introduce you to new features as they become available. It helps users discover new product features as they are using the tool and also demonstrates that the software developer is committed to improving the software regularly. I’d like to do something like that inside of GetFiveStars.

Phil: GetFiveStars relies a lot on being able to contact your customers by email to ask for feedback / reviews. What are some best-practices for emailing that you’d really want a GetFiveStars user to know and apply?

Don: Personalize your email subject lines and the body of the email as well. Personalized, relevant emails get opened and acted on. We provide some nice defaults within the tool, so it doesn’t take long to tweak and customize them for your specific industry or types of customers.

Another tip I have is this – don’t be afraid to ask your customers for feedback. Many businesses I talk to are afraid to ask at first. But you will be surprised – customers want to be listened to. And even if they are not happy – especially if they are not happy – you want to hear from them. You can really turn an upset customer into a super happy customer by listening to them and addressing their concerns!

The big idea here is to engage with your customers and build lifelong relationships, so they will be happy and tell their family and friends about you. This becomes your best marketing, instead of running expensive ad campaigns.

Phil: Some business owners only try to get reviews in fits and starts, and don’t really take the slow-and-steady approach. They might be reluctant to pay even a small amount monthly, even for a tool that helps quite a bit. What advice would you have for those people?

Don: I know it is tempting to try to get a lot of reviews all at once, but the reality is that Google uses very sophisticated algorithms to determine ranking, placement, and review authenticity.

They are looking for a natural review profile that is built up over time from diverse sources. If they detect a surge in reviews or a lot of reviews from one source they may suspect that someone is trying to “game the system”. This results in filtering of some reviews, and poor results in the search rankings.

It’s similar to the panda and penguin updates where some people were stuffing their sites with thin content or buying backlinks. Sometimes they got a temporary boost but then got hammered when Google updated their algorithms to detect this behavior.

That’s why we recommend building a steady flow of feedback and reviews over time for the best, and most long-lasting results.

Phil: There are a lot of mistakes a business owner can make when asking customers for reviews. To what extent do you think business owners need to “educate” themselves about the dos and don’ts before (and while) using GetFiveStars?

Don: It’s true – there are some “best practices” that businesses should consider when asking their clients for reviews.

In fact, we recommend asking for feedback first, and then depending on that feedback, take action to resolve any unhappy customers, or asking for online reviews from your happy customers. This shows your customer you aren’t just out for the review. You are in it to make them happy and satisfied customers. Then the great reviews come naturally.

This basic sequence will work wonders. And you don’t need a tool for this – you can even do it manually:

1. Ask your customers for feedback

2. Ask your happy customers for online reviews

3. Follow up with unhappy or neutral customers to understand and address their concerns

I also suggest that businesses monitor the major online review sites so they know what is being said about their business online. Major review sites like Google and Yelp even allow the business owner to leave comments on the customer reviews. You can leave comments on positive and negative reviews, and leaving these comments shows that you are engaged with your customers and care about them.

Phil: Obviously, a business owner can use GetFiveStars right “out of the box” to start asking for reviews. But – as with anything else that’s worth doing – getting reviews is something where it’ll take you a little time to go from good to great. What’s the learning curve for business owners who use GetFiveStars? What do they need to get better at or discover over time, in order to use the tool to the max?

Don: Recently we added a 3-step setup process to help businesses get up to speed quickly. It involves adding links to your online review profiles, customizing the feedback request email, and importing your customer email list.

Once those steps are done, GetFiveStars will automatically start sending out feedback requests to your customers (this automation is optional, by the way.)

Here are a few things I think business owners should do regardless of GetFiveStars:

Tell your customers how important reviews are for you, and make it easy for them to leave you a review (i.e. provide them with a direct link to your review profile.)

Make your website more personal. Add a picture of yourself, or of your smiling receptionist or office manager. People buy from other people, not anonymous websites.

Be transparent about reviews – put testimonials and reviews on your website with links to your online profiles. This shows customers that you aren’t hiding anything.

I’ve seen these tips lead to much more effective websites for many different businesses.

Phil: Some business owners say that because there are so many fake reviews floating around the web, and because some reviews can get lost or filtered, it’s not worth putting much effort into getting reviews. How would you reply to that?

Don: It’s true there is a lot of this going on. But it doesn’t make it any less important to be proactive about your online reviews.

Google, Yelp and other services are getting very good at detecting false online reviews, and they have whole teams working on this. Don’t waste your time trying to game the system.

In the end, what does it matter if you have 100 five star reviews that are faked? What you are after is happy customers that are telling their friends about you. Fake reviews do not help with that. Engaging with your customers does. I know many businesses who don’t even need marketing campaigns because their word of mouth referrals provide so many new customers. You don’t get there by buying fake reviews.

The reason that we support so many forward facing review sites is to give a business’s customer a choice that they are familiar with and that they are used to. If they have used that particular review site before, the review that they leave for the business is more likely to “stick”.

Phil: Let’s say someone makes a knock-off version of GetFiveStars that has the same features (but that maybe isn’t put together as nicely). Would GetFiveStars evolve in any way to stay ahead of the curve, or is there a unique benefit you already bring to the table that you’d want to remind your users of?

Don: My philosophy is that everything is a commodity today. We live in a truly global economy, and someone can always do it cheaper. The way to differentiate is by the experience you deliver to your customers. So that is our focus. We will keep raising the bar on the usability and effectiveness of the tool. We will keep raising the bar on the support we provide, and the knowledge and best practices that go into the product and process.

This opportunity is large enough – 26M small businesses in the US alone, 10s of millions more internationally. If we do our job of building a tool that truly provides value, and treating our customers like kings and queens then we will have plenty of customers and traction in the market.

Phil: What changes brewing at Google, Yelp, or in the reviews space in general do you think might change the way GetFiveStars works?

Don: That’s a very good question. It was interesting to watch how Google tried to change from the 5 stars model to the 30 point Zagat inspired scale for all businesses. Now they are changing back.

I think the core premise of the product – engaging with your customers to get their feedback and act on it – will not change based on any variations that Google, Yelp, or any other services makes.

Phil: Is there a “core” feature of GetFiveStars that you just don’t see yourself ever changing (significantly)?

Don: The ability to get feedback from customers and act on it. There are a lot of exciting directions I can see this product going, but one thing that I don’t think will ever change is the focus on interacting with customers and making it easy to get feedback from them and see how that is affecting your business.

Phil: Right now, GetFiveStars is a one-offering brand. Do you see it turning into a brand with other offerings?

Don: I do feel like there are a lot of directions we can go with GetFiveStars. I want to keep the tool focused and effective, instead of cramming it with a ton of features and complexity. It should always be a pleasure to use, and take the minimum time and effort on the part of the business owner.

As we work with our customers, we can add new capabilities that add value. Birthday reminders, loyalty programs, and other customer interactions are certainly things we can imagine in GetFiveStars in the future.

Phil: What are your current “listening stations” for getting feedback about GetFiveStars?

Don: As you might imagine, we are using GetFiveStars to collect feedback from our customers. We are engaged one-on-one with them as they use the product to get their feedback and ideas. We are actively trying to solve their most pressing problems.

We also connect in with the Local Search community (look at the contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors report) to keep on top of best practices and changes in the industry.

We’re also using a tool called Mention.com (based on a customer recommendation) to monitor certain topics on the web.

Phil: What’s the best way for a user of GetFiveStars to contact you with technical questions or to offer feedback?

Don: We provide personalized email support at support@GetFiveStars.com. We also have a user guide with video tutorials, FAQs and full documentation. Our developers respond to every email too.

Phil: Putting GetFiveStars aside, what advice do you have for business owners who need more reviews? (Like advice you gave people before you built GetFiveStars.)

Don: Here are a few things I always recommend that a business should do:

1. Monitor your online reviews so you know where people are leaving reviews for you, and respond to them.

2. Put a simple and effective process in place for your office staff to ask your best customers for online reviews. This can be as simple as a clipboard with a list of names and email addresses. Collect those emails throughout the week, and then send a nice email at the end of the week to the people who visited, with a direct link to your Google+ page so they can leave you a review.

3. Cultivate your online profiles for Google+, Yelp, and any industry specific site, and your website.

Phil: Unrelated question: What’s a handful of books that helped you grow Expand2Web – and that you think would help anyone trying to grow a business?

Don: I love this question. I consider reading great books an essential part of my business and life. Here are a few of my favorites:

The Referral Engine – by John Jantsch

Made to Stick – by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Decisive – by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs – by Carmine Gallo

Delivering Happiness – by Tony Hsieh

Predictably Irrational – by Dan Ariely

Seth Godin – Tribes, Purple Cow, others…

How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer

Presentation Zen – by Garr Reynolds

Resonate – by Nancy Duarte

If you want to know about a book for something – just ask me. I’ve probably read it!

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Huge thanks to Don for the great insights.

If you’re serious about customer reviews, I highly recommend giving GetFiveStars a try.

(I also suggest checking out Expand2Web and following Don on Twitter.)

Any questions for Don or for me? Leave a comment!

8 Questions to Ask Local Citation Builders (Before You Hire Them)

September 5, 2013 by Phil 6 Comments

Citations can make or break your local SEO campaign, and they’re deceptively tricky. If you want to hire people to help with your citations, how can you be confident they’ll do a good job?

I like Andrew Shotland’s post on what to ask a customer-review-management service before you hire one. In the same spirit, I thought I’d bring up some questions you should ask anyone you’re thinking of hiring for citations work.

By the way, I’m not even talking about what to ask some goofball on ELance or Fiverr. Don’t. I’m talking about what you should ask people who seem to be specialists in citations or who offer a broader local SEO service that you’re considering.

I suggest you ask these 8 questions (in no particular order):

“How much do you charge?”
If it works out to less than about $3 per citation, you may be paying for sloppy work, or for the work to be done by someone who doesn’t speak the language you do business in. If money is so tight that bottom-dollar actually sounds attractive, you’re better off working on your citations yourself. At the very least, ask them the rest of the questions and see what they tell you.

“Do you let me pick which citations I’d like?”
You probably won’t have to hand-pick all of the citations from scratch (although you can). But you will want to make sure that you see the list of citations before your builders work on them. If they plan to submit to 100 sites but you’ve only heard of 10 of them, most of the citations are probably junk. (This post can help you determine whether the citations are any good.)

“Will you keep track of my login info for each site and send it to me as soon as you’ve created my listings?”
If the answer to either part of this two-part question is no, find someone else to work on your citations. You need control of your listings long-term. You’re paying for those citations to be built, not rented to you.

“How do you plan on handling sites like ExpressUpdate.com, LocalEze.com, CitySearch, YellowPages, and Yelp?”
If you want to claim and fix your listings on those sites, you (the business owner) or an employee will have to verify ownership by phone. It’s quick and easy, but a third party can’t do it for you. The honest answer from your citation-builders is “We can’t do those sites for you.” The honest and helpful answer is “We can’t do those sites, but we can walk you through the verification processes, if you’d like.”

“Will you show me exactly which sites are all set versus need work and which of them require me to do something?”
You need to be able to see at a glance where each site stands, and if there are any lingering to-dos.

“Are you only ‘building’ citations, or can you also helping me claim and clean up existing citations?”
It’s OK if the answer to this is “Nope, all we do is build the citations.” You just need to know up-front so that you can either find someone who can work on your existing citations, or plan on doing it yourself.

“How do you plan on handling any listings that don’t ‘stick’?”
You’re fine as long as they give you some idea as to why a given site just doesn’t have your listing 100% correct.

“Do you research the citations that matter in my local market?”
Again, it’s OK if the answer is no. But it’s nice if – in addition to working on a “core” list of citations that are pretty much always important – your citation-builders try to find the citations that seem to matter most in your particular industry and in your city or region.

Update – “bonus” question: “How many citations do you plan to work on?”
See Nyagoslav Zhekov’s great comment, below.

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My personal recommendations for citations work are NGSMarketing or Whitespark. I’ve also heard that BrightLocal’s Citation Burst is good.

Any other questions worth asking up-front? Any questions you wish you’d asked your citation-builders? Horror stories? Success stories – of citation-builders who did a good job for you? Leave me a comment!

Phil

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