I don’t run across these awards too frequently—but when a business has one, I notice it.

More often than not it’s a “Best of CitySearch” award, but sometimes I see other types.

For a few years I’ve wondered how many “best local business” awards are out there and (more importantly) which ones can help a business attract more local customers in one way or another.

I did a little research and found some distinctions that can help your local visibility in some or all of the following ways.  These are awards that:

• Google will showcase prominently at the top of your Places page,

• You can take a picture of and upload as a photo on your Google Places page,

• You can feature prominently and “talk up” on your website,

• Earn you a link from the site that awarded you the distinction, or

• Increase your visibility and reputation to customers on local-business sites other than Google Places.

Here are some of the most visibility-enhancing awards you can win (depending on your industry):

Angie’s List Super Service Award (see example on Places page)

Best of CitySearch (see example on Places page)

Gayot awards (see example on Places page)

MojoPages: MojoAwards

OpenTable: Diner’s Choice (see example on Places page)

TravelandLeisure awards (see example on Places page)

TripAdvisor: Traveler’s Choice

Vitals: Patients’ Choice

Take a look at this spreadsheet for more info about each award.

Chances are your business is eligible for at least one of those awards.  But not necessarily.   It depends largely on your industry.  Just look into the ones that seem as though they might apply to you (that’s why I made the spreadsheet).

What if you try hard to get recognized as a “best-of” but don’t end up winning the blue ribbon?  Well, you’ll still come out ahead.  In order to pursue the award in the first place, you need to get tons of positive feedback from customers—often in the form of glowing reviews.  Those third-party reviews can help your Places ranking hugely (as you may know).  You’ll also boost your prominence or rankings on the site where you’ve been pursuing the award, which will mean more visibility to potential customers who use that site.

Most likely you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results of your push to win—and you’ll get a snazzier-looking Places page, a good link, more bragging rights, and probably more local customers out of the deal.

By the way, please leave a comment if you know of any really good local-biz awards that aren’t on my list.  Extra kudos if you can find awards that you’ve seen highlighted on someone’s Google Places page (and that aren’t on my list).

For example, here’s a screenshot of how one of my clients shows up in Google Places—notice the 3 little links under his Google listing:

I’ve never seen sitelinks show up where they do now in Google Places.

Sitelinks have shown up in non-local (organic and paid) search results for several years.  In terms of how they’ve appeared in the local search results, it’s been the case for quite some time that if you search for a business by name and see its “one-box” appear in Google Places, typically you’d see any sitelinks that Google has given it.

(By the way, here’s a post I did on how you can get sitelinks from Google.)

What’s different about these sitelinks is they’re showing up for some businesses (and not others) in the cutthroat arena known as page one of Google’s local search results.  Some businesses get to show their sitelinks to customers, even when those customers don’t search for those businesses by name.

What’s more, I’ve only seen the “blended” sitelinks for the businesses that are already ranked at the top of the heap.  The above example of my client is one such example (hey, I’m not complaining).  Here’s another example:

It’s possible this is a test.  But I’d say that’s unlikely, based on the fact that sitelinks have appeared in more and more areas of Google over the years.

In any case, this isn’t an earth-shaking change, but it does change the local-search landscape a little (is that too many L’s?).  Mainly it’s a force-multiplier for businesses that are the top of Google Places for some search terms.  The sitelinks push the other local businesses down the page just a little bit, and the sitelinks are likely to boost click-through rates for local businesses that have them.

The moral of the story?  Try to get sitelinks.  An optimized, Google-friendly site can help your Google Places ranking big-time, and the process of trying to get sitelinks can help you tighten up your site and give it a boost in this way.  Plus, if and when you’re at the top of the local search results in your market, your sitelinks can be an even greater advantage over lower-ranked local competitors.

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Have you noticed more sitelinks in your local market than you noticed before?  Is it only the top-ranked businesses that have sitelinks?

If perchance you’ve never used GetListed, open it up in another browser tab, run a free scan of your business (takes maybe 15 seconds), and you’ll instantly see how it’s useful to you.

Done?  OK, back to what I was saying…

GetListed is handier than duct-tape because it shows you exactly how you can increase your local visibility.  Its beauty is it’s free and simple to use—not weighed down with bells and whistles.  You don’t need any tutorials to use it: you can just launch right in and immediately boost your local visibility.

However, over time I’ve found a few techniques for using GetListed to the fullest.  I’ve used it pretty much every day for my clients for the past few years.  Even though it’s as easy-to-use as ever, GetListed has steadily become more sophisticated, robust, and useful.

You obviously don’t need my advice in order to run and benefit from GetListed scans.  But I assume you’re always looking for ways to get info that you can use to get more visible in Google Places and elsewhere, and for ways to make the whole process easier and faster.

In no particular order, my tips for using GetListed.org to the max:

1)  Check out all the options on the left-hand side whenever you perform a scan.  I find the “Accuracy” and “Reviews” buttons particularly handy.  Maybe you already do this—but I know I’d used GetListed for an embarrassingly long time before I even noticed that it had features other than the basic “Snapshot.”

2)  Always click on the “View additional details” link, even if you see a green checkmark next to a given site.  Just to double-check and be positive that your info on that particular site is 100% accurate.  You can also do this just by clicking on the “Accuracy” button on the left-hand side of the screen.

3)  Do GetListed scans semi-routinely—like every month or two.  This can alert you to a host of problems, like if (for instance) one month you score 100% and then the next month a GetListed scan indicates that you’re not listed on ExpressUpdateUSA.  This would mean that you should probably time to log into your listing there and make sure all your info is accurate, that there aren’t duplicate listings floating around, etc.  Think of GetListed as a doctor who can perform a checkup on your local visibility and alert you to problems.

4)  Take screenshots of your scan results (AKA your “score”) every month or two, or whenever you do a scan.  It’s just a good way to keep track of your progress in terms of getting your business listed on all those important sites, and it’s handy in case you run into problems (“Gee, I was at 80% last month but now I’m down to 35%…better check up on why”).  Plus, sometimes I like to give these screenshots to clients in the earlier stages of a project, before their Google Places rankings have come to fruition, because it shows that I’m actually working on their listings J and not just watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island.

5)  Perform scans on your higher-ranking competitors occasionally.  Even though you should shoot for a 100% GetListed score no matter what, checking how your competitors score up can give you an idea of the specific ranking advantages they may have over you.  If they score 40% completeness and you score 90%, then their citations may not be why they’re outranking you: in this case, I’d suggest checking the “Accuracy” and “Reviews” tabs in GetListed, to see if their info is more accurate or if they have more reviews than you do.

6)  Play around with it.  Try performing scans using neighboring ZIP codes, rather than the one your business is actually located in.  Try entering simple search terms—not business names—and seeing which local competitors pop up in the GetListed scan results.  You may find nothing valuable…or you may learn something about your local presence or your competitors’ that you didn’t know before.

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By the way, GetListed.org is constantly updating, improving, and growing.  Therefore, if it changes significantly, I’ll update this post to reflect any changes.

What’s in your personal “bag of tricks” for GetListed?  If you have any suggestions, do leave a comment (and I’ll probably end up including your suggestion on this list).

Local Google is a minefield of bugs, glitches, often-murky “Quality Guidelines,” sudden algorithm changes, and possibly unethical competitors. Tiptoeing your way around all the hazards requires luck or know-how.  If you don’t feel like playing Russian Roulette with your business’s local presence, then you’d probably prefer the extra know-how.

“But Phil, I’m not having any problems in Google Places…I just want to rank higher.”

Well, if you want to rank more visibly, you first need to make sure your wings aren’t being clipped by a host of particularly common hazards.  Even if you’re already ranking well in Google Places, you need to know how to identify, fix, or prevent these problems.  Just because you haven’t encountered them doesn’t mean you won’t.

That’s why I’ve rounded up 7 posts that help to troubleshoot some difficulties you might encounter—or maybe have encountered—in Google Places.

Taking a few minutes to read these posts might just be enough to get you out of whatever Google-related jam you’re in—or to prevent future troubles.

Problem: Merged Listings
If your Google Places listing has a bunch of incorrect info on it, it might be “merged” with another business’s Google listing.  Mike “Professor Maps” Blumenthal shows you how to deal with a merged listing.

Problem: Spam Reviews from Competitors
Are your competitors spreading lies or talking smack about you—on your own Google Places page?  Here are some great tips for handling spam reviews.  By the way, I suggest you read all the comments on that post; there are some great suggestions in there as well.

Problem: Sudden Drop-off in Rankings
If you’ve had a decent—or very good ranking—vanish all of a sudden, this post from Linda Buquet might light the way for you.

Problem: Frustrating, Unclear Error Messages from Google
Nyagoslav Zhekov tells you what to do when you have no idea why you’re receiving an error message from Google.

Problem: Other Puzzling TARFU Situations in Google Places
A “part 2” to the above post, this deals with other common Google problems you may encounter.

Problem: Duplicate Google Places Listings
“Duplicate” listings are a huge problem in Places.  They’re also one of the most annoying and tricky issues to solve.  An excellent step-by-step guide for how to unravel duplicate listings.

Problem: Worried about Getting Ripped off by SEO Scammers
In addition to being a crackerjack troubleshooter, Nyagoslav has some great tips for how you can sniff out and avoid unethical local SEO companies.

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Any questions that aren’t answered by these awesome posts?  It’s hard to imagine that’s the case, but if it is, just leave a comment and I may be able to take a crack at it.

Got any suggestions for a great Google Places troubleshooting post I should know about?  Email me, tweet to me, or (again) leave a comment.

We know that the first type of reviews—“Google reviews,” written directly on your Places page—have a strong influence on Google Places rankings.  That’s well-established, and I’ve seen it to be the case throughout the 3 years I’ve been specializing in Google Local.

But what about reviews written on third-party sites?  Yeah, they’re important.  But what else do you know about third-party reviews and how they relate to your Google Places rankings?  Probably not much more or less than I did before I did a little fact-finding on the topic.

I took a “core sample” of 200 local markets and 1400 businesses in Google Places, in all different industries and cities in the US.

(Back in July of last year I did similar research, but that was on “Google reviews” and third-party reviews collectively.  This time I’m focusing on the third-party ones.)

Obviously this wasn’t exhaustive research—if it was, I’d be using my break from collecting data to  shop around for some glass eyeballs. However, I’ve got enough figures to answer some specific questions about how third-party reviews tie into first-page Google Places rankings.

“How many different third-party sites does a top-7 business have customer reviews on, on average?”

When you’re on a given Places page, how many distinct sites are shown as having reviews for that business?  For example:

What I wanted to know is how the number of third-party review sites corresponds to Google Places rankings.  Here’s what I found:

Here are the naked numbers for the chart (that is, how many different third-party sites each ranking has customer reviews on):

A = 1.52

B = 1.46

C = 1.29

D = 1.06

E = 1.095

F = 0.99

G = 0.955

What do these numbers tell us?

First of all, there is a correspondence between the Google Places ranking of a business and how many third-party sites it has customer reviews on.  Maybe you intuitively knew that already, but now you have some numbers.

The top-3 rankings have customer reviews on more sites than rankings #4-7 do.  The difference is even clearer between A-B and F-G: rankings A-B generally have reviews on 1-2 third-party sites, whereas the lower rankings tend to have reviews on just one third-party site.  That’s a ratio of 3:2.  Put another way, the businesses at the top of the Google Places “7-pack” typically have customer reviews on 50% more third-party sites than the businesses at the bottom of the 7-pack have.

The numbers also tell us that if your business is in the top-7 of Google Places, chances are you’ve got customer reviews on at least one third-party site—meaning a medium other than Google Places or Yelp.com (because Yelp reviews no longer show up on Google Places pages).

This helps affirm what I’ve told my clients for a long time, and what Mike Blumenthal has suggested for quite a while: that you can’t simply rely on the reviews that customers write on your Places page.  If you’re serious about getting a top-7 Google Places ranking, one good place to start is with asking  some of your customers to write you reviews on at least one third-party site (InsiderPages, SuperPages, YellowPages, CitySearch, or another).

“How many third-party reviews does a top-7 business have, on average?”

Here’s what I found:

And again, the plain numbers for how many third-party reviews each ranking has (on average), between all the third-party sites where customers have posted reviews:

A = 8.255

B = 8.335

C = 5.87

D = 4.71

E = 4.235

F = 5.515

G = 4.325

What does this tell us?

The top-2 rankings have significantly more reviews than rankings C-G (3-7).  Once again, we’re seeing a difference of 50-100% between the top of the “7-pack” and the rest of it.

Again, this doesn’t count Google Places reviews (which obviously aren’t “third-party”) or Yelp reviews (which Google Places no longer uses).

Most of all, we’ve got a couple more handy ballpark numbers that you can work into your customer-review strategy:

• If you’d like to get into the Google Places top-7, you should probably try to get at least 5 customer to write reviews on at least one third-party site.

• Or if you’re already in the local top-7 and trying to get to the very top, your strategy should include getting at least 30-100% more customer reviews on third-party sites than the other top-7 businesses have.  In terms of reviews, there’s a big gap between #1 and #7.

“So how should I change my reviews strategy?”

Time for a recap.  Use the following as rules-of-thumb as you move forward:

1.  Don’t just focus on Google Places reviews; ask customers to review you elsewhere, too

2.  There’s a correspondence between your ranking and how many third-party sites you’re reviews on.  You’ll probably need reviews on one such site in order to get into the top-7.  But the more different third-party sites your customers can review you on, the better

3.  There’s also a correspondence between your ranking and how many total third-party reviews you have.  Ranking in the top-2 will probably require that you get 30-100% more customer reviews than your page-one local competitors have.

4.  If you’re trying to get into the Google Places top-7, a good initial benchmark is to get at least 5 customer reviews on at least one third-party site (SuperPages, CitySearch, etc.

5.  If you want to climb higher in the Google Places 7-pack, shoot for a total of about 8 reviews on at least 2 different third-party sites

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By the way, you can download my spreadsheet with all the data, in case you’d like to roll up your sleeves and handle some numbers.

Of course, I’d appreciate your weighing in—leave a comment!

OK, fine, so maybe even the Google Places / local-search-visibility puzzle is different in the UK from how it is here.  That is, you need to list your business on different third-party sites in order to get maximum local visibility (which isn’t news to you).

The first step, of course, is to know what those third-party sites are.

Enough of me mates have asked me to cough up my list of UK local-search citation sources.  It’s about bloody time I do so.

Here’s the full monty:

(extra-important sites in bold)

118.com (www.118.com/user/login.mvc?view=AddListing)

118Information.co.uk (www.my118information.co.uk/Search.aspx)

123Bang.com (www.123bang.com/add.php)

AgentLocal.co.uk (www.agentlocal.co.uk/add-business)

ApprovedBusiness.co.uk (www.approvedbusiness.co.uk/register.aspx)

BizWiki.co.uk (www.bizwiki.co.uk/write.htm)

Britaine.co.uk (www.britaine.co.uk/add)

BTLinks.com (www.btlinks.com/advertise.htm)

BusinessNetwork.co.uk (businessnetwork.co.uk/register/)

BView.co.uk (www.bview.co.uk/accounts/preregister.html)

City-Listings.co.uk (www.city-listings.co.uk/add_listing/service)

City-Visitor.com (add listing from homepage)

CityLocal.co.uk (www.citylocal.co.uk/changelocation-all.php?type=business)

CompaniesintheUK.co.uk (www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/AddCompany/AddCompany)

Cylex-UK.co.uk (www.admin.cylex-uk.co.uk/firma_default.aspx?step=0&d=cylex-uk.co.uk)

Fortuna.co.uk (www.fortuna.co.uk/Login/AddUser.aspx)

FreeIndex.co.uk (www.freeindex.co.uk/myfreeindex(display-details).htm)

Fyple.co.uk (www.fyple.co.uk/add-business/)

GoMy.co.uk (www.gomy.co.uk/signup/faccountinfo)

HotFrog.co.uk (www.hotfrog.co.uk/AddYourBusiness.aspx)

It2.biz (http://it2.biz/d/Advertise)

Local.TrueKnowledge.com (www.local.trueknowledge.com/add_business/)

LocalDataCompany.com (www.localdatasearch.com/edit-business.php)

LocalDataSearch.com (www.localdatasearch.com/edit-business.php)

LocalMole.co.uk (www.business.localmole.co.uk/enquiry)

LocalLife.co.uk (pick a city, then find the “Add” button in the top-right)

LocaTrade.com (www.locatrade.com/business.php)

Manta.com (www.manta.com/world/Europe/United+Kingdom/)

MarketLocation.com (www.marketlocation.com/data.php)

MisterWhat.co.uk (www.misterwhat.co.uk/content/add-company)

MySheriff.co.uk (http://www.mysheriff.co.uk/users/)

Opendi.co.uk (www.opendi.co.uk/entry/add/step-1.html)

Qype.co.uk (www.qype.co.uk/business_users/find?qlb_path=HeaderB1)

Scoot.co.uk (www.scoot.co.uk/advertise/free-listing.html)

SmileLocal.com (www.smilelocal.com/get_listed.php)

TheBestof.co.uk (add listing from homepage)

TheDirectTree.com (www.thedirecttree.com/the-direct-tree/free-premium-listing)

TheDiscDirectory.co.uk (www.workingfeedback.co.uk/the-disc-directory-new-listing-request/)

ThomsonLocal.com (www.thomsonlocal.com/free-listing.aspx)

Tipped.co.uk (www.tipped.co.uk/login)

TouchLocal.co.uk (www.stings.touchlocal.com/touch/)

UFindUs.com (www.ufindus.com/get_on_ufindus.php)

UK.MerchantCircle.com (www.uk.merchantcircle.com/signup/)

UK.Uhuw.com (www.uk.uhuw.com/logon?ReturnUrl=%2faddbusiness)

UK.WowCity.com (www.uk.wowcity.com/login_register.php)

UK-Local-Search.co.uk (www.uk-local-search.co.uk/add-listing.aspx)

UKSmallBusinessDirectory.co.uk (www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk/advertising/free.asp)

UpMyStreet.com (www.upmystreet.com/findmynearest/premium-listing/free-business.html)

Wampit.com (http://www.wampit.com/individual_register.aspx)

WheresBest.co.uk (www.wheresbest.co.uk/claim-venue.php)

WhoseView.co.uk (www.whoseview.co.uk/claim-your-business-1.html)

Yell.com (www.yell.com/free-listing/)

Yelp.co.uk (www.biz.yelp.co.uk/)

Zettai.net (www.zettai.net/Add/add.php)

Now comes the fun part: listing your business on all the above sites.  As I’m sure you’ve noticed, links to the “Add business” pages are on the right, so at least you don’t have to hunt around for them.

I’ve added all of the sites to my Definitive List of Local Search Citations as well—where they mingle with their Yank counterparts.

Last but not least, credit goes to David Mihm for listing a number of these sites in a great blog post he did a few years ago on top UK citation sources.

I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few, so please leave a comment if you have any sites to suggest.

Cheers!

Here’s how the “snippets” area looked before:

The “At a glance” is new only to the Places page itself.  It’s not completely new to Google Places.  For the last few months it’s appeared in the preview area that you see when you hover your mouse over a local-business search result:

Is the addition of “At a glance” to the Places page a big deal?  Of course not.  But it’s a nice baby-step toward greater usability of Google Places.

I’ve had a number of clients (and a whole bunch of other people) ask me what those random-looking “keywords” are on their Places pages.  At least for now, I’ll still have to explain that Google culls the “keywords” from customer reviews, third-party sites and reviews (InsiderPages, CitySearch, etc.), and from your website.

I’ll also still have to explain that there’s no way to control directly what phrases wind up in the “At a glance” snippets—and that sometimes they can include nonsensical, unflattering, or downright ugly phrases.

Still, this little annotation at least will give customers and business owners a slightly better idea of what they’re looking at in this little sliver of the Places page.  That’s always good.

I’m hopeful that Google will continue to add features to the “At a glance” area, and to improve the quality and relevance of the snippets themselves.

As perhaps you’ve noticed by now, getting visible in Google is largely a process of communication.  You’re trying to tell Google certain facts about your business, in order to rank as highly as possible in your local market.  If you communicate clearly, you’re more likely to get what you’re after.

(Of course, Google won’t do everything you hope it will: if you stuff your Places page and website with 50 keywords that you want to get visible for, you’ll be disappointed.)

So what you need to do is eliminate mess from your “local presence.  You need to remove online clutter that can trip up Google and hurt your local rankings or (worse) earn your listing a suspension.  There’s a lot of garbage floating around Google Places and the rest of the Web, and it can hurt your local visibility to customers.

The good news is cleaning up is easy and quick.  It may be all that’s necessary (a) to resolve any suspensions by Google or (b) to give you the visibility boost you’ve been looking for, or both.

Here are the areas I suggest you pay attention to and clean up if need-be:

To remove from your Google Places page / account:

• Remove duplicate Google Places listings (that is, multiple listings of the same business).  If any duplicates show up when you’re logged into your “Dashboard,” get Google to delete them.  Then go to Google and search for your business by name, in order to find any unverified duplicate listings that you may not have known about (and probably never created personally).  Try to get those removed, too (here’s an excellent post that might help with this).

• Kill off any extra phone numbers on your Places page.  There should only be one number on your Places page—and it had better use a local area code.  Don’t include additional phone numbers anywhere on the page (fax numbers are OK).

• Remove city/town names from the name of your Places page (unless they’re part of your real DBA) and from your “Categories” fields.  Google sees the inclusion of these as a spam tactic.  Obviously, many businesses get away with keyword-stuffing, but I’ve also seen a number of listings get suspended for it.

• Scrub out any extra search terms (“keywords”) from your business name.  As with the location names, search terms are OK to include in the “Company/Organization” field of your listing Google if they’re actually part of your real business name.  Otherwise, you risk getting your listing pulled.

• Get rid of redundancies between your “Categories” and your “Description.”  If you select “Landscaping Design” as a business category, don’t call yourself a “landscaping design specialist” in your description, and vice versa.

• Remove or edit “Additional Details” fields that contain keywords or location names that appear in the “Categories” or “Description” areas of your Places page.

To remove from your website

• Remove all crawlable phone numbers OTHER THAN the one you use for your Places page.  For instance, if you have a line of text that contains a phone number that isn’t the one you list on your Places page, you’ll confuse Google.  The only way you can include additional phone numbers on your site without gumming up Google’s bots is to add them as images—not as normal, “readable” text on your site (you know text is readable if you can highlight, copy, and paste it).  Of course, even if you include additional phone numbers as images, you’ll want to think hard about whether their presence might confuse would-be customers.

• Shorten any parts of your title and description tags that are LONGER than 70 and 155 characters, respectively.  Make your title and description tags fit within those character lengths, or else customers won’t be shown the excess parts in the search results.  I haven’t seen evidence that excessively long meta tags harm Google Places rankings, but the name of the game is to attract customers.  Customers are less likely to visit your site—whether it appears in the organic or the “blended” Google Places search results—if they can’t even read your entire title / description tags.

• Eliminate repetition in your title and description tags.  Don’t have your title tag read “Austin plumbing, Austin plumber, plumbing company Austin TX” and so forth.  It doesn’t help your rankings in the least, and it’s just gibberish in the eyes of potential customers.  This is particularly true of the title tag: Fewer people will visit your site or Places page (sometimes the title tag appears as your business name in the Google Places “7-pack”) if your title tag is keyword mush.

Also, I suggest you check the major third-party sites (Yelp, SuperPages, InsiderPages, etc.) and data-providers (particularly InfoUSA) and try to remove any duplicate or inaccurate listings that these sites have for your business.  These usually contain inconsistent info about your business, which can really ding your Google ranking.  Depending on the specific site, trying to get these unwanted listings removed can be even more of a hassle than trying to wrangle with Google to get unwanted Places listings removed.  Still, it’s something you always have to be patrolling around for and trying to weed out.

Oh, and one last thing: the items I just mentioned largely don’t even deal with the human element—that is, making sure your Google Places listing or website doesn’t contain any “junk” that might repel would-be customers.  (For more on this, check out The 1st Annual Google Places Freak Show and my 10-Point Maintenance Routine for Your Local Visibility.)

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Can you think of any other mess worth cleaning from your Places page or your site?  Leave a comment!

Or maybe you’ve busted your butt for 40 customer reviews but still toil at #13 on page 2 of Google.

Perhaps your competitor is outranking you…even though he has 3-star average rating and you have a 5-star average.

You’re well aware that reviews influence your Google Places ranking.  That’s as true as ever.  So what gives?

Simply this: a review is not a review.

Numbers do matter—a lot.  So does your average rating.

But Google looks at many aspects of your reviews when deciding how to rank your business in Google Places.

Why should you care?  Well, because you need a rough idea of whether your reviews are helping, hurting, or having no affect on your Google Places ranking.  That tells you whether your current review-solicitation strategy is right on the money or needs serious tweaking.

At least 9 factors seem to determine how your reviews influence your local ranking.  I’ve noticed these on my own, and David Mihm touches on most of these factors in his excellent “Local Search Ranking Factors.”

It’s impossible to tell which single factor is the most important, which one is second-most important, etc.   But what is clear is that the more of these qualities your reviews have, the more likely it is you’ll outrank local competitors in Google Places.

Anyway, without further ado, the main review factors (in no particular order):

• Total number.  The grand total of all your reviews on all the sites where customers may have written reviews for you—Google Places, CitySearch, InsiderPages, etc.

•  Total number of “Google reviews.”  Long story short, Google pays somewhat more attention to its own “brand” of reviews.  All other things being equal, you get more ranking benefit from 10 Google Places reviews than from, say, 10 SuperPages reviews (in my experience).

• Total number of reviews on third-party sites.  In other words, how many customer reviews you have on sites other than Google Places.

• Average rating.  Newsflash: a 5-star average is better than a 4-star average.

• Relevance to services.  Your reviews help your ranking more if they contain phrases that are relevant to the services you’re trying to get found for.  A review that says “Best dentist in town” is more beneficial than one that says “Dr. John Doe is the best!”

• Relevance to location.  One of the big “questions” that Google tries to determine is whether your business is, in fact, local.  If reviews seem to confirm that you are located in the area you claim to be located in, Google’s more likely to rank you well.  So, to go back to my previous example, a review that says “Best dentist in town” is not as good as one that says “Best dentist inCleveland.”

• Velocity.  AKA the speed at which you receive reviews.  If you get 5 reviews in 5 weeks, your Places ranking is more likely to improve than if you get 5 reviews in a year.  Receiving reviews at a healthy pace is one indication that you run a fully operational business, and that customers emerge alive and well and willing to write you reviews from time to time.  To Google, it’s just another sign that you run a quality business.

• Diversity of sites.  Do you only have reviews on MojoPages, or do you have them on MojoPages, CitySearch, InsiderPages, YellowPages, and Google Places?  The more sources your reviews come from, the better.

• Prominence / authority of third-party sites.  20 customer reviews on a well-established site like CitySearch will probably get you more Google Love than if you had 20 reviews on some dinky little site nobody’s ever heard of.  (Note: Yelp reviews used to influence over your Google Places ranking heavily, but ever since July 2011, when Google stopped using Yelp’s data, Yelp reviews haven’t seemed to pack as much of a wallop).

There are some other aspects of reviews that may influence your Google Places ranking, but that I haven’t seen as much evidence for.  To some extent, I’m speculating.  Anyway, consider these 4 “maybe” factors:

• Who writes the reviews.  It only makes sense that a Google review from a customer who’s written 20 reviews for other businesses would count for more than a review written by someone who’d never written a Google review and just opened a Google account 5 minutes ago.  I haven’t verified that this is the case, but it makes sense that the history / activity of the reviewer’s Google account would matter.

• Pace.  I’ve noticed that businesses seem to rank most highly when they can get a steady stream of reviews.  If you get 30 reviews in a weekend and then none for a month, the alarms are likely to go off at Google.

• Age of oldest reviews.  In the organic SEO world, “domain age” (how old your website name is) gives you a slight advantage in the rankings.  Similarly—all other things being equal—if you have reviews that are 3-5 years old, I’m sure Google gives you a slight edge over (say) a competitor whose oldest reviews are from earlier this year.

• User feedback.  If people consistently visit your Places page and flag your reviews as “inappropriate,” I imagine that those specific reviews—be they 1-star of 5-star—would influence your ranking less.  Of course, if they’re flagged enough, Google may remove them entirely.  Similarly, the extent to which people rate your reviews “helpful” most likely affects how much influence they have over your Google Places ranking.

I think you could draw one of two conclusions from all of this:

Conclusion 1:  “Holy $#!%, I totally underestimated Google!  I’m going to have to put in overtime in my laboratory to conjure up the kinds of reviews that Google ‘likes’!”

OR

Conclusion 2:  “Google’s is just trying to determine if my reviews are real, written willingly by my customers.  I’m just going to keep it simple and ask a bunch of my customers for reviews.”

The best thing to know about these factors is you can’t control all of them: you really cannot and should not try to cook up the reviews, nor should you be too heavy-handed in ask customers where, when, and how to write the reviews for you.

Instead, if you ask enough customers for reviews, over time you’ll cover all the bases (the “ranking factors”).  And that will ensure that your reviews, as a whole, will have the one quality that Google can’t detect but that will win you the most customers: authenticity and sincerity.

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Any interesting stats, tests, or case studies that I should know about?  Any review factors that I forgot to include, or that you think belong on the “maybe” list?  Leave a comment!

By the way, here’s a one-page “tip sheet” I slapped together a few months ago on best practices for asking customers for reviews.

I don’t know what your competitors think—and you probably don’t know, either.

But I do know one thing: you don’t want your business, livelihood, and your family’s finances to depend on whether or not your competitors are ethical people.

Just as people can hurt each other in real life, they can hurt each other where it really counts online: Google Places.

Your competitors are probably honest people.  But there are always the bad apples.  Even the bad ones most likely can’t hurt you intentionally in Google Places right now—unless they’ve been studying up on it.  Some people are clever and knowledgeable but also dishonest and unethical.

There are specific tactics they can use to deprive you of local customers in Google Places and take a chunk out of your business and profits.  For any competitors to use any of these against you, they’d have to fall somewhere between savvy and ingeniously cunning.

Some of these tactics I’ve seen used, whereas others I haven’t seen anyone use.  But each one is a vulnerability that you should know about.

Disclaimer:  I can’t control who reads this, or what that person does with the info I provide.  I’m telling you about these tactics so you can prevent them from being used against your business in the first place, and so you have an idea of how to counteract them in case you do encounter them.

Here are the 9 nastiest ways an unethical competitor could sabotage you—ranked in order of least to most sinister:

9.  They upload malicious or unflattering photos to your Places page.  They don’t even have to be untrue or libelous; they could just be really ugly or irrelevant photos that turn customers off to you.  Sure, you could get them removed, but it will be a real nuisance for you—and some potential customers will inevitably see the photos in the meantime.

8.  They relentlessly use the “Report a problem” feature in Google Places to try to convince Google that you’re doing something wrong.

7.  They pepper your Google reviews with flags and reports of being “inappropriate”—and then get their henchmen to do the same.  If they succeed, your legitimate reviews might go the way of the dodo bird.

6.  They could get several people to write you a bunch of positive reviews.  Google may suspect you’re buying positive reviews (which some people do), and may pull your reviews or even suspend your account.  Your competitors could take it a step further by making the reviews sound really fake (though still positive), which could cause legitimate people who visit your Places page to flag the reviews as “inappropriate” or “unhelpful” and get you into trouble.

5.  They write nasty reviews of you on third-party sites and/or or on sites like PissedConsumer.com.  These are especially tough to combat because (1) it’s harder for you to keep tabs on a bunch of different sites, because (2) one person can easily create a bunch of different user accounts on these sites and write you a nasty review on each, and because (3) some third-party sites don’t give you much recourse even if your business is getting slammed unjustly.

4.  They write fake negative reviews, get their friends and family to do the same, and pay even more people to do it.  They’d get a bunch of people to write not only negative Google reviews, but also nasty reviews on third-party sites.  Most customers would know the reviews are cooked-up, but some would be convinced, and your Google Places ranking would most likely still take a hit.  You could counteract their efforts if you took enough time away from running your business, but don’t expect Google to step in and do anything.

3.  They set up fake Google Places listings for your address, using a different phone number from the one you use.  Long story short, Google views your phone number as the unique “ID” of your business.  If Google doesn’t have confidence that it knows what your real phone number is, your ranking will take a big hit.

2.  Alternatively, they could set up fake Google Places listings using the name of your business but with a different phone number and a different address from the ones you use.  Again, this would be an attempt to spread inconsistent info about your business and create “uncertainty” about your business in the eyes of Google.  Having duplicate listings in general isn’t good for your Google Places ranking, and it’s far worse if there is a bunch of inconsistent information about your business floating around on the duplicate Places listings.  The worst part is if your competitor lists an address that isn’t your real one, he potentially could receive the verification PIN from Google in the mail and actually “owner-verify” the fake listing.  Google likely would eventually conclude that it isn’t the right address, but your competitor still will have thrown a wrench into the system.

1.  Probably the worst thing a competitor could do to you is to use Tactic #2 against you and go to numerous third-party sites and create a bunch of fake listings for your business, all slightly different from each other.  Not only does your Google ranking suffer when you have a ton of duplicate listings floating around cyberspace, but it’s infinitely worse when the info in those listings (phone numbers, addresses, name of business) is inconsistent.  It would be extremely tough to manage the information that the most important third-party sites have about you—especially if an unethical competitor keeps peppering them with false info and maybe even claiming some of the listings.  Especially if this tactic is used in combination with any of the others, you’ve got a serious problem on your hands.

So how can you avoid or counteract any sabotage?  A few suggestions:

• Watch your Google Places listing like a hawk.  This means not only checking the Place page itself for anything suspicious or malicious, but also logging into the “Dashboard” area to make sure you don’t have any notifications/warnings from Google.

• Keep an eye on third-party listings and data providers—including Yelp, SuperPages, CitySearch, and ExpressUpdateUSA.  Look out for duplicate listings and see if the info they contain is accurate.  If not, get the duplicates removed.

• Set up Google Alerts for your business name and website name.  Doing the same for your competitors’ names is a good measure, too.

• Read all your reviews—first and foremost on your Places page, but also occasionally on major third-party sites, like Yelp and InsiderPages.  If you see a suspicious-looking review, click on the username of the person who wrote it.  You’ll be able to see what other reviews that person has written.  If there’s a scathing 1-star for you but a glowing 5-star for your competitor, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

If prevention doesn’t work, contact the business owner.  First just mention what is going on, and ask in a non-accusatory way whether they might know anything about it.  If they’re dodgy, explain your reasons for thinking they’re up to something, and then ask them to explain what’s really going on.  Obviously, be as polite as possible and don’t lead off with finger-pointing—but also be firm and keep your BS detector cranked up.

Meanwhile (maybe before you even contact the business owner), use Google’s feeble but occasionally handy “Report a problem” feature to let the powers-that-be at Google Places know something’s awry.

(By the way, if you still encounter trouble even after all of that, feel free to contact me; I may be able to give you some suggestions.)

To a peaceful, fair, prosperous local market.