We have known for over a year that reviews on City Search were going to be the most
important element regarding placement on CitySearch.  This knowledge came about as a
result of a lunch I had with a regional manager for CitySearch.  Yesterday, I had a
conversation with a 10 year veteran of SuperPages.com who confirmed that free
listings on SuperPages are now being ranked by number of reviews.  As he put it,
“Even local search engines are now going to be part of ‘social media.’”  It is no
secret that reviews effect ranking on the kingpin of local search, Google Maps.

To complicate matters, I have been in a running battle with Yelp due to their
“unique” ways of using reviews.  Through pushing and pushing one of their
representatives and reading everything I could on the subject, this is what I think
I can say without fear of contradiction.  Yelp is going to decide, based on what
they believe to be objective criteria, which reviews to use and which they will not
use.  One of the most important criteria will be how many other reviews the reviewer
has done.  Therefore, having your friend or best customer do a single review on your
business, when they have never done any other review on Yelp may not be useful.  I
have multiple examples of such single reviews never making it to the listing.
However, these reviews are stored invisibly on your site.  If this person then goes
out and does three other reviews on a restaurant, dentist, and bakery, the review on
your business may magically appear.

What does all of this mean for you.  It will become more and more critical to get
your clients to review your store.  Good reviews are better than bad reviews.  You
can thank me for that brilliant advice later.  However, good reviews come from
OVER-THE-TOP customer service.  Is that what your customers are getting.  Customer
service can be measured.  I can help you do that.

Offer your clients incentives, beg, plead, whatever it takes.  Get reviews up on
these local search engines.   Google Maps, YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com,
MerchantCircle.com, Yahoo.local.com, and yes, even Yelp.

Stay tuned. We will be rolling out a widget called ‘Shout Dog’ that you can add to
your site to help guide your site visitors and customers to all of the important
review directories.

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