Foot In Mouth Internet Marketing- Content Writing Advice » Local Search

Notes on adding Photos to Google Places

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:09:00 +0000

As a business owner:

Add photos of a a logo with contact information
Source: It’s important to understand that the interaction of a Google Places with photos is different depending on the source of the photo. When you upload your photos logged in to your Places account, then it will gain a stamp
“From the owner” .
Add photos of your location from the street, so those seeing your brick and mortar will be better able to pick out your business, in case they have to park elsewhere if parking space isn’t available.
Add photos of your products and service being fulfilled

Lessons from messing up your Google Places Settings

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:23:10 +0000

I took up a job to find out why these paralegals in Riverside were suddenly no longer ranking for local oriented searches. After a little poking around, I found that they had changed their Google Places setting:

They had changed this setting to be “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations”, instead of serving at their location. If you have a brick and mortar, your site/business and citations are treated differently! If you DO have a location, then make sure you play that card for all it’s worth. Otherwise, you need to make sure you’ve got enough area specific keyword references backing up your listed service areas if you don’t have a brick and mortar address.

Troubleshooting Local Rankings

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:00:15 +0000

I’ve decided to keep a log as I troubleshoot this Local Rankings issue for a client, for the term Riverside Paralegal. They were ranking in the first page of mapped results for that term, and dropped off the map! Time to Troubleshoot!

Affordable Document Services

3516 9th St., Suite K, Riverside, CA 92501

(951) 682-8523 ‎http://www.affordabledocs.org

Putting My Mouth Where My Foot Is: Going Local

Jeremy Rivera — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 07:09:11 +0000

Howdy!

I am going to be re-orienting this blog and my posts to focus on Local SEO, and specifically on the city of Diamond Bar, CA. Why? Because I want to put my thoughts about “local SEO” into action, and I live in Diamond Bar. If you’re a Diamond Bar business, I can also provide you with consulting services to help you have a bigger impact. Thanks and stay tuned, I’m excited about future posts and hope you will enjoy the change up!

Local Search Case Study: An Event to Remember

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:56:59 +0000

When people are searching locally, and getting information specific to an area, quite often they are actually searching for local events. This could be anything from classes and seminars to the latest gig for their friends band.

A Valuable Event

There is a niche type of website that caters to supplying this event information to online sources, and one component of your local search optimization should include the use of these resources. One reason for this is the “Citation” that they can provide your business, because when you list your business as a venue you enter your business name and address and also have an opportunity to get an inbound link to your site. You also have the opportunity of creating your own profile on that website and get another link on that profile. This is in addition to the even listing itself, so all in all you can get 3 quality inbound links all in one go, on top of the exposure to their users!

The Top Event Sites

Doux vintage Eventful profile
Doux Vintage Grand Opening Event

Upcoming Event: Doux Vintage Grand Opening

Doux Vintage Upcoming Profile

Zvents- Doux Grand Opening Celebration

Doux Vintage Zvents Profile

Doux Vintage : Venue Listing

Bonus Event Value!

It turns out that Zvents.com exports to several different platforms! So when you add your business as a venue, it actually gets syndicated to several different authority sites!It exports to Things To Do by MSN and also to the Press Enterprise Events page, and may have other partners, but these two showed up in a Google search very quickly as they are authority domains! Update: It looks like another exported page is on a High Desert News website, once again through Zvents.

What about your events?

Be sure to take advantage of Event Marketing because it has many valuable rewards to give you. Don’t think you have an event worthy of listing? Here’s some quick thoughts for you where you could list yourself. Host a seminar on your industy, create a “coffee group” to discuss your expertise, list your grand opening ( like I did for Doux Vintage…be sure to offer refreshments like cupcakes and wine and you’ve got a win!). You could also host a band, which could also yeild extra links if the band has a blog, since they’ll want to let their groupies and followers know where they’re playing(thanks Alex Guillen for that tip)! Any way you slice it, there’s tons of value in event marketing so get to it!

Update: Thanks to everyone that attended the Grand Opening of Doux Vintage! Your support was very much appreciated!

Local Search Case Study: Doux Vintage

Jeremy Rivera — Sun, 03 May 2009 05:59:01 +0000

I’ve been deeply intrigued by local search ever since attending SMX West 2009 in San Jose. Matt Mcgee and Steve Espinosa were both big influences that made me re-evaluate my efforts online to consider the large changes that Google has brought to the table in regards to Local Search. It has become clear to me that any business that has a brick and mortar location has hundreds of online opportunities that are accessible, most are free to utilize, positively impact traffic, and have a good result on site rankings and online visibility. In other words, as a small business owner YOU HAVE TO BE INSANE not to take advantage and learn as much as possible about these opportunities.

My Own Case Study: From Online to Offline

My beautiful Wife Michelle has been twittering, blogging about fashion and running an online vintage store. She recently got moved into an art studio and has been diligently working to convert part of the studio into an exhibition room so she can show her collection off on the first Thursday of every month( as part of the Riverside, Ca Art Walk) and by appointment. It struck me that she would now have an opportunity to take advantage of many online opportunities now that she was going to have a physical location. I decided to use this opportunity to publicly show what steps a small business should take to make an impact on their local search profile. I just hope that this turns out to be helpful, and instructive!

Surveying the Local Landscape

I first started doing Google searches for vintage clothes, accessories, stores and shops to find out what the local landscape was in terms of competitors. Fortunately, there are very few stores that are competing for this particular industry. The search engine results page quite often pulled a “onebox” map result, and the rest of the results of the page were actually listings of shops on 3rd party websites. I bookmarked those sites to come back to see if I could add her business as a listing on those ranked pages.

Hello World: Getting Listed

The first step was to get the shop’s physical location identified as a business listing. Google Local was my first move, so that I could be sure that any citations, reviews and links her listing would get would be credited with that value. Even the reviews that are entered into Yahoo get cited in Google Local, so it was really the only choice.

After you enter your basic information into Google Local you have the option of selecting categories. Now in Google Local, when you enter a search that isn’t in a specific category it will suggest a revision to what it beleives is the closest category that matches that query, so they’ve done a pretty thorough job of narrowing down the categories, so be sure that you enter in up to 5 categories that describe your business.

Google Categories: Clothing Collectible Period Vintage, Clothes & Accessories Consignment & Resale,Vintage Clothing Store, Vintage Accessories, Vintage Dresses

A Google Post Card: Greetings from Mountain View, CA!

Google is at least minimally interested in verifying that entries into Google Local are actual verifiable businesses, so they require either the phone number or physical address be verified. Now the phone verification is pretty much immediate, they’ll call you and you punch in a pin code, but you can also have a post card sent to your listed address to verify your business. Downside is that the post card takes some time to verify, but in this case it was necessary since the number used actually is a voicemail box that sends an email transcript.

My What a Nice Profile You Have!

The Google account that you sign up with for your Google Local listing can also yield a secondary online presence that is searchable, on the Google URL, and fairly customizable. Here’s the Google profile for Doux Vintage and my suggestion is that you tie it into a Picasa or Flickr account. If you use Flickr, then seperate out a set that has the specific pictures you’d like to use otherwise you might end up displaying pictures that aren’t exactly related. Be sure to list your contact information, and take advantage of the Bio area to get some good anchor text links in addition to the Links section.

Be sure to check out these resources on Google Local and Google Profiles and Small Business SEO

The Start of a Good Thing

That’s all for now, as I continue to expand on Doux Vintage, I’ll be continuing this as a series of posts, reporting my tactics and results so that you can learn from the example. Hopefully it’s a helpful one!

Get Listed in Local Search

Jeremy Rivera — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:57:11 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of presenting this slideshow presentation to an association of Realtors, and thought that it was content that was worth sharing for small business owners, and people not familiar with Local Search.