Let’s talk about local listings Google places so tell us a bit about what that, what that is about, what that means?
Okay well local listings are, they are more, it is more than just Google places but that is typically where people think of making a local listings. It is you know, just like the Google search engine is the number one local listing service. But other ones are considered beyond the local, being local pretty much one and the same these days. Yelp would be a local listing service, service magic, Angie’s list, urban spoon, if you are a restaurant, there is tons of, there is thousands. And basically it is just the place for you to list your business info, description, contact information, what services you provide, so on and so forth and a lot of these accept reviews, yelp accepts reviews and a lot of these, these are the listing services accept these as well. So take your place, get reviews from client, get feedback from clients as well. So, Google places is obviously the most popular and
And the most linked one too since it is Google. I mean is this one of the most important
It is the most important
Okay
Easily the most important
That is true because of the rankings inside the search results
Exactly right. The starting and at the beginning of 2011 they started to really sort of be more aggressive about integrating the local listings, business listings within the actual organic search results page and that was a huge deal. In around March along with * of 2011 they made them more predominant and featured in even more search terms, in even more geographic based search terms and it is great that they did that and it was really final nail of the coffin for yellow pages because previously before that if you are looking for a local business you kind of had to turn to Google maps, which that wasn’t exactly right, it was not really tied towards their business. It was more kind of like a, weird phone address service but this is tied directly into who is providing the service that you are searching for in geographic region that you are searching for. so very important, yellow pages are dead. Get a Google local listing at the very least. There is a lot of listing services that are also very valuable and depending on your search terms and search phrases in geographic area that you are searching, you can have a really good chance of showing up on that main page. very important and it is something that is, it is a specific service that we even provide to our clients. It is the cheapest service that we have arrived. It is also one of the most important and I recommend everybody who has a service or location based business have a Google local page and we go even further and we really are aggressive about giving even more local listing pages for our clients. Yelp is very effective, service magic, Angie’s list, * services as well. * Google places is the most important one.
Okay and I didn’t interject. One thing I have noticed here, maybe it is since the March update of 2011, I remember on some of the pages where we use to rank and you would, they would have the local listings and they were small and they took about that much space on the page and now if you are not in local you are * ranking are pushed way down the page on some search phrases.
Yes
Like way down there where almost the point that if you weren’t local you might have three spots left and that is it. So it is disastrous if you are not in local in my opinion.
Yeah this is exactly right and the Google local listings specifically they are showing, you see, since we are a SEO company that services in many different businesses and many different geographic regions. We have seen several different types of search engine result pages and they don’t always appear the same. The most common one that you will see and this is in popular regions that have a lot of competition, a lot of businesses providing whatever service you are searching for, say plumbing service in Miami or whatever. Typically what you are going to see on that search engine result page are ten local listings at the very top of the page. it is going to contain company names, the address of that company and the phone number and it is going to link to that website
Some have an image that is interesting I * think about talking about this but let’s mention that real quick because I noticed on ours we, you know, we had new logo, our new cartoon character created for our company and I am noticing, he is yellow and he is appearing next to local listings and you know this is * here. That image is actually, when that does show up in some of the search phrases, thinking about the image you put on your local page. I am getting a little off topic but if I know a lot of guys will have a kind of a blog looking color or logo or that image will be an off color and ours is yellow, pops out in your eyes, drawn to that image in the local listings. It is even more
Very effective
Very effective so that is something really to think about that it doesn’t work everywhere but
Right it depend again on the format that Google delivers on that particular search request. So there are a couple of different formats that you will see for the search engine results phase. If it is really a small study, you might not even get local listings for it. There is a lot of services out there that don’t even have local listing pages as well but I am just saying on the other hand, we are seeing and this is true for actually a couple new clients that can’t do the agency, they serve their businesses serve small cities, small populated cities and they have, we have great success with them because they do have Google local listings pages for those areas but nobody in those areas have claimed their listings. They are the first people to do it. They are the only people on that listing that have reviews and of all their satisfied clients and that shows up right there on the main search engine’s result page so I guarantee you everybody who searches for that particular service in those cities where we have optimized their local listing page that is going to be the number one result that people are going to see first because it has effort put into it. It has, it’s been atomized. It has reviews. It is active and there is a actual place page behind it. If you click on it you can go and see the full Google place page, photos of the business, photo of the owner, photo of the work that they have done. Very important and they are really manupilizing their area right now and they are a great example of a company who are sticking forward and they are really taking advantage of getting first to market. In the sense they are the first people taking advantage of SEO and local listings in their whole geographical area.
You know in SEO there is domain age. The concept where the longer you have been there it is kind of little bit an advantage for you
Yes
If you have that in local do let me know
There will be that in the same sense that reviews play a big factor on how you rank as well as how many people are clicking on your listing.
Okay
You know just like your website if lot of people are clicking on your listing, people are going to think they like your business a lot, people have heard of this business and they are clicking on it so Google is going to think that they need to show up more because a lot of people are looking for it.
So much like back in the vision of the yellow pages where you use to pay for the biggest ad, now you get the biggest ad which is the first placement by getting more people going to it, filling it out and we are going to talk about this so that is kind of how you get a big ad now.
Exactly right*
Okay
And you know what, the awesome thing about, it has really changed a lot of things that we do as an agency. And it is great for our customers and it adds a really sort of a low cost of entry to getting on that first Google place page because previously you do have to spend some money to get a good ranking to get in top ten ranking specially the competitive geographic region and this really let’s small companies have a shot at getting there. But if you don’t put in some work behind your local listing page, you aren’t probably might going to be there, stay there. So it is something that takes an effort but it is incredibly valuable and that is I have said in other videos. It is the number one thing that everybody should be doing.
So if you are doing a local, let’s use your analogy, smaller towns may be most guys hadn’t planned the local listing so you get your local listing here immediately at the top which is awesome. Over the course in the next few years may be your market place becomes a little more savvy. They see you there and they figure out they are a better at, you know figure out how to solve this problem because you are maybe go out of business. So now then you start having a bunch of competition. Does, I have noticed that Google is weaving SEO in the local
Yup
Mixing the results, so
In certain
In certain markets
In certain markets yes
So you think that your SEO efforts assist your local or are they completely independent. What you do ion local, does it benefit SEO, what you are doing SEO doesn’t benefit local.
No absolutely not. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately that is the case.
Fortunately it’s the case that you enter *
The Google fact, amongst, we will get into some of the factors that Google takes into account when it does a, when it ranks your page within the local listing area and one of them is, is just like, you do ad words. You have actually looked at the page that your place listing links to which would be your main website.
Okay
It is going to look at the first page of your website, look at the title tag, look at the page content and judge whether or not that side, the content on that site and all the copy on that site has anything to do with the search terms that people have just searched for that has brought up your local listing in first place. So it is very important that you put in effort into not only optimizing your main main site but also your local listing. There is a lot of things you can do to your local listing to make it, to make it rank well in conjunction with your website.
Okay
And just like Ad words where ad words will bring traffic to your site, where in traffic * will help boosts its rankings say anything with the Google place page
So we talk about Google all the time * same thing
Yes
Right
Yes
Okay so
Little bit in your services and we don’t neglect those as well. We do
You do both, you do all three
Yes absolutely there is, again depending on the services of the particular client that we are working on. We will generally do probably fifty to sixty of the most high value of local listings. We will get out clients listed in there but sometimes
Because you are now talking about stuff like Yelp and other thing. You are not. Okay
Yes exactly
Okay
We do a breath
You do a lot and so of that is Bing and Yahoo and in the top priorities
Yes yes
Okay
Being local absolutely Yahoo local, there listings are pretty intertwined but they haven’t quite merged completely. Very important you know Facebook place page is in there as well that is kind of a slightly different topic that we will talk about, we will talk about social media stuff later but that is part of it is as well. But they all, they all play role and they are all important and the thing you have to keep in mind is not everybody, everybody has sort of different levels of experience on the internet. So everybody is searching differently.
Yeah
Even though that Google gets the, the, large, the most used and it is most popular. Not everybody uses Google.
Yeah
There is so many people that have, that are using you know internet explorer and they are just default search engines being or they are bought a laptop and their default search engine is yahoo or something to that effect. There is a number of different ways that people are finding you so what we are trying to do is, is trying put your business out there in a number of different ways so that anybody who is looking for a business of your type has the greatest opportunity to find you and part of that strategy is using multiple local listings services and that is why we don’t just do Google places
Yeah
That is why we just don’t being the local. We use a number of different ones but being local again is going to come in to play you know, like we have mentioned before lots of people are searching on their phones these days. Lots of people are searching on mobile devices with GPS and they are going to be using services like being local. They are going to be using services like Google. Place and location are tied into every mobile device these days
Yeah
And it is very important that we take advantage that Yelp has their own app, urban spoon has their own app if you are a restaurant.
Yeah and actually this brings up a really good point. You know and every single study, every bit proves that mobile is only growing
Yes
And one of the best this * Tiffany, my wife got a new iPhone
Yes
I mean she gets on the computer any more. She does it really from iPhone
Yes
It is just huge
And if you look at this statistics, the iPad is eating directly into
Yeah
PC cells, and to desktop computer cells
Yes
People are buying tablets rather than buying computers
Yup
And every tablet has GPS built in and its location where it is very important
Another thing you touched on, this is slightly a off topic but maybe not, this, some other studies by guys that know what they are doing prove that a disproportionate amount of time spent on the internet, they forget the device. Or maybe consider the device like an iPad or an iPhone, it is built inside the application
Right
Like you are saying open table or Yelp
Exactly right
So the app that is installed on the Facebook ad consult, they are in that doing their stuff not in the search engine
Exactly right
The apps are massive and so if you are listed in Yelp, you are listed in open table, you are listed in all these services and those services have a app that people are using then you are getting found.
Exactly right
If you are not in those, you are not getting found
That is exactly right. That is why we want to reach as many eye balls as possible
Yup yup that is a good one
Alright so what else should we say about local
There is a bunch. So okay let’s continue down this line so we, this should be pretty clear, Google local, Google places, Bing, Yahoo have to do those, Yelp, I will put that at very top of the list.
Yeah Yelp is very important
And the reviews, reviews are stuff that we will talk about in a minute but reviews is something even inside Yelp you want to get your clients giving you reviews and in all these different services and Yelp is one.
Yeah exactly but as a hopefully as a business owner, you are already aggressively following up with your clients and checking on your service and acquiring testimonials and getting feedback on a regular basis
Yup
Hopefully that is just part of your business process
Slightly off topic but these * these testimonials should get, you don’t want to be posting fake, all your own fake testimonials
No Google can get with that
Get with that. They figure it out. You need your clients to go do it. Google is smart enough to know the IP address and all kinds of other factors where these things are coming from and so don’t even bother trying that to play game would you agree?
Yeah, yes absolutely. You, if your goal is to fool the search engines at some point you are
You are going to get burnt
You are going to get caught up
Yeah okay so continuing down the line of local, you know Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, open table what are some others.
Some of there, there is a lot of paid local listing services. Service magic, Angie’s list are two of the, they are two of the more popular ones. You probably have some experiences with these *. They have, we have lawn care clients as well. You have lawn links keeping company. And they are very popular contractors in those sorts of services. You are basically paying for a lead. It is similar to pay per click but you actually get a lead, an actual person phone number, contact information
Yup
Information delivered to you from these sites. if somebody in your area looking for the exact service that you are providing and you are paying a fee to, to get it you know, sometimes it could be ten dollars. It could be whatever.
That is good. Now we look at it the same way you do. I look at any of these local let’s just focus on service magic because they are big one.
Yes
We will talk about some others but they are big one so I look at them exactly like * describing their pay per click we are paying for that service we get a lead and we pay for the lead when we get it essentially. And so I value it the same way, I, through service auto pilot, I have over the last couple of years spoken with quite a number of our clients and one thing I have heard a lot is a lot of guys will say hey I have a website or I have got two websites and one of those sites I will refer to you as their service magic site. I’d be very careful with that * because you have a listing at the top of Google for pay per click that you have another website and that is not
Not *
Yeah and so you have no control over that and they can shut it off, you quit paying and it is just not, it
It is temporary
Very temporary and you are just and you can’t, you can’t get enough control over to get really good rankings. You are just paying for ads like pay per click so yeah I am a believer in that stuff. We spread it around so my first party we have talked about are places, our first priority is, is SEO. It is becoming local. I mean local is a big part of it. I almost bounce *
They are intertwined. Diversity is always a good point.
Yeah. Next or us would be pay per click. That is just what we do. In terms of money spent and then but again these local listings like Yelp and stuff they can start to feed backlinks so I also consider that a part of the SEO strategy
Right
So but we use Yelp. So I am referring now to the lawn care landscape company I own. We use Yelp, we use *, we use Manta, we use service magic, *Angie’s list is when you know how much control over. They just work a little differently than the others
Yup
And city search, yeah there is a bunch. I mean there is a ton of little obscure ones that we are listed in just so somebody happens to be on there, they show up
Yup
Like you will somewhere like the name of the city search like Dallas search or I mean that is not the real one but you will see little obscure sites like that so definitely believe in, in getting all of those.
And another thing to mention, one another value in getting listed in multiple directories, like we mentioned previously. Not everybody searches for the same, not everybody is finding businesses in the same way that you might be doing it on your own. And one the values of being listed in Yelp or city search or any of these other directory services is that Google actually calls reviews from these sites. They do it, they here recently in the last couple of months, they changed the way they get it. But they are still client reviews.
Okay so what are some ways to get started with local right now. Like what would we do?
Well the most important thing is to start * start to back and
Yeah
Fortunately local one of those things that is a little bit easier than a lot of more advanced stuff that we need, that we do you know. You don’t necessarily need an agency to do it but I would recommend that you definitely see a consultant at very least you know your key phrases, you know exactly what you are targeting for your industry.
That is right so and you put that on your * when you set up your local page you got to have keyword phrases.
What you need to know, you need to know what the key phrases are for your market. Like optimizing web page you can also optimize the local listing and that is alright
Okay so if you are going to do local yourself at least get some help for your key word phrases
Yes
Okay
And start it * as everybody should do it if you have, if you are just selling products, not selling services, it is not as important but if you are a business that is selling services especially in a geographic area, small geographic area
Yup
You got to do it
Okay.
So first thing to do, claim your listing
Yeah
If your address and phone numbers are already listed, if Google has got that from another location claim it. If it is not there
And they just do a search in Google find it or
When you enter your phone number or your company details that will
Pop up. let’s say that you are going to set up local and you put in some details and says hey is this you
Yes *
But you also might come across your business actually searching in Google maps or whatever. You can claim that listing as well. Google maps, Google local, Google place all the same thing
so if you have more than one office or more than one physical location or multiple addresses you are going to claim multiple
you are going to do that for each location
okay
so very important thing in claiming if you don’t claim it. It is not going to show up on the main page unless none of your competitors have claimed their either. Very important you claim it if you already see it and you haven’t claimed it, it is not going to rank. It is not going to rank well. It is not going to be one of the top ten local listings, very important that you claim it. It is number one thing that Google suggests, it is number one thing that we suggest, claim it. Number two, you need to make sure that you have a physical address that you can use.
Right I know there is a lot of people who do consulting and stuff and they go and see clients, clients never come to them. They might work at their home whatever. Well in order to set the Google local page, you have to have a local address. It can’t be a P.O. Box because it is a requirement from Google. It has to be an actual mailing address.
Don’t they send you a postcard or some thing
Exactly right. They send you a postcard with a six digit pin which you have to go back to their website, enter in that information and then your listing will have to show up Google search’s result page. and that is, that is good in the sense that, that it will, it helps keep out spammers out of local listings. So it is good but at the same time it makes it a little bit more difficult for consultants that do not have a typical brick and motor business
Yup
Next most important thing, third thing would be to completely fill out your listing. One hundred percent. Don’t just do half of it. Don’t just put in your name and address, don’t just put in your phone number or your website. Fill out the entire thing. There is a little progress indicator on the right hand side of your Google local listing page when you are filling it out that has to say a hundred percent when you are done. If it doesn’t it is going to affect your ranking. Fill it out one hundred percent.
That is like your services you offer, your business hours, a picture, stuff like that right
Exactly, exactly right the entire form, what types of payments you accept
Yeah
Description, you want to upload images, you want to upload video, we will go into these things here momentarily but all of that is really important
Okay
So fill out your Google local profile one hundred percent.
And this is, is this all true of Yahoo and Bing as well.
Yes it helps on Yelp and stuff as well but not so much on the ranking and Google looks at it and says okay it, it adds credibility to your business, Google looks at and says okay it is a real business. They are doing all these things. They care about their page. alright we are going to give them a better ranking
Exactly but it is good practice. We offer local listing service and it is good practice to do that across all local listings ever since, as we discussed this so far as the videos there is many other services not just Google place there is Yelp, there is City search, there is Bing local
Yeah
There is service magic, there is a lot of different places that we use for our clients. Next is the description, there is a description box there and it is limited to criteria of 50 or 60 characters and so you want to fill that out with unique copy. Don’t copy content from your, exactly from your website, unique copy and include your, include your, at least your number one key phrase within that copy
Okay
And we had mentioned this before, have a professional do your key phrase research for you so you know exactly what search terms you need to use within the geographic area that you are doing business. So if their key search phrase were include a city name would they, would it be negative if you use more than one keyword phrase in the copy
No I recommend that you just make it sound natural
Okay
It is a description but also you want to steady yourself
Okay
And you only have, you know probably about three sentences to do in it so you don’t have a whole ton of room. So you are really not going to have all, a lot of room to do more than one or two key phrase
So if you key phrase is carpet cleaning Miami Florida, does it have to say carpet cleaning Miami Florida before you go on to the next word or can you say we do carpet cleaning and then down below say we serve Miami beach, Miami, Fort Lauderdale. I mean, so you know since you have used the words that make up you keyword phrase but you have separated them in the ad or does it have to be sequential?
That would be acceptable as well but what we typically do is, we will insert a word in between
Okay
So we might start off the description as you found the best carpet cleaner in Miami
Okay
And so it is right at the beginning of the description. You had your key phrases there and only in separating carpet cleaning and Miami
Okay
So that is typically how we do it
Okay
That is how we recommend it but it can also be acceptable to to say you know, we offer carpet cleaning, car shampooing and list your services like that and list your cities, your major cities that you do business as well.
Okay
That would work as well and sometimes the approach we take with certain clients depending on their services and just kind of how much room we have to work with
Okay
But it is a good rule of thumb to follow to, when you are using key phrases to keep them as close to what the exact search term is as possible.
Okay
But you do have some way
Okay
So include key phrase in the description and make that description unique. The next thing that you will see in your Google place page, all the way to very bottom, there is an area where you can add additional descriptions about your company. There is a field at the bottom where you can add, they are kind of like tags if your, if you have a blog, if you * blog, you can tag your blog post with a different descriptors and stuff like that. Well you can kind of do that at the same on Google place page as well and some of the tags that we like to use and that we have found have been effective is include service areas. So we can include one tag, there would be service areas and we would list in order of importance, your top cities that you are, that your top city and your top market.
So like Miami comma space Fort Lauderdale
Lauderdale
Comma space Holly wood
And it is worth, if you have room, it is worthwhile to include the state abbreviation as well. For each, so, for each one, Miami, FL so on and so forth
Okay what about
If you have to, you can drop the commas
Should they mix in like a Miami space FL and then Miami or Fort Lauderdale space Florida all the way out
You can if you want
Doesn’t matter
It doesn’t matter so much what we see when do our key phrase research is people rarely enter in these type of enter in the entire state name
Okay
They intend to type in the abbreviation
Yeah
And that is what we work from
Okay
The next thing would also be add another tag for services zip codes. You want to list all the zip codes in the areas that you are doing business. Some people do in fact when they are searching they are putting in the city name and
Yeah
You have seen this in your own.
It doesn’t seem like as big as it used to be. It seem like three four years ago there use to be more, I may be wrong
Yeah some people still do that. We still * search that involve the zip code and it is just a worthwhile practice
I think it is great, especially where there is a specific industry is like, maybe like a dry cleaner. They are going to be more likely to put in a zip code because they want that specific person at this part of Miami. * probably depending on your business, you determine if your clients are more likely to use zip codes and cities
Exactly and that will help your listing bump up when people are searching by zip codes as well
Okay
The other thing to, there is an area to fill the categories that your business falls in
Right
And Google provides their pre buildl categories and what you want to do is choose as many categories that Google suggest that directly apply to your business. Don’t use any of the other one that you do with your business. Choose ones that directly apply to your business. Say your, if you are a carpet cleaner, you are going to have several that were apply to you. you might have, you obviously would have carpet cleaning, you might have a poster cleaning, you might have some different ones but choose all the categories that Google makes available to you and then after you have chosen all the ones that Google has made available to you, what we do is we, we in that area we add some key phrases, some more exact match key phrases. Your number one key phrase, your second most important key phrase and so on and so forth until all those categories are filled out and we have noticed that helps as well.
So you are putting in other stuff
Correct, you are basically suggesting okay
Okay that is a good tip
And that is
And they remember and use them
Yes and that is completely acceptable and that is why those additional category boxes are there in the first place. We are not tricking Google, we are not doing anything shady but they add additional category boxes there because they know that all the categories that they are suggesting don’t necessarily apply to everybody
Right
And sometimes you would have to enter in unique categories, specific to your business. Then below the categories you are going to have an area where you can upload images and video and this is very important. You have room to upload eight images, upload eight images and you also have room to upload, I am not sure how many videos you can max out. I think it might be five videos which you add links from your YouTube page and all you have to do is add YouTube URL which contains the video that you want to use. do this to creating YouTube page, upload at least an intro video, introduce your company, I mean we have had clients before who wouldn’t provide us with any video at all and so we found somebody else’s video on YouTube that had to do with what they were doing and it could be as simple as somebody demonstrating a piece of a machinery that they use in their service that they are providing. I like to do the services. I like to explain the services and why if you are hiring us for this service, these are the, this is the detail we go into in terms of how we provide such a quality service. These are the things that go into doing it. You are like laying it out to people. You may think it is common knowledge and you know maybe no big deal to you but the buyer, the consumer, they don’t know what you do. I mean like in lawn mowing, they don’t know that you sharpen your motor plates every single day. They have no idea about this stuff
Oh no it is important
Yeah so tell them, make it sound, if it is important, you tell them. It will then become important to them. So I love to do videos, so you can do videos for each and every service
You are one of our few clients who does, love to do videos.
Typical client action when you ask them for * Oh my God I hate to stand on videos. I understand everybody. They work, nobody likes to, its valuable, we don’t like asking our clients to do anything. We don’t like asking our clients to do any more work than they absolutely have to. We know they are busy, we know it is a pain in the butt. We know nobody likes to do video tape. It is important. It works. Do it. Take the time. Take the effort. But you have to include at least one video to get to that hundred percent completion rate on your Google place page. if you don’t add a video, your page is not hundred percent complete. So you got to create at least one video. It will take you, take you five minutes to think about, introduce your company, shoot as many takes it takes until you feel comfortable and you are happy with the product. Upload to YouTube, boom, done! After that let’s go back to images. You can upload eight images
Yeah
Something that we do and this is, this is something I will tell you, it is something that we do and something that I have mentioned in optimizing our videos about optimizing your site. We name all the images that we upload for a client with a very specific key phrases in the file name. even the images that we upload are all named with key phrases in the file name, it matters. Those go directly into Google images, it matters, do it.
There is no reason not to do it
Exactly determine your key phrase, get those right, name all the images that you are uploading to Google place page including the Key phrase. Another thing that we have found to be really effective is to, what we call Geo tagging. It is where you associate a location with your website. And what you want to do is after you create your Google place page, you will be able to get a latitude longitude lines of where your business is located and you can get a boast in your ranking for that local search page if you include this geo tag at the end of your title tag on your page. it is something that not a lot of people do but we see a boast from that as well. Yup and going along with that, you want to include the exact mailing address that you are using on your Google place page and phone number, I will recommend formatting in the same way include on the footer of all your pages on your website that you are linking to from your Google place page. that information should be the same and that will
They will verify. Is that is what you are thinking, they will verify or what is the logic
Well the logic, having that information, this goes outside of Google places as well
Okay
The thing is when you have your address and your phone number on your website and that is the same within Yelp and
Oh
And City search and these local listing search pages we recommend as well
Oh I heard this actually okay
That is how Google ties reviews on these sites to your website
Oh wow
So it is comparing the address in that listing and all these other local listings services and your phone number and it is tieing that information to your Google place page.
And to use physical for this
You, well you have to use the same one that you are using in your Google place page
which is physical
Yes * yeah but you * well once Google makes the link between your external local listing pages such as Yelp and city search it is going to maintain
Oh it does
So if you
Okay
So if you have changed you address in the future, it is still going to leave those links for your reviews
Okay
We have not come across an instance where we have to change a client’s address and we have lost their links and their reviews. Not seems established, it seems put
Okay
We haven’t experienced one yet
Okay
So that is good news
Yeah reviews are big deal too
Yeah. We are going to do a whole another video on reviews testimonials
Yeah
That are very important
You still see reviews bump rankings
Yes review that is next on the list.
Oh okay
Also you want to include your website, your main, link to your main website. I think, we are doing probably forty plus websites for you that we are managing
I don’t even know the number any more but it is out there
It is a lot
It all at different stages. A lot that are really mature and some that we are working on
It is a lot. We have, we have a Google place page for every city that he does business in. we have
We
We have site specific to every city he does business in and
Message to market match stuff you know, we are selling this specific service in a specific city
Exactly right
And by the way I pay him to do all this stuff so you know. I don’t get anything for free. So my point being that I can still justify
I can’t do anything I am sorry and also in regards to the website, we have noticed that, we have noticed in all the tracking and research we have done, the website that you include in your Google place page, that will help your website get rank quicker when you have a local listing associated with that website. You will help it get indexed quicker and it will help it move up in the rankings quicker. If you have an authentic verified local listing page. so very, that is very important
Yes
Because
That said again if you have
Okay say you have a branding business
Right
You have set up a Google place page, you have a brand new website, a brand new domain,
Yup
Verified page, verified data website
Yup
I know you set up a lot of stuff on auto pilots with a great really basic website. Most of them don’t have websites when they come to you.
I won’t say most, but some don’t.
Okay
Most have a website but some don’t
Good
And but what a lot of clients will do is they want another website
Okay
And you know kind of when you hear, some of how well this stuff works, you know you end up to do some of the, they end up want a second website so but you are right there is plenty of guys that have no website or a good example too is their existing website has no rankings. They have a website but there is not link to it anywhere and so it is like starting from scratch
Exactly right
Okay so that is a great example because people are starting new websites with us all time
So what we are seeing at it, it is something that didn’t take whole lot of research because we noticed it is really easy because the change was drastic in the ranking. You know a couple of weeks after we added a local listing page for particular client’s locations and a new website that they just created, we will see a boom, a bomb as soon as we created their local listing and associated with that particular website. So it is very valuable in that aspect alone and if at all possible, I have a website for every location that you have.
But is that a website tied with different local listing
Yes, yes
Okay
And but if you * well if you have multi, if you have multiple brick and motors and say you are a pet care shop
Yeah
If you have multiple locations you are going to have multiple mailing address
Right
That is easy
That is easy
Finally, reviews, very important and this plays a role in building your credibility online on credibility with the brand that you are building and they are very important. Reviews is something that you should be actively getting from your clients, you should be requesting testimonials. We are going to go into this in depth because it is so important. It deserves its own video. Reviews are very important. You want to actively monitor your Google reviews page, your Yelp reviews page, any other place where you have listings. You want to see what people are posting about you. what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong and even more importantly you are from time to time going to get a negative review * whether you like it or not
Yup
And I have had many clients who come to me and say I got a negative review. This is going to kill my page. this is horrible and my response is always no it is great because now you can and lot of these sites, most of the good ones at Yelp, Google local, a lot of the really good local listings services, let you reply to the reviews and that is awesome
Yeah
Because you can reply to the reviews, half of the time, they will come from your competitors who
I know I have heard about some of these
Half of the time they will come from your competitors and they are just trying to cause trouble and make you look bad but that is okay because we don’t care about that. Because the point is we get to reply to their reviews and we reply to their reviews in as nice as possible way. If we think it is your competitor trying to knock us, we try to reply as nice as possible way. Sorry Joe Smith, we have any record of serving you but we would love it if you come back to our location we will you know, your next service call is on us, we would love to make it out to you. and if you are not really a past customer, we would love to make you a new customer.
Yeah
And that right there replying to a review in a really positive fashion like that just makes you look more professional and honestly I think that is better than just another five start review on your page. it just shows that you are up branding at a different level than you competitors. You are not, you are about your business. You are serious about your business, you are serious about your customers and you know they will take care of you.
And nobody believes five hundred glowing five star reviews any way
Right and from time to time you might come up, you actually might come across some competitors that have two hundred positive five star reviews in a really small geographic area that they are doing business. There is a competitor of mine in my area that has two hundred, they are an SEO company and they have probably about two hundred and fifty positive reviews
Sort of scam the system
And I guarantee they hired some, they hired some company in via to add positive reviews.
Yeah
And I guarantee you when Google changes their algorithm to effect reviews, when that comes, when that change comes in place, their listing is going down in tubes because Google is tracking every review where it is coming from. What IP address it is coming from that is geographic location so when it sees a business in Miami or Dallas or Phoenix or whatever getting two hundred reviews from Bangladesh
Certifies customers from India
Exactly right they are going to, their listing is going down the drain
Yeah
So we always try to keep everything on the up and up and that is why it is really important that we turn to our clients and really encourage them to be active about giving real reviews and testimonials from the clients.
Should they spread them around like so, this is kind of interesting stuff. There is a big software company in California that was really heavy in Denel and some other markets that we have an exposure of stuff, had done somebody and they were getting their * like fifty eighty a hundred reviews, two hundred reviews, the software was doing it for them. And it was awesome for a couple of years and they everything got shut down last couple of months
Yup
They are all gone. All these reviews they collected, all gone because they were kind of getting in the system
Of course
And
It is going to be more and more common
Yeah so anyway where was I going with this oh, reviews what they were doing is they were pushing all these reviews into Google and so should you push all your reviews into Google. Should you get some reviews like, tell what I mean like if you have a strategy like encouraging your clients to review you, should you have them go to Google, should you have some go to Yelp, some go to Yahoo or do you want to, or is it better to focus on just Google and have all your reviews go there.
We actually have a full, a strategy that we send our clients when they sign up for a local listings service or actually the best way to go about getting reviews. We
Okay
We will talk about it
Okay
But I will just touch on that momentarily yeah I would spread them around. But Google local reviews should be your focus
Yeah
And actually if you would ask me that about two three months ago, I would have said no you really need to be putting a lot of review to Yelp. And the reason that has changed is
Google *
Well Google is doing a lot of things. They are Google + their social network
Yes
Is going to play a big part on reviews. The Google plus for businesses is going to play big part on reviews so there is a lot of stuff coming up on Google that doesn’t really effect you yet but it is going to. And, and but more importantly few months ago they changed how reviews were appearing. Previously when you put up a local listing page, it would, it would show you the total number of your reviews from all the local listings that you are listed so it would give you a total of Yelp, city search, I am sorry urban spoon if you are restaurant, service magic, James book and it would combine that entire total into a, the number of star reviews that you have got into one total but since then and it would also display that in your Google local page and that was great so all your Yelp reviews and all that were fitting your giant review total and it looked great but what they did about two or three months ago is they changed is and now you only see how many reviews you are getting from Yelp or service magic
Individually
On that first local listing page
Okay
It is no longer on your specific, it is no longer on your specific page. it is only listed under on that main search results page. so it doesn’t total them anymore. It keeps them separate which is okay but we are telling our clients the focus is a little bit more on Google reviews
You think Google is then probably weighting their reviews more than may be others
We don’t have an evidence of that yet but we think because they made that change, we are starting thing that at some point they are going to cut those people from their review pages. After they get into the mass amount of reviews on their Google review system. We think they are going to drop Yelp and city search and all them from even being displayed on their local listing site because they really want you to use your Google places listings.
Yeah
So that is why we are telling our clients to give a little bit more weight to getting reviews on Google reviews.
So bit off topic, Google plus, is it going to affect local more than SEO or SEO more, do you have idea yet.
It is going to affect traditional SEO more than local
Local
More than local yes. Well it is going to affect local too in a sense that you are going, there is a whole another video I am just * but you are going to start seeing your search engines results modified depending on what you look at
What you look at, that is actually scary for SEO
Well that is already happening but
You are logged into Google
No what your friends like, what your friend plus one. Microsoft is already doing this. Microsoft has a partnership with Facebook and they are modifying your search results in Bing based on what your friends on Facebook like so if your friends like a particular lawn care company and on Facebook that result is going to bumped up in Bing. That is already happening and that is the whole reason why Google has created their own social network because that data is extremely valuable
Is it good or bad
We will talk about that on another
Okay
Since that is important but that is where everything is going
Yeah
Okay great
Anything else you think off
That is all
Cool
Get started.
Yes now
Let’s talk about local listings Google places so tell us a bit about what that, what that is about, what that means?
Okay well local listings are, they are more, it is more than just Google places but that is typically where people think of making a local listings. It is you know, just like the Google search engine is the number one local listing service. But other ones are considered beyond the local, being local pretty much one and the same these days. Yelp would be a local listing service, service magic, Angie’s list, urban spoon, if you are a restaurant, there is tons of, there is thousands. And basically it is just the place for you to list your business info, description, contact information, what services you provide, so on and so forth and a lot of these accept reviews, yelp accepts reviews and a lot of these, these are the listing services accept these as well. So take your place, get reviews from client, get feedback from clients as well. So, Google places is obviously the most popular and
And the most linked one too since it is Google. I mean is this one of the most important
It is the most important
Okay
Easily the most important
That is true because of the rankings inside the search results
Exactly right. The starting and at the beginning of 2011 they started to really sort of be more aggressive about integrating the local listings, business listings within the actual organic search results page and that was a huge deal. In around March along with * of 2011 they made them more predominant and featured in even more search terms, in even more geographic based search terms and it is great that they did that and it was really final nail of the coffin for yellow pages because previously before that if you are looking for a local business you kind of had to turn to Google maps, which that wasn’t exactly right, it was not really tied towards their business. It was more kind of like a, weird phone address service but this is tied directly into who is providing the service that you are searching for in geographic region that you are searching for. so very important, yellow pages are dead. Get a Google local listing at the very least. There is a lot of listing services that are also very valuable and depending on your search terms and search phrases in geographic area that you are searching, you can have a really good chance of showing up on that main page. very important and it is something that is, it is a specific service that we even provide to our clients. It is the cheapest service that we have arrived. It is also one of the most important and I recommend everybody who has a service or location based business have a Google local page and we go even further and we really are aggressive about giving even more local listing pages for our clients. Yelp is very effective, service magic, Angie’s list, * services as well. * Google places is the most important one.
Okay and I didn’t interject. One thing I have noticed here, maybe it is since the March update of 2011, I remember on some of the pages where we use to rank and you would, they would have the local listings and they were small and they took about that much space on the page and now if you are not in local you are * ranking are pushed way down the page on some search phrases.
Yes
Like way down there where almost the point that if you weren’t local you might have three spots left and that is it. So it is disastrous if you are not in local in my opinion.
Yeah this is exactly right and the Google local listings specifically they are showing, you see, since we are a SEO company that services in many different businesses and many different geographic regions. We have seen several different types of search engine result pages and they don’t always appear the same. The most common one that you will see and this is in popular regions that have a lot of competition, a lot of businesses providing whatever service you are searching for, say plumbing service in Miami or whatever. Typically what you are going to see on that search engine result page are ten local listings at the very top of the page. it is going to contain company names, the address of that company and the phone number and it is going to link to that website
Some have an image that is interesting I * think about talking about this but let’s mention that real quick because I noticed on ours we, you know, we had new logo, our new cartoon character created for our company and I am noticing, he is yellow and he is appearing next to local listings and you know this is * here. That image is actually, when that does show up in some of the search phrases, thinking about the image you put on your local page. I am getting a little off topic but if I know a lot of guys will have a kind of a blog looking color or logo or that image will be an off color and ours is yellow, pops out in your eyes, drawn to that image in the local listings. It is even more
Very effective
Very effective so that is something really to think about that it doesn’t work everywhere but
Right it depend again on the format that Google delivers on that particular search request. So there are a couple of different formats that you will see for the search engine results phase. If it is really a small study, you might not even get local listings for it. There is a lot of services out there that don’t even have local listing pages as well but I am just saying on the other hand, we are seeing and this is true for actually a couple new clients that can’t do the agency, they serve their businesses serve small cities, small populated cities and they have, we have great success with them because they do have Google local listings pages for those areas but nobody in those areas have claimed their listings. They are the first people to do it. They are the only people on that listing that have reviews and of all their satisfied clients and that shows up right there on the main search engine’s result page so I guarantee you everybody who searches for that particular service in those cities where we have optimized their local listing page that is going to be the number one result that people are going to see first because it has effort put into it. It has, it’s been atomized. It has reviews. It is active and there is a actual place page behind it. If you click on it you can go and see the full Google place page, photos of the business, photo of the owner, photo of the work that they have done. Very important and they are really manupilizing their area right now and they are a great example of a company who are sticking forward and they are really taking advantage of getting first to market. In the sense they are the first people taking advantage of SEO and local listings in their whole geographical area.
You know in SEO there is domain age. The concept where the longer you have been there it is kind of little bit an advantage for you
Yes
If you have that in local do let me know
There will be that in the same sense that reviews play a big factor on how you rank as well as how many people are clicking on your listing.
Okay
You know just like your website if lot of people are clicking on your listing, people are going to think they like your business a lot, people have heard of this business and they are clicking on it so Google is going to think that they need to show up more because a lot of people are looking for it.
So much like back in the vision of the yellow pages where you use to pay for the biggest ad, now you get the biggest ad which is the first placement by getting more people going to it, filling it out and we are going to talk about this so that is kind of how you get a big ad now.
Exactly right*
Okay
And you know what, the awesome thing about, it has really changed a lot of things that we do as an agency. And it is great for our customers and it adds a really sort of a low cost of entry to getting on that first Google place page because previously you do have to spend some money to get a good ranking to get in top ten ranking specially the competitive geographic region and this really let’s small companies have a shot at getting there. But if you don’t put in some work behind your local listing page, you aren’t probably might going to be there, stay there. So it is something that takes an effort but it is incredibly valuable and that is I have said in other videos. It is the number one thing that everybody should be doing.
So if you are doing a local, let’s use your analogy, smaller towns may be most guys hadn’t planned the local listing so you get your local listing here immediately at the top which is awesome. Over the course in the next few years may be your market place becomes a little more savvy. They see you there and they figure out they are a better at, you know figure out how to solve this problem because you are maybe go out of business. So now then you start having a bunch of competition. Does, I have noticed that Google is weaving SEO in the local
Yup
Mixing the results, so
In certain
In certain markets
In certain markets yes
So you think that your SEO efforts assist your local or are they completely independent. What you do ion local, does it benefit SEO, what you are doing SEO doesn’t benefit local.
No absolutely not. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately that is the case.
Fortunately it’s the case that you enter *
The Google fact, amongst, we will get into some of the factors that Google takes into account when it does a, when it ranks your page within the local listing area and one of them is, is just like, you do ad words. You have actually looked at the page that your place listing links to which would be your main website.
Okay
It is going to look at the first page of your website, look at the title tag, look at the page content and judge whether or not that side, the content on that site and all the copy on that site has anything to do with the search terms that people have just searched for that has brought up your local listing in first place. So it is very important that you put in effort into not only optimizing your main main site but also your local listing. There is a lot of things you can do to your local listing to make it, to make it rank well in conjunction with your website.
Okay
And just like Ad words where ad words will bring traffic to your site, where in traffic * will help boosts its rankings say anything with the Google place page
So we talk about Google all the time * same thing
Yes
Right
Yes
Okay so
Little bit in your services and we don’t neglect those as well. We do
You do both, you do all three
Yes absolutely there is, again depending on the services of the particular client that we are working on. We will generally do probably fifty to sixty of the most high value of local listings. We will get out clients listed in there but sometimes
Because you are now talking about stuff like Yelp and other thing. You are not. Okay
Yes exactly
Okay
We do a breath
You do a lot and so of that is Bing and Yahoo and in the top priorities
Yes yes
Okay
Being local absolutely Yahoo local, there listings are pretty intertwined but they haven’t quite merged completely. Very important you know Facebook place page is in there as well that is kind of a slightly different topic that we will talk about, we will talk about social media stuff later but that is part of it is as well. But they all, they all play role and they are all important and the thing you have to keep in mind is not everybody, everybody has sort of different levels of experience on the internet. So everybody is searching differently.
Yeah
Even though that Google gets the, the, large, the most used and it is most popular. Not everybody uses Google.
Yeah
There is so many people that have, that are using you know internet explorer and they are just default search engines being or they are bought a laptop and their default search engine is yahoo or something to that effect. There is a number of different ways that people are finding you so what we are trying to do is, is trying put your business out there in a number of different ways so that anybody who is looking for a business of your type has the greatest opportunity to find you and part of that strategy is using multiple local listings services and that is why we don’t just do Google places
Yeah
That is why we just don’t being the local. We use a number of different ones but being local again is going to come in to play you know, like we have mentioned before lots of people are searching on their phones these days. Lots of people are searching on mobile devices with GPS and they are going to be using services like being local. They are going to be using services like Google. Place and location are tied into every mobile device these days
Yeah
And it is very important that we take advantage that Yelp has their own app, urban spoon has their own app if you are a restaurant.
Yeah and actually this brings up a really good point. You know and every single study, every bit proves that mobile is only growing
Yes
And one of the best this * Tiffany, my wife got a new iPhone
Yes
I mean she gets on the computer any more. She does it really from iPhone
Yes
It is just huge
And if you look at this statistics, the iPad is eating directly into
Yeah
PC cells, and to desktop computer cells
Yes
People are buying tablets rather than buying computers
Yup
And every tablet has GPS built in and its location where it is very important
Another thing you touched on, this is slightly a off topic but maybe not, this, some other studies by guys that know what they are doing prove that a disproportionate amount of time spent on the internet, they forget the device. Or maybe consider the device like an iPad or an iPhone, it is built inside the application
Right
Like you are saying open table or Yelp
Exactly right
So the app that is installed on the Facebook ad consult, they are in that doing their stuff not in the search engine
Exactly right
The apps are massive and so if you are listed in Yelp, you are listed in open table, you are listed in all these services and those services have a app that people are using then you are getting found.
Exactly right
If you are not in those, you are not getting found
That is exactly right. That is why we want to reach as many eye balls as possible
Yup yup that is a good one
Alright so what else should we say about local
There is a bunch. So okay let’s continue down this line so we, this should be pretty clear, Google local, Google places, Bing, Yahoo have to do those, Yelp, I will put that at very top of the list.
Yeah Yelp is very important
And the reviews, reviews are stuff that we will talk about in a minute but reviews is something even inside Yelp you want to get your clients giving you reviews and in all these different services and Yelp is one.
Yeah exactly but as a hopefully as a business owner, you are already aggressively following up with your clients and checking on your service and acquiring testimonials and getting feedback on a regular basis
Yup
Hopefully that is just part of your business process
Slightly off topic but these * these testimonials should get, you don’t want to be posting fake, all your own fake testimonials
No Google can get with that
Get with that. They figure it out. You need your clients to go do it. Google is smart enough to know the IP address and all kinds of other factors where these things are coming from and so don’t even bother trying that to play game would you agree?
Yeah, yes absolutely. You, if your goal is to fool the search engines at some point you are
You are going to get burnt
You are going to get caught up
Yeah okay so continuing down the line of local, you know Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, open table what are some others.
Some of there, there is a lot of paid local listing services. Service magic, Angie’s list are two of the, they are two of the more popular ones. You probably have some experiences with these *. They have, we have lawn care clients as well. You have lawn links keeping company. And they are very popular contractors in those sorts of services. You are basically paying for a lead. It is similar to pay per click but you actually get a lead, an actual person phone number, contact information
Yup
Information delivered to you from these sites. if somebody in your area looking for the exact service that you are providing and you are paying a fee to, to get it you know, sometimes it could be ten dollars. It could be whatever.
That is good. Now we look at it the same way you do. I look at any of these local let’s just focus on service magic because they are big one.
Yes
We will talk about some others but they are big one so I look at them exactly like * describing their pay per click we are paying for that service we get a lead and we pay for the lead when we get it essentially. And so I value it the same way, I, through service auto pilot, I have over the last couple of years spoken with quite a number of our clients and one thing I have heard a lot is a lot of guys will say hey I have a website or I have got two websites and one of those sites I will refer to you as their service magic site. I’d be very careful with that * because you have a listing at the top of Google for pay per click that you have another website and that is not
Not *
Yeah and so you have no control over that and they can shut it off, you quit paying and it is just not, it
It is temporary
Very temporary and you are just and you can’t, you can’t get enough control over to get really good rankings. You are just paying for ads like pay per click so yeah I am a believer in that stuff. We spread it around so my first party we have talked about are places, our first priority is, is SEO. It is becoming local. I mean local is a big part of it. I almost bounce *
They are intertwined. Diversity is always a good point.
Yeah. Next or us would be pay per click. That is just what we do. In terms of money spent and then but again these local listings like Yelp and stuff they can start to feed backlinks so I also consider that a part of the SEO strategy
Right
So but we use Yelp. So I am referring now to the lawn care landscape company I own. We use Yelp, we use *, we use Manta, we use service magic, *Angie’s list is when you know how much control over. They just work a little differently than the others
Yup
And city search, yeah there is a bunch. I mean there is a ton of little obscure ones that we are listed in just so somebody happens to be on there, they show up
Yup
Like you will somewhere like the name of the city search like Dallas search or I mean that is not the real one but you will see little obscure sites like that so definitely believe in, in getting all of those.
And another thing to mention, one another value in getting listed in multiple directories, like we mentioned previously. Not everybody searches for the same, not everybody is finding businesses in the same way that you might be doing it on your own. And one the values of being listed in Yelp or city search or any of these other directory services is that Google actually calls reviews from these sites. They do it, they here recently in the last couple of months, they changed the way they get it. But they are still client reviews.
Okay so what are some ways to get started with local right now. Like what would we do?
Well the most important thing is to start * start to back and
Yeah
Fortunately local one of those things that is a little bit easier than a lot of more advanced stuff that we need, that we do you know. You don’t necessarily need an agency to do it but I would recommend that you definitely see a consultant at very least you know your key phrases, you know exactly what you are targeting for your industry.
That is right so and you put that on your * when you set up your local page you got to have keyword phrases.
What you need to know, you need to know what the key phrases are for your market. Like optimizing web page you can also optimize the local listing and that is alright
Okay so if you are going to do local yourself at least get some help for your key word phrases
Yes
Okay
And start it * as everybody should do it if you have, if you are just selling products, not selling services, it is not as important but if you are a business that is selling services especially in a geographic area, small geographic area
Yup
You got to do it
Okay.
So first thing to do, claim your listing
Yeah
If your address and phone numbers are already listed, if Google has got that from another location claim it. If it is not there
And they just do a search in Google find it or
When you enter your phone number or your company details that will
Pop up. let’s say that you are going to set up local and you put in some details and says hey is this you
Yes *
But you also might come across your business actually searching in Google maps or whatever. You can claim that listing as well. Google maps, Google local, Google place all the same thing
so if you have more than one office or more than one physical location or multiple addresses you are going to claim multiple
you are going to do that for each location
okay
so very important thing in claiming if you don’t claim it. It is not going to show up on the main page unless none of your competitors have claimed their either. Very important you claim it if you already see it and you haven’t claimed it, it is not going to rank. It is not going to rank well. It is not going to be one of the top ten local listings, very important that you claim it. It is number one thing that Google suggests, it is number one thing that we suggest, claim it. Number two, you need to make sure that you have a physical address that you can use.
Right I know there is a lot of people who do consulting and stuff and they go and see clients, clients never come to them. They might work at their home whatever. Well in order to set the Google local page, you have to have a local address. It can’t be a P.O. Box because it is a requirement from Google. It has to be an actual mailing address.
Don’t they send you a postcard or some thing
Exactly right. They send you a postcard with a six digit pin which you have to go back to their website, enter in that information and then your listing will have to show up Google search’s result page. and that is, that is good in the sense that, that it will, it helps keep out spammers out of local listings. So it is good but at the same time it makes it a little bit more difficult for consultants that do not have a typical brick and motor business
Yup
Next most important thing, third thing would be to completely fill out your listing. One hundred percent. Don’t just do half of it. Don’t just put in your name and address, don’t just put in your phone number or your website. Fill out the entire thing. There is a little progress indicator on the right hand side of your Google local listing page when you are filling it out that has to say a hundred percent when you are done. If it doesn’t it is going to affect your ranking. Fill it out one hundred percent.
That is like your services you offer, your business hours, a picture, stuff like that right
Exactly, exactly right the entire form, what types of payments you accept
Yeah
Description, you want to upload images, you want to upload video, we will go into these things here momentarily but all of that is really important
Okay
So fill out your Google local profile one hundred percent.
And this is, is this all true of Yahoo and Bing as well.
Yes it helps on Yelp and stuff as well but not so much on the ranking and Google looks at it and says okay it, it adds credibility to your business, Google looks at and says okay it is a real business. They are doing all these things. They care about their page. alright we are going to give them a better ranking
Exactly but it is good practice. We offer local listing service and it is good practice to do that across all local listings ever since, as we discussed this so far as the videos there is many other services not just Google place there is Yelp, there is City search, there is Bing local
Yeah
There is service magic, there is a lot of different places that we use for our clients. Next is the description, there is a description box there and it is limited to criteria of 50 or 60 characters and so you want to fill that out with unique copy. Don’t copy content from your, exactly from your website, unique copy and include your, include your, at least your number one key phrase within that copy
Okay
And we had mentioned this before, have a professional do your key phrase research for you so you know exactly what search terms you need to use within the geographic area that you are doing business. So if their key search phrase were include a city name would they, would it be negative if you use more than one keyword phrase in the copy
No I recommend that you just make it sound natural
Okay
It is a description but also you want to steady yourself
Okay
And you only have, you know probably about three sentences to do in it so you don’t have a whole ton of room. So you are really not going to have all, a lot of room to do more than one or two key phrase
So if you key phrase is carpet cleaning Miami Florida, does it have to say carpet cleaning Miami Florida before you go on to the next word or can you say we do carpet cleaning and then down below say we serve Miami beach, Miami, Fort Lauderdale. I mean, so you know since you have used the words that make up you keyword phrase but you have separated them in the ad or does it have to be sequential?
That would be acceptable as well but what we typically do is, we will insert a word in between
Okay
So we might start off the description as you found the best carpet cleaner in Miami
Okay
And so it is right at the beginning of the description. You had your key phrases there and only in separating carpet cleaning and Miami
Okay
So that is typically how we do it
Okay
That is how we recommend it but it can also be acceptable to to say you know, we offer carpet cleaning, car shampooing and list your services like that and list your cities, your major cities that you do business as well.
Okay
That would work as well and sometimes the approach we take with certain clients depending on their services and just kind of how much room we have to work with
Okay
But it is a good rule of thumb to follow to, when you are using key phrases to keep them as close to what the exact search term is as possible.
Okay
But you do have some way
Okay
So include key phrase in the description and make that description unique. The next thing that you will see in your Google place page, all the way to very bottom, there is an area where you can add additional descriptions about your company. There is a field at the bottom where you can add, they are kind of like tags if your, if you have a blog, if you * blog, you can tag your blog post with a different descriptors and stuff like that. Well you can kind of do that at the same on Google place page as well and some of the tags that we like to use and that we have found have been effective is include service areas. So we can include one tag, there would be service areas and we would list in order of importance, your top cities that you are, that your top city and your top market.
So like Miami comma space Fort Lauderdale
Lauderdale
Comma space Holly wood
And it is worth, if you have room, it is worthwhile to include the state abbreviation as well. For each, so, for each one, Miami, FL so on and so forth
Okay what about
If you have to, you can drop the commas
Should they mix in like a Miami space FL and then Miami or Fort Lauderdale space Florida all the way out
You can if you want
Doesn’t matter
It doesn’t matter so much what we see when do our key phrase research is people rarely enter in these type of enter in the entire state name
Okay
They intend to type in the abbreviation
Yeah
And that is what we work from
Okay
The next thing would also be add another tag for services zip codes. You want to list all the zip codes in the areas that you are doing business. Some people do in fact when they are searching they are putting in the city name and
Yeah
You have seen this in your own.
It doesn’t seem like as big as it used to be. It seem like three four years ago there use to be more, I may be wrong
Yeah some people still do that. We still * search that involve the zip code and it is just a worthwhile practice
I think it is great, especially where there is a specific industry is like, maybe like a dry cleaner. They are going to be more likely to put in a zip code because they want that specific person at this part of Miami. * probably depending on your business, you determine if your clients are more likely to use zip codes and cities
Exactly and that will help your listing bump up when people are searching by zip codes as well
Okay
The other thing to, there is an area to fill the categories that your business falls in
Right
And Google provides their pre buildl categories and what you want to do is choose as many categories that Google suggest that directly apply to your business. Don’t use any of the other one that you do with your business. Choose ones that directly apply to your business. Say your, if you are a carpet cleaner, you are going to have several that were apply to you. you might have, you obviously would have carpet cleaning, you might have a poster cleaning, you might have some different ones but choose all the categories that Google makes available to you and then after you have chosen all the ones that Google has made available to you, what we do is we, we in that area we add some key phrases, some more exact match key phrases. Your number one key phrase, your second most important key phrase and so on and so forth until all those categories are filled out and we have noticed that helps as well.
So you are putting in other stuff
Correct, you are basically suggesting okay
Okay that is a good tip
And that is
And they remember and use them
Yes and that is completely acceptable and that is why those additional category boxes are there in the first place. We are not tricking Google, we are not doing anything shady but they add additional category boxes there because they know that all the categories that they are suggesting don’t necessarily apply to everybody
Right
And sometimes you would have to enter in unique categories, specific to your business. Then below the categories you are going to have an area where you can upload images and video and this is very important. You have room to upload eight images, upload eight images and you also have room to upload, I am not sure how many videos you can max out. I think it might be five videos which you add links from your YouTube page and all you have to do is add YouTube URL which contains the video that you want to use. do this to creating YouTube page, upload at least an intro video, introduce your company, I mean we have had clients before who wouldn’t provide us with any video at all and so we found somebody else’s video on YouTube that had to do with what they were doing and it could be as simple as somebody demonstrating a piece of a machinery that they use in their service that they are providing. I like to do the services. I like to explain the services and why if you are hiring us for this service, these are the, this is the detail we go into in terms of how we provide such a quality service. These are the things that go into doing it. You are like laying it out to people. You may think it is common knowledge and you know maybe no big deal to you but the buyer, the consumer, they don’t know what you do. I mean like in lawn mowing, they don’t know that you sharpen your motor plates every single day. They have no idea about this stuff
Oh no it is important
Yeah so tell them, make it sound, if it is important, you tell them. It will then become important to them. So I love to do videos, so you can do videos for each and every service
You are one of our few clients who does, love to do videos.
Typical client action when you ask them for * Oh my God I hate to stand on videos. I understand everybody. They work, nobody likes to, its valuable, we don’t like asking our clients to do anything. We don’t like asking our clients to do any more work than they absolutely have to. We know they are busy, we know it is a pain in the butt. We know nobody likes to do video tape. It is important. It works. Do it. Take the time. Take the effort. But you have to include at least one video to get to that hundred percent completion rate on your Google place page. if you don’t add a video, your page is not hundred percent complete. So you got to create at least one video. It will take you, take you five minutes to think about, introduce your company, shoot as many takes it takes until you feel comfortable and you are happy with the product. Upload to YouTube, boom, done! After that let’s go back to images. You can upload eight images
Yeah
Something that we do and this is, this is something I will tell you, it is something that we do and something that I have mentioned in optimizing our videos about optimizing your site. We name all the images that we upload for a client with a very specific key phrases in the file name. even the images that we upload are all named with key phrases in the file name, it matters. Those go directly into Google images, it matters, do it.
There is no reason not to do it
Exactly determine your key phrase, get those right, name all the images that you are uploading to Google place page including the Key phrase. Another thing that we have found to be really effective is to, what we call Geo tagging. It is where you associate a location with your website. And what you want to do is after you create your Google place page, you will be able to get a latitude longitude lines of where your business is located and you can get a boast in your ranking for that local search page if you include this geo tag at the end of your title tag on your page. it is something that not a lot of people do but we see a boast from that as well. Yup and going along with that, you want to include the exact mailing address that you are using on your Google place page and phone number, I will recommend formatting in the same way include on the footer of all your pages on your website that you are linking to from your Google place page. that information should be the same and that will
They will verify. Is that is what you are thinking, they will verify or what is the logic
Well the logic, having that information, this goes outside of Google places as well
Okay
The thing is when you have your address and your phone number on your website and that is the same within Yelp and
Oh
And City search and these local listing search pages we recommend as well
Oh I heard this actually okay
That is how Google ties reviews on these sites to your website
Oh wow
So it is comparing the address in that listing and all these other local listings services and your phone number and it is tieing that information to your Google place page.
And to use physical for this
You, well you have to use the same one that you are using in your Google place page
which is physical
Yes * yeah but you * well once Google makes the link between your external local listing pages such as Yelp and city search it is going to maintain
Oh it does
So if you
Okay
So if you have changed you address in the future, it is still going to leave those links for your reviews
Okay
We have not come across an instance where we have to change a client’s address and we have lost their links and their reviews. Not seems established, it seems put
Okay
We haven’t experienced one yet
Okay
So that is good news
Yeah reviews are big deal too
Yeah. We are going to do a whole another video on reviews testimonials
Yeah
That are very important
You still see reviews bump rankings
Yes review that is next on the list.
Oh okay
Also you want to include your website, your main, link to your main website. I think, we are doing probably forty plus websites for you that we are managing
I don’t even know the number any more but it is out there
It is a lot
It all at different stages. A lot that are really mature and some that we are working on
It is a lot. We have, we have a Google place page for every city that he does business in. we have
We
We have site specific to every city he does business in and
Message to market match stuff you know, we are selling this specific service in a specific city
Exactly right
And by the way I pay him to do all this stuff so you know. I don’t get anything for free. So my point being that I can still justify
I can’t do anything I am sorry and also in regards to the website, we have noticed that, we have noticed in all the tracking and research we have done, the website that you include in your Google place page, that will help your website get rank quicker when you have a local listing associated with that website. You will help it get indexed quicker and it will help it move up in the rankings quicker. If you have an authentic verified local listing page. so very, that is very important
Yes
Because
That said again if you have
Okay say you have a branding business
Right
You have set up a Google place page, you have a brand new website, a brand new domain,
Yup
Verified page, verified data website
Yup
I know you set up a lot of stuff on auto pilots with a great really basic website. Most of them don’t have websites when they come to you.
I won’t say most, but some don’t.
Okay
Most have a website but some don’t
Good
And but what a lot of clients will do is they want another website
Okay
And you know kind of when you hear, some of how well this stuff works, you know you end up to do some of the, they end up want a second website so but you are right there is plenty of guys that have no website or a good example too is their existing website has no rankings. They have a website but there is not link to it anywhere and so it is like starting from scratch
Exactly right
Okay so that is a great example because people are starting new websites with us all time
So what we are seeing at it, it is something that didn’t take whole lot of research because we noticed it is really easy because the change was drastic in the ranking. You know a couple of weeks after we added a local listing page for particular client’s locations and a new website that they just created, we will see a boom, a bomb as soon as we created their local listing and associated with that particular website. So it is very valuable in that aspect alone and if at all possible, I have a website for every location that you have.
But is that a website tied with different local listing
Yes, yes
Okay
And but if you * well if you have multi, if you have multiple brick and motors and say you are a pet care shop
Yeah
If you have multiple locations you are going to have multiple mailing address
Right
That is easy
That is easy
Finally, reviews, very important and this plays a role in building your credibility online on credibility with the brand that you are building and they are very important. Reviews is something that you should be actively getting from your clients, you should be requesting testimonials. We are going to go into this in depth because it is so important. It deserves its own video. Reviews are very important. You want to actively monitor your Google reviews page, your Yelp reviews page, any other place where you have listings. You want to see what people are posting about you. what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong and even more importantly you are from time to time going to get a negative review * whether you like it or not
Yup
And I have had many clients who come to me and say I got a negative review. This is going to kill my page. this is horrible and my response is always no it is great because now you can and lot of these sites, most of the good ones at Yelp, Google local, a lot of the really good local listings services, let you reply to the reviews and that is awesome
Yeah
Because you can reply to the reviews, half of the time, they will come from your competitors who
I know I have heard about some of these
Half of the time they will come from your competitors and they are just trying to cause trouble and make you look bad but that is okay because we don’t care about that. Because the point is we get to reply to their reviews and we reply to their reviews in as nice as possible way. If we think it is your competitor trying to knock us, we try to reply as nice as possible way. Sorry Joe Smith, we have any record of serving you but we would love it if you come back to our location we will you know, your next service call is on us, we would love to make it out to you. and if you are not really a past customer, we would love to make you a new customer.
Yeah
And that right there replying to a review in a really positive fashion like that just makes you look more professional and honestly I think that is better than just another five start review on your page. it just shows that you are up branding at a different level than you competitors. You are not, you are about your business. You are serious about your business, you are serious about your customers and you know they will take care of you.
And nobody believes five hundred glowing five star reviews any way
Right and from time to time you might come up, you actually might come across some competitors that have two hundred positive five star reviews in a really small geographic area that they are doing business. There is a competitor of mine in my area that has two hundred, they are an SEO company and they have probably about two hundred and fifty positive reviews
Sort of scam the system
And I guarantee they hired some, they hired some company in via to add positive reviews.
Yeah
And I guarantee you when Google changes their algorithm to effect reviews, when that comes, when that change comes in place, their listing is going down in tubes because Google is tracking every review where it is coming from. What IP address it is coming from that is geographic location so when it sees a business in Miami or Dallas or Phoenix or whatever getting two hundred reviews from Bangladesh
Certifies customers from India
Exactly right they are going to, their listing is going down the drain
Yeah
So we always try to keep everything on the up and up and that is why it is really important that we turn to our clients and really encourage them to be active about giving real reviews and testimonials from the clients.
Should they spread them around like so, this is kind of interesting stuff. There is a big software company in California that was really heavy in Denel and some other markets that we have an exposure of stuff, had done somebody and they were getting their * like fifty eighty a hundred reviews, two hundred reviews, the software was doing it for them. And it was awesome for a couple of years and they everything got shut down last couple of months
Yup
They are all gone. All these reviews they collected, all gone because they were kind of getting in the system
Of course
And
It is going to be more and more common
Yeah so anyway where was I going with this oh, reviews what they were doing is they were pushing all these reviews into Google and so should you push all your reviews into Google. Should you get some reviews like, tell what I mean like if you have a strategy like encouraging your clients to review you, should you have them go to Google, should you have some go to Yelp, some go to Yahoo or do you want to, or is it better to focus on just Google and have all your reviews go there.
We actually have a full, a strategy that we send our clients when they sign up for a local listings service or actually the best way to go about getting reviews. We
Okay
We will talk about it
Okay
But I will just touch on that momentarily yeah I would spread them around. But Google local reviews should be your focus
Yeah
And actually if you would ask me that about two three months ago, I would have said no you really need to be putting a lot of review to Yelp. And the reason that has changed is
Google *
Well Google is doing a lot of things. They are Google + their social network
Yes
Is going to play a big part on reviews. The Google plus for businesses is going to play big part on reviews so there is a lot of stuff coming up on Google that doesn’t really effect you yet but it is going to. And, and but more importantly few months ago they changed how reviews were appearing. Previously when you put up a local listing page, it would, it would show you the total number of your reviews from all the local listings that you are listed so it would give you a total of Yelp, city search, I am sorry urban spoon if you are restaurant, service magic, James book and it would combine that entire total into a, the number of star reviews that you have got into one total but since then and it would also display that in your Google local page and that was great so all your Yelp reviews and all that were fitting your giant review total and it looked great but what they did about two or three months ago is they changed is and now you only see how many reviews you are getting from Yelp or service magic
Individually
On that first local listing page
Okay
It is no longer on your specific, it is no longer on your specific page. it is only listed under on that main search results page. so it doesn’t total them anymore. It keeps them separate which is okay but we are telling our clients the focus is a little bit more on Google reviews
You think Google is then probably weighting their reviews more than may be others
We don’t have an evidence of that yet but we think because they made that change, we are starting thing that at some point they are going to cut those people from their review pages. After they get into the mass amount of reviews on their Google review system. We think they are going to drop Yelp and city search and all them from even being displayed on their local listing site because they really want you to use your Google places listings.
Yeah
So that is why we are telling our clients to give a little bit more weight to getting reviews on Google reviews.
So bit off topic, Google plus, is it going to affect local more than SEO or SEO more, do you have idea yet.
It is going to affect traditional SEO more than local
Local
More than local yes. Well it is going to affect local too in a sense that you are going, there is a whole another video I am just * but you are going to start seeing your search engines results modified depending on what you look at
What you look at, that is actually scary for SEO
Well that is already happening but
You are logged into Google
No what your friends like, what your friend plus one. Microsoft is already doing this. Microsoft has a partnership with Facebook and they are modifying your search results in Bing based on what your friends on Facebook like so if your friends like a particular lawn care company and on Facebook that result is going to bumped up in Bing. That is already happening and that is the whole reason why Google has created their own social network because that data is extremely valuable
Is it good or bad
We will talk about that on another
Okay
Since that is important but that is where everything is going
Yeah
Okay great
Anything else you think off
That is all
Cool
You started.
Yes now
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