The quickest way to determine the difference between a professional local search marketing expert and someone who does not understand the process, is to watch how long it takes them to select the category or categories for your local business listing. If they complete the task in less than a few minutes, you’re working with a novice. If they follow the process I’m going to describe below, you’ve found someone who is going to put a lot of money in your pocket.

Don’t Assume Anything

Professional local search marketing experts don’t assume anything. They understand that category selection is way to important to flippantly take what is offered by Google and assume that Yahoo, Bing, InfoUSA, Localeze, UBL and others know what’s best for your business, they don’t!

Selecting the right category for your business takes effort. And, when you get it right, you will dominate your market. Here’s what you need to know.

There are three things you must take into account when selecting categories for your business listing.

1. Local Keyword Research

When selecting a category for your business, the first thing you want to do is determine what words and phrases you think your customers are using to find the services you offer. For example, if you own a flower shop you would start with words like: florist, flower delivery, flower shop, etc. Problem is, you’re only guessing.

Next I suggest you use a keyword research tool like Market Samurai or Google to see exactly what words and phrases people are using and how often they’re using those words in their search. I would also arrange them in order of the most searched keywords first. Here are the daily searches for each keyword I found using Market Samurai.

• Florist – 201,205 searches / day
• Flower Delivery – 40,110 searches / day
• Flower Shop – 32,877 searches / day
• Wedding Flowers – 32,877 searches / day
• Flower Delivery – 18,082 searches / day

Then do a search on Google using each of these “keywords + your community” to insure that Google shows a map with local results. Here’s what you’ll find if you search for “wedding flowers Kennesaw, GA.”

Notice how this search generated a local map. If your search does not pull up a map, discard that keyword from your consideration; it’s of no value to you in your local search marketing effort. It may still be a very good keyword, but not for this purpose. Drop it.

Note: You must test each keyword in each search engine to determine if it will generate a map in that search engine.

2. Competitive Category Research

The second thing you want to consider is your competition. What categories have they selected or what categories have been selected for them? If they’ve not yet claimed their business, the search engines will select a category on their behalf. How they do this is not important nor is it appropriate for this article, what is important is the category their business is listed under.

It’s also important to understand that when I use the term “competitor,” I’m not talking about your toughest, meanest most savvy competitor. I’m talking about the businesses that are listed in the top three spots for your keywords on Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Let’s go back and take a look at the florist example above.

The search results show A Pretty Petal in the top spot on Google for the term “Wedding Flowers Kennesaw, GA.” If you look at their Place Page (and you can find it by clicking on the link that reads … 1 review, directions, hours, and more, you will see that they’ve selected Florist and Wedding Store as their two categories.

Then look for the top three categories for the business in the second and third spot which include Marietta Florist and Gifts and Wedding Flowers by Village Green.

Here are the first three categories you will find for each of the top three results.

• A Pretty Petal – Florist, Wedding Store
• Marietta Florist and Gifts – Florist, Roses, Flowers
• Wedding Flowers by Village Green – Florist, Gift Shop, Silk Plant Shop

You will need to do the same research for the other highly search “keywords + community” on Google, and you will need to do the same thing when you select your categories on Yahoo! and Bing.

Note: Wedding Flowers by Village Green is spamming Google by placing the keyword Wedding Flowers in front of their business name which is Village Green Flowers & Gifts. This is against Google’s rules and they are taking the risk of being removed from the search engines completely. You don’t need to spam the search engines to get high placement. Don’t take this risk.

3. Selecting Your Categories

Google gives you an opportunity to select up to five categories. You must choose at least on of their suggested categories and then you can create up to four more of your own.

This is best understood though an example. Let’s start by looking at the five categories Google offers for someone in the florist business.

• Florist
• Wholesale Florist
• Dried Flowers
• Silk Plant Shop
• Artificial plant supplier

If you’re business focuses on dried, silk and/or artificial flowers, Google offers some very good category choices for you. On the other hand, if your business sells and delivers fresh cut flowers, there’s only one category that accurately describes your business; Florist.

Based on my keyword and competitive research, these are the categories I would choose for my Google business listing for a florist who sells and delivers flowers. Remember, I can select up to five categories in Google and only one of them has to be a Google suggested choice.

• Florist - Only category suggested by Google
  
• Flower Delivery
• Flower Shop
• Wedding Flowers
• Flower Delivery

My category selections were primarily chosen in the order of the number of searches for each keyword or keyword phrase I discovered from Market Samurai. Order matters so choose your first category based on the category that generates the most business for you. You don’t have to choose Google’s suggested category first, you just need to make sure that you select one of their choices. In this example, it just happened that Florist is the most search for keyword.

Yahoo! and Bing Category Selection

Yahoo! and Bing don’t give you the opportunity to create your own categories. Yahoo! allows you to select up to five categories and Bing six. Both search engines make you select from their list of standard category selections.

When choosing categories for Yahoo! and Bing, I encourage you to go through the same process. Start by doing your keyword research, and then pay very close attention to the categories chosen by your competitors on those sites. They are often not the categories you expect.

Conclusion

Selecting the most profitable categories for your business listing takes time. By doing the research you will know exactly what words and phrases the search engines promote and which words and phrases they ignore. Don’t hurry though this process. It’s to important and to valuable.

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What should I write? Does it really matter? Will it help my ranking on Google Maps? These are the questions I asked the first time I was confronted with this task, and I’m sure you’re wondering the same thing.

This article is going to answer the first question in detail. The answer to the second question is a resounding “Yes,” and you’ll find the answer to the third question with conclusive proof before you finish the article.

What The Experts Do

As a local search engine marketing expert, I’m always looking for ways to optimize my description text for the search engines while grabbing the attention of my readers. This can be tricky, but very rewarding if done correctly. Unfortunately, most business owners and local search marketing professionals don’t give it the attention it deserves. This is a big mistake.

When writing the description text for your local business listing, you have fewer than 30 words to inform your human readers about the products and services you offer while simultaneously providing the search engines with fodder to promote your business to your target market. Here are three of my favorite ways to accomplish that task.

Informational

If you don’t tell people what you do, they’ll assume you don’t do it. Fortunately, Google gives you an opportunity to briefly tell the world what you do in one to two sentences. Here’s an example used by a very successful mortgage company on Maui.

Premiere Mortgage is a Maui mortgage company specializing in home loans, debt consolidation, home refinancing, jumbo loans, lot loans, construction loans, condotel loans and second home loans.

Notice how the description text includes the geographic modifier, “Maui” along with their litany of services. Many people would not know that a mortgage company offers debt consolidation or condotel loans, so the people at Hawaii’s Premiere Mortgage Company decided to use this space for just that reason.

And here’s the proof. If you do a search for the term, “condotel loans” + “Maui” you will discover that Hawaii’s Premiere Mortgage comes up in the top position. This is proof that Google does pay attention to the keywords in your description text and uses it in their rankings.

Directional

Location, location, location. You may have a business that’s located in a place that’s hard to find. Maybe your business is located in the basement of a warehouse or inside a grocery store or down a hard to find alley without proper signage. If this is the case with your business, you can use your business description to provide potential customers with directions. Here’s an example.

Go two blocks South of the Big Chicken in Marietta and turn left into the Honda Car Dealership. Joe’s Appliance Repair Shop is in the back of the same building. If it has a plug, we can repair it.

This is generally not how I want to use the business description section offered by the search engines, but if location is a problem, it’s always my first choice. If customers can’t find your business, they’re not really customers are they?

However, there are a few things added to this directional business listing that give it additional value.

To start, it includes three geographic markers; the Big Chicken, Marietta and the Honda Car Dealership. If you’ve ever been in Marietta, GA you know that the Big Chicken is a local landmark known and revered by the people who live there.

And since local people will often search using terms that include local landmarks, adding these terms could very well cause your listing to show up on the first page of results when these terms are used.

Take Advantage of Every Character

And since we were able to provide accurate directions to Joe’s using only 150 characters, we were able to use the remaining characters to tell people what Joe’s Appliance Repair did. “If it has a plug, we can fix it.”

If your location is hard to find, use this space to tell people how to find you. If you have extra space, tell the world what you do.

Testimonial

This is my favorite way to describe a business. I like it because it can be used by almost everyone and it’s by far the most believable and persuasive. Best of all, you don’t have to write it yourself. Let your customers do the work for you. Here’s how it works.

Take your very best testimonial and paste it in your business description. Let your customers do the bragging for you. Here are a couple of different business description examples that could be used by the Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii to persuade searchers of the quality of their programs.

Wow! I learned way more than I expected and I had a lot more fun than I anticipated. I can’t wait for the next Java Gym! – Sydney Smith Coloriginals.

Mahalo for a very informative, fun and educational meeting. I could have stayed an additional four hours to listen to what you had to say. Lee Wheeler – Keller Williams Real Estate.

Notice how the testimonials do a better job of describing what this association does than anything the association owner could have said. It’s persuasive, believable and genuine.

The other thing I want you to notice is how each testimonial ends with the name of the person who provided the testimonial and their business affiliation. This is another way of adding trust.

Conclusion

As you can see, your business description does matter. It can inform your potential customers about what you do, where you’re located and what your customers think about you and the service you provide.

Will it help your ranking on Google Maps? Up until a few weeks ago I would have told you, “I don’t know.” However, based on my personal research, I have to assume that Google and all of the search engines do pay attention to the keywords you use in your business description and that they do reward you with higher rankings, especially if you use geographic qualifiers and/or product or service related keywords. Look at how Hawaii’s Premiere Mortgage Company is doing for the term “condotel Loans Maui.”

You can’t underestimate the value of a good business description. Write it with care and use it to your greatest advantage.

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What Is A Citation?

A business citation is nothing more than a mention of your business, (which could also include your address and telephone number) on a website or blog. The reasons this is important is that it acts as proof to the search engines that your business actually exists at the specified location. The more citations, (or mentions of your business on the Internet) the better.

What A Citation Is Not

Many search marketing experts are under the impression that a citation must include a clickable link back to your website. This is not true. All of the search engines including Google, Yahoo! and Bing understand that many businesses don’t have a websites and that it would be unfair to punish them for that reason.

Accuracy and Consistency

Citations are how the search engines know that your business actually exists where you say it exists. Therefore, you can imagine how important it is to insure that your business name, address and telephone number are consistent across the Internet.

If the search engines see multiple business names with multiple addresses and multiple telephone numbers showing up on multiple websites, they get confused. And when a search engine is uncertain about the accuracy of your business listing, it is hesitate to promote it. At best your business listing will show up deep in the search results where no one will ever find it.

First Things First

Start by checking the accuracy and consistency of your business listing on the Internet. You can do that by doing a Google search for your business name, business address and business telephone number. Search for each piece of information separately. In doing so you may discover that your business name is attached to an incorrect address or telephone number. If this is the case, correct the information on each website before acquiring new citations.

1. Check Out Your Competition

The best way to find powerful business citation sites is to do a little competitive research. Find the company in the top position on Google Maps and Bing Maps for your local search term and see what websites are citing them. (Bing will show many more citations)

Do this for the top three business listings in your community and work on getting citations from each of those sites. Let’s look at an example.

Do a search for “pizza Atlanta.“  You will find Rosa’s Pizza showing up in the number one position. Then, go to the Rosa Pizza local business listing and you will see under the heading More About This Place (as of 2/6/10) that Rosa has 63 citations. If you click on any of the 63 websites, you will see a mention of Rosa Pizza on that page … or at least the page where Rosa Pizza was mentioned in the past.

You’ll also notice that many of the websites citing Rosa’s Pizza are local directories and review sites including: UrbanSpoon.com, AllMenus.com, Yellowpages.aol.com, Kudzu.com and more. Once you see where your competition is getting their citations, it’s a simple matter of getting citations from the same sites. And most of the websites that offer the best citations are free.

Moving Target

It’s important to understand that the Internet is dynamic but not instantaneous. Google, Yahoo! and Bing don’t see citations the instant they’re listed on another website. Sometimes it can take months for the search engines to discover a citation before giving you credit for it.

On the other hand, if a citation is removed from a website or blog, the search engines will continue to give you credit for it until their spiders or crawlers discover that your citation has been removed.

2. Get Listed In Local Business Directories

After you’ve exhausted your list of citation sites gathered from your competition, look for ways to get your business cited on local directories. There’s certainly at least one business directory in your community. Just do a search for the term “business directory + your town + your state.” For example, if you do a search for the term “business directory Atlanta, GA” Google will show you 44,000,000 results.

You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me

Now there are certainly not 44 million business directories in the Atlanta area, but there are at least a hundred that will allow you to list your business for free. Look for a link that reads, “Add a Site,” or “Add a Link,” or “Add Your Business” etc. These links are usually found at the bottom of the home page or in the navigation bar.

I would discourage you from paying for advertising with these directories, at least for the time being. Most will give you a free listing and then try to up-sell you to their paid service. Don’t do it. Go for the low hanging fruit first.

If you want to advertise in their directories later, feel free to do so, but make sure you have a plan to insure that you’re getting a good return on your investment. The way to do that is to ask every new customer how they discovered your business. This is the only true way to determine if your paid advertising is working.

Don’t Waste Your Time

The other thing to note is that the search engines will give you more credit if you have a citation from a website or business directory in your community. It’s a waste of time to garner listings from directories that are outside of your community. Stick with local directories.

3. Get Listed In Industry Directories

Just as the search engines will give you credit for having your business listed in a local directory, they will also give you credit for having your business listed in an industry specific directory.

For example, if you do a search for “pizza directory” you will find the National Pizza Registry which also offers a free business listing for people who own pizzerias. There is probably a similar directory available in your industry. Get your business listed there. These tend to be very powerful citation sites.

4. Get Listed In Universal Business Listing

For a one time fee of $30, Universal Business Listing will get your business listed and generate citations for you in multiple directories. Doing this on your own would take months.

• Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN
• Online Yellow Pages such as Superpages, Yellowpages.com
• Portals and Guides such as AOL, CitySearch
• Cell Phones and Mobile devices such as BlackBerry and iPhone
• 411 Directory Assistance
• In-Car GPS Navigation
• Telematics such as OnStar

5. Get Listed On Local Websites

We like to reward our local Maui customers with valuable citations from our Maui websites when they provide testimonials. You can see an example of what we do on our Testimonial page here. You probably have businesses in your community that do the same thing. This is a little know way to acquire very valuable local citations and a lot of goodwill at the same time. We not only post the testimonials we receive from our customers on our website, we also add their photo and a full business citation.

More importantly, we freely give testimonials to the companies who provide us with exceptional service. We end each testimonials with our business name, address and telephone number and ask that the business owner add that information to our comment if he or she chooses to use it on their website. You can do the same.

6. Get Listed On A Local Blog

Every community has someone who is a blogging fanatic. These people love to write about what’s going on in their community and they do it every day. Find those people in your community. Make friends with them. Write them and tell them how much you enjoy their blog and tell them about your local business.

And when they write about your business in their blog, and they will, ask them to include your full business citation in the post.

I have a friend who is the author of A Maui Blog. Her name is Liza Pierce and she is the blogging queen on Maui. She blogs about life on Maui every day and her blog is very interesting.

I contacted her and asked if she would write about the Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii and how it was helping business owners in Hawaii. She wrote a wonderful post describing what we did in her blog. Not only did her article provide us with great local PR, but it also provide us with a valuable business citation.

7. Article Marketing

We’ve recently been adding a business citation to the author block of every article we submit for distribution, and it’s working. We’re still testing the value of these citations, (in that they are not posted on local or industry sites) but they are showing up as citations on Bing and Google.

If you do article marketing, I encourage you to add your business citation in the author block. It’s easy to do and we’ve not had a single article directory turn us down for adding a business citation to the author block. Try it and see what happens.

Here’s an example of an article from GoArticles.com that provided a citation on Google. And here’s the author block showing the business citation.

Join permission email marketing expert Bob Sommers at the Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii and learn how to run your own successful email marketing campaign. Internet Marketing Association of Hawaii 821 Kumulani Drive Kihei, HI 96753 808-891-0449

You can see where this article, along with the business citation, is currently showing up on 72 different websites.

If you want to learn more about how to use article writing to build your reputation and generate multiple business citations, check out this set of Article Marketing videos. They will show you everything you need to know.

But Wait, There’s More

There are many other ways to acquire citations for your business, but this will get you started in the right direction. If you want to list some of the ways you’ve acquired citations for you business, please tell us in the comment section below.

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47% Never Look Back

Forty seven percent of potential customers who read a bad review will go onto the next business listing without giving your business a second glance.

Here’s the dirty little secret reviewers won’t tell you. The vast majority of bad reviews are from people who are very upset, angry or disappointed with your service. And, their reason for providing a bad review has little to do with the product or service they purchased, it almost always has to do with how you made them feel.

Problem is, the reviewer who took the time to leave a bad review is already angry, and it’s going to be harder to change their mind now than it would have been at the time when the problem occurred. But fortunately, all is not lost.

If you have a bad review that you want removed from Google, here are five solutions that will either win back a dissatisfied customer or push spam reviews to the back of the line.

Solution 1

The only person who can edit or remove a review on your Google Map account is the person who put it there. If you know who they are, you can try to persuade them to change it or remove it. But, here’s the catch.

You must be willing to apologize for your mistake and make things right with the person who posted the bad review. And the only way you’re going to do that is to listen to their concern, apologize and offer a solution. If you handle yourself properly, you’ll be surprised at how easy it can be to get a bad review removed. If you don’t, you’re going to make matters worse … sometimes much worse

Before you initiate contact, put yourself in the mindset of a problem solver. You’re goal is to make the reviewer feel better about you and your company without making them feel bad about posting their review. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Contact the person who posted the review and tell them that you saw their review on Google and that you want to find out what happened and make things right.
2. Listen to their complaint until they’re finished talking.
3. Paraphrase what they said and apologize for what went wrong.
4. Let them know how much you appreciate them bringing their concern to your attention and ask for their suggestion on what you can do make things right.
5. Follow through on their suggestion before you move onto step six.
6. Ask them if they would be willing to edit or remove their review. If they do, you’ve succeeded. If they don’t, you’ve lost nothing but time.

Solution 2

Google will only show five or six reviews on the first page of your Local Business Listing. If you can generate five or six positive reviews, it will move the bad review to the second or third page. Most people will not look that far into your listing before making a decision. But, and this is a big “BUT,” if you ask for too many positive reviews too quickly, Google will push your business listing down in their rankings. When Google sees lots of reviews in a short period of time, it triggers a spam reaction. Spread your positive reviews out over a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Be patient.

Solution 3

Is the review inappropriate according to Google? Read their rules and regulations about reviews and see if this review violates their rules. If it does, you can click the “Flag as inappropriate” button and leave your explanation as to why this review should be removed. If it does violate Google’s rules, they will remove it. This takes time, so be patient and be persistent.

Solution 4

Under each review, Google asks, “Is This Review Helpful (Yes / No).” Google probably won’t remove the review if enough people say, “No,” but if 10 out of 10 people indicate the review was not helpful, your readers will discount the review and basically ignore it. Ask your customers and friends to rate poor reviews as not helpful.

Solution 5

Google does not allow you to offer a management response, but many review sites do. For example, if you get a bad review on Insiderpages.com or TripAdvisor.com, you have an opportunity to respond to the review directly. But let me warn you, there are three approaches you can take when responding to a bad review and only one works.

You can respond in anger. You can respond by making an excuse. You can respond with an apology and a solution.

If you would like to see a well written management response to a poor review, check out the management response by the owner of Eva Villa Bed and Breakfast on Insider Pages.

Unfortunately, the management response on another review site will not show up on Google, but it will show up directly under the bad review on the site where it was posted.

The very best way to handle bad reviews is to insure that unhappy customers never get to the point where they post their opinions on Google. find a way to uncover and solve their concern before they leave your presence. If you provide exceptional service, poor reviews will never become an issue.

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They generally start by going to one of the three big search engines: Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Then they type in the name of the product or service they want to purchase along with the location where they want to purchase that product or service.  For example:

“bed and breakfast Maui” Click to see top 7 results in Google

“pizza Honolulu” Click to see top 3 results in Yahoo!

“dentist 96740” Click to see top 5 results in Bing.

Now it’s your turn

Go to each search engine and search for the product or service you offer just as your customers would. Depending on what you sell, you might not even have to type in your location. The search engines are smart enough to know where you’re searching from. Try it with and without a geographic indicator and see what happens.

• Google

• Yahoo!

• Bing

1. Did your business listing show up on the first page?
2. If so, do you know how it got there
3. Do you know how to keep it there there?
4. If not, do you know how to get it there?

More people are using the Internet to find a local service provider than any other means of search … including the Yellow pages. This is why it’s so important to be where your customers are looking for you.

If you want to know how we get our customers on the first page of the search engines, here’s what we do the help them Get Listed. You can do the same for your business.

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