Recent content by DavidGetty

I’ve noticed that every year people say that citations are less and less important. I’m wondering if any of you pros have an updated list of directories that you still think are important for local SEO?

I had consistent NAP on my GMB profile, website, and Facebook page for 10 years. Nothing. Less than a week after I put a link to my Facebook page on my website it was linked in my GMB, showing my Facebook reviews under “Reviews from the web”.

I put a link to my company’s Facebook page on my business website recently, and less than a week later my Facebook reviews showed up on my Google business profile.

Yes, their name is correct now because I just changed it. I’m sure they will change it back to add the spammy keywords soon. Using the redressal form has never worked for me until I had corrected the name 10+ times and showed that they continued to change their name back to being spammy.

Unfortunately this is just the way it works. You change it, then they change it back, rinse and repeat. What I have found to work is to keep changing it until you hit 10 to 12 times. Then submit a redressal explaining how many times you entered the correct business name and they changed it to...

That is good news. What method did you find successful to get past customers to leave reviews?

I have always found the best way to get your customers attention is to use something that they know about and might actually care about. As an example, the best time that I get reviews is right after doing the work. When the work is finished during the day they will get an email payment...

You mentioned that Freshbooks was becoming too much like accounting software, but out of curiosity, do you use other accounting software? How do you do your bookkeeping? I ask because if you use QuickBooks, you could use them to do your billing as well. I use QuickBooks for my bookkeeping, but...

I have been spam fighting in the skilled trades vertical for a while now and there’s something I’ve always been curious about, maybe the answer to this can help take these places down quicker. Many businesses will set up multiple Google listings by using other addresses that they are associated...

@WesMichy I was wondering if maybe you can help me as well. I have been fighting spam for a while and enjoy it, it usually goes very well. But every once in a while I will find a listing that won’t budge, and I don’t know why. I am working on one right now, there is a real listing and then a...

City based landing pages are great, but there are certain things you have to do to make sure you don’t get penalized for them as if they are doorway pages. The most important thing is to make each page unique, each page should be like its own homepage for the people in that town. When someone...

You mentioned that you got backlinks, but are they good quality? Most local businesses don’t have high-quality back links. If you could get some that would most likely put you ahead of most of the competition. That might be an area to focus on.

I read Joy say once that hardest review to remove is one without any context. There’s no way to prove that it’s not a real customer leaving an honest rating.

Thank you for the response. Just to confirm, you don’t think that getting reviews would hurt in anyway, correct? Those competitors in your example with hundreds of reviews that your client is outranking aren’t being held back by that many reviews, right?

Nitesh, are you using the word illegal to describe when someone breaks the rules or guidelines? Or do you actually mean you believe it’s against the law and the government can prosecute you for it? I think there might be a misunderstanding in the use of the word. What you describe may very well...