Are Younger Consumers More Tolerant of Bad Reviews? Or Do They Just Understand Them Better?
If your business has an aggregate star rating of 3 or less, you need to be concerned that shoppers might reject you out of hand. If, on the other hand you have a star rating greater than 4 most shoppers will accept you on face value. However we are seeing dramatically different standards within different […]
Google Now Displaying Full Review Snippets in the Knowledge Panel
Off and on for the past few months Google has been showing reviews in the Knowledge panel for local searches. James Gibbons pointed out today that he was now seeing them more regularly. I would have to agree. This may be a more extensive test or it may be the new normal but many (not all) […]
Do Positive Reviews Motivate Consumers?
It seems intuitive that a negative review corpus would severely limit a business’s online opportunities. And likewise that a positive review corpus would expand them. But these recent surveys indicate that a negative collection of reviews is much more likely to harm a business than positive reviews are going to help them. In an effort to […]
Can Facebook Crack the SMB Nut? Can Google?
Greg did an interesting article on Facebook’s move into the SMB market. Whether their decision to forgo resellers is the correct one, time will tell. But has Greg points out, the real question is whether they can deliver compelling value to SMBs, in an easy to use package that drives widespread adoption. Many have dreamed […]
The Annual Print Yellow Page Page Count And Other Dead Horses
It’s time for the annual print Yellow Page count. And I promised last year to stop beating that dead horse… so this year I will beat several. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Page counts in my local print version have declined once again by over 10%. The good news for […]
Google Pre-Announces Plus Features for Bulk
Alert reader Nico has pointed out that Google has publicly committed to the rollout of Plus features for bulk upload users on their Help Pages. We’ve listened carefully to your feedback. In the future, you’ll be able to: Make updates and posts to your customers using the Google+ page for your location See Insights to […]
Google Announces Upgraded Schema Support
Today on the Google webmaster blog Google has announced upgraded Schema support for additional phone types and detailed specific recommendations for using Schema.org on location pages. It is unfortunate but Google did not include a new schema for call tracking. Obviously this granular detail is useful for achieving more accuracy in Knowledge Graph answer boxes. […]
Google Upgrades Bulk Upload Again
Google recently added new features to the bulk upload (week before last) and they are announcing another set of new features today. Hat tip to Linda Buquet for spotting and Max Minzer for pointing out. Google Jade posted the following in the forums: We are rolling out new features for the bulk location management tool […]
Matt Cutts: Google Plus to Receive Manual Penalty
Google has in the past penalized it’s own properties five times for breaking its own SEO rules. Matt Cutts has apparently now also sanctioned Google Plus with a manual penalty. Here are the comments from the internal email that was forwarded to me: “Forks or no forks, we believe that the Plus team has overdone […]
Should a Local Business Use Just a Local Page or a A Brand Page And a Local
I have written before about the fact that it is not possible to merge a G+ Page for local with other page types like brand or company. But the question of the relative value of one page versus another is an om-going question for me. Is there a benefit to having both page types if […]
Google Updates Bulk Feed
Posted from 20,000 ft on my iPhone so forgive any typos. Googler Jade, who seems to be everywhere these days doing everything, just posted these notes about an upgrade to the bulk tool: Importing a spreadsheet to the bulk upload tool is now improved. Now, when you import a file, you’ll see a preview of […]
Reviews: If it is Good Enough to Do, It’s Good Enough to Do in Excess
File this under: Bosses come up with the worst ideas category or perhaps in the “it felt so good shooting myself in the left foot, let me do it in my right one as well” category. This comment was recently posted on my GOOGLE: REVIEW CONTESTS VIOLATE GUIDELINES article from a Mrs G. Mrs G. (1 […]
Google’s “Organic” Algorithm Is A Lot Faster Than Google’s Local Algo
On March 15th, the WP Total Cache plugin on this site for some reason started serving Googlebot 403 response codes (aka “Access Denied”): As you can see organic entrances to my site via the home page have tanked over the past couple of days: While traffic to other pages was down about 20% on Monday, […]
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Which Is The Most “Generous” Search Engine To Local Businesses?
Earlier this month, one of our customers asked an interesting question in a training workshop. They wanted to know which search engine displayed the most local results for different types of search terms. Google gets the lion’s share of focus in the SEO world, particularly in Local. They also…
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Google Maps Report a Problem: Does It Work For Local Spam?
After Bryan Seely released the exploits he used to add false and misleading (spammy) listings to Google Maps on Mike’s blog as well as on Valleywag, Google went into full PR damage control and made some changes in how they handle local spam, including ending phone call PIN code verification for new businesses on Places. […]
Last Week in Google Local
tl;dr: Lots of small updates last week. And Soon, very soon I won’t be pulling my hair out. The transition to the new dashboard status: Judging by the fact that there were lots of complaints over the past two weeks in the forums about THE EMAIL and that my crufty, 2007 dashboard was finally converted I […]
One More Reason for an SMB to Engage with Google Plus
Engaging with G+ can seem like a chore to most SMBs who have trouble attracting their local clients to their Plus page. Its main advantage is that Google has integrated it with search, where folks are in fact looking. Google seems to have recently upped the ante in local providing one more reason for the […]
Google Testing Moving Directional Local Info Panel Back into Search Results
With the advent of the knowledge graph and the info panel, Google has provided local businesses a lot of territory above the fold. This is true in both the main search results and the area to right of the search results where ads often show. Kerry Fager of Findlaw.com shared this screen shot (IE) that […]
New Look for Google Local Search Results
Google is apparently testing a new, cleaner front page layout that will affect both local and regular search results. First reported by Dan Barker on March 5th, Searchnewz is reporting that they will be rolled out. I am now seeing this new layout on Safari for Mac. The differences: The removal of the underlines from […]
Why You Got the Google Places Email & What You Should Do
Over the past few weeks, Google has been moving a large number of listings from the old dashboard to the new one. Often these dashboards held listings that were claimed into more than one account or had been claimed in multiple ways. When there was a conflict in either scenario Google sent out an alerting […]