Small Business Online Coach

News About Google’s New “Local +”

Matthew Hunt — Thu, 31 May 2012 15:19:41 +0000

So Google finally released the new Local + yesterday. No surprises here for us local SEO’ers. Now even though this is a major change, DO NOT panic! So far rankings seem very similar and you will still manage your information via your Google Places Dashboard. Google has said: “If you are a business owner, you [...]

4 Important Recent Google Places News Updates Worth Noting

Dat To — Sat, 26 May 2012 18:12:17 +0000

So much happens in online local search each week that it is exciting to be a part of it all. One of the reason’s I love being a part of the local SEO community. Local search is very important local small businesses. A recent study called the 2012 Local Search Usage Study shows how important [...]

How to Use Adwords Editor to Change Broad Match Keywords to Exact or Phrase Match

Dat To — Sat, 19 May 2012 00:08:38 +0000

Often we take over poorly managed Adwords campaigns. One of the biggest mistakes we see is ad campaigns that only bid on ‘broad match’ and we need to go in and clone all the those broad match keywords into ‘phrase match’ and ‘exact match’, but who the hell wants to do that manually?! Lucky enough [...]

Google Places Updates From Vanessa Schneider

Matthew Hunt — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:58:54 +0000

Vanessa Schneider, the Google Places community manager (aka vanessagene) is now doing weekly roundups on Google Places. I think she does a great job. Vanessa gives credit to two of my Google Places peeps: Linda and Nyagoslav for encouraging the idea. Here are Vanessa’s Weekly Roundup Updates & Tips to Google Places: Recent Google Places [...]

Matt Cutts Finally Tells Us How To Rank # 1 On Google

Matthew Hunt — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:30:13 +0000

Sam Applegate made this wickedly funny spoof video on how to rank # 1 on Google. I LMAO! Thought some of my readers might get a kick out of it too! Thanks Darren Shaw for sharing it with me.

Are Your Google Place’s Reviews Missing?

Matthew Hunt — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:30:40 +0000

Recently missing Google Place’s reviews has gotten even worse then normal. Missing reviews has always been a challenge for Google Places, just look at all the threads on Google Places forum about it. Not sure if it’s a bug or a really unsophisticated spam algorithm. Personally I say bug. Looks like Google Places is aware [...]

Google Places Bulk Uploads

Matthew Hunt — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:45:48 +0000

Finally Google Places has made it easier to do bulk updates through the Google Places here. Now if you’re looking at the new listing management interface for users with 10 or more Google Places listings. Follow the steps in the video tutorials to learn about the new features. Here are some highlights to the new [...]

Google’s Over-Optimization Penalty – Is It Affecting Your Small Business’s Website Rankings?

Matthew Hunt — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:09:05 +0000

Google’s long anticipated over-optimization penalty is now live. So Google released another update on April 24th, 2012 being called by SEO’ers as Google’s “Over-Optimization Penalty”. Except Google is calling it an algorithmic update that’s targeting web spam. Google Claims: “Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% [...]

How Does Google Rankings Work?

Matthew Hunt — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:42:25 +0000

How Does Google Search Rank Your Small Business Website? We get this question all the time about how Google Search ranks websites. Above is a great introduction video given by (Google’s Head of Web Spam) Matt Cutts. If you ever wondered how does Google crawl the web and then determine which web pages get ranked [...]

Do Small Businesses Now Need to Worry About Negative SEO?

Matthew Hunt — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 04:04:54 +0000

I work with a lot of small business websites and I can tell you for most of them 60-80% of their traffic comes from Google. Now just imagine that traffic stopping one day to zero… what do you think is going to happen to their businesses…? Yeah, you got it… massive losses in business. Scary [...]