Category Archives: Blog

You may know you want to get your business online, you may not. Either way you are most likely too busy growing your business through your core competencies and don’t have the time to even figure out where to start. Sound familiar? If so, you are in the same boat as many of the local business owners we have talked to in our customer development efforts. Unfortunately, it becomes really easy for some of us involved in the online marketing space to get too deep in the weeds to understand this more fundamental problem, so I decided to compile a quick guide about how local business get online as well as some basic things you can do to enhance your online presence.

How Do Online Business Listings Get Created?

While this question may seem pretty obvious, the answer is actually quite complicated. Local business information is created and aggregated through numerous sources. This video by David Mihm breaks down the complex way in which Google creates local business listings:

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the local search ecosystem graphic David references in this video. It further illustrates the complicated web of local business information online.

The Local Search Ecosystem - This is where you get your business online

I Understand How My Business Gets Online… Now What?

Excellent question! If dealing with this complex system is too much for you to tackle it on your own, there are lots of local search professionals out there who can help you. If you are brave enough to tackle this mighty beast on your own then keep reading, as I will provide some optimization resources for you.

Neil Patel, from KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, released this incredibly comprehensive guide about local search and social optimization. You will have to churn through several pop ups, but I promise the guide itself is worth it, especially for those of you who don’t have time to dive through endless resources.

In order to understand how to prioritize optimizing your business’s online presence, it is important to understand what the most important factors are. Luckily, David Mihm comes through again with his panel of experts list of local search ranking factors and their importance relative to each other. While it may take a little bit of effort to fully comprehend this list, combining it with Neil Patel’s guide referenced above will give you a great start to successfully marketing your local business online.

Wading into the Local Search World

For those of you who want more specific and granular resources here is a pretty comprehensive list on relevant subjects:

Google Places Optimization – While Google Places has undergone a few changes since this article was written, the core components of how to optimize a Google Places page remain relatively intact. If you want to stay up to date with all things Google Places then Mike Blumenthal’s blog is the place to do it. If you have questions related to Google Places, definitely check out the Local Search Forums over at Catalyst. It’s filled with questions by local business owners coupled with actionable advice from experts in the field.

Local Social Media – If you don’t think social media is important for local businesses you should be aware that 15% of consumers use social media to discover local businesses. If you want a more comprehensive guide to social media, I highly recommend Social Media for Small Business.

MicroData Markup -I highly recommend taking a look at the schema.org local business standard (and all variants). If that level of web development is not up your alley (don’t worry, it isn’t for most people), you should send it to the person who handles your business’s website. The ability to send targeted signals to search engines about your business is critical for achieving high search rankings and driving more relevant traffic to your website.

This should be enough to keep you occupied for the immediate future. Just remember, there is always more out there and the local business ecosystem is always changing.

With Yahoo! Local’s invention of the Marketing Dashboard in 2012 and Google’s recent migration to its new user interface, Bing recently evolved into something new: Bing Business Portal is now called Bing Places for Business. So what’s new and different with their completely-revamped UI? Apart from dropping the “BETA” version in its name, there are numerous differences between the Portal and Places.

Bookmark it!

The URL used to log into your Bing account has changed. You no longer log in through www.bing.com/businessportal but rather https://www.bingplaces.com/. Although, if you do happen to forget that the web address has changed, typing in www.bing.com/businessportal will redirect you to Bing: Places for Business.

Appearances

Once you have logged in to your Bing Places account, you will immediately see the drastic difference in appearances between the Portal and Places. Bing has simplified their menu for the user, dividing its menu tabs into three parts:

Add Your Business – This section of Bing Places allows you to add your business listing(s) or find existing listings that you can claim into your account.
Add Multiple Businesses – Managing a chain of restaurants? Bulk upload your multi-location business with an excel file sheet. Bing includes a template of the excel file once you export it. Use this template to add your locations making listing creation quick and easy!
Manage Your Listings – This is Bing Places’ dashboard. Here you will find all your Bing listings and their statuses.

Bing now provides a map on the right panel of your Bing Places account, so you can see their geographic locations. You can view the map through a “Bird’s eye” which resembles Google’s Satellite version of Google Maps. If this does not appeal to you, you can use the standard road map version. If your map marker is incorrect, you can move it. Bing still does not offer street view.

Apart from the interface add-ons, Bing removed offers and deals. When a Bing Rep was asked why they discontinued this feature, he responded that “…the engineering team wanted to simplify user experience…”

In place of this feature, Bing launched Bing Offers. Business owners can still add offers and deals to display on this new platform just as long as the offers are added on deal aggregators like Living Social, Yipit, and Yelp, to name a few. Bing pulls offers from these aggregators onto their Bing Offers site so consumers can find all deals from different industries and businesses in one interface.

Bing Offers is a new offers platform and operates alongside with deal aggregators like Yelp, Yipit and Living Social.

Change is good

Inside the Bing Places account, you no longer have the business name, street address, city, state, and phone number to search for an existing listing. Bing has simplified the search with two search options: phone number and business name plus location. (If these fields are too narrow for your search, you can always utilize the business name field to input a keyword.) The search results returned to you will contain many results. This is great for looking up duplicates, even if it’s for an outdated business listing lingering on Bing Maps.

Users will appreciate this change: you no longer need to PIN verify duplicate listings to remove them. Bing representatives say with the new migration, users can just claim listings and hit the “delete” button. It’s a quicker process and one fewer PIN verification for cleaning up your listings.

To enhance the user experience, Bing has added a few more fields that the portal did not have. This gives the user more options to optimize their listings. These fields include:

Adding up to 10 categories (no custom categories permitted)
A field for video links (That’s right, it is plural; we can add more than one – from any video hosting site!)
A field for additional websites
A submit button! (The Portal did not have this, which mislead many users who were curious to see if their data was submitted.)

Change is good…to an extent

We’ve reviewed the list of changes Bing has integrated, but what has been taken away from the user experience? What has been added that has challenged or restricted Bing users?

Can’t find the option to hide your business address? You are right! Bing removed that feature. According to a Bing rep, “We’re pushing the team as hard as we can to bring that feature back,” since there were many who favored that feature. For now, the user must decide whether or not they want their address displayed on Bing. Until we find out whether or not Bing decides to keep the hide-address option, users must be patient.

Here’s another: you may want to sit down for this one. You may cringe. You may cry and you may pull out a few hairs: Bing does not allow users to modify a business name, even if it is adding an “LLC,” an “Inc.” an “s” or changing an “and” to an “&.” Bing implemented this change for security reasons so that no one can claim and modify someone else’s listing.

However, there is a solution to that. If you are frantic to add “awesome” to “Harry’s Subs” or an ” ‘s ” to “Ricardo Pizzeria” to show that it’s yours and not Jared’s or Mike’s, then get in contact with a Bing representative and explain your issue. It’s free and only cost you some time, but you can resolve the problem.

Have a punching bag ready because Bing won’t allow you to change the address and phone number at the same time. Even if you need to add a suite number or modify “Street” to “St.” you may only change one element at a time. And yes, that means TWO PIN verifications are required.

If this is perplexing, you can contact a Bing rep through their chat and they can assist in changing both at once.

Just Keep Your Shirt On!

All these changes mean we must adjust and adapt. Bing is still undergoing changes and we should prepare to see revisions to their interface, both additional features and deletions of some already present.

Bing encourages feedback. If you need to have your opinions or ideas heard, email [email protected].

First Impressions

Early this year, Google rolled out phone support for local business listings. This was a big step for them, as Google has been very difficult to contact with regards to most of its products. It is also an especially welcome accomplishment because Local in general has been such a mess lately that any step toward dealing with the scores of problems that we see on a daily basis is a welcome one. Recently, I was setting up Google Places accounts for a few clients, most of whom were not able to receive mail at their addresses and therefore they were not eligible for PIN verification I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to try out Google phone support for verification.

During my first call, I was asked for the email address of the account in which my listing was located. I provided it and then was asked to confirm the business information (Name and Address) of the listing, which was easily done. Next I was asked what was wrong with my listing and I explained that I was unable to receive mail at the entered locations.

Here’s where things got a little hairy. The first guy I talked to asked me if I was the business owner, to which I replied that I was not. He then told me he could go ahead and verify the listing for me. I hung up feeling extremely satisfied with my experience. (After taking the phone survey, of course. Who wouldn’t take the survey after such a pleasant and smooth experience?) I was told to wait a week for the listing to be verified, which I did. No results. I waited another week for good measure. No results still.

Nagging Works!

I made my second call to check up on how this listing was doing. I answered the questions as asked and told the customer service representative that I had called previously but had gotten no results. He mentioned that he saw that someone had touched the listing, but now he needed confirmation that I was allowed to verify the listing. He asked if I was the business owner, and when I said no, I was told that Google would have to contact our client so the client could give Google permission to verify. I was hesitant to tell Google that I was from an SEO agency, but fortunately the rep seemed completely fine with this. He let me know that they would be sending me an email so that we could set up a time for him to call my client and the client could verify that the listing was his.

Seems gravy right?

The email never came. A week later I checked the listing and — OH WAIT! it’s verified.

I assume Google sent a message not to the account that the listing was in, but to the email named in the listing, which went directly to my client. The email must have asked if the business could be verified, and the client must have responded in the affirmative.

Easy Peasy Mr. Freezy. Or not.

Using phone support to get listings PIN verified CAN be fairly smooth experience. In my experience the fastest way to do this is to call in, tell the customer service representative that this listing is for your client and said client is unable to receive mail at that location, and ask them to call your client to confirm that you have authority to verify the listing. They’ll put you on hold while they call the client, and if all goes well your listing will be verified within the next 2 minutes.

Unfortunately, there are other situations you might encounter that will give you mixed results. I once tried to verify a listing and the woman on the phone told me that my business address was not legitimate. (The business was a fishing charter and the address was the address of the marina.) She asked me to confirm the address with my client and call back to get it verified. I hung up, promptly called back without contacting my client, got a different operator, and was able to get the listing verified easily.

Other complicated situations involve efforts to claim listings that are already verified by your clients. I had 2 clients who had verified listings in their own places accounts, but either didn’t want to share the login credentials with us or couldn’t remember their usernames and passwords. The Google support team usually has a different plan of action for each scenario, so you’ll just have to roll with it. If the client’s Google Places account has been inactive for a while, Google can remove the listing from their account and allow you to claim it. If the client’s account is active, Google can call or email your client and request that you be allowed to control the listing by deleting it from their account. However, if your client wants to continue owning the listing without giving you login credentials you may be SOL.

The conclusion I have drawn about Google phone support is that everyone’s experience may differ somewhat, and your efforts may not always produce the expected results. Calls to different operators with the same request have yielded different results and there have been a few times when an operator has told me that they would take action and a few weeks later I’m still waiting for something to happen. Whatever the case, speaking with someone on live support who can outline a plan to deal with your Places problems is infinitely preferable to submitting a form online and not ever knowing if anyone got your request or even whether they care enough to deal with it. Phone support for Places is a GOOD thing that everyone should take advantage of if you’re having difficulties with anything in your listing; it can only get better from here.