When an authority site like Yelp rolls out a new feature to add video content to reviews, small businesses and marketers should take note.
By Carmen Salerno · June 30 2014
yelp, reviews, local business
Outside of Yelp (whose review snippets were removed from Google) and native Google+ Local reviews, here are the top third-party sources for dentist reviews in the US.
By Dave Cosper · April 29 2014
reviews, local, local search, google plus
Having good quality reviews on your Google+ Local page (i.e., Place page) not only influences your ability to convert prospective customers, but can affect your local search ranking. Most customers won’t know to leave you a Google Places review, so it is important to promote or actively encourage customers to give honest reviews.
By Dave Cosper · September 11 2013
google, google plus, google, reviews
Customer reviews are a fundamental part of your local marketing efforts and online reputation. If you can get enough good ones, they can go a long ways. A slew of good reviews can boost both your local search ranking as well as click-through rate (CTR), which should ultimately lead to converting more customers.
A Local Consumer Review Survey (2012) showed that approximately 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business.
But building customer reviews, and doing it ‘the right way’, especially on Google (with all of their flip-flops and recent updates) has been a dizzying process for SMBs....
By Dave Cosper · March 20 2013
google plus local, local search, reviews, seo
Mike Blumenthal blogged last month on the topic of becoming a Top Reviewer (as a business page) in Google Plus Local. Notably, there appears to be an opportunity for a business, as a Google+ page, to achieve this distinction. But how exactly do you (as a business) become a Google+ Top Reviewer?
As you may have noticed, Google Plus ranks review content based on who is leaving the review and what other users think of the review (most useful -> least useful). More or less, it’s an effort to weed out spammy or fake reviews and establish a hierarchy for everything in between. There’s also anecdotal evidence to suggest that reviews from...
By Dave Cosper · November 16 2012
reviews, top reviewer, google local
Two weeks ago The Consumerist put out an excellent article on how to spot fake online reviews. A week later, after enlisting the help of their shrewd reader base, they compiled a list of 30 additional symptoms of online review fakery. Both pieces are superb and deserve a full reading, but here are a few highlights that stood out to us:
By Jorge Cordova · April 19 2010
reviews, google, fake reviews
Here at EZlocal, we love Google. Everyone uses Google as their primary search engine and Gmail as their email client. Nearly the whole office is connected through Google Talk and most people use Chrome as their browser. A few of us even look forward to the day when we can pay our taxes directly to Google.
Since our specialty is local business search, it comes as no surprise that a fair amount of our time is spent nosing around Google Maps and Google’s Local Business Center, constantly searching for more ways to increase exposure to our members, small business owners. To this end, we find ourselves pondering questions like these:
What websites are cited on Google Maps?
Are they being cited for business info, reviews, user content?
What sites boast the most review citations in Google Maps?
On our quest to answer these questions, we started to count and analyze the reviews that appear in...
By James · March 24 2010
google maps, reviews, url hack, google hack
Last week we discussed which websites feed the most restaurant reviews into Google’s Local Business Center (LBC). While Citysearch impressively captured nearly 47% of the restaurant reviews appearing on Google Maps, it was Yelp’s complete lack of reviews that inspired the most curiosity here at EZlocal. Our crack SEO team has been helping small businesses get found on Google for a few years now, during which time we grew accustomed to seeing Yelp reviews in Google’s LBC. Now, finding a Yelp review in Google Maps is almost unheard of. Why?
As near as we can tell, the reviews disappeared from the LBC after acquisition talks between the two companies disintegrated back in December 2009. It is reported that Google offered
By Derek McKenzie · March 16 2010
yelp, google, lbc, reviews
