Website Promotion is not Voodoo

The reason testimonials and reviews are so powerful is because they provide a third-party (and hopefully, unbiased) opinion of what actual users think about products and services. Google knows this and considers reviews and citations an important factor in local search rankings.

Studies have shown that not only do long customer stories (2.5 times longer than reviews) lead to increased, more relevant search results, but increasing website interactivity with fresh, real-world content like customer questions and answers can increase sales conversions and lower customer service costs. For some business owners online reviews have become far more useful than the traditional print yellow pages and savvy business owners have figured out proactive ways to use online review sites.

Google’s idea of giving small businesses their own page through their project, Place Pages for Google Maps, has got local search buzzing with the SEO implications of this move for small business websites. Could Place Pages provide competition in the SERPS for the small business website? It’s possible. Will they be bad for business? That’s not so clear.

For one, a business without a high ranking or optimized website would benefit from the obvious boost of having Google display “all the information for that place in one place” on its very own Place Page. On the other hand, the fact that Place Pages also provide user-generated content, in the form of reviews, has just made the task of online reputation management that much harder.

From those who claim that Twitter is just a fad, to internet experts who believe that the impact of Twitter is being felt in ways never imagined, the news is abuzz with reports of this social media website.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is here to stay, with its user numbers having grown at the rate of 752 percent in 2008 alone. Facebook is still the #1 networking site in terms of numbers and user loyalty and not all businesses might need to get into the social networking sphere.

SEO experts are almost unanimous in their agreement that customer reviews play a crucial role in boosting visibility and rankings in the local search results. So how can you use this information to leverage local search rankings for your own business?

In a previous post, we discussed how a pro-active approach to customer service and feedback can boost your business reputation online. Positive reviews are a sign of trust, and that carries a great deal of weight in search rankings. Happy customers are an excellent source of positive feedback and reviews.

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For online businesses that depend on customer reviews to improve visibility in local search, social media engagement has become even more relevant with companies like Yelp giving reviewers the option to seamlessly broadcast their Yelp reviews to Facebook and Twitter.

According to the official Yelp blog, any photos that reviewers upload to Yelp.com will also be included when sharing reviews for that business via Facebook Connect. Users also have control over which reviews they want shared and which ones they don’t.

Facebook far exceeds the other major social networking sites in popularity and value, because it has the most loyal users, states a new social media study by Anderson Analytics. According to the news report, Facebook members were the most loyal among regular users of the four major social networking service (SNS) destinations – Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn being the other three.

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Staying Connected

Facebook is used by many people to share photos, post updates and keep in touch with family and friends, especially by the older population. The site launched Fan Pages in November 2007 to give brands and celebrities an official presence on Facebook.

Editor’s note: this is the first in a series we’re calling “Don’t Believe The Hype”

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Rocket Scientist or Pretender to The Throne?

“It’s OK, you’re not cheating on Google”, says the autopopulated search box on the Leapfish homepage. But is Leapfish, the new meta search kid on the block, just another flash in the pan as far as it’s search aspirations are concerned? Innovation and new applications are always welcome in the world of search. It’s obvious however, that except for their “click-free search”, Leapfish is offering nothing new.

“Markets are conversations”, states the Cluetrain Manifesto, the online reputation managers’ Bible. And if you sell any kind of product or service today, you must be part of the conversation or get left out.

Crowd Pleaser - The Power of Word of Mouth

In the days before the internet, reputations were built on word-of-mouth (WOM) and reputation management was a term that referred to damage control and crisis communications. The growing reach of the internet means that online business is now a two-way conversation.