ShoutDog.com is ready!  We’ve been talking about the cute Orange Dog
for some time now, but after a huge effort on the part of the entire team here at
Page1Listings, especially “Gigi”, who patiently modeled for our logo, we are breaking out the champagne.

What is ShoutDog.com? It is an easy way for you, the small business owner or
marketing manager or consultant to generate local business reviews, and yes, the
Holy Grail of business review sites, Google Places business reviews.  We send you
the ‘Review Us at ShoutDog” widget for your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter or, email newsletter.

When your clients see the ShoutDog Review Us logo it will be obvious that you would like them to help out with a review of your business.

Now the best part! When they click on the Review us at ShoutDog logo, the will be linked to a page specifically constructed for your business with easy as 1, 2, 3 instructions for them to create those golden reviews. (See examples Mauricio’s Mexican Restaurant, Puroserve Water Softeners, A-1 Locksmith)

You will have a unique page that will specifically point out the business review
sites that you care about.  These can be the large local search engines and
directories mentioned above, or industry specific sites like AVVO for lawyers,
UrbanSpoon for restaurants, or TripAdvisor for hotels.  All your customer needs
to do is click on the link to these business review sites, and they will go directly
to the very page where they can say wonderful things about you.

Go to ShoutDog.com right now and sign up.  The sooner you sign up the
sooner you can start to see your star rising up on Google Places.  You do know that
part of your ranking at Google Places is based on how many reviews you have.  AND,
not only how many reviews you have at Google itself, but they also give you cred for
having reviews on other directories.

Did you know that when your potential customer visits CitySearch or SuperPages
looking for the kinds of goods and services you provide, they are twice as likely to
call you or click through to your website if there are positive reviews about you?
And the reviews themselves can be the motivation needed.   For only $19.95 per month, it
will likely only take one person to visit you or call you because of these reviews
to more than pay for the monthly subscription.

Special Bonus to sign up NOW!  We will also send you 250 business cards like these.

Front:

Back:

You can hand these out to customers at check out or to friends and business
associates at meetings or functions.  What an easy way to ask a favor:  “Please help
me grow my business with a review.”  We want to help you get those reviews.  We will
be posting other ideas and suggestions for how to use your ShoutDog as a massive
review generator.  Get your bonus today.

We are positioning ShoutDog as a proactive online reputation tool.  You may have
already experienced a negative review on one of these sites.  The best cure to one
or two negative reviews is five or ten or 50 good ones.

Or maybe you’ve never been “flamed.”  A flame is a really bad review that is more
commonly written by a disgruntled former employee or competitor that a really mad
customer.  But it has the same effect.  The best way to get ahead of a future flame
or other negative review.  Have multiple good reviews already posted.  Either way,
the answer is ShoutDog.com!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Nobody is perfect.  If you are in business, mistakes are going to happen.  Your unhappy customers are at least 10 times more likely to go to the trouble to review you as are your deliriously happy customers.  Even if you did make a mistake, and that is not always the case, there are potentially two sides to any issue.  Now Google Places Business Listings is joining Yelp in offering a way to respond to critical consumer reviews.  They have offered some do’s and dont’s and even some rules (so unGoogle-like).

Google Places business listings fully intends to be number one among all business listing tools on the web.  They have the right location to accomplish this.  The only thing left to do is provide such a robust environment for both owners and their customers that both will spend time, energy, and money here rather than at Yellowpages, Yelp, Yahoo, or other competitors in the online local search engine and directory world.

According to conversations I’ve had with managers at Yelp and CitySearch, and according to many articles on the subject by various pundits, the real competition is in the reviews.  And reviews are real trouble.  Flames from competitors, unreasonable expectations from consumers, and a propensity to complain and ask questions later, has resulted in lost business for otherwise excellent businesses.

Yelp has been at the center of the controversy, including various lawsuits on the subject.  They started offering owner responses several months ago.  Now Google is following that lead, and in a way that is very unGoogle-like.  They have given rules, recommendations, and even examples of do’s and dont’s for handling the responses.  And at least at first blush, they have made the process simple.  Could this be a forerunner of better customer care by Google in the future, or just a recognition that anything less might create lawsuits for Google?

In order to make a response to a review on Google Places, you must have claimed your listing.  Amazing, but true, there a millions of businesses who have not yet claimed their listings.  Once you have claimed your listing, you will see the reviews section on the Place Page.  There you will also see “Respond publicly as the owner.”  Merely click here, make your response and click publish.

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

And google has posted their thoughts and ideas on what to say or not say when you post a response.  These are very common sense ideas.  You can see their suggestions here.

My thoughts are these.  Acknowledge and validate their feelings and concerns while not necessarily agreeing with their facts.  If you do agree with their facts, make it clear that you would welcome a chance to make it right.  If you don’t acknowledge their facts, make your own clear statement of your position with a very “nice” tone.  In many cases, even if they don’t have a leg to stand on, you can create great future goodwill with them and others by graciously offering to meet them somewhere in the middle.

Be sure to provide a response to every issue.  Sometimes a good review might contain a slightly negative element.  Profusely thank the person for their good review and use the guidelines above to respond to the negative part.

By far the best response to negative reviews is lots and lots of postiive ones.  Explore ways to generate positive reviews and make it a part of company policy to encourage such reviews.  Shout Dog is one online company offering some methods for getting more reviews.

Popularity: 9% [?]

If you are interested in the whole Google Places Local Maps issue to the point where you’ve read everything you find on Page1Listings.com blog and you still want more, the head over to the Blumenthal Blog.  He’s more techie than we are (we are more marketing oriented, but as techie as we need to be.)  In any case, he has recently posted the current stats for local search.  It is eye-opening:

The Comscore Search report for June has been released. Google had 10.29 billion searches. If roughly the same percentage of searches (20%) had local intent as Google has indicated then there were approximately 2,187,200,000 searches in the U.S. on Google’s main search site last month that were local in nature.

Popularity: 12% [?]

In a far more modest look than the one circulated last week, Google appears to be trying a time-tested idea underneath the map.  They are adding optional searches, or at least testing the idea.  I stumbled on this one, and couldn’t find it anywhere else, even under hotels in another city.

Note the search choices

If this were to stick, it would certainly give an opportunity to SMB’s to follow on with potential places they could leave their scent.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Are you letting others know about these internet marketing tips?  Not your competition, but maybe your friends?  Please let them know about our website and blog.  I don’t think you can find anyone on the internet who is offering more free direction and advice when it comes to How to Set Up Google Places, or how to optimize your website, or how to use other methods of SEM to provide maximum visibility.  Here is our SEO Tip five out of ten.

Your local address and phone number need to be on the front page and every page.  This establishes your bona fides as a local business.  This address and phone number should also be the same address and phone number that you use on blogs, other websites, YouTube, YellowPages.com, Google Place, Yahoo, and all other directories or local search engines.  Even if you never have anyone come to your place of business or operate out of your home, use this address to clearly identify yourself as local.

Popularity: 14% [?]

This is probably not the first Internet Marketing Secrets page you have ever seen.  Everybody loves to use 10 tips, or 10 secrets, and you can see that I have succumbed to the same approach.  But, unlike most such pages that give you the same ole same ole about back links and finding out the best keywords, this top ten list is really the secret sauce that some in the business don’t even know.  Hopefully, you’ve been following the list as I publish these posts, but if not, go back and check out the others.  They are all just as good as this number four below:

Page Footer Example

Create a local keyword footer at the very bottom of every page.  This should look something like    Italian Restaurant Beverly Hills | Italian Restaurant Los Angeles | Pizza Beverly Hills | Pizza Los Angeles | wine tasting Beverly Hills | wine tasting Los Angeles |     You have 50 words (250 characters) for this footer.   Don’t hesitate to include five suburbs in this area or 10 keywords with one or two suburbs.

Popularity: 12% [?]

In our first tip, Local SEO Secrets of SEM for Local Business – Tip One of Ten, I provide the underlying basis for this series of tips.  Now if someone would help me understand why SEO Optimization is a major keyword.  The redundancy is funny, and why would we bother to create the acronym SEO and then still have to spell out the unwieldy word optimization.  It has a “z” in it.  On to tip 3.

3.  You need to repeat your Keywords in your headline and the first 150 words of content on your first page.  Do not overdo this.  Just keep it natural.  Don’t go crazy trying to get 3.765 keyword density.  But don’t neglect to get these keywords in.  Make at least one instance of each keyword Bold and link to an appropriate inside page.  Once again, use the city (s) here, too.

Popularity: 13% [?]

In our first tip, Local SEO Secrets of SEM for Local Business – Tip One of Ten, I explained that there are methods that SMB (Small Businesses) can use to search engine optimize (SEO) their businesses in order to get great search engine placement (SEP) using many Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategies.   I “spelled” all of those three letter words out, because who can keep up with all of the acronyms.

Today, we have the second tip.

2.  Your URL matters now.  In the past, the URL might be something easy to remember, or cute.  No longer.  I am not recommending  that you throw out your current website URL to get better keywords in your URL.  You get points from Google for having an website that’s been around for a while.  However, if you are starting a new website, use keywords in the site URL, not your company name or some cute phrase unless that name or phrase has keywords in it.
Also, make your internal pages into landing pages by adding appropriate keywords to the url like this   .com/keyword-keyword.  Use your important city name in the URL and/or the landing page URL.  Example:  italianrestaurant.com/Miami-Beach

Popularity: 12% [?]

I attended a meeting this morning where one of the business owners announced that she had just spent a considerable amount of time and energy learning all about local SEO. I wonder if this same owner has also become an expert on print advertising, website design, and interior store design. While small business owners have to have a basic understanding of many, many aspects of their business, time spent going in depth takes away from actually doing the business of the business. In other words, balance.

In the specific case of Local SEO, the rules of the game have been changing so rapidly that most companies who profess to be experts in local search engine optimization have to work like crazy to keep up. Whether by design or by failure of design, Google keeps their methods a secret. The result is a constant scramble by those who need to know. The goal is to unravel the methods and use them to the advantage of SEO clients.

If a local business owner spent ten hours a week or so trying to stay on top of the local SEO news, he or she might be able to stay on page one of organic listings and Google Places. But that would assume that they are spending even more time or money actually implementing the strategies they learn about.

Google Places alone has made almost weekly changes over the past 6 months: changing the brand, offering posts, reducing the outside maximum on the outside pack to seven from ten, now allow links in the listings at two places, came out with a specific list of rules on some issues, created a paid ad called tags, have eliminated the direct link on the short listing to the website, and have added a problem center (albeit as of now it is one way). These are just the major changes. The entire list would be the subject of another entire article.

Over the course of the next ten days, I will provide the inside information that we might seem foolish to reveal. Your SEO consultant doesn’t want this list to see the light of day. But you need to know it. The main reason is so that you can tell your web designer who claims to know local SEO how to correctly set up your website. You need to know it so that you can help the SEO expert who tells you they will get you on page 1 for hundreds of dollars per month, but your phone never rings.

Here is Tip One of Ten on Local SEM Through Use of SEO

Title Appears Above the URL address Bar on Most Browsers

1. Meta Title Tags may be the most critical words on your website. This title tag is often what will be the headline in search, and Google thinks this is what is important to you. Your title tag should not be “Home” or “Joe’s Restaurant.” It should be “keyword keyword keyword city keyword keyword city.” Using restaurant as an example: “Italian Restaurant Pizza Beverly Hills | Wine Tasting | Los Angeles” You get 64 characters to tell your story.

The Title is Commonly Used by Google as the Headline

Popularity: 30% [?]

Google Places Links?  Even some of the most sophisticated folks don’t know that there are now two places where you can add links on Google Places business listings.  The following video tells you where and how.

Popularity: 21% [?]