Closing an Old Google+ Local Listing vs. Editing It

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Dec 122012
 

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about what a business should do if they have moved to a new location, or if they re-branded themselves in regards with their Google+ Local listing. The options are generally two: 1. Edit the old listing and add the new information (duh…) 2. “Close” the old listing and create a new one with the new information (duh?!) I know that if you’ve never had to deal with Google and if you are newcomers to the world of local search this topic might look completely silly to you, and you might be saying to yourself “Isn’t it more than obvious the correct answer is 1?”, let me surprise you – it’s not how things work in the Places world. What Google actually suggests and encourages is to mark the listing that features outdated information as closed and to create a brand new (read more)

12 FAQs for Local Citation Building

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Nov 262012
 

We already have an FAQ page for our citation building service on our site, but I felt there are some more general questions that do not fit into that page, and would be better off discussed in a post form. I share the questions in order of frequency of poppingup-ness (if there is such a word): 1) Do you verify the information I am sending to you? Yes! We always check what you are sending to us in terms of information. Some of the most common mistakes we face are: – business name is not the one that is most frequently used online – categories are simply keywords (such as “helicopter” or “Las Vegas”), rather than phrases that explain what your business is (such as “helicopter flights”, “personal injury attorney”, etc.) 2) Why do you NOT offer citation building for more than 100 citations? The most important reason is that (read more)

Learning Local SEO from the Ones That Do It Best

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Nov 202012
 
Learning Local SEO from the Ones That Do It Best

There are three main ways to learn about SEO (and these are the same for local SEO): 1) Listen to what the search engines and specialists have to say – Matt Cutts of Google and Duane Forrester of Bing are the two most notable figures sharing insights about SEO from the horse’s mouth; 2) Test and analyze the tests; 3) Observe what others are doing and learn from their mistakes/triumphs. In the case of local search there aren’t many that get both better high organic search rankings and more organic search traffic across a vast number of verticals than Yelp, so who else could be better to learn about local SEO from? While Yelp functions mainly as a social network for sharing opinions about local businesses, in this article I would rather place more attention on the way they have structured their business listing pages and what everyone could take (read more)

Using Local SERP Checker for Local Links and Citations Prospecting

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Nov 082012
 
Using Local SERP Checker for Local Links and Citations Prospecting

A couple of weeks ago Sergiu Draganus demoed to me a new tool that his team is building  – Local SERP Checker. What the tool does is basically displaying the first page results for particular keywords, simulating what users in specific cities would see if searching for those keywords. The tool provides both the “raw” list of ranking pages and an organized heat map (I am a fan of those) that shows pages from what domains rank across different locations: The tool has the ability to display both organic and paid Geo-localized results for one or more keywords at a time. This provides the interesting opportunity to research and compare the difference between local intent keywords with and without Geo-modifier in the search query: The tool can be used in a number of different ways for local SEO research purposes: 1. Discovering high ranking domains across different locations, which supplemented (read more)

Overcoming Google Local Listing Mergers with Additional Citations

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Oct 312012
 

Merging of two separate listing and the appearing of duplicate listings are two of the longest term problems with Google’s local listings. They are basically the product of the same problem: the local data threshold. This threshold determines what percentage matching information should be present in order for new incoming data to get merged with data already existing in Google’s business information database. If this threshold is passed the data is merged. If it is not – a new cluster of data (listing) is created. Here is an example that illustrates this better: Home remodeling company “Bob the Builder” has a listing on Google+ Local (ex- Google Places). They are located in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. Here is how the information in their listing looks like: Name: Bob the Builder Address: 11 Main Street #100, Rancho Cucamonga, CA 91701 Phone: 909-909-9090 Categories: home remodeling, home renovation, home restoration Unfortunately, they also (read more)

Service Area Shows Up on Google Maps

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Oct 292012
 
Service Area Shows Up on Google Maps

Service area has long been one of the features that, for unknown reasons, hasn’t been visible on Google Maps, although it was introduced more than 2 years ago. Today I noticed that it already is visible. Google hasn’t made any official statement for when this happened, but I would bet it was around the time (or together with) the “expanded coverage of buildings footprint” update on Google Maps from a few days ago. Here is how it looks like: Note the description of the service area (I surrounded it in a red square in the screenshot) – it hasn’t been displayed publicly since the “Additional Details” section disappeared from the Google Places listings the last year. Here is how a listing with service area set to match the city boundaries looks like: What the implications on local SEO might be? It could be expected that Google might start using this (read more)

How to Remove Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories

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Oct 092012
 
How to Remove Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories

Duplicate listings can very easily turn into the plague of the online marketing of every local business. They not only often feature old or incorrect and misleading information, but could also potentially “transmit” this information to other sites, thus spreading it throughout the whole ecosystem and ultimately reaching Google’s local data cluster, which could be devastating for business’s local search rankings. Unfortunately, getting rid of such duplicates has proven to be more difficult than any other process related to local listings – adding, claiming, or editing them. Additionally, there is currently no automated service that deals with this problem, so manual clean-up is the only way to go. Why removing duplicates is so difficult? There are a few main reasons for this: 1) Making it easy for people and businesses to remove listings from a business directory could very easily backfire and cause the loss of data that has been (read more)

Are Spammy Google Reviews Really Gone?

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Oct 022012
 

Yesterday at Local University Advanced Joel Headley, one of the main people behind the development of Google Maps answered a number of very intriguing questions related to Google+ Local. But before I start discussing some of those Q&A’s I should note that I didn’t participate personally in the event, so everything I know is sourced from the social networks. One of the topics that was of greatest interest to me was the Google reviews one. It all started with the following tweet: Joel Headley is talking about Google’s clean up of the review space. They deleted any review that they found had a duplicate. #localu — Mike Ramsey (@niftymarketing) October 1, 2012 I was curious to get a clearer idea of which reviews have been targeted and that is why I asked: @niftymarketing Duplicate in Google’s database, or anywhere on the web??? — Nyagoslav Zhekov (@Nyagoslav) October 1, 2012 Mike was (read more)

Local Citation Sources for Australia, Germany, and New Zealand

 Posted by  14 Responses »
Sep 252012
 

Here comes the time to complete a promise I gave a while ago. In the article “Local Citation Building Study Part 4: Local Business Directories Around the World (Canada and the UK)” from June 19 this year I claimed that I was going to be delivering a two-part piece related to the most important business directories and citation sources in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and New Zealand. The first part covered Canada and the UK, and the time finally came for the second part. Without any further blabbering, here are the top citation sources for Australia, Germany, and New Zealand: 1. Local Citation Sources for Australia I used a number of great sources for this part of the citation sources study: The Guide to Australian Citations for Local Search (by David Mihm) The Definitive List of Local Search Citations – Australia Citation Sites (by Phil Rozek) Local Google Places (read more)

I Am NOT Part of OptiLocal

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Sep 142012
 
I Am NOT Part of OptiLocal

I feel I have to dissolve a piece of serious misinformation. I am not part of OptiLocal‘s team anymore. Yes, I helped establish the company and I was part of the managerial team, but I am not anymore (for a few months now). I suppose one of the main reasons for this misunderstanding is the fact that when one searches for [nyagoslav] on Google.com, the first result that shows up is the homepage of OptiLocal. It is also the second result for the same search on Bing: I believe this is largely because a lot of comments, which I’ve previously written, contain my name as the anchor text and link to the homepage of OptiLocal. I am unable to update these myself as most blogs do not allow comment editing, but I am willing to provide a juicy link from my site to all blogs that update my comments with (read more)

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