Small Business Local SEO Services

Google is now letting local businesses respond to reviews that get posted on their Google Places Page. This will be huge for reputation management for small local business owners who frequently are target by bad reviews from legitimate and sometimes not so legitimate reviews. You must have your listing verified before you are able to respond to reviews.

To help business owners in responding to what can be irate customers, Google offers the following recommendations.

1. Be nice. This isn’t just a guideline — it’s also a good idea. You aren’t going to win an argument with a frustrated customer. And you don’t want to burn any bridges. Even customers who initially had a bad experience might come back.
2. Don’t get personal. Remember that you’re replying to feedback about an experience, not about you as a person. Reply in a way that addresses the overall experience, and remember that there’s a real person on the other end. If you believe the review violates the posting guidelines, please use the Flag as inappropriate link.
3. Feedback is helpful. Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). Think of all feedback as an opportunity to improve.

This is excellent advice, especially #2.

Google also offers some ground rules for what to post as a business owner responding to negative reviews.

1. Be polite and professional. You’re responding to one person, but the response is public. Keep your responses useful, readable, and courteous.
2. Keep it short and sweet. Users are looking for genuine responses, but not necessarily novels. Don’t say in twenty words what you can say in ten.
3. Be appropriate. Responses should comply with our local content policy.
4. Be thankful. A customer who has written a review has taken the time to invest in the success of your business.
   • Respond to happy reviewers when you have new or relevant information to share.You don’t need to thank every reviewer publicly. One response reaches to lots of customers, not just one.
   • Feedback is a chance to improve. If you’ve made a business improvement based on a review, thank the user and share the change. You don’t need to address every single complaint.

5. Be a friend, not a salesperson. Your reviewers are already customers, so there’s no need to offer incentives or advertisements. Tell reviewers something new about your business. Share a tip or something they might not know from their first visit.

Google also offers reviewer posting guidelines.

• Don’t spam or post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings.
• Don’t post or link to content that is sexually explicit or contains profanity.
• Don’t post or link to content that is abusive or hateful or threatens or harasses others.
• Don’t post or or link to any file that contains viruses, corrupted files, “Trojan Horses,” or any other contaminating or destructive features that may damage someone else’s computer.
• Don’t post any material that violates the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of others.
• Don’t impersonate any person, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity.
• Don’t violate any other applicable law or regulation.
• Don’t use comments as a forum for advertisement.

Also.

• Make your comments useful and informative
• Post clear, valuable, and honest information specific to the content which you are reviewing. content which you are reviewing.
• Try to include both positives and drawbacks.
• Be nice to others; don’t attack others.
• Keep it readable; don’t use excessive capitalization and punctuation.
• Use good grammar and check your spelling.

Unfortunately, this information targeted towards those posting reviews will probably never be seen by 99% of consumers doing the reviewing.

Reputation management is almost always something a business reacts to as opposed to planning for. The time to control what shows up in a search for your business name should be before something negative is posted online. I offer reputation management services for those needing help with this segment of a businesses online presence.

This is a large Baskin-Robbins Caramel Cappuccino Blast. My second one in a week. Unfortunately the shop is about three minutes from my front door. I see more of these in my future.

Google just recently announced Google TV. What is Google TV? This was posted on the Googleblog to offer some explanation.

“Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do.”

Should Google TV take off as a product of Google, here are a few things to consider.

Optimizing video content is going to be more important than ever. Not just optimizing the content itself, in terms of quality, but making your videos visible in search results in Google and YouTube. This is one area where whenever possible I try to get local business owners to create or optimize already created videos that can be ranked for local search.

Consider how much people watch their TVs. Now Google is right there, accessible from their TV remote. If you thought Google had a great deal of market share before, imagine how many more searches Google would get from the TV set, if this thing really takes off.

As Google TV was only announced Thursday, we really don’t know the full effect it will have on the industry, or on search, but it has the potential to be a huge deal for online businesses of all sizes. A game changer in a variety of capacities and something early adopters will definitely benefit from.

As I write this it is day two of some of the hardest rain I think I have ever experienced. All I can say is thank God for high ground. Fortunately, our neighborhood is draining into a empty field of many acres that also sits against a small river about two miles away. Unfortunately, that same river comes very close to the homes of many friends just down the road.

This video shows I24, one of three main interstates that run through Nashville under water.

Every so called “marketer” with a system to sell emails me the pitch. This is not by accident. I am on some of the top marketers email lists. I like to keep up to date with the new SEO, Social Media, online marketing products and services being offered. Most of what I receive is over hyped, over priced junk that has been rehashed from other previously released “systems” and programs that promise riches and instant Internet businesses.

The only people getting rich from these offers are the guys that develop and sell these products.

One of the latest of these over promising offers caught my attention today as it deals with something I know very well. Local SEO.

A new product is being offered as a push button approach to providing local SEO to small local businesses across the world. The sales pitch says you will be able to make four to five figures a month in this new and expanding business. The cost? Six payments of $547.00 or one payment of $2,997.00. Yes for only $3K, you can learn to be a local SEO specialist like me.

Now I am not going to go into all of the details the 30 minute video on the site touches on. I want to get to the meat of the matter. By looking at the search result for “la jolla house painter” you can see some of the tactics this “system” uses. Utilizing social websites, especially video sites, is one way to rank for local search results for your local business or service. However, this approach is not going to work for every local business wanting to rank online.

Google’s emphasis on more localized search results means that local sites that have been online for many years are not going to be pushed aside by a handful of these community/sharing sites that may rank for a few days or weeks but will have no lasting place in a local search result. Yes, video is a great way to send traffic to your site and some local search results will list a You Tube video for the types of local business searches this program sells. However, that will not work for every local business.

If you really want to learn Local SEO, my SEO training is about 1/3 the price and does not rely on tactics that are hot now but really just a Google update away from being useless.

That’s my perspective. Feel free to comment below if you agree or disagree.

Yes, I said, the absolute best article spinner!

I provide content for many of my SEO clients. This content is then distributed to blogs, article directories and other websites that provide an opportunity for content distribution. To get the best use possible for the articles that are written, they need to be spun so that each article is significantly different than the original. I have tried every article spinner available online. Most are a waste of money and time. However, I have tested and approve of what I consider the absolute best article spinner available.

If you need a good article spinner, you need to check it out. I am confident you will be pleased with this article spinning software.

It has been exactly six years ago today that Alex came into our home and never left. He was 18 months old on that day. I still remember his entrance through our front door. Alex had been living with My wife’s mother and Mandi had asked me about Alex living with us a few weeks before that Christmas visit but I really had not given it much thought. If I had, I am not sure he would be with us now. I remember deciding to let God decide.

At that time, I had been going to church on a regular basis for the first time in my life. One of the things that had been coming up on a weekly basis was that I should give my problems to God and he would handle the details. To me, Alex living with us was a potential problem, so I gave the whole issue to God. On that day, when I turned to see Nana and Alex coming through the front door, I knew in my heart that he would never leave.

He didn’t.

Six years later we have almost completed all of the legal requirements to finalize the adoption of Alex. It has taken years and cost greatly but it has been worth every minute and every dime. Alex has made a better man of me than any other person that has ever been in my life. I am sure that will always remain true as we continue through life together.

Just a quick post to praise my long time web host.

This week I had the misfortune to have to deal with a new clients web host. Yes, I will name the company. Network Solutions is a joke. The client has a content management system website through their hosting service. There was a problem creating new pages so the client contacted the support department inquiring about the issue. The next day there was a reply that in no way addressed the question that was asked. A second attempt to find out the problem failed when the reply back again did not address the question that was asked.

As I said, Network Solutions is a joke. At least their support department is a joke.

Anyway. Back to the reason for this post. I have used Hostgator for almost ten years. I have never had a problem with their hosting services. I have had some issues with some of the blog sites that I host with them but the problem was with my sites, not their hosting of the sites. Every problem I have ever had was addressed by a confirmation email instantly and a reply by a knowledgeable support person within an hour at the most.

The best part, the support person in every instance fixed the problem I was having without any further communications with myself. Obviously the support staff at Hostgator is well trained. Never have I ever received a reply to my inquiry that did not directly address the problem at hand. Something Network Solutions might want to work on.