Recent content by Local Search News Curator

Multiple Owners for Google Business Pages & Accounts - Online Ownership This post brought to you by Online Ownership The post Multiple Owners for Google Business Pages & Accounts appeared first on Online Ownership. Google My Business now allows multiple owners of a Google business page and...

You only have so many customers.? Many of them are probably happy to write you a review online (especially if it?s as easy as possible).? So where should you encourage them to go to post reviews of your business? If you think the obvious answer is ?Oh, I?ll just steer everyone to Yelp and...

I learned the hard way this past week that a business listing in the new Google Places for Business Dashboard that has been upgraded to social functionality, is intimately tied to that social presence. Delete the social page and you delete the business listing forcing you to reclaim the listing...

Since Google has allowed ?business listings created via the (old) Places Dashboard to merge with and take on attributes of a G+ Page for local, it has been standard procedure in certain problem cases to delete the G+ Page and return the listing to a non-social listing. I had done so on numerous...

First spotted on Linda Buquets forum earlier today, Google has announced that they have started auto-merging G+ social functionality into basic (upgraded) Dashboard listings. Here is the Google announcement (bold is mine): Starting today, some pages managed in the new Google Places for Business...

Joy Hawkins of Imprezzio Marketing, alerted me to this post in the Google forum where a business noted that the Google Places for Business Guidelines do not prohibit the use of city in the category field . Apparently?Google has recently changed the Google Places Quality Guidelines and removed...

If you’re a business owner who needs more local visibility, you want to make sure the person helping you has all he/she needs to deliver the goods. Or, if you’re a local-SEO pro, you want to make sure you have all you need to deliver the goods. The questionnaire I send to potential clients helps...

The new Places for Business Dashboard has for the most part been a significant improvement over the old Dashboard in most regards. That being said, it was missing one critical feature: you couldn’t remove a listing from the dashboard once you had started the claiming process. That self evident...

Google has had a busy week on the local front. The most significant of these updates are two new local interface conventions in the main search results. Clearly Google wants increase the visibility of their reviews and it is going to do so by keeping users on their front page. Yesterday Andrew...

If you have a local business, you will need to incorporate local into all aspects of your online marketing strategy, including your content marketing. This can help ensure that more pages of your website (your blog in particular) rank well when people are searching for local content. In today’s...

Maybe this describes your small business, or a client’s small business: 1.) You know you need to create great, unique content so you can target relevant local keywords and attract new search traffic. 2.) You offer the same (or very similar) products/services in multiple cities. Here are...

Duplicate listings can very easily turn into the plague of the online marketing of every local business. They not only often feature old or incorrect and misleading information, but could also potentially “transmit” this information to other sites, thus spreading it throughout the whole...

Are we gearing up for another format war (does anybody still remember Betamax vs. VHS?) or is Apple just telling Google that they can’t play in their sandbox anymore? When iOS was unveiled earlier this week, probably the biggest hubbub came from Google Maps and YouTube getting the boot. With...

Darren Shaw, creator of the Local Citation Finder, recently asked me this great question… I’ve heard people talking about how citations might not be a valuable ranking factor in the future. What do you think? Will they stop being effective for local optimization in the future? It might...

The big G turned big because it managed to gain a tremendous amount of mindshare. Google today does not rule the search engine arena. It rules minds. You don’t pay Google to have your site ranked. Really, who does that, right? Wrong. You do pay for it. But not with money, with content...