Small Business Search Marketing

Manta: More Than a Million Claimed Business Listings

Matt McGee — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:49:16 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write something about Manta’s local business directory for a little while now, primarily because I see it showing up more and more in local “place / category” search results. (They have some sharp SEOs from what I understand…)

And now it appears I don’t need to write something, because Greg Sterling did a bang-up job of that yesterday. I think his “sleeping giant” analogy is a good one, but not sure how much longer it’ll be appropriate as they continue to grow and gain visibility. Some stats from Greg’s article:

More than a million claimed business listings now.
That should grow to two million by year’s end.
3,000 businesses per day claim their listing on Manta.
About 25 percent of the claimed profiles get updated every month.
26 million unique visits per month to the website.
More than 90 percent retention on paying members, which currently numbers about 25,000.

That should whet your appetite. Check out Greg’s full article and, when you’re done, go to Manta’s website and see if you have a listing that needs to be claimed or added.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Manta: More Than a Million Claimed Business Listings

Slowly Making Progress on Unmerging a Triple-Merged Google Places Listing

Matt McGee — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:31:41 +0000

Time for this week’s update on my wife’s merged Google Places listings nightmare. This is the third installment, and things have gotten slightly better since the last update.

You may recall that this began in mid-January when Google emailed to let me know that it would un-merge her Places listing and then re-merge it again. And two weeks later, it happened just as Google promised. At that point, my wife’s listing was merged with two other real estate agents in the same building. This is how it looked:

As you can see, very little of the info on that page was coming from her listing. So, I used the “Report a Problem” link at the bottom of the page (and I may have also used the Google Places troubleshooter, not sure) and continued to pound away at this listing, trying to get it right.

I explained that the Place page was showing data from three different listings and even included a link to my second article with all the details.

Things are a little better now, but still not fixed. Here’s how it looks tonight:

The photos are still messed up, and the business name is being pulled from Dallas’ listing. (It was coming from Cari’s listing two nights ago, though! Ack!) But everything else — website, phone numbers, business hours, description, categories, etc. — is coming from Cari’s listing.

Baby steps, right? I’m not sure what my next step will be. I’ll probably just pound away again at the “Report a Problem” link and the troubleshooter forms, and include links to all of these posts.

And hopefully the next update will include even better news….

Don’t you just LOVE local search and Google Places??!!??

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Slowly Making Progress on Unmerging a Triple-Merged Google Places Listing

Lots of National Advertisers are Ignoring Basic Local Search Tactics

Matt McGee — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:35:40 +0000

There are a lot of national advertisers/marketers who should be, but aren’t, taking full advantage of the most basic local search marketing tactics. That’s the main conclusion to be drawn from a new study by GMS Local.

GMS surveyed marketers from national brands in the U.S. with more than 500 physical locations; two-thirds of the respondents were from traditional retail.

While 70 percent of the survey takers said they spend more than 60 percent of their budgets on local marketing, the survey also revealed that many of these national companies aren’t doing some of the basic blocking and tackling of local search marketing.

I put an arrow on the graph to emphasize that these are the numbers of marketers not using these tactics.

More than one-third are not actively marketing on local directories like Superpages.com or YP.com.
Forty percent are not actively managing local business listings on Google Places and the Bing Business Portal.
Forty-five percent aren’t doing local paid search.
Fifty-five percent aren’t actively utilizing local review sites.

According to the GMS survey, the main reasons for this are lack of money (58 percent) and lack of awareness of local opportunities (32 percent).

The GMS survey reminds me of the stats I shared back in September from Marketing Sherpa, stats that showed how the local search ranking factors aren’t actual industry practices. In that survey, tactics like adding photos and videos to a local business listing, associating the listing with multiple categories, and building local citations were all used by less than 50 percent of the marketers who answered.

What does it all mean?

I think it means that a) local search remains a mystery to a lot of marketers, and b) there’s still a lot of opportunity in local for marketers of any size, from national brands down to as one-man shop working from home.

What do YOU think it means that so many basic local search tactics are still not widely used?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Lots of National Advertisers are Ignoring Basic Local Search Tactics

Review Skeptic: An Algorithmic Approach to Fight Fake Reviews

Matt McGee — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:50:57 +0000

Sometimes you can spot a fake review a mile away. (Remember that old post about the fake florist reviews in California?) But some of the services that offer phony reviews for a small fee are getting smarter and less obvious about their spammy ways.

Some really smart people are developing software programs that aim to spot fake reviews algorithmically, and you can play with one of them yourself.

It’s called Review Skeptic, and it’s as simple as pasting the review text into the site and letting the computer guess if it’s authentic. The public website is out there “for entertainment purposes only,” the site says … and it is kinda fun to see how accurate it is.

The site says it’s best to use English-language hotel reviews, but I did some limited testing of my own using a variety of business types: I cut-and-pasted the full text of my 10 most recent Yelp reviews, and Review Skeptic identified all of them as truthful. Whew.

Review Skeptic is the work of a group of Cornell University researchers, and the result of testing on 400 fake and 400 authentic hotel reviews. There’s a link at the bottom of the site to their research paper, which explains that the software had 90 percent accuracy during testing.

How to Detect Fake Reviews

I’m no scientist, but the way I read the material in that PDF is that Review Skeptic classifies words and text patterns and looks for signs of authenticity or deception. And one of the researchers, Myle Ott, just explained it like this to TIME.com:

…the software takes note of subtle signs that most people overlook. “Truthful reviews tend to have more punctuation, such as dollar signs, which indicate a specific that’d only be known to someone who has been there,” he said. “There are also more specific details, like the hotel location or that the room was small or large.”

Fake reviews, by contrast, tended to have more superlatives and adverbs in the writing (makes sense) and more details that were “external to the hotel,” such as whom the reviewer was traveling with. The fakes were also filled with pronouns, rather than proper names — because someone who had never been to a hotel wouldn’t know the name of the bellman or the woman at the front desk.

Interesting stuff, but I kinda wish the “secret sauce” was kept secret.

That TIME article mentions that no “major websites” are using the software behind Review Skeptic, but I’d be shocked if Google and other major review sites aren’t also using algorithms to identify review spam. Yelp, in fact, is well known for having a review filter in place — although my understanding is that Yelp’s filter focuses as much, if not more, on the user than on the words used in reviews.

Anyway, if algorithms and software can do a better job than we humans of identifying review spam, here’s hoping Review Skeptic and similar products catch on more widely. On that note, one last thing: According to this New York Times article from last summer, the Cornell researchers have been contacted by Amazon, TripAdvisor, Hilton Hotels and other sites … and Google contacted Ott to ask for his resumé.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Review Skeptic: An Algorithmic Approach to Fight Fake Reviews

SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital?

Matt McGee — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:32:10 +0000

Relevant web pages. Relevant title tags. Relevant meta descriptions. Relevant copywriting. You’ve heard it a million times, right? I’m guilty of talking about relevance to pretty much every SEO client I’ve ever had.

No more. Relevancy is overrated. Anybody can be relevant; just throw a keyword on the web page a few times and BAM! You’re relevant.

You want to do better than that. And what’s better than being relevant?

Being vital.

SEO Quality Scale

If you think about an SEO quality scale, there’s nothing better than being vital.

I’d never suggest that a small business owner take everything Google says about SEO as the gospel truth, but I think it’s wise to look at and think about how Google classifies web pages.

That’s from a document that Google uses to train the people — regular folks like your neighbor — that are paid to rate Google’s search quality. They’re called Google Search Quality Raters and there are thousands of them around the world. They’ve been rating Google’s search results for at least the past 6-7 years. (I recently interviewed one of them on Search Engine Land.)

Web pages are rated on a five-point scale, with “off-topic/useless” at the bottom of the scale, moving all the way up to “vital” at the top. And as for “relevant,” well — that’s right in the middle. Just kind of normal or average.

The SMB’s Task

Keep this in mind next time you’re creating new content for your website, building a new website altogether, or blogging: Once you’ve done your keyword research and it’s time to turn those keywords into content, don’t just aim for being relevant. Your goal is to be vital for every keyword that you’re targeting.

After all, if you were a search engine, what kind of pages would you want to show to searchers? Pages that are just relevant to their search terms? Or pages that are vital to their search terms?

Don’t stop at being relevant. Go all the way to vital.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital?

January ’12: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Matt McGee — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:20:32 +0000

Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts I found and read during January. If you’re new to this blog, this is a monthly feature that began way back in 2007. You can find earlier “Best Of”s for each month in the Link Roundups category archive. I never include my own posts in these end-of-month recaps.

Small Business Search Marketing

Manta: More Than a Million Claimed Business Listings

Slowly Making Progress on Unmerging a Triple-Merged Google Places Listing

Lots of National Advertisers are Ignoring Basic Local Search Tactics

Review Skeptic: An Algorithmic Approach to Fight Fake Reviews

How to Detect Fake Reviews

SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital?

SEO Quality Scale

The SMB’s Task

January ’12: Best Search/Marketing Posts

Local Search

SEO

Social Media

Blogging

Design & Usability

Analytics

General/Miscellaneous