Reviews

The importance of reviews for your business

To continue our map optimization discussion once you have claimed your listing and completed your profile to 100% the next step will be getting reviews! In the middle of 2010 Google changed the algorithm to their map positioning. In essence they made reviews a core component to WHERE your map result will be found.

Now … there are a few things you need to know … you CANNOT “pay” or otherwise offer an incentive to have people leave a review. This needs to be as natural as it can. You CAN however set up a computer at your place of business where customers can leave a review!

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=187622

You can also email your database and ask for a review!

reviews

About the Author:

Samuel Araki is Co-Founder of Local Trifecta Internet Marketing (www.localtrifecta.com). When not out to cure the Yellow Pages epidemic, he dreams in acronyms. Read more about him (www.about.me/samuelaraki)

Sam Araki – who has written 9 posts on Owen's Byz Blog.

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http://twitter.com/bcwebpress BCWebPress

This is good advice. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems Google puts more weight on the number of reviews a company gets than the average rating. For example, I’ve seen companies who consistently received 1 or 2-star reviews (complaints really) ranking well above companies that had a handful of 4 and 5-star reviews.
- http://twitter.com/samuelaraki samuelaraki
  
  We’d all like to think of Google and search as a whole as black and white. We REALLY want to be able to quantify why certain things happen and what exactly we need to do to rank at the top. If it was that easy, there wouldn’t be any need for the growing population of “Internet Marketers.”
  
  To answer your question, there are many factors that blend into why and how rankings occur. For an example of how broad the ranking landscape is and the sentiment of Internet Marketing professionals go, take a look at: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
  - http://twitter.com/bcwebpress BCWebPress
    
    Thanks for sharing that, Samuel. A lot of information to digest, but it’s certainly helpful in explaining some of the strange behavior I’ve seen with Google Places and blended search results.
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