Nearby Now

[ChristianRdz]

Does anyone have any experience with working with/using Nearby Now? I'm trying to get more information about this service but what they provide seems so ambiguous. From an seo perspective I'm a little suspicious of it's effectiveness and if they 'play by the rules'. Any insights provided are greatly appreciated.

 

[Tony Wang]

I looked into it a couple years ago and thought it looked promising. My main issue was that getting reviews is hard enough, getting them on your website vs google vs yelp, etc only dilutes them further, especially if you're a smaller business.

But I do recall reading another marketing agency really liked them and thought it was helpful for seo.

What is it that about them that makes you suspicious?

 

[Jac]

For me I prefer to use Checkin a place from drop menu instead Nearby, Many a times Nearby has no relevance or bank.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I tried it a couple years ago. Could not get clients (small business owners) to use it properly and found that the widgets for the site weren't easy to customize.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

So it just facilitates reviews? And Google no longer has a "check in" option for local businesses, correct? So I guess they just mean their own custom check in?

 

[ChristianRdz]

It seems like they have their own custom check in which gets applied via a widget to local city pages you create on a site.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Interesting. Not sure I see a use case where I would use them though. Is anyone using them? Can anyone enlighten me?

 

[brettmandoes]

It's a first party review provider. The reviews are added to your site directly via HTML so it's crawlable. It's useful for getting UGC on your website, potentially with some local keywords in the mix. It's definitely not a silver bullet for SEO.

All you have to do is look up the sites that currently work with them and check their rankings. They talk a good game, but Google isn't giving Nearby Now users a giant boost.