How to Understand If a Listing is Claimed or Not (Part 1)

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May 222013
 
How to Understand If a Listing is Claimed or Not (Part 1)

In my daily citation building work I encounter a lot of different cases. Sometimes, the business I work with has absolutely no online presence other than a 1-page website. In other cases, the business is found literally everywhere – from Google and Yahoo, through Facebook and Twitter, to smallestrandombusinessdirectory.net. Most of the cases are, of course, somewhere in the middle. In some of them (rather rarely) the client kept neat record of where they enlisted their business and what usernames and passwords they used. In the majority though, clients have set up tens of accounts by themselves and never bothered to track their progress. If they made sure all their business information was correct, and they planned to keep it that way forever, everything would have be fine. But as we do not live in a perfect world, it is specifically the clients that had to, for any reason, change (read more)

Google Places Email Support in Other Languages

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May 162013
 

As previously noted by Mike Blumenthal, Google effectively closed their Places support forums in all languages other than English. Obviously this situation is not perfect for users around the world, so since yesterday Google started offering email support for Places/+Local issues for users in the following languages: Spanish German Portuguese Dutch Russian French Italian Polish Japanese And apparently the ones in Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) are still under construction. I haven’t tested those myself yet, so I currently have no information on how much the response time is.

Why I Am So Inactive Recently

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May 132013
 

Probably most of the regular readers of my blog have noticed that I am unusually inactive recently. With only 1 post since 27 February, this is by far the worst period for me in terms of writing productivity. The reasons for this are complex, but I want to stress on one in particular that is so significant that it is practically affecting my entire business – the Internet. My wife and me moved to a new condo about 6 months ago. Although I have office space that I rent monthly, I go there very occasionally for meetings and training with my team, and there isn’t even constant Internet access there. In 99% of the time I work from home, so the move meant that I also moved my office. Unfortunately, it became clear very soon (a few days before the move) that it might be a problem to find a (read more)

How Google’s Local Search Results Will Look in Europe

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Apr 262013
 
How Google's Local Search Results Will Look in Europe

Google has been the subject of antitrust investigations in Europe for some time now. The reason has been allegations from competitors about some anti-competitive practices of Google, especially related to vertical search. While a similar case has been settled in Google’s favor by the FTC in the US, the European Commission, claiming that Google’s market share in Europe is much more significant, has “pushed” the company to change their search results for some specialized verticals. The verticals included are Google Shopping, Google Places, Google Hotel Finder, Google News, Google Finance, Google Flights, Google Maps, as well as all future verticals that Google would roll out. Google finally came out with a proposal on Thursday. For me, naturally, the most interesting part of the proposal is the one related to local search results. Google offered the following format of the local search results on desktops: And here is the proposed format (read more)

Citation Building Guide – Why You Should Get It

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Feb 272013
 

Since I wrote my first (and only, up to now) e-book (Citation Building Guide) about 3 months ago I’ve been having a lot of requests for additions and I’ve been receiving questions related to topics that for one reason or another are not covered in the current version of the e-book. That is why I decided to prepare a “second edition” of a sort. This second edition is scheduled to be issued on 18 March. What will change and what will be added Besides some changes to the structure of the content, there will be the following additions and updates: 1. Information about citation building in countries other than the United States – I have rightly been blamed that the guide focuses too much on the case of the US. And I agree. That is why there will be many improvements that could be beneficial to Internet marketers and regular (read more)

Who Is Who in Local SEO

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Feb 262013
 
Who Is Who in Local SEO

This is an article I have been planning for very, very long time. Although there are a few great lists of local SEO specialists I frequently refer to (David Mihm’s, Mike Ramsey’s, Matthew Hunt’s), there is no single resource which gives more insights into who the people behind the names and the websites actually are. In fact, this is a problem not just with local SEO in particular, but with the online marketing industry as a whole. On the one side are the customers, for whom it is often very difficult to determine which SEO to choose. Traditionally, the cornerstones have been testimonials, recommendations from friends, and general awareness of the reputation of the service provider. But in a business where the “seller” and the “buyer” could be as far from each other as tens of thousands of miles (in my case for example), these traditional guides could sometimes be (read more)

Google: Your NAP Should Be Consistent Both Online and in the Real World

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Feb 082013
 
Google: Your NAP Should Be Consistent Both Online and in the Real World

Joel Headley of Google shared the following: “… NAP consistency is important not just online, but real world. Not just signage, but in phone conversations. I expect, and so does our quality team, to hear the full and complete name of the business over the phone. When it is answered or when specifically asked.” He also said that if the calling data quality moderator hears the business presenting themselves in even slightly different way from what is listed on their Google+ page, this might result in the moderator taking the decision to change the business name. While I generally do agree that consistency should be observed both online and in the real world – for branding purposes to say the least, I see a major problems with such an approach: too much power is given to a single person to decide how to modify something of such importance for any (read more)

Determining the Best Local Citation Sources for Any Market

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Feb 072013
 

During my discussions with Ken Fagan an interesting question occurred: “How does one determine what business directory is a good citation source?” The obvious and shortest answer would be “Based on its quality.” But yet again – how do you determine the quality? What are the factors that could show you if one citation source is better than another? Here is a summary of what I think (the factors are not in particular order): 1. Number of the top ranking direct competitors having listings coming from the citation source. There are numerous ways to discover what citations your competitors have and you can do this either manually, or use some local SEO tool(s). The best covered countries are United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. 2. Number of businesses from the same business line or the same locale being listed on the particular citation source. I did a small-scale research (read more)

Google Threatens to Remove Listing While Pitching AdWords Express

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Feb 062013
 

Update (8 February): Joel Headley (Consumer Operations Manager for Google Maps) said: “This was an isolated problem, which was corrected.” The horribleness of the customer service at Google, and especially the customer service for their free products is notorious and has a long and sad history. Google Places/Plus Local is one of those unfortunate products, which had to go a long way before getting the deserved attention on the support front. And while things are improving there, Google apparently still has a lot to do in terms of training their sales representatives. A user at the Local Search Forum shared an email from Google, which made a great impression on me. The email goes like this: “I tried reaching you earlier to brief you on the Google Places Page. If it’s easier, please call me at this number 1-877-503-0842 (ext. 23920) to discuss your Places Page. Please Call DO NOT (read more)

Best Local SEO and Local-Search-Related Articles of 2012

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Jan 092013
 

One year ago I published a list of the best local SEO and local SEM articles of 2011. Ever since, one of my dreams has been to turn this into a regular practice. And here we are – in the beginning of 2013, and I managed to compile a list of the best local-search-related pieces of the past year. The list consists of approximately 200 articles divided into 8 categories (clicking on the category name will take you to the corresponding part of the list): General Local-Search-Related Onsite Local SEO Offsite Local SEO Google Places and Google+ Local Local Citations and Citation Building Reviews and Reputation Management for Local Search Non-Google Local Search (Bing, Yelp, Apple, Nokia, Yahoo) Mobile-Local I also included a list of some of the articles I published this year that you might find read-worthy: My Articles This article library holds a ton of wealthy information shared (read more)

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