Posts Tagged ‘Local SEO’

Greg Sterling posted yesterday about Ads Entering the Google ‘7-Pack’. These ads are actually called Enhanced Listings that Google is now featuring in the map pack.  This was also noted on Mike Blumenthal’s blog post titled Google’s “Enhanced Listings” for Local earlier today.

You will notice that the Golf Club at Boulder Ridge is highlighting photos.  This is just one of the many options that Google allows you to choose to highlight.

Google says that you can use any of the following enhancements to jazz up your listing.

• Website for your business.
• Photos of your business.
• Videos of your business.
• Coupons for your listing.
• Menu for your restaurant.
• Reservations page for your business.
• Driving directions to your business.

“The enhancement types you can select depend on what information you already have available in your business listing. If you want to highlight a video, for example, you’ll first need to add a video to your business listing. Once you’ve done that, the option will show up in the menu for your enhancement types.”

There is a $25 monthly fee that gets paid to Google to create an enhanced listing for your local company.  There are no bids or keywords to optimize for either.

The Burlison Law Firm chose to highlight some of their videos, in order to persuade the viewer to click the link.

Not only does your listing get highlight next to where you appear in the maps, but you also get a nice icon to accompany the map its self.  This should improve the click through rate of your listing since it is a way to separate your map listing from your competition’s.

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.