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Jul 29

Why You Need Reputation Management

By SEO Tips

Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management or ORM as it has come to be called is quite simply making sure that what is being said about a business online is watched and managed. As any business owner these days can attest, the overwhelming majority of potential customers will lookup a business online to get reviews etc. before deciding to do business with them.

I’m sure just about anyone reading this has done the same…running a quick search for “[Business Name] reviews” or “[Business Name] scam” just to see what comes up for a business which you are considering using.

Here’s the problem for business owners…there are a massive number of sites where people can leave reviews and almost none of them are vetted for accuracy. Lots of sites try and keep people from leaving fake positive reviews, but very few of them verify negative reviews.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the places positive & negative reviews can be left:

  • Google My business
  • FaceBook
  • Yelp
  • Judys Book
  • Dex Knows
  • Four Square
  • City Search
  • Insider Pages
  • Local.com
  • Merchant Circle
  • Site Jabber
  • Super Pages
  • Urban Spoon
  • Yellow Bot
  • Yellow Pages

Do you have the time and/or means to monitor the above sites and address potential negative reviews while also trying to run your business?

Then we have the other sites such as

  • Ripoff Report
  • Complaints Board
  • Who Scammed you
  • Complaints.com
  • Consumer Affairs
  • Glass Door

…where virtually anyone can leave reviews (factual or not) about your business.

The reviews left in the first set of sites are bad enough as people will often see them when looking up your company contact information online. The good news with these sites is a couple of bad reviews won’t have too much of a negative impact if you have enough positive reviews to overpower them.

The reviews left in the second set of businesses can be potentially devastating as they will often show up right on the front page of Google when someone searches for your company name. The sites have so much “authority” that they can sometimes rank even ABOVE your own business for searches on your business name. They sit there right in front of potential customers often costing businesses thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands in lost revenue if not dealt with.

These reviews may not even be legitimate. They could be left by an angry or unreasonable customer, a former employee that wants revenge for a perceived wrongdoing, or even a competitor looking for an advantage.

Ready for the worst part? Even with lawyers involved it can be virtually impossible to get reviews left at these sites removed!

That’s where we come in. We are reputation management experts and we will work with you to insure that potential customers find the the information you want them to find when researching your business name. In essence we monitor and maintain your online reputation across virtually every area where a review can be left.

We insure that there are plenty of positive reviews being left for you on the sites such as Yelp, Google My Business, etc. and if you are dealing with ripoff report or review left at one of the other similar sites, we work to insure that those are taken care of as well. We likely won’t be able to have them removed (as we mentioned, that’s often impossible), but because of our SEO expertise, we can insure that only pages with the information about your business we want customers to find, are shown when they search for your company name.

Stop losing business! Contact us today to see what our online reputation management experts can do for you! Check us out at http://www.platinumseoservices.com/reputation-management/

Jun 12

Why Local Business Listing Optimization is Crucial to Your Online Success

By SEO Tips

If you have a small business or any type of local business, you know getting customers to call you and/or come in is crucial to your businesses success.

In the not too distant past, it was most common for customers to find you by going to the yellow pages and pulling up listings for whatever service you provide. Those days are over. Today, the only time someone picks up a yellow pages book is usually to grab it from their front porch and put it in the recycling bin.

Today, people search for businesses online and if your business can’t be found, you might as well not exist. That’s the hard truth. The internet has completely changed how potential customers search for and find a local business. Today, the vast majority of customers will pull up their favorite search engine and type in a search such as “dentist in Dallas” or “hair salon Houston” or whatever they were searching for and will be shown quite a few local results.

Run any type of local search at any of the top engines these days and you’ll see two types of non-paid results. The first type of results you’ll see are often termed “local business listings”. They show the local business name, address, phone number, and show them on a map. Check out the image below for an example.

Local Business Listing Optimization

You can see in the above image, the first non-paid results returned by Google for the search phrase “dallas dentist” is a “7 pack” of local listings that correspond to the map on the right hand side.

It’s not until after the 7 pack of local listings that we get to the standard organic results.

Ranking well in the search engines for your target phrases has always been important, but with the prominence of the local business listings in the search engines today, ranking in the 7 pack is critical. Ranking well in the 7 pack will generally mean you’ll also rank well in Google Maps and similar services.

This is called “Local Business Listing Optimization“. The issue with ranking in the 7 pack (it’s not always 7 listings…it can vary from one to three or sometimes five), is that the criteria is quite a bit different than the criteria for ranking in the standard organic results.

Let’s take a look at some of the factors that go into the ranking of the local business listings in Google specifically.

1 – Citations

A citation is basically a reference to your business from another site that includes your business name, address, and phone number. These includes things like the BBB, Yelp, yellowpages.com, etc. The more citations you have the better, but it’s not just the number of citations, it’s also the quality of the source of those citations. A citation from the BBB is going to carry more weight than a citation from a random blog.

2 – Google Business listing information

The local business listings in Google are pulled directly from the Google My Business (formerly Google Plus Business) database. This means you want to make sure your listing is claimed and built out and optimized well. This means choosing the best possible category, completing all the sections of your Google My Business Profile, including plenty of your important keywords/products/services in your description (without looking spammy), images, etc.

3 – On Site Content

Initially, Google only looked at what was in the Google Plus Business listing in regard to ranking a local business listing. That began changing over the past year and now they also take into account what is actually on your business website. This means the on-page optimization of your website also affects your local business listing.

4 – Location

Since Google wants to display local businesses that are not only quality businesses, but also convenient businesses, the location of the business in relation to the where the person doing the search is plays a factor. The farther out a business is from where the search is being performed, the more of the other factors above they would need to rank in the 7 pack.

This is especially true in regards to searches performed on a mobile device as Google and other engines are able to know exactly where you are from your mobile devices GPS system. For desktop searches it’s a bit different. Since they don’t know precisely where you are, they generally take the city and show favoritism to listings closer to the center of the city.

5 – Information found along with third party citations

In addition to using citations as a sort of trust factor, Google also seems to look at what else those citations say about your business. This means a good description utilizing the keywords you want to rank for along with those citations will impact how well, and for what keywords your business ranks for in the local listings.

6 – Reviews

This should come as no surprise, but having lots of, ideally positive, reviews will also positively impact a sites ranking. Reviews at Google seem to have the most impact, but having reviews spread across all sites that allow reviews is the best approach. Sites such as Yelp, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc. all allow for reviews and Google spiders them all. The more positive reviews Google finds about your business, the better your chances are of ranking in the local listings.

With local listings taking more and more screen real estate and being displayed first for more and more searches, it’s imperative for any local business to insure that they are doing everything possible to get their business ranked in these listings.

Platinum SEO Services are seasoned professionals at SEO and Local SEO and can easily help virtually any type of local business increase their presence in both organic and Local Business listings. With over 15 years in the business, why put your trust in anyone else? Contact us today to see what we can do for your business.

Mar 24

Are You Ready For Google’s “Mobilepocalypse” Update on April 21st??

By SEO News

MobilepocalypseUnless you’ve been hiding deep underground or spending some quality time in a Tibetan monastery, you’ve likely heard rumblings about a coming update from Google, but do you understand what it is and more importantly, are you ready for it? Are you absolutely sure?

Here’s a link to Google’s own announcement about this coming mobile focused update.

 

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html

The bottom line here is that Google has been pushing webmasters to make their sites “mobile friendly” for a while now and now they are going to push A LOT harder. When this update goes live on April 21st, sites that “G” sees as “mobile friendly” will get a pretty heft boost in rankings for users that are searching on a mobile device.

What’s that I hear you saying? “Well, ok, but if it’s only for people searching on a mobile device, how much can that really hurt us if we’re not mobile friendly?”. Good question…and I’ll give you a simple answer…a LOT!

Google has estimated that approximately 50% of it’s users are now using mobile devices. Read that again…on average HALF of their users are on mobile devices…and that is only going to increase. Couple that with the fact that, in the U.S., Google accounts for around 70% of the search traffic losing out on that mobile traffic could easily break many businesses.

On sites we work with, I’ve been seeing closer to 40%, but still, and some niches will likely have even less, but even at 40% or 30% that is a LOT of potential traffic lost if your site is deemed as not mobile friendly.

“OK…OK…It’ s Important, So How Can I Tell If My Site is Mobile Friendly?”

So, how can you tell if your site is mobile friendly? Well there are a couple of ways. First you can visit your site on your mobile phone. Does it reformat nicely for your screen so that everything is easy to get to? Does your menu reformat so that links aren’t too close together?
Mobile FriendlyIf so, it’s likely you are mobile friendly, but again, the important thing is that GOOGLE thinks you are mobile friendly.

Check out the graphic to the right. Do you see how some of the results show a little “mobile friendly” tag and some don’t. Well that is Google telling you which sites it sees as mobile friendly. You can bet after April 21st, those sites that don’t have the mobile friendly tag are going to be MUCH farther down in the rankings.

So, how can you tell if Google thinks your site is mobile friendly? Well, Google has been kind enough to provide webmasters with a tool that will analyze any URL and tell you if it sees it as mobile friendly.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Remember, Google looks at each page of your site so one page could be seen as mobile friendly and another not. Any page that is seen as not mobile friendly will get pushed down in the results in favor of mobile friendly pages after April 21st.

I urge you to go and test your site now, or contact us and we’ll test it for you, jut find out and if it isn’t mobile friendly that is something you need to address ASAP.

Luckily, we can help. Platinum SEO Services is a Dallas SEO Company with a ton of experience in updating and reworking sites to make them search engine friendly. We also have a lot of options for business owners that are now needing to make their site mobile friendly.

Not only is being mobile friendly now massively important to your site’s rankings, it’s just good business. As more and more users browse the web via mobile devices, your site should adjust to give them the best possible experience. The better and easier they can navigate your site, the better your chances are of converting them into a customer.

That is the bottom line right…more customers?

So get to it, go check your self at the URL above, or give us a call today at 972-544-6820 to see what we can do for you. Oh…did I mention we are pretty good at ranking sites as well? Yeah…we’re sort of SEO Experts so we could probably help you with that little issue while we’re at it!

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