Archive for the ‘Directories’ Category

Here is a paraphrase of conversations I’ve had with several local businesses recently:

Them: “How do I get on the first page of Google?”

Me: “Show up in the local business results.”

In each case, these businesses have no real hope of cracking the first page of Google’s web results. They are relatively small, local businesses that sell products that are also sold by large national or international companies. These large companies have a much better shot at ranking well in Google web results and likely have significant search engine optimization (SEO) budgets as well. But in each case, Google is also including local listings along with web results for queries relevant to the businesses I’m talking to. Below is an example of the results I get from Google when I search for “office furniture”. You can see that in this case local listings show up after the third web result. Google shows local listings when it thinks I may be interested in finding something locally, and uses my IP address and other indicators to determine what “local” means to me. Sometimes local listings show up at the top, and sometimes they show up further down the page. While Google has had local listings for a while, they have been putting more emphasis on these listings in the last couple of years, and this trend is likely to continue. This is fantastic news for local business. (And kudos to Google for supporting local businesses in this way.)

It can take a bit of work to show up in the local listings. Depending on the search term and other variables, Google presents local listings in groupings of one, three, seven or ten. Assuming you are not the only business of your type in your area, the tasks below will help your listing to be among those top results.

Before getting to the list, there is one dynamic you should understand about Google local business listings. With local business listings, Google seeks to establish external verification of the content that appears on a business listing page (also known as a “Place Page”). Google uses public records of business data for verification, as well as business listings on yellow pages and other local sites. This verification process helps to prevent non-local or questionable businesses from showing up in the results, but it also means that you should be consistent in how you represent your name, address and other information about your business. For example, if your business name is ACME Plumbing, but you write it as “ACME Plumbing and Free Beer” in Google Place Pages, Google may not be able to verify your business name elsewhere, which could hurt your ranking.

I have organized the work in to a to-do list format, with explanations pertaining to each to-do list item. I also created a simple PDF to-do list for printing, without all of the explanations.

1. Claim your listing: if your business has been around for a while, Google probably already has a listing with basic information. If your business is relatively new, they may not. In either case, you need to claim your listing to be able to edit most of the elements described here. Here is a post I did a few months back describing the basics of claiming a listing: Adding a Google Local Business Center Listing
2. Enter Your Business Information
   1. Pick an Address – you may not have much choice about this, but you will be better off if you can specify an address in the largest town or city in your area. Google favors listings that are in the city a user searches, versus towns and cities nearby. This factor is so important that it may be worth considering opening an office or somehow establishing a central address if you are near-to but not in a big city. But don’t be deceptive, Google is on the lookout for businesses that falsify locations with P.O. boxes and such. It is also important that the address you specify is reinforced by mentions of your business on other sites. For more on this, see Citations below. Google also allows you specify service areas for your business, but at the time of this writing doing so is more likely to cause harm than good.
   2. Pick Categories – the categorization of your business listing is very important. Google uses categories to associate product and service search terms with your listing, even if those keywords don’t occur in your description or elsewhere. Google allows you to come up with your own custom categories, but it’s best to stick with standard categories as much as possible. As you are typing in category keywords, Google will suggest categories that relate to the keywords. These are the categories Google recognizes, and are likely to match to a wide variety of search terms. If you do feel that your business merits its own category, only do so if the category you create is a phrase people are likely to search. And don’t choose or create categories that are not directly relevant to your business. If the categories you choose do not relate to your web site or descriptions of your business on other sites, Google may penalize your listing.
   3. Pick a Business Name – you should stick with your registered business name or a registered DBA, but keywords here do matter. For example, if you offer physical therapy but your business name is just “John Smith”, you could consider getting a DBA of “John Smith Physical Therapy” and specifying that as your business name.
   4. Write a Description – the description can have a lot to do with whether or not your business gets a visit or a phone call, so above all else it should describe what you do in an accurate and compelling way. Try to introduce relevant keywords that are not in your business name or category selections, and avoid repeating category keywords unnecessarily.
   5. Pick a Phone Number – it is better to have a local phone number than a 1-800 number in your listing. And it helps if the number you specify is consistent with your business listing on other sites. It is also good if the number is unique to your business, so if you operate more than one business get more than one phone number.
   6. Add a Website Link – it is best if the link you specify points to a page that includes your business address. A “contact us” page is often a good choice, or if you have multiple locations you should create landing pages for each location and point to those with the corresponding Place Pages for those locations.
   7. Add Additional Details – Google allows you to add “additional details” to your listing such as brands carried or specific services. This is a great place to add lists of services offered or products carried, but don’t use this feature to repeat keywords you’ve already used in your categories or description.
3. Add photos: the completeness of a listing has an impact on ranking, and photos are an important part of being complete. As far as the ranking algorithm goes, the photos don’t have to be particularly good or interesting, but your goal is not just to rank, it is to have people visit or contact you. Many business owners upload poorly composed photos taken with a phone or similar low-fi device. It is worth making a little effort to get photographs that stand out. Google Place Pages are not very attractive on their own; good photos can help your listing convert visitors in to customers.
4. Add a Coupon: adding a coupon won’t do a lot for your ranking (it will do a little), but it gives visitors to your page a reason to take action, and helps turn comparison shoppers in to buyers.
5. Check for Completeness: as mentioned above, one of the metrics Google looks at when ranking listings is overall completeness. Make sure that you have filled out all of the information fields that are relevant to your business, and added additional content where possible.
6. Ask Your Friends to Review Your Listing: Google’s Place Pages UI feels like it is designed by robots and for robots. It is easy to get caught up in their drab world and forget that your goal is to share the excitement of your business with prospects. Have your friends look over your listing to make sure you are capturing what makes your business great.
7. Enjoy a Cold Drink and Wait for Our Next Checklist!

Extra Credit

1. Create a Video: while video belongs as part of a complete listing, I put it under Extra Credit because video takes effort to produce and plenty of listings do very well without video. Having video does not have a big impact on ranking, but video content can make your listing much more personal and it may be easier to create than you think. Production values are much less important than sincerity in a context like this. Below is an example of a small business video that has been wildly successful, with over 200,000 views. It is a bit over the top, but I also think there is a good lesson to be learned. Let your passion show and people will respond. You probably don’t need to swear as much as the man in the video, but he does make me believe he loves printing and I would give him my business if he was in my area.
2. Get Citations: It will also have a big impact if you get more listings and mentions of your business online. Being listed on the major directory sites and local sites such as Chambers of Commerce and local guides will help your Google Place Page ranking. If you have not done so already, create listings on the sites included in our article Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business. Also have a look at the David Mihm, Dave Cosper and Rand Fishkin articles below for more ideas on how to get mentions of your business.
3. Get Reviews: When you ask customers for feedback about your business, point them to an online review site such as Yelp or Superpages.com or your Google Place Page and ask them to provide feedback there. Google crawls many sources for reviews, so reviews almost anywhere can benefit your Place Page ranking. Some businesses are nervous about online reviews because a bad review can just sit out there forever-and-ever. If you are one of those, get over it. By encouraging your customers to review your business, the sum of feedback will provide a fair portrayal of how you are doing and you will appeal to a new generation of shopper that values reviews above all else. For more on soliciting reviews, see our article Unhappy Customer: Judge, Jury and Executioner?.

Click Here for the Printer-Friendly PDF To-Do List

Additional Resources:

• Local Search Ranking Factors – Various Contributors
• 8 Steps to Building an Optimized Local Business Listing – Dev Basu
  This is the 3rd article in a series of three. The first two are worth reading as well and linked-to from the top of this article.
• One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings In Google Local – Rand Fishkin
• Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link – David Mihm
• Optimizing Your Business Listing for Local Search Supremacy – Dave Cosper

This is the second in my series of posts describing the steps involved in adding a business to the Top 10 Free Places to List a Business. In this post, I will describe the process of adding a Facebook Fan Page for my friend Kelton’s business, QUICK-BEND design. Note that I say Fan Page, but Facebook mostly says “Page” without the “Fan” – they used to say “Fan Page”, but I guess they found it too limiting. There’s no difference between the two, but I find it confusing to just say Facebook Page, so stick with the old naming.

To add a page, you have to be logged in to a Facebook account to add a page. Then go to the Create a Page page. You can create a page from any account, and unlike the Google Local Business Center, more than one account can have administrative access to a Fan Page.

From the Create a Page page, I selected “Local” and the category “Other Business”. I also selected “Do not make Page publicly visible at this time.” – I figured I’d let Kelton decide when he wants to make it public.

Believe it or not, that’s it. I could have stopped there and make the page live, but of course it’s nice to put up something for people to look at if they visit, so I added photos from the QUICK-BEND design web site. To keep things simple, I created photo folders to match the categories on QUICK-BEND. It may seem unnecessary to duplicate all of the photos, but I don’t think so. People are very familiar with Facebook photo navigation, and frankly I find the WordPress navigation on the QUICK-BEND site a little tedious. Case in point: I’d been to the QUICK-BEND site a number of times, but had no idea how talented and prolific an artist Kelton is:

Tip: if you are uploading a bunch of photos at once, you can select the option “Edit Album” after the photos have been uploaded. This will allow you to add captions to all of the photos at once, which saves a lot of time.

The other important things to do are:

• Upload a profile photo – you can do this by clicking on the place where the profile photo goes.
• Add a web site URL and location information – you can do this by clicking on the “Info” tab, then “Edit”
• Add a description – this is just below the profile photo, click on the pencil icon

The whole process would have taken 15-20 minutes tops, save for the fact that I had to go to Kelton’s web site and save all of the photos to my computer before I could upload them. That and adding captions to the photos took a little longer. The thing I like most about Facebook Fan Pages for businesses is that they are a very unobtrusive way to let people know of recent news and upcoming events. Much better than email in my opinion. And the Facebook environment encourages users to share content and see what their friends are sharing.

Here is the finished page, if you’d like to check it out and become a fan.

And a couple of other posts highlighting cool things businesses are doing on their Fan Pages:
Einstein Bros + Facebook: Good Bagels Make Good Friends
Titus Cycles Tattoo Contest

Before the web, the vast majority of consumers found local business by opening up the yellow pages and searching by category. This made it easy for businesses to ensure that they could be found. Buy a yellow pages listing and your job was pretty much done. While consumers are increasingly looking for businesses online, there is no comparable authoritative source for local business information on the web. Consumers look to a variety of channels to find businesses, which makes the job of getting found a bit more difficult. I have compiled a list of what I view as the 10 most important sites on which to list (for US businesses), with the important qualification that doing so is free in all cases. I looked at a variety of factors, including overall traffic, domain authority, share of local search and depth of listing content in compiling the list.

All of these sites also have paid advertising options, but first you should take advantage of what they have to offer for free. Note that in most cases, you will need to be able to verify a phone number and/or a physical address to add your listing. I have included traffic figures for each site, using Compete.com January data. I have also noted cases where web site links are nofollowed, with an explanation of what that means at the bottom of this post.

1. Google Local Business Center

By adding your business to the Google Local Business Center, you show up on Google Maps. As I’ve mentioned before, this is one of the most important things a local business can do to get found on the web. Here are a few reasons why:

• It is the most popular mapping service on the web, period.
• Google Maps results show up first on Google.com for many local searches.
• Google Maps is the default local search app on the iPhone (for now) and of course Google’s Android phone.

Google Maps is currently at 182 million visits per month. To add your listing: Google Local Business Center
My post describing adding a Google business listing

2. Facebook Fan Page

Apart from being the second most visited site on the internet behind Google, 1.5 million businesses have created fan pages on the network, and 20 million people become fans of pages every day (source). Facebook is a long way from being where consumers search for businesses, but it has quickly become the most likely place for consumers to connect with local businesses online. According to Compete, Facebook received almost 3 billion visits in January, but little of this constitutes local business search traffic. Web site links nofollowed. To create a page you must be logged in to your personal account, then go here: www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
My post describing adding a Facebook Fan Page

3. Yelp

The review site Yelp is now the most trafficked site focused on local business search. Given its emphasis on social content and interaction, Yelp tends to do better than other directory sites when it comes to attracting younger, more social users. Currently at 50 million visits per month. To add your listing: Yelp signup page

4. Citysearch

Citysearch.com has been holding steady for a number of years now in terms of on-site traffic, but they have been growing their network of distribution through syndication and the recently announced CityGrid blows their distribution opportunity wide-open. Currently at 34 million visits per month. Web site links nofollowed. To add your listing: add business – note that you must be logged in to a personal Citysearch account to see this page.

5. Yellowpages.com/YP.com

AT&T owned Yellowpages.com rebranded as YP.com, and it’s not your parents yellow pages any more. Under pressure from the likes of Google and Yelp, YP.com has a fresh look and more social content and features. And they are beta testing a new social-local search site called Buzz.com. They also distribute listings to a number of syndication partners. Currently at 28 million visits per month. Web site links nofollowed. Claim your listing.

6. Bing Local

Microsoft has long struggled behind Google and Yahoo! in the world of web search, but the tides have turned of late. Since Microsoft launched Bing.com last year, they have steadily been gaining search share. And recent regulatory approval in Europe clears the way for a long planned partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. As a result of this partnership, Bing will replace Yahoo’s own search engine on Yahoo properties. Bing currently accounts for a relatively small portion of local search, but expect that portion to grow. To add your listing: Local Listing Center

7. Yahoo! Local

As with many things Yahoo!, Yahoo! Local is on the way down. But they still provide a very popular service, so worth making sure you are listed there. Currently at 12 million visits per month. Web site links nofollowed. To add your listing: Yahoo! Local add a business page

8. LinkedIn

LinkedIn isn’t exactly a place where people go to look for local businesses, but it does offer rich business listing functionality, and the domain carries quite a bit of authority. LinkedIn has also been adding many useful features for businesses, such as the ability to announce promotions, share articles and blogs, and list open jobs. Currently at 63 million visits per month, but very little of this is local search traffic. Web site links nofollowed. Add a company.

9. Superpages.com

Superpages also went through a significant redesign recently, but doesn’t seem to be keeping up with Yellowpages.com or the others. Their traffic figures indicate same, with a fairly consistent downward trend. Nonetheless, they get 9 million local search visits a month, so deserve to be on this list. Web site links nofollowed.  Get your free listing now.

10. Local.com

Local.com is another directory site, less well-known, but with a great domain name and considerable traffic. Local.com has an extensive syndication network, but is primarily focused on promoting paid listings. Currently at 14 million visits per month. Add your listing.

There are many benefits to getting your business listed on other web sites. Four important ones are:

• Links – links pointing to a web site are major factor in how that site ranks in search engines. I would say the most important factor, but linking is a complex and nuanced topic. Links are not all created equal. Where a link comes from is important. For example, a link from the home pages of nytimes.com is worth a lot more than a link on a page buried deep within a blog like this one. And some web sites put a “nofollow” attribute on links. This attribute is a way of telling search engines not to follow nor associate value with a link. However, there is still some SEO value in a nofollowed link, in particular because user behavior is also a factor in Google ranking. And Matt Cutts of Google explains more about the value of nofollowed links here.
• Web site traffic – this one is kind of obvious, but your listing will include a link to your web site, which will result in more traffic. Many consumers like to visit a web site before visiting a business. If yours isn’t listed, you lose out.
• In-store traffic – as mentioned at the beginning of this post, consumers are using the internet more, and print yellow pages less.  According to one study, print now accounts for less than a third of local business search. Listing your business on the web is now the best way to get people to walk in to or call your business.
• Placerank – PlaceRank is a measure Google uses to understand location-based relevancy. It is not very well understood, but as location is increasingly becoming an integral part of search, expect optimizing for PlaceRank to become an important part of local business SEO. The short version is that businesses that are strongly associated with well-ranked places will benefit. SEO expert Ash Nallawalla has an excellent post explaining PlaceRank in detail.

Now that I have compiled this list, I am going to go through the process of adding a business to each of these sites. Look for posts in the coming weeks as I describe that experience.

After reading my last post, my wife reminded me of a letter that was circulating around about five years ago. We had just moved to the UK on a job assignment, and were in the midst of struggling to get basic services like a phone number and a bank account. The letter is to NTL, a cable and internet provider in the UK. It is written by someone who was hoping to receive service from NTL. Here is an excerpt from the letter:

Suffice to say that I have now given up on my futile and foolhardy quest to receive any kind of service from you. I suggest that you cease any potential future attempts to extort payment from me for the services which you have so pointedly and catastrophically failed to deliver – any such activity will be greeted initially with hilarity and disbelief quickly be replaced by derision, and even perhaps bemused rage.

The full text of the letter can be found here, but I caution you that some of it is less polite than the above. The letter resonated with us and many others because it is funny and captured some of what we were feeling.

So the moral of the story is that keeping your customers happy is more important than ever, in a world where reviews and recommendations are the primary influencers of decision-making. You may not have a customer as clever as the above letter-writer, but a well-phrased complaint seems to get passed on more easily than praise.

I believe this principle can work in favor of small businesses, particularly ones that offer very personal service. Much of the NTL customer’s frustration came from the fact that he was getting passed around and around. It is basic human nature that we are less likely to show contempt for someone if we have a personal connection with them. But per my previous post, small (and large) businesses should actively seek the praise of their customers – it is a busy world and we often forget to show appreciation when it is due.

Customer reviews are fast becoming the primary currency of business information on the web. Google Maps is putting increased emphasis on reviews, and has been aggregating business reviews from all over. And AT&T just announced the impending launch of a new consumer-review-focused site, buzz.com. Presumably some of the motivation behind the new site came from the fact that the review site Yelp.com is eating AT&T’s lunch. Specifically, Yelp.com is crushing AT&T’s Yellowpages.com site, in terms of unique visitors.

And Google, AT&T, Yelp and others are putting reviews first because that’s what consumers care about. According to Nielsen Online (April, 2009):

When making purchase decisions, North American Internet users trust recommendations from people they know and opinions posted by unknown consumers online more than advertisements on television, on the radio, in magazines and newspapers, or in other traditional media.

But there has been some backlash against this increased emphasis on customer reviews. Many businesses believe that review sites give too much power to a vocal minority. An Inc. Magazine article recently described a business owner who began fearing and harassing her customers because of Yelp. While the proprietor in question sounds a-few-monkeys-short-of-a-barrel, there is some validity to the concern. One or two unhappy customers can create a bad impression, and if reviews of a business are sparse, prospective customers have little else to go on. It can even create an atmosphere where subsequent reviewers feel they have to respond to the earlier, negative reviews.

On this topic I have an instructive anecdote concerning my former dentist, Shauna Gilmore. (Note that she is no longer my dentist because I moved too far from her office.) Several years ago, I recall getting an email from her office after an appointment. I don’t remember the exact words of the email, but it went something like:

Thank you for your recent visit …

We would love to hear from you how we are doing. We would very much appreciate it if you would post a review of your experience with us on doctoroogle.com.

Again, I’m going on memory here – I don’t recall the exact wording, but the gist was that they were asking me to write a review, positive or negative. Since I’d just had a very positive experience in her office, I was happy to take a few minutes to write a good review. And so did a lot of other people. If you have a look at the Good Dentist Guide for Denver, Dr. Shauna Gilmore is the highest rated dentist there is.

If, like Dr. Gilmore, you provide excellent service, think about respectful, unobtrusive ways you can ask your customers to review your business. Try to ask when you are still fresh on their minds as gratitude tends to have a very short half-life. And don’t ask for a positive review, just ask them to say what they think. For the most part, customers will appreciate that you value their opinion, and most if not all should have positive things to say. By encouraging a broad cross-section of your customers to speak out, you minimize the impact of a vocal few.

Also see this follow-up post: The Moral of the Story