This has got to be my favorite use of QR Codes to date. If I passed by this ad, I would have a tough time not scanning the code. I love creative marketing that pulls in, not just typical
consumers, but new ones. This ad does it. Of course, it is Victoria Secrets after all. My heating and air client may have to be a little more creative.
The new Zero Moment of Truth Webinar Series has been pushed back another week. This is all brand new stuff and we’re trying to make sure there’s a ton of good content for you. If you haven’t seen the ZMOT trailer, then go to this link and check it out. You can also get the free ZMOT ebook from Google.
We’re going to discuss the new approach to consumers and how you can zero in on those who want to buy from you.
I’ve been lagging a little lately on my blog posts due to the preparation of the webinar. I apologize to my readers as I know you expect regular content from me, but I promise the webinar will be full of a lot of really cool stuff for local business owners. The new start date for the webinar looks like it will be Wednesday, September 7th. We’ll keep you posted with times and replays.
For a long time now I have been engaged in a marketing idea that I have believed to be revolutionary. Not exclusive, others have been using it as well, but new, exciting and absolutely ground-breaking. Google calls this idea ZMOT and it is what every local business owner must know if they want their company to survive.
If you are not familiar with ZMOT, or at least the idea of reaching consumers at the most critical moment in the sales process, then you should watch this video and download the ZMOT Ebook.
Granted, this may be a not-so-subtle way for Google to promote Adwords, but the Zero Moment of Truth has changed the way business needs to approach consumers. In the old days, advertising campaigns told consumers which products to buy and which services to use. But business is no longer in the driver’s seat. The consumer is. They’re going online to customer review sites and forums to learn and make better buying decisions. They’re blogging and using social media to discuss brands. They’re reporting back to their circle of influence about their experience, beginning the cycle all over again for others. This is great power for the consumer, but it’s also a great opportunity for business. We have to engage them in the process by participating at this moment, which Google calls the Zero Moment of Truth.
Read the book. You can go to You Tube, search for ZMOT, and watch the full series of videos as well. They’re short – each one is about 2 minutes in length – but they’re powerful and offer great insight into the mind of the present day consumer.
First of all, thanks again to everyone who participated in the training last night. We had some really terrific questions. We know Google changes are getting more and more frequent, but hang in there and practice sound, fundamental marketing and you will be fine. Remember, the search engines like relevancy and popularity. Keep doing the things we teach and you’ll stay visible, regardless of changes. Also, make sure you check your email for the additional tools and resources to help you climb the search engines. This is great stuff and no one else out there is teaching it – at least not for free.
Finally, the long awaited “new” training webinars are almost here. We expect to have them going by the end of July. Rather than once a month, we will be offering them two, three and in some cases four times a week. Much of it will be repeat information so you don’t have to attend more than one for now. Once you have attended the first one, the rest of your training will come to you via email. We promise to send you only top quality content – stuff you can actually use to get more business.
This is exciting stuff and if used, will make you the authority in your market…so be sure to use it. Create a plan, take action and build your customer list. Market to them regularly with good content (like I do with you). Don’t send them fluff or they will block your emails. You must offer them something they can use (and please, no recipes for crumb cake).
So, we can’t wait to get started with the new training. If you know of any other business owners that are struggling to find new customers, forward them the email we send you and they can join in. Only 300 per call will be allowed and you know how quickly these things fill up so be sure to tell them to sign up quickly. Thanks again.
As we stated earlier in the year, we are working on providing a new series of webinars to train business owners on very basic SEO and Google Places techniques. These will be different from the webinars we have already been doing. Remember, everything we teach you can implement yourself and most of it can be done using free tools on the web. So all you have to do is take action.
Thanks again for attending last night’s webinar and we look forward to hearing from you in the next one!
Citations are important to any local business owner who wants more online visibility for their business. By local, I mean businesses that sell primarily to a local community such as a general contractor, dentist, attorney, print shop owner, restaurant owner, baker, accountant and real estate agent.
What is a citation?
A citation is a mention of your business on the Internet. In other words, if a web property ‘cites’ your business for any reason, it results in a citation. Typically, your business title, address and phone number have to be ‘cited’ in order to have any significance to the search engines.
Why are citations important?
Citations are important because Google regularly scrapes the Internet, looking for citations of your business. The more citations it finds, the more credit your business gets and the higher it will rank your local business listing – Google Places listing – in search results.
Where can you get citations?
You don’t actually ‘get’ too many citations. You have to be proactive and make them. You can give yourself a citation in a blog post. You can submit a press release and include your business name, address and phone number (lumped together) and it can count as a citation; however, the overwhelming majority of citations are generated from online directories. Think of an internet version of the Yellow Pages. There are hundreds of directories out there. Normally, you’d have to go out and find them, but it just so happens that I’ve included a bunch for you at the end of this post. Thanks to eGumball in the Google Help Forum and a few other contributors from the Warrior Forum for their help with the list.
Just remember that the list is incomplete and the most powerful citations come from local directories and directories that are specific to your industry. Those you’ll have to find yourself.
Ignore Yelp at your own peril. Today, consumers want to know before they buy and turn to customer review sites such as Yelp to find out what other customers are saying about a business. 
Yelp is by far the best on the Web. Other customer review sites like City Search, Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, Super Pages and even Google Places can all be manipulated by business owners posting their own ‘fake’ reviews. Angie’s List is not bad, but subscribers must pay an annual fee. Judy’s Book and Kudzu are not bad options either, but none of them have the reach and marketing power of Yelp.
Yelp has invested a lot of time and money keeping their customer reviews clean. In the past, business owners would write their own reviews under different names or they would have friends and family write reviews for them. Gaming the system in Yelp has become so difficult that it is just easier to play by the rules than it is to try and cheat. That’s what makes Yelp so powerful. Most of the consumers writing reviews for businesses are legitimate customers.
Yelp also provides consumers a voice. If I receive bad service at a restaurant, you can bet I’ll let the world know by posting it on Yelp. Likewise, if I like a business, I just might give them five stars and let the world know how good they are. Customer review sites like Yelp are a great tool for consumers, helping to hold business owners accountable.
Below are a few tips that can help you take advantage of this tool for marketing your own business.
Claim Your Listing
Yelp scours the Internet looking for local businesses to add to its directory. Chances are your business is already listed. If so, you need to claim it. Claiming your business in Yelp is very simple. Go to https://biz.yelp.com/. Be sure to fill out a complete profile. You are doing this to help visitors learn about your business, not necessarily to help the search engines, though it doesn’t hurt. Add plenty of photos and a good description. You can add some keywords, but I wouldn’t get carried away with them. Just make it flow naturally.
Search
Your listing in Yelp is a web page just like any page on your website. It can be found in search so why not optimize your listing? If optimized well enough, your listing can make the first page of a keyword search along with your website. The best part is that your Yelp listing will show the stars in search results. This is very powerful. If a consumer searches for a heating and air company and sees the yelp listing with five stars next to it, how powerful do you think that is for search marketing?
Which one of these listing in Google search results for "air conditioning san diego" stands out the most?
Yelp is its Own Search Engine
Rather than search Google or Yahoo, some consumers go directly to Yelp to find a local businesses. They may type a certain keyword in the Yelp search box like dry cleaners, pizza or general contractor. How do you get your listing to the top of those results? Yelp’s search algorithm is different from the other search engines like Yahoo. Yelp relies heavily on the number of visitors to your page. The more visits you get, the higher you will rank in results. So how do you get more visitors? See the paragraph above.
Get More Reviews
Encourage your customers to open a Yelp account and to write you an honest review. Make this a normal practice for as long as you have your business. After time, you will have built a large base of reviews. Put a link on your website that goes directly to your Yelp listing. This way you make it easy for them to review your business and you get the juice of another visitor to your page. Encourage them to become regular Yelp users. One of the things Yelp does to control spam is to filter (hide) the reviews of one-time users. If a customer of yours writes one review for you and doesn’t review any other businesses, then eventually that review will disappear.
Turning Around Negative Reviews
Customer review sites are a double edged sword. If you run a good business and keep customers happy, you will be rewarded with lots of good reviews. If, on the other hand, you run a poor business, customers will make you pay by writing bad reviews. If you are one of these business owners, there isn’t much we can do for you, but if you have generally good reviews and an occasional bad one shows up – you can’t make everyone happy so chances are you’ll get a bad review eventually – then you need to address it.
Try to contact the person who made the bad review and see if there is anything you can do for them that will get them to remove or improve the review. There is an option to contact them privately from your business dashboard in Yelp. If this is not possible, Yelp gives you the opportunity to publicly address a review. This is not the time to get back at the reviewer! Always remember, your response to a bad review is not for the reviewer, but for all those reading the review. People want to see how you respond to unhappy customers. They can careless about the review, they just want to know how you handle unsatisfied customers. Show that you care about their experience and want to make it better. Show that you are willing to go out of your way to help them. Do this, and you can turn a bad review into an opportunity.
If the review is fake, or put there by a competitor, you can report it to Yelp. They are notoriously committed to keeping their reviews clean of inappropriate reviews.
You can also advertise on Yelp, but I recommend that you become an active Yelper first. Create a good listing and have fun with it. It’s free marketing and a great way to find new customers.
How to get your business on the first page of search results.
Note: As online business marketing consultants, there are a lot of procedures we use that achieve the top level visibility that drive online consumers to our clients. Many of those procedures are either too technical or too lengthy for me to explain in a single blog post. The following information, however, is enough to get most businesses started and provides the fundamental framework for high visibility in online search. Follow these steps and you will likely achieve your online goals.
Many business owners are beginning to realize the potential of a strong web presence. In the past, most believed the Internet was just for national or global corporations. Nothing can be further than the truth. In fact, search engines like Google take a lot of pride in leveling the playing field, allowing businesses with little cash to compete on a platform with the largest companies in the market. They do this by providing free marketing tools and resources for local business owners – those that sell to a local community. This concept is what drives Google Places, which is the local business listing platform in Google Maps. 
Type into the search box phrases like Attorney NYC, Dentist San Diego, General Contractor Denver or Salon Newport Beach and your results will most likely render seven local business listings, A through G. These listings are in the middle of the page, just below the sponsored ads. They usually come with an image, customer review information and a placement marker in the map to the right of the page showing their location.
Getting your business listed in this section can be incredibly profitable for the businesses lucky enough to be there. In many cases, such visibility has little to do with luck, however, and everything to do with strategy. Below I’ve listed a few steps you can take to get on the first page of these results.
Claim Your Google Places Business Listing
First, if you haven’t claimed your listing in Google Places, do it now. Google Places is essentially a business directory, much like the Yellow Pages. Google “bots” regularly scrape the Internet looking for new businesses to add to their directory. If you have a business that has been around for a while, chances are Google has already placed you in Google Places. All you have to do now is claim that listing. To find out, go to http://maps.google.com and type in your business telephone number. If your business is there, it will show up to the left of the screen, next to the big map in the center of the page. If you can’t find it, I’d make sure by trying a few variations of your business name and some old phone numbers. You want to be certain that you are not listed before you set up a new listing. Duplicate listings can cause major problems. To learn how to claim your listing, you can watch this You Tube video.
Optimize Your Google Places Business Listing
Once you have verified your Google Places business listing with the pin number that Google has sent to you, you are ready to optimize your listing. Before you do that, however, I strongly recommend that you review the Google Places Quality Guidelines. I spend a lot of time helping people in the Google Places Help Forum. Most of the problems I encounter could have been solved if the business owner had followed the guidelines. They are short and easy to read so if you have not done that yet, you should do it now.
Always keep in mind that Google’s intention is to make search as relevant to the consumer as possible. The best way for them to do this is for you to give Google as much information about your business as you can. And guess what, they will reward you for doing so. So, fill in almost everything you can. You can upload as many as ten images. Upload all ten. You can upload as many as five videos. Upload all five. Note: Videos do not have to be professionally done. You can just put a bunch of images together, throw in some music and text, and create a 30 minute slide show. Chances are your computer came with a very simple video making tool such as Windows Movie Maker.
Don’t forget to provide 5 offers.
TRICK: Google gives you the option of uploading images from your computer or from the web. Choose the web. Use Panoramio (conveniently owned by Google). Panoramio is Google’s version of Flickr, an image sharing website. Upload your photos to Panoramio and be sure to geo tag the images. You can also add your company name, address and phone number in the description area to provide yourself with a citation. Go back to your dashboard and upload the ten images. This is more powerful than uploading from your computer files.
It is very important that your title reflect accurately your company name. Do not try to stuff keywords here or your account will likely get suspended. Do not use your location unless it is in your legal company name.
Your address needs to be a physical address where you can receive mail. No PO boxes. As much as you can, try to choose an address that is permanent. You do not want to have to change your address later if you can avoid it. Address, phone number and company name changes can be a pain down the road. I’ll get into the reasons for that later.
There is a field to input your website url. If you do not have one, you can use another listing. For example, you may want to go to Yelp, Angies List, Citysearch or Kudzu and find your business listing in those directories. You can put that url in this field until you get yourself a website.
Add a good description of your business in the description field. You can use a few keywords here if they flow naturally with the rest of the text.
Choose your categories carefully. Here’s what I do: I go to the Google Keyword Tool and find the most popular and relevant search phrases for my client as possible and use those phrases as my categories. You must choose at least one from Google’s drop down menu in your Places dashboard so hopefully one of your keyword phrases will match. If not, choose one that is most relevant to your business. Do not repeat the same words in your categories. For example, if you are an electrician, there is no need to use the word electrician more than once. Try electric, electrical, wiring and so forth.
TRICK: I have no proof of this, but another contributor in the Google Places Help Forum insists that it is very difficult for businesses to rank well in Google for their first category field. You may want to try putting your most powerful keyword, then, in the second field and not the first.
The other fields are self-explanatory. For the Additional Details field, try to be creative. You can list service areas, you can add links to associations that you belong to, you can list additional categories and services, and you can insert links to other web properties and directory listings. You can upload as much detail as you can to help the consumer – and Google – get a good picture of your business capabilities. Remember; relevance is key.
Reviews
A common misconception with Google Places listings is that the more reviews a business has, the better it will rank in search results. This is not true. You definitely want to have your customers write honest reviews of your business, but reviews tend to be a weak ranking factor at best. The reason you want reviews is because they help sales conversions. You should get in the habit of asking each customer to write a review. This is something you want to do for as long s you own your business. Keep in mind, however, that Google also picks up reviews from 3rd party review sites such as Yelp, Angies List, Judys Book, Citysearch, Superpages, Yellow Pages, Insider Pages, Kudzu and others. It is my experience that these third party reviews give more juice to your listing than Google reviews. Yelp is my favorite, but encourage your customers to write reviews on any of the customer review sites. Build a few in Google first. Once you have five reviews in Google Places, the yellow stars will show. Let’s hope there are five of them.
TRICK: Look at the listings of your top competitors – the ones that are near the top of search results – and see which customer review sites show up the most in their listings. These are the ones that you want to encourage your customers to use for you.
Citations
What is a citation? A citation is simply a mention of your business somewhere on the Internet. They are usually found in customer review sites (as mentioned above) and in online directories such as yp.com and Superpages.com. Think of directories as an online phone book. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. Wherever you can find your company name, address and phone number lumped together on the Internet, then consider it a citation. Google “bots” crawl the Internet looking for citations for your business. The more of them they find, the more juice you get for your listing. You can see how many citations Google crawlers have found for your business by going to your listing as it appears online and scrolling down the page to More about this place. 
All the links in this area are your citations. They come from directories, customer review sites, press releases and other websites. The more credible the web property, the more juice you get from the citation. You can go here to see a list of some of the more common directories.
TRICK: Besides the popular online directories, find industry specific or geo specific directories on which to create a citation. Industry associations and local directories will give your listing the most juice. You can often find these by going through the More about this place section for your top competitors’ listings. You should have a citation everywhere they do and then some.
Google will typically list less than half of your citations and they come and go on a regular basis so you should engage in an ongoing citation building campaign for your business, same as reviews.
Your Website
In late 2010, Google made a pretty large change to its Google Places format. No longer do Google Places listings stand on their own, but have been merged with the url associated with your listing, most likely your website. Clicking on the listing title in search results will take a consumer to the website.
Research and testing have shown that the strength of a well optimized website can greatly increase the position of your listing in search results. Unfortunately, there are so many elements to search engine optimization that it would be very difficult to effectively address them all in this email. Here are two key factors that can get you started in the right direction:
First, the effective and natural use of keywords on your home page can help Google and the other search engines determine the relevance of your website. Do not keyword spam, but rather insert your keywords liberally on the page, but in a way that reads naturally to the consumer. Having your keywords in paragraph titles helps. Inserting your keywords in
the title tag and title description in search results can be powerful as well. Finally, providing lots of good content on the home page of your website tells Google crawlers exactly what your site is about and helps them categorize you appropriately, thereby boosting your position in search results.
Second, high quality backlinks to your website are about as powerful in SEO as anything. A backlink is a hyperlink from other websites to yours. When many, high quality websites make the effort to link their site to yours, it tells Google crawlers that your site is popular and important. Clearly, the more of these you can build, the better you will rank. Be careful not to use a link farm or paid links as this is a violation of Google policy. Making posts on industry specific and geo specific blogs with a link back to your website is a good way to get backlinks. Asking webmasters to link to your site is another. Submitting online press releases that allow you to link the release to your website is a good way to get both a citation and a backlink for your business. Do a little research and you will discover a lot of effective backlink techniques. Just be careful. There are many consultants out there that use shady backlinking methods. If caught, you can get your listing suspended, and good luck trying to get it back.
Though I do not hide the fact that I am in business to make money, like everyone else – my intention for this blog is to always provide good content and usable information for business owners that sell to a local community. If you want to learn more, or are interested in hiring me as a consultant, please contact me at info@internetwebmarketing.org.
just think of all the great training that your competitors are missing by not attending these webinars. You are so far ahead of them, but you have to take action. Use all the information we’ve provided and be sure check your email for new updates. you can also refer back to this blog t make sure you stay on top of things. As always, thanks for attending the training.
For the last year, Google Places has been experimenting with tags, a yellow icon attached to your local business listing to highlight your coupons, deals or specials. It was a way to make your business stand out in search.
I test drove a tag when they first came out and never used them or recommended them to my clients since. Finally, Google has decided to cancel the test and focus more on Google Boost, which is an Adwords (pay-per-click) type of ad that puts you at the top of search results with a blue marker in the Google Map.
This change highlights a new attitude among Google Places. Consultants such as myself have lamented for a long time about the excessive bugs, problems and complete lack of support for Google Places and now it seems, things will be changing.
This is great news for local business owners as opportunities to promote your business online will continue to become greater and more profitable. Stay tuned for some good things for local search.
