Written by Lesa Seibert | 14 May 2012
Posted in SEO Tip of the Week

 

A recent review on small business search results found that more than 80 percent of results did not point to the websites of those businesses. Instead, they pointed to social network results and consumer reviews.

Some of the businesses surveyed were restaurants, travel agencies, law firms, beauty related businesses, plumbing companies and automotive repair companies – all highly susceptible to consumer reviews. These businesses and similar consumer-facing companies need to be aware of where they stand in search results with their own websites, compared to the rankings of reviews and comments from social media users.

It is a growing trend for consumers to go to their favorite review sites and leave reviews of companies they have done business with. A lot of times the reviews and ratings might not even be justified. So, not only is it important to know where you stand on these sites but also to have resources ready to speak out (or type) on your behalf. That means recruiting brand advocates. Of course, the best way to do that is to provide quality experiences for your users and to respond quickly to any problems before they become viral hate campaigns.

Some obvious places to look for your small business reviews are social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp.com, and Google Maps, Bing, Yahoo Local, City Search and Local.com. Below are a dozen more places where your business or products might be getting reviewed.

InsiderPages.com
Mainly focused on rating those in the medical and health care field. Insider Pages also features reviews on restaurants, beauty and home & garden.

MerchantCircle.com
MerchantCircle focuses on promoting businesses by using online user reviews via a pseudo paid advertising system. Businesses can create their own local coupon book.

JudysBook.com
Judy's Book provides review guides to users, such as "Top 10 Auto Mechanics" and so on. Businesses can create their accounts and get help with promotion and SEO.

AngiesList.com
Angie's List is a paid service for consumers to get certified, unbiased reviews of local businesses. It is a large and trusted network, claiming more than one million members.

TripAdvisor.com
As the name suggest, TripAdvisor helps users filter travel destinations via user reviews. A must-know for travel businesses.

OpenTable.com
Because OpenTable.com allows users to make reservations immediately, good reviews on this site can help restaurants take advantage of the convenience factor.

BBB.org
The Better Business Bureau is a relative newcomer to the user review scene but its trusted reputation makes it a must-monitor for every business.

Buzzillions.com
Buzzillions' focus is products -- electronics, computers, sports equipment, clothing, etc. Manufacturers and retailers would be wise to research their products here.

Epinions.com
Part of the Shopping.com family, Epinions solicits reviews on just about anything a person can buy online -- from autos to office supplies.

Wize.com
Wize reports "the best & worst products" by matching products based on consumers' needs. The main focus is electronics and appliances.

PowerReviews.com
In tandem with Buzzillions, PowerReviews looks to connect consumers with reviews about the producty they care about, through SEO, mobile, social networks and more.

SiteJabber.com
SiteJabber provides reviews of websites as a whole. Obviously, every online property should make sure good things are being said about them, or find a brand advocate to get the ball rolling. They claim more than 450,000 people search websites for reviews every month.

Written by Lesa Seibert | 07 May 2012
Posted in SEO Tip of the Week

Last week we discussed the importance of and how to optimize listings on local directories.  This week we are going to look at optimizing your website itself for local search.

Optimizing your actual website content should also be an important part of your local awareness efforts on the web.  Optimizing titles, descriptions, header tags, body text and alt text should all be focused on the city/region for which you are optimizing by including the city/region name liberally throughout the landing page or site pages being optimized.

If your business has more than one location, but only one website, it is imperative to have a landing page for each and ensure that the information is current and has proper address tags.  The landing page will have information on each locality that is specific to that location. 

Another important step is to use a geo sitemap and a regular site map and make them accessible from the root directory of your website. 

A final note is that you have a lot of competition out there and one way to make sure there is some interest in the search terms you want to rank for is to user the Regional Interest Map on Google's Insights for Search -http://www.google.com/insights/search.  This tool allows you to see which state and metropolitan areas index high against search volume for a particular word or phrase. 

Written by Lesa Seibert | 28 April 2012
Posted in SEO Tip of the Week

The Internet is becoming more and more local every day.  One reason is that consumers are using their mobile devices to perform searches for local businesses more frequently.  According to a recent report, there are nearly 3 billion search queries containing local terms each month.  For companies that have a local presence, visibility on local search is proving to be essential for them.

The most important piece to local search optimization is the presence of accurate NAP data: name, address and phone number.  Search engines aggregate data from multiple sources and ultimately they should all lead back accurately to your business.  If the information is not consistent, your websites listing will be seen as less accurate and will likely be lowered in the search results, causing you to potentially miss out on the opportunity for citations(links) that come with local listings.

To optimize local business listings, first focus on developing a quality title, then add an accurate, up-to-date physical address.  Next, choose the business categories strategically.  Make sure to have a local phone number and finally undertake a campaign to acquire reviews from your customers.  The more reviews you can get, the sooner you will be on the fast track to generating traffic from local mobile traffic and regular search traffic.

One of the most important parts of building a positive local presence is the existence of directory citations.  YellowPages.com, Yelp, CitySearch and InsiderPages.com are just a few.  But citations (links) should not stop at directories.  You should also acquire them from other websites.  Finding those on a city level is not an easy task, but it is possible.  Take your time to complete profiles on the following websites or hire someone to do this for you.  It can help your local presence.

• Google Places  - www.google.com/places
• Foursquare - www.foursquare.com
• Yelp - http://biz.yelp.com
• Yahoo Local - http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
• Bing Business Portal - http://www.bing.com/businessportal
• Local.com - https://advertise.local.com/?CID=710
• Merchant Circle - http://www.merchantcircle.com/corporate/services.html
• Manta - http://www.manta.com/getlisted/mantahas?referid=10456&gclid=CNarqsWLh60CFYTsKgodpG62TQ
• Yellow Pages - http://adsolutions.att.com/advertising/internet-listings
• MapQuest - http://listings.mapquest.com/apps/listing
• SuperPages - http://www.supermedia.com/business-listings/
• Citysearch - http://www.citysearch.com/
• Cityslick - http://www.cityslick.net/
• Localeze - http://localeze.com/
• LocalPages - http://www.localpages.com/advertise/

Written by Lesa Seibert | 18 July 2011
Posted in SEO Tip of the Week

by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media

Your website can quickly suffer SEO irrelevance, particularly if you rely on more edgy content development strategies.  The best tool available to ensure site relevance is provided by Google in its Webmaster Tools product.  With it you can see what Google considers the most common keywords on your site.  This information can be used to optimize content and ensure it is focused around a central theme.  The tool will also reveal if the content is actually relevant, it Google's eyes, to your website and its objective.  Another option to achieve the same result is to develop a tag cloud to determine the relevance to the keyword target of the page.

One of the major mistakes to those who are not familiar or trained in SEO (search engine optimization) is the failure to realize that it is a process that requires building upon incremental improvements over time to move up in the rankings.  The Google Webmaster Tools provides insights into the number of impressions you are receiving (pages displayed) vs. the number of clicks (people clicked on links on the page or navigation links).  This might tell you that it's time to improve the quality of titles and descriptions. 

Setting up regular monthly reviews of crawl errors, relevancy assessments and ranking reports will help you increase the ranking of your site.  Some of these things can be done on your own, but some can require a professional SEO firm.

Written by Lesa Seibert | 11 July 2011
Posted in SEO Tip of the Week

by, Lesa Seibert, President, Xstreme Media

It is essential to check the SEO status of your website by running a quick checkup.  All size sites will benefit greatly from this overview to gain insight into how effective your pages and site are.

If everything is working perfectly, all of the pages on your website would be accessible to the search engines and crawled with frequency.  Most websites have issues in the form of crawl errors which keep search engines from indexing pages on the site.  Working to remove these errors will give the search engines an easier path to crawl your content and help with SEO efforts.

First you should identify the pages that are returning the errors and start correcting the problems.  Find pages with broken links using the free W3C Link Checker that you can get from http://wsm.co/fZsIGv.  Then either build pages that the broken links go to or implement at 301 redirect to send users to the correct destination.  You will be surprised at the impact this can have on search engine rankings.

Another opportunity to remove barriers is to reduce the amount of duplicate content on the website.  Those areas that are most prone to duplicate content are title tags, dynamic URL's, meta descriptions and product descriptions.  A useful tool to aid in the fight against duplicate content is Xenu Link Sleuth.  The tool provides information on broken links and for possible duplication issues.  Another option is Yahoo Site Explorer.

Next week we will look at site relevance and current rankings.