As we discussed last week, encouraging customer reviews is a key component in getting your small business found on Google and other search engines.  So if reviews affect your small business’ search placement so much, what are the very best sites to encourage reviews from?  What sites are picked up by Google’s Local Business Center most frequently? 

We found the answer differed from industry to industry.  The top review sites for restaurants or hotels were not the same for plumbers and doctors, etc.  Thus, we have decided split our findings up into a series of posts, each dedicated to finding the best review sites for a specific industry.  Now, without further ado, the top 5 sites picked up by Google’s Local Business Center for restaurant reviews:

1)      www.citysearch.com – Citysearch was the runaway winner when it came to restaurant reviews, accounting for 1,594 of the 3,398 reviews studied.  Taking credit for nearly half of the restaurant reviews in Google’s Local Business center is a truly impressive feat.  Feel confident encouraging your customers to review at Citysearch, they are a proven commodity.

2)      www.tripadvisor.com – Coming in second was the travel-specific website: TripAdvisor.com, which allows users to rate and review hotels, restaurants and other travel related destinations.  TripAdvisor clearly has a strong passive feed with Google, accounting for 472 of the 3,398 reviews studied.  If your restaurant is located in a large travel hub or destination, feel comfortable encouraging customers to review on this site.  However, restaurants in small towns should explore better options, as TripAdvisor doesn’t pay too much attention to the little guy. (For example, TripAdvisor doesn’t show a single restaurant in my hometown of Eureka, IL – though we have several, just ask Citysearch).

3)      www.zagat.com – Coming in third with 207 total reviews is another industry specific website: Zagat.com, which also specializes in hotel, restaurant and travel specific reviews.  When it comes to encouraging customer reviews the playbook for Zagat is identical to TripAdvisor.  The site clearly has a strong passive feed with Google and you should feel comfortable pointing customers in Zagat’s direction if your restaurant is in a major city or travel hub.

4)      maps.google.com – To the surprise of no one, Google makes the list, coming in at number four with 198 total reviews.  The advice here is a slam dunk: Feel 100% comfortable pointing potential reviewers to Google.  Unlike the other sites we have noted, Google doesn’t need to crawl anything to find these reviews, they are dropped off right on Google’s doorstep, showing up in the Local Business Center almost immediately.  To write a review on Google, simply search the business you wish to review, click through to their profile and scroll down until you see “Write a Review” (as seen below).

5)      www.urbanspoon.com – Rounding out the top 5 is one final industry-specific review site, Urbanspoon.com, which focuses entirely on the restaurant information industry.  Though Urbanspoon only pulled down 162 of the 3,398 reviews studied, they are still comfortably situated on Google’s radar.  Try encouraging your younger clientele to review your restaurant on Urbanspoon.  Their site is very iPhone-friendly, you may be able to score a review right on the spot.

Notable Exceptions:

There are plenty of sites that missed the top 5, but still showed up in Google.  For more on those, scroll down to the next section, “Breaking Down the ‘Other’ Slice of Pie.”  Instead of going into further detail on those sites, I’d like to address three sites that were noticeably absent from our entire study of 3,398 reviews:

1)      Yelp.com – In the review game, Yelp is an absolute powerhouse.  Our own study of the sites feeding into Google covered 30 restaurants in 10 cities, ultimately totaling 3,398 reviews.  Just for fun, we checked to see how many reviews these 30 restaurants had in Yelp.  4,382. That’s not a typo.  Yelp exceeded Google’s aggregated review count by nearly 1,000.  So why aren’t Yelp reviews picked up by the Google Local Business Center?  Here’s the short version: Yelp reviews used to be picked up by Google.  Google tried to buy Yelp for $550 million.  Yelp declined.  Now Yelp reviews are not picked up by Google.

2)      www.merchantcircle.com – Merchant Circle is another big player in the local search game, one of the few local search sites to boast over 10 million indexed pages.  So why aren’t their reviews picked up by Google’s Local Business Center?  We honestly don’t know.  However, thanks to Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool, we do know it’s a deliberate choice by Google:

3)      EZlocal.com – Okay, maybe we aren’t notable yet, but we are enthusiastic about local search, and especially passionate about how it relates to small business owners.  Good things are happening here at EZlocal, stay tuned.

Breaking Down the “Other” Slice of Pie:

The above pie chart boasts a fairly hefty slice called “other.”  This tasty slab encompasses over 70 other sites that feed restaurant reviews into Google.  While none of these sites cracked the top five, their cumulative effort netted over a fifth of the pie, thus meriting the following breakdown:

Methods:

·         We chose the top ten cities in the U.S. by population, but omitted any city that was already represented by another in the same state. (e.g. We omitted San Antonio and Dallas because Texas was already represented by Houston).

·         This left us with the following 10 cities:

o   New York, NY

o   Los Angeles, CA

o   Chicago, IL

o   Houston, TX

o   Phoenix, AZ

o   Philadelphia, PA

o   Detroit, MI

o   Jacksonville, FL

o   Indianapolis, IN

o   Columbus, OH

·         In each city, we searched Google Maps for “Pizza.”

·         We selected the three restaurants on the first page of search results with the most reviews.

·         We went through these reviews for each of the 30 selected restaurants in the 10 selected cities and noted what site they were drawn from.

·         We collected data on 3,398 reviews, which is our sample size for this article.

Small businesses are in a unique position to truly benefit from customer reviews.  Chains are pretty well locked into their branding and there tends to be very little differentiation city-to-city and state-to-state.  They will build reputations for being consistent and predictable, but rarely break through to extraordinary.  However, small businesses are unencumbered by these expectations; small businesses have the opportunity to make a name for themselves as something really special.  Soliciting customer feedback can play a crucial role in building this reputation.  Here are 4 things to keep in mind as you encourage your own customers to review your business:

1)  Incentivize.  Give your customers a reason to review your business or service.  Offer them a coupon or discount off their next purchase if they go to Yelp, Citysearch or EZlocal and leave a review.  Here is an example of a flyer we encourage our members to distribute:

2)  Link your business profiles on your own website.  Don't count on customers tracking down your listing on Yelp, InsiderPages or EZlocal.  Add links to your website for each profile and further encourage customers to go leave reviews.  See the below picture in which a doctor integrated links to his Yelp profile on his own website:

3)  Encourage a constant stream of reviews.  Keep the reviews trickling in, this serves two important purposes.  First, it looks better.  If you are visiting a profile whose reviews are all clustered around 3 or 4 dates, it looks questionable, a little bit planned and spammy.  A constant stream of reviews spread across all dates looks much better and will build more trust with potential customers.  

Secondly, a constant review stream will add up in the long run.  Take a look at the below Yahoo search results for "carpet cleaning" near San Diego, CA.  Notice how the search placements are in perfectly descending order by their review count?  Make no mistake, review count matters so always keep that stream trickling in, it will add up and pay dividends, especially if your competitors are only making sporadic pushes for reviews.

4) Don't discourage bad reviews.  We don't live in a perfect world and no one expects your business to bat 1.000.  In fact, if your business has nothing but 5-star reviews across the board it might strike consumers as a bit suspect, is anybody that perfect?  Also, negative reviews offer a golden opportunity for you to prove yourself, to go above and beyond. The Consumerist actually has an entire category dedicated to incidences where businesses stepped up and made things right after something went wrong.  

The strength of small businesses often lies in customer service and attention to detail.  If a bad review falls on your doorstep, rejoice—you have a chance to showcase your talents and turn a negative review into a positive experience, something they will be impressed with and tell their friends about.  This word of mouth will prove to be incredibly valuable to your business.

The local search space has never been more teeming with new applications and features emerging on some of the most popular sites and newest mobile devices - all concentrating on more localized and more relevant content -- and we're pretty excited about that.

Even better, it's the small businesses in suburban locations and rural areas which are positioned to be the benefactor as they'll find it increasingly easier to gain exposure, reach out to local consumers and build loyalty, without having to compete with the more traditionally dominant online presence from bigger businesses in the city or online mega-marts. Those business owners who recognize this trend and successfully promote and manage this local content have the opportunity to gain a significant edge on the competition.

But increased online exposure also carries additional risks. Media continues to experience decentralization, and online marketing is becoming more complex and advanced. With this comes many opportunities as well as challenges for the small business owner.

For instance, many complaints from consumers or negative reviews left on message boards like Twitter may have gone under the radar before, but now new local-centric features have the potential to make comments like these more visible to consumers across multiple sites who aggregate this content.

As a result, more businesses will require consultation and assistance on how to properly promote their services, without opening themselves up to unwanted scrutiny. Additionally, businesses will need to make sure their addresses, contact information and list of services are always current so users searching within a small search radius will easily be able to find and reach them.

With all of these changes occurring, I think it’s important to take some time to reflect on some of the do's and don'ts of online promotion.

Nine do's and don'ts of local search marketing:

Do: Encourage past, current and future customers to rate your products and services and share their experience across multiple business review sites.

Don't: Rate or leave feedback on your own business - at least from the same IP address you used to create your business listing ;) Multiple entries stemming from the same IP can get your listing flagged faster than NFL stunts in the endzone.

Do: Respond to comments. This presents a unique opportunity for you to connect with your customers, build relationships and learn more about them. Be prepared to participate.

Don't: Obsess over negative feedback. Often times, ongoing responses to negative posts actually boost search engine rankings on that page making it more visible. The best strategy is to politely respond once and leave it be. Eventually, enough positive feedback will bury it seven feet deep.

Do: Take advantage of social networking - it's never too late to get started. Build a little buzz about your business and it can go a long way on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon and Digg - all of which have a deep user base. Appeal to your target audience.

Don't: Get discouraged if you don’t see millions of hits overnight. Prepare a long-term strategy with realistic goals and stick with it!

Do: Make it as easy as possible for consumers to find you - potential customers are often closer than you think. There are multiple factors affecting local search like organic SEO and pay-per-click, but there are also new techniques emerging as Web applications and search features unfold. For instance, we've found optimizing map results within local business listings to be a relatively new optimization technique. If you're an EZlocal Premium member, working with one of our local search guru's to create the right content in the right places will help dramatically. Among other things, we make sure you have keyword-rich content on all your profiles -- Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing listings, Yelp, Local.com, EZlocal, etc.

Don't: Think you can do all the work upfront and leave it be. Maintain your business profile and keep information as current as possible. Avoid having conflicting or out of date information - especially phone number or address. Your listings will actually rank higher the more often search engines find your business name with consistent business details. Tip: Keep a spreadsheet of user names and passwords for all your social media and business listing adventures.

Do: Make it easy to share. To help consumers spread your message and create an environment for customer evangelism, you need to make sharing positive feedback as easy as possible - and encourage it. And this shouldn't be limited to Web-only applications like social media sharing buttons on your site. You should also be creative with in-store promotions to coordinate with your online profiles.

For instance, just recently after a visit to my dry cleaner the owner told me he would clean one free shirt per online review I posted. I'm not sure if he was joking or not, but the point is these reviews have real value and business owners are starting to recognize that.

Here's an example of how you can professionally fish for compliments ;) ...

Keep a stack of these next to your register and hand them out to your best customers.

Google has tucked a new feature into its business profiles under the reviews section called, “Nearby places you might like.”  As an employee of a small business search engine, features like this get me excited.  I am always looking for creative, new ways to link our ever-growing roster of members together in a relevant, cohesive manner.  By adding this feature, Google provides alternatives that users may not even have known to search for.  And, at the end of the day, this is exactly what a good search engine should do: bring the most relevant, useful information to the user so they can make an informed decision.

A couple of thoughts:

• » The new feature doesn’t appear in every profile.  I tried five test queries this morning and then selected a profile, but the feature only appeared in three of the five:
  
  

  Search Term	Displayed “Nearby places you might like”
  Cleaning Service near Oakbrook Terrace	Yes
  Steakhouse near Oakbrook Terrace	No
  Suits near Oakbrook Terrace	Yes
  Pizza near Oakbrook Terrace	Yes
  Television Repair near Oakbrook Terrace	No

• 
  » The suggestions seem to be search and profile specific, not taking your broader search history into account.  For example, when I searched for pizza, I viewed a profile for Aurelio’s Pizza in Villa Park, IL.  The suggestions for “nearby places you might like” included many of Aurelio’s nearby locations and also a few nearby pizza joints.  None of the suggestions related to the cleaning service, steakhouse or suits I had searched for previously.

Overall I think this is a great feature, one that brings searchers even closer to the information they seek.  I look forward to working a similar feature into EZlocal’s small business profiles.  Incidentally, if you are a small business owner, head over to EZlocal and claim your free small business listing now.  Let us help, we are happy to point potential customers in your business’s direction, it’s what we do!

Google has been testing “Sponsored Ads” as part of the Google Maps result 10-pack for the past few months. Today, one of my local business listings in San Jose, CA started showing a link for “Create enhancement.”  Google says, "Enhanced listings are being offered in limited areas, but we hope to expand soon. Because this is a limited trial, it is subject to change. We're using your feedback from this trial to improve our products and services and help local businesses grow!"

From what I can see so far, it is just like adding bling to your eBay listing. It is just a subtle little thing to enhance your profile to make it more noticeable. Google is offering a month free trial, then $25 a month after that. Take a look:

The “Get Directions” enhancement:

The “View Photos” enhancement:

Read the Google Help topic for enhancements.  Here is a list of the enhancements that it says they offer:

• Website for your business.
• Photos of your business.
• Videos of your business.
• Coupons for your listing.
• Menu for your restaurant.
• Reservations page for your business.
• Driving directions to your business.

Honestly, I like these much better than the sponsored local business listings.  The amount of advertising real estate used up where there were 3 AdWords results, some sponsored local listings and then the map was really looking obnoxious.  Google is so successful because of how unobtrusive their advertisements are.  I could not imagine them rolling out those ads after seeing them.  Hopefully they choose to take this route.

I do not feel like Google is ready to take the local business center to this level.  Local search is a very hard field to stay on top of.  The amount of spam in the LBC is still far more than is acceptable, and the LBC just does not feel as refined as the rest of Google's products.  In fact, one of my accounts was completely locked out of the LBC and I still do not know why.  No customer support, a generic locked out message and weeks of waiting for an answer does not entice me to start paying for enhancements!

Google has been pushing the need for speed on the web for some time now.  More and more articles are written about how speed will effect search engine optimization.  I always contented that the faster and smaller a page is, the better, especially for the smaller, fresher sites.  Look at the Google web crawlers.  As large as Google is, the web is infinitely bigger.  They can only handle so much data at any given time.  The amount of data their crawlers handle is somewhere between absurd and ridiculous, but still not unlimited.  Google knows which sites people want to see, which sites people go to and will index these sites more often.  This is why a site like Yahoo! can change and be indexed in Google almost instantly, and smaller sites have to wait hours, days or even weeks to get indexed.  

In the SEO field, getting pages indexed is half the battle, especially on large sites.  If Google only allocates so much CPU time to a website, you better make sure the pages are as fast as can be.  If your server is a little slow, and the pages are bloated, instead of crawling 30 pages, Google Bot may be stuck only looking at 15 pages because they took so much longer to download and look at.

Based on this theory, we spent the past few weeks optimizing queries and reducing database calls to improve page load.  The amount of data we have is large compared to the current reach of the site.  As we grow and expand resources, we have to constantly look at speed as an issue.  Instead of throwing hardware at the problem, we started by optimizing code.  As a result, we have noticed a large increase in pages indexed in correlation with the speed of the page download.  Recently we completely overhauled our URL structure resulting in a loss of thousands and thousands of pages in the index, with hopes of more in the future.  Take a look at the graph below to see the correlation between page speed, and pages crawled per day.

Recently, Google added snippets from reviews into the Local Business Center in a way that only Google can do.  On the profile, Google chooses amazingly helpful portions of reviews and posts them.  Parallel to the moderately recent addition of rich snippets into search results with reviews and other information via microformats, Google has taken the rich review snippets to a new level.  Reviews about certain aspects of a business are now grouped together and an overall rating per category is calculated.  In the sushi example below, Google broke down reviews by the food and the service.  As a user, this information is fantastically useful as most people care more about certain things than others, take a look.

Have a look at some of the technology used on EZlocal:

All of our sites are built with Microsoft's ASP.NET 3.5 and in places use the ASP.NET AJAX framework.  We are phasing out are usage of the .NET AJAX framework, and moving towards jQuery delivered by Google.

We live 100% off of Windows servers.  We use Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 as well as MySQL for our database solutions.  Some of our full text search is powered by Sphinx.  Our blog is powered by BlogEngine.NET and some of our mail services are powered by AuthSMTP.

We use various content providers.  Some business data provided by Localeze.  Local weather, events and geo-encoding services are obtained via Yahoo! and local news is provided by Topix.  Job listings are provided by work4abc.com and Indeed. Maps are generated via the Google Maps API.  Some photos are results of the Yahoo/Flickr API.

Check out the EZlocal member map.  Want to get listed and on to our map?  Create a free business profile today.

Everyday local search becomes more integrated into the old fashioned search results.  Google expanded its local search universe again recently and shows no signs of slowing.   

The Google Local Business Center is so great because you can dissect a listing and really understand why it is ranked.  Not only does the business owner have the opportunity to provide details, but Google finds other sites that reference a business and includes it in the listing details.  For example, searching custom closets Broadview, IL  brings up the listing for Crooked Oak.  When viewing the listing details, not only can I see business details such as payment options and hours of operations, I can also see where Google is pulling this information from.

Here we can see information is provided by the business owner, servicemagic.com, insiderpages.com and superpages.com.  If I am a business owner selling custom closets near Broadview, IL I now know the bare minimum of where I should be listing my information. 

The most important thing to take away from this: references to your business are the “link juice” of local search.

On the place details page, we can also see coupons, images, reviews, user content and other web references.  All of this information factors into the ranking of the business on Google.  The question then becomes, what are the best sites to list your business on to maximize results.

I will always contend that the best place to start is at the source.  If you want to be found on Google, claim your listing with Google.  The same goes for Yahoo! Local, Bing Local and Yelp.  You might say, hey Yelp isn’t one of the “big three” but Yelp is the leader in the social space for local businesses.   I have worked with many businesses, especially in the beauty and restaurant industry, that live and die by their Yelp profiles.

Outside of these major sites, I recommend looking at the large data providers that distribute their data to hundreds of places.  Not only do these data providers provide data to Google and the rest, they power most Internet Yellow Page (IYP) sites, and the data stored in most GPS units.  Our data provider here at ezlocal.com is Localeze whose distribution channel is said to reach 90% of the local search market.  You can also easily list your business information on infoUSA , whose reach is also very large.  To get a good idea of the data food chain, check out this great visualization by getlisted.org.  Essentially, the more places you get your business listed, the better off you are.  Google is the king of data, and as you can see from the visualization, all of this data gets back to Google Maps.  As I said above, all of this data getting back to Google as web references.  Again, these references are the juice of local search.

It is important to realize, it is not as simple as hitting the big three data providers and calling it a day.  The data provided by, let’s say, Localeze to a site like Superpages is not nearly as robust as a profile that you create directly into Superpages.  Generally, infoUSA, Localeze and Acxiom merely get you listed on these sites.  When you claim or create your profiles on each of the smaller sites individually your profile will be more prominent on each of the sites.  A more prominent place on these sites usually means you will be moved closer to the top of the link hierarchy on these websites which, in turn, increases the likelihood of your profile page being crawled and indexed by the search engines.  When your robust profile is indexed by the search engines, you have another reference to your business.  Keep in mind, there are around 16million businesses in the United States alone.  If Superpages has 16million not-very-robust profiles provided by Localeze, how long is it going to take before your profile is crawled by Google?  In short, claim your business profile on all of the smaller directories for the maximum effect.

Here is a short list of what I feel the best directories to start with are.

Google, of course, followed by Yahoo! Local, Bing Local and Yelp.  Then, I recommend the big providers Localeze and infoUSA.  Then for the smaller sites: Superpages, Insider Pages, Angie’s List (if applicable), ServiceMagic.com (if applicable), Citysearch, Judy’s Book, Kudzu.com and Best of the Web Local.