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Review Ranking Filters – Social Review Ranking

By: Scott Gallagher27.7.2010 Comments: 0

Local Internet Marketing seems to be about numbers, those pesky algorithms that have haunted up for over a decade now, with little answers.

Let’s all welcome YELP to mysterious algorithm game.

You see, YELP, in their own words is

Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great – and not so great, in your area

It’s a wonderful site. It makes sense. Except they needed to be different than the Yellow Pages. Heck, Yelp was founded in 2004 and by this time they already had A LOT of competition. Their difference?

LOCAL ALGORITHM

See, YELP is a site to find local reviews about your local establishments. I can leave a review, you can leave one. I can leave a review about myself, or a negative review about my competition. This isn’t good.

This is where the Review Ranking Filter comes in. YELP, and competing sites, need to figure out through a computer algorithm how to eliminate the bogus results. This isn’t a problem, Google has solved the Internet problems, right?

Yeah right. Google is good, but they are far from a perfect search engine. They are still struggling a lot in Local, a lot!

This doesn’t mean YELP isn’t working with their review filter. It doesn’t mean they have it figured out either.

We’re doing A LOT of testing on this topic. Very little is published on the topic. YELP has provided a little video that discusses…nothing! They are as quiet about their algo as Google, rightfully so, it’s their competitive advantage.

So, how do you explain an account that has all 7 reviews filtered versus another account with 8 reviews that aren’t filtered? Well, it’s likely easy to explain, until you explain the 7 reviews are genuinely the most honest, value added reviews we could create, and they are ALL filtered. The other account with 8 reviews are bogus, they are all made up. Yeah, we’re toying with the system.

What does this tell us? Not much, until the full report is released.

We have learned A LOT. We feel we have cracked the code and understand exactly what is involved and we will be releasing an entire step-by-step process and factors involved in this mysterious algo.

LMS students are already enjoying this material and their clients are ethically managing their online social profile and winning the game at social review ranking.

If you’re not a student, get on our list. Sure, the answers require a paid membership, but those on our list will be given key ingredients in order to demonstrate we know our stuff.

If you’d like to learn more about becoming a LMS Member to enjoy the benefits, take some time to learn about the Marketing Local Business Online coaching course and the LMS Membership.

Why Small Business Marketing Should Include the Internet

By: admin24.7.2010 Comments: 0

Small businesses need to use every cost effective method that they can to market themselves. Large corporations have endless dollars to throw at marketing campaigns but this is a far cry from how most small businesses operate. These smaller companies need to find ways to let their potential customers know about their organization without effectively spending their entire operating budget on a marketing campaign that may or may not turn out to be successful. That is why small business internet advertising is often the most practical way to go. The internet provides the most bang for your buck when it comes to marketing any type of business.

When it comes to marketing on the internet, there are literally hundreds of ways that you can promote a business, and start making sales. The best news is that most of these methods don’t cost anything. Instead, they require an investment of time, but in the case of most small businesses, time is an easier commodity to spend than money. Although there are a few methods of online marketing which do cost money, such as pay per click marketing, these methods still usually produce much better results for the dollar value you spend than marketing in more traditional ways.

One of the best ways to market your business on the internet is through search engine optimization. This is where you pick certain key phrases or keywords, and target your site so that when people search for those words your site will rank higher in their search results. Even a single term can have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of searches for it every month. By targeting several of these in an effective manner, you can expose your site and your products to many times more people than you ever could through the presence of your local business on its own.

Creating content is another important way that you can draw massive amounts of attention to your business online. The goal when creating a great article, blog posting, or video, is to have it go viral. This is the term that is used to describe what happens when something spreads so quickly that it seems like everyone on the internet knows about it. It is called viral because of the way that it can exponentially grow because each person can expose dozens more to the content, just like they can with a cold. A piece of content which grows viral can cause huge traffic spikes for a business.

Another reason for small businesses to not leave out the internet in their marketing strategy is because of the great sense of community use of the internet in the right way can create. The most successful businesses are those which have high percentages of return customers. Those satisfied customers not only represent sales again and again, their word of mouth helps bring in new customers. The internet provides you with great means for staying in touch with current and past customers, such as through a blog, Facebook, or Twitter. These methods help create a social aspect of the customer/company relationship and help to encourage people to return to your company when they need your particular type of product or service again.

To leave out the internet when crafting a marketing campaign is to essentially say that you don’t care about your businesses success. By now, even the most basic business in the world probably has a website, showing that doing business on the internet has just become a part of doing business, in any way, in any sector. The more attention you focus on your online marketing though, the better results you will see.

Google’s Focus on Local Search

By: admin24.7.2010 Comments: 0

Google is a company that is constantly changing. For years now, the strength of the most popular search engine in the world has been that it is constantly improving. The owners of Google are never complacent, and work hard to constantly change the algorithms of the search engine in order to provide their users with more relevant results. They also are consistently rolling out new services and functions which they feel add to the overall Google experience. Tracking these changes and seeing where they are going in the future shows that Google has been putting an ever stronger focus into the area of local search. When marketing for a small business online, this growing trend towards local search is certainly something that needs to be taken into consideration.

Google’s main mission in constantly working on the site is to provide search results which are the most relevant to the things that people are searching for. This is why they have begun to put such a strong focus on local search. They feel that providing people with results that are easily within their reach on a physical level is going to provide them with a result that they are more likely to actually use. They also are doing this for a number of other, more complicated reasons, such as providing search products for use in mobile devices. In these cases, people are often searching for something because they are already out and about, not at a computer, so local results are going to be much more practical for them.

You can also see the focus that Google is putting on local search by the improvements that they are making to the products which are involved in local search. Maps, for instance, is an area that Google has been putting a great deal of work into lately. This doesn’t just mean the actual Maps function itself, but the search results that it provides to people. The local business listings which appear in maps are an important part of local search. New opportunities have arisen such as the opportunity to sponsor business listings, showing again that this is a new key area of focus for Google.

Because the most important search engine in the world is putting so much emphasis on this area of search, local business owners need to get on the bandwagon sooner rather than later. When it comes to search and getting your site to perform in the rankings, you need to always be moving, and to keep pace with the current developments as they arise. In this case, that means that people need to start being aware of local search and to start taking measures to make sure that they are rising to the top of their local search results.

There are a number of things that people can do that can help them in terms of local search. One of the most important is making sure that your Google local business listing is correct and complete. You may also look into sponsoring a listing, as mentioned earlier. However, just like SEO for regular searches, there are some things you can do on and off your site to make it rank better in local results.

First of all, you need to make sure that your website has a complete contact page which includes a physical address, as the search engines will spider this. You may even include that information on every page of your site in some form and see better results. Also, rather than just worrying about links to your site containing anchor text, you now want to build links to your site which are listed with the address of your business, such as would appear in a Yellow pages directory.

Effective Use of a Blog for Local Business

By: admin2.7.2010 Comments: 0

Many people who run a smaller local business are not getting even close to touching on how effective they can market their small business online. When just getting into small business internet marketing online, the error that many small businesses make is that they focus on just one method of internet business promotion, such as SEO, instead of taking a well rounded approach that will incorporate two or more different ways of promoting a website. One of the things that is easiest to use in tandem with whatever method of internet marketing your business is currently using is to incorporate a blog into your company’s website.

The blog is a tool that can be of great use to a small business for many reasons. First of all, a static website tends to exist in a vacuum. Unless you update with new products or services very regularly, the website generally just sits there, and so once customers have seen it once or twice, they find very little reason to come back. The purpose of a blog is that it is going to be updated regularly. One of the best things this does is bring customers that have already been to your website back, again and again. Each time they visit is another time that you might sell something to them. This is why one of the most important elements of implementing a blog for a small business is making sure that you do in fact update it regularly.

The next thing that a small business owner needs to know about making effective use of a blog is that they need to utilize their comment section as much as possible. Inviting people to comment on a blog, and then replying to those comments is a great way to open a dialogue about the area in which a small business operates. This can have several great benefits, including creating a sense of community within the blog readers. It can also build trust in the company if they are open in discussing anything that customers want to address via the blog. It also provides customers with a direct method for voicing questions or concerns they may have.

A blog is an important opportunity for a company so showcase its expertise in a given subject area. When people are considering a company (either to provide a service or to buy a product from them) online, they always want to see evidence that a company is truly the best in their area. This is just one of the many reasons that “content is king” online. A blog is one of the easiest ways to create great content based on your area of expertise. To make the best use of it, don’t waste time offering your customers fluff or incomplete information just to try and trick them into buying a product. Instead, offer high quality content with valuable information in it. This will convince your customers of your level of expertise in your area which will make them trust you more, and make them much more likely to purchase products from your company.

Why It Is Critical To Define Your Online Service Area for Local Businesses

By: admin2.7.2010 Comments: 0

When thinking about marketing a business online, too many people overlook the actuality of their real geographic location and their service area. The notion that because they are online that they can simply offer service to everyone is a useful one to some extent, but it can also make it difficult to focus your marketing strategies. One of the marketing strategies for small business owners that is often forgotten about is what can be gained by clearly defining your service area online.

Marketing experts will tell you that success in marketing is all about specificity. You have to target your potential sales targets as specifically as you can in order to increase the overall conversion rates that you’re going to have. Targeting your sales prospects by service area is an important part of this narrowing down process to make sure that you’re only investing time into your most qualified leads possible.

When you’re defining your service area, there are several methods that you can use to do this. First of all, defining your service area on your website itself is important so that when people do find their way to your site they can easily see how far your services extend. However, beyond simply listing the area that you offer your services in online, you also can help to define your service area by using local search to bring qualified leads to that website in the first place.

Placing a local search emphasis in your SEO efforts for your own website can have several positive benefits for you. The first thing it is going to do is allow you rank much higher in the SERPS for certain keywords, because there is usually less competition on any given local search front than there is for the more generalized industry keywords.

The other reason this is such a useful technique is that it works like a built in pre-defining measure of your service area. Using local search as one of the primary means to drive leads to your website will ensure that the majority of those who find their way to their site will be qualified leads that may actually be interested in purchasing your services. Despite the internet, most people still buy services from small businesses in a similar geographic area.

This is all so important because it is a large waste of time to try and sell products to leads that are unqualified, unable, or uninterested in buying your services. People that are experienced in marketing know that they have to spend their time on leads that will actually convert. This helps to create a greater ROI on your time. By defining your service area you help to make sure that you aren’t wasting that valuable time on leads that are never going to turn into profit for you. Creating a clearly defined service area is just one of the many focusing tools that you can use to make sure that the time that you invest into marketing a small business creates the greatest eventual profit.

GOOGLE: Quality Links to your Site

By: Scott Gallagher24.6.2010 Comments: 0

NOTE: This is directly from Google’s Webmaster Blog and a very worthy read.

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.