Posts Tagged ‘Local Business Center’

Several thousand users of Google’s Local Business Center (LBC) were recently surprised to find that they had received confidential LBC analytics information from other LBC users.

Google sends out a monthly newsletter to its LBC users that includes product news and Web traffic statistics related to users’ business search listings. As a result of an employee’s mistake, several thousand newsletter recipients received statistics for other people’s businesses.

No sensitive personal information was disclosed, a Google spokesperson said. Exposed data consisted of the number of times the account owner’s LBC listing appeared in Google local search results, the number of times searchers clicked on the listing and the associated Web site, and the number of clicks seeking further information and driving directions.

“Shortly after sending the newsletter to a small portion of our users (less than 1%), we discovered that some e-mails included incorrect business listing information,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. We promptly stopped sending any further e-mails and investigated the cause, which we found to be a human error while pulling together the newsletter content. We’d like to apologize to all the business owners affected and assure all our users that we’re working hard to ensure that nothing similar will happen again. Those affected should have all received a corrected e-mail.”

Google LBC users like David Dalka, a business development and online marketing strategy strategy consultant, reported receiving one of the errant e-mail messages and suggested that the incident could harm users’ trust of Google. “If the Google Local Business Results were sent to many people, this could likely be as serious as the AOL data breach,” he wrote.

AOL’s 2006 breach exposed about 20 million search terms and phrases used by 658,000 of its subscribers, so it’s not that serious, but it’s nonetheless embarrassing and something that Google doesn’t want to repeat. The company is exploring ways to automate its newsletter to remove the potential for mistakes of this sort.

1. Submit Complete Forms.

All three local search centers include a wealth of information that’s of use for people doing searches (i.e. your prospects!), so be sure to fill out each form completely (the hyperlinked “Google”, “Yahoo” and “Bing”, above, will take you to each).

For example, if you have a bricks and mortar storefront, you can indicate your operating hours. If your site then appears in Google’s 10-pack listing and someone clicks on your listing, it will say whether or not you’re open for business – in real time.

Also be sure to choose the appropriate categories for your business – and yes, you can choose more than one. Choosing more than one category helps ensure you site is shown in local searches for those categories (nevertheless, show restraint: only choose those categories that genuinely refer to your business).

As you can see in the screen shot below, Spa Bar, a day spa in San Francisco, has included its operating hours but is listed for one category only.

Its competitor, Tru Spa, also located in San Francisco, lists its operating hours and six categories, as you can see in the screen shot below.

2. Ask all of your customers to give you a review – on multiple sites.

Customer reviews comprise a major component of the local search algorithm. And, as you can see in the screen shot below, Google is now including a link for “Reputation Trend,” which links to a trending analysis on the review site Judy’s Book.

This means it’s becoming increasingly important that you become very strategic about getting your customers to leave reviews for you – on multiple review sites.

In this shot for Luminous Day Spa, you can see that Bing is pulling information from the CitySearch directory, including “menu” and “reservation” hot links, and it’s showing that the spa has a rating of 9/10 (we’re not sure how that is calculated).

Other review sites you’ll want to consider include:

Local review sites for your city/region – These include CitySearch and Yelp, to name just two popular review sites.

Travel sites — Fodor’s and HotelTravel.com are two popular sites.

Health sites — Doctor Oogle, Health Grades, No More Clipboard, and Health Profs are a few popular sites.

Google Reviews – Anyone with a Google account can leave a review simply by clicking on the little “comment” icon that follows any search engine listing (provided the person is logged in to Google).

Yahoo! and Bing Reviews – The review function works similarly to Google’s.

3. Upload your own images.

Although all three search engines let you upload images, you can upload more than just one or two to Google’s local business center. If you don’t upload your own images, you leave to chance exactly what image Google is going to show – which could be unflattering, to say the least.

For our day spa example, many of the spas used photographs of people getting facials and massages or images of their interiors. You can also upload your logo and YouTube videos.