Google+ Local

Should You Be Worried About Google My Business?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

A few weeks ago, Google launched a brand-new platform for small businesses. Called Google My Business, it combines the features of Google+ Local and Google Places for Businesses, streamlining advertising and campaign management. Should you be worried about the change? As a Prospect Genius client, the answer is no. We’re staying on top of the updates and can safely say that we’ll be able to continue managing your account without any interruption to your campaign.
For several years now, we’ve been predicting that Google would eventually make this kind of platform available. So far, we’re very pleased with the layout of Google My Business and the accompanying dashboard (which all of our clients should now have access to). As you’ve hopefully noticed, the new dashboard provides you with access to the social sharing features of Google+ as well as the Maps features of Google Places. It helps you manage your customer reviews, too, and lets you track your visibility and performance.
Overall, Google My Business is a highly anticipated design that removes the need for two different platforms and makes advertising management much less complicated.

Will Anything Change?

Since none of Google My Business’s features are actually new—they’ve always existed, just in disparate locations—there won’t be any major changes in the way we do things on our end. The only difference is that we can be listed as your account’s “manager” instead of the “owner,” which means you won’t have to give us all of your log-in information. Being your account manager provides us with access to all of the same features as before, so we won’t be limited in the revisions and additions we can make.
From the new platform, we’ll be able to perform a multitude of tasks, including:

Managing your customer reviews
Tracking your visibility and audience engagement
Sharing photos, links, and other updates from your company
Accessing your Google Analytics data

Remember: In order to continue managing your Google account effectively, we need all of your online information to match. Since we use your Prospect Genius LeadTrax™ URL and CallTrax™ number when creating accounts for you on social media and business directories, we also need to use them on your Google account. This keeps all the parts of the campaign working in harmony, maximizing your return on each dollar.
Google My Business is nothing to worry about because Prospect Genius has you covered. Any questions? Don’t hesitate to call!

How to Make Google+ Work for You

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

As a business owner in the year 2014, you most likely have a Google+ page. If you’re enrolled in the Prospect Genius Starter or Core program, then you definitely do. But the simple act of having a listing isn’t enough if you want to truly optimize your lead generation.
To get the most out of your Google+ page, you’ll have to become an active participant. In this blog post, we’ll cover two of the easiest ways you can optimize your listing: adding photos and getting reviews.

Add Personality With Photos

Adding photos to your listing will have a number of immediate benefits for your business.
First, any prospective customers who see your listing will instinctively view your business as more legitimate if the page is populated with lots of unique, professional photos. After all, it’s no secret that people respond to images and visual aids more strongly than they do to plain text.
Second, Google values diverse, interactive content over one-dimensional content. If your listing is populated with photos, videos, and links, then your rankings will improve.
Finally, the act of adding photos isn’t something that has to remain exclusive to your Google+ page. You should absolutely add these photos to all of your social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter. Unique photos will bring more personality to your company’s listings, which would otherwise be virtually indistinguishable from similar companies’ listings.
Whether they feature your team of technicians, your company truck, or your own family, photos add a face to your business’s name.

Get Rewarded for Your Reviews

We’ve written extensively about the benefits of customer reviews from a marketing standpoint. (We have several blog posts about the topic, which you can view here.) The value boils down to how important it is to showcase your previously satisfied customers as a way of convincing prospects that you’re worth their investment.
But did you know that there’s also a technical advantage to having more customer reviews on your listing? Google’s search algorithms highly value Google+ pages that have lots of customer reviews. Therefore, if your page has lots of legitimate, relevant reviews, it will be ranked higher on search results pages.
Keep in mind, Google+ isn’t the only important online platform for customer reviews. Yelp is equally important for Bing users, as Bing pulls up Yelp reviews in its search results for businesses. That’s why smart business owners will try to spread their reviews around to a handful of different outlets instead of putting them all in one place.
Prospect Genius recommends collecting five to ten reviews on Google+, then another five to ten on Yelp, before moving on to other platforms like Facebook and Citysearch.

Add Our Free Review Feature to Your Site

If it sounds like a difficult task to cultivate reviews and spread them to specific websites, don’t worry: Prospect Genius has a solution. We have a free review feature that you can add right to your LeadTrax™ site. We don’t have an algorithm that arbitrarily blocks or filters out reviews, which means all of the reviews that you want to appear on your site will appear (and the ones you don’t want to appear won’t).
How does it work? Customers click on the “Leave Us a Review!” button displayed on your LeadTrax site. If a customer leaves a positive review (a rating of 4 or 5), they will be prompted to spread that review around on social media outlets like Google+, Facebook, and Yelp. If someone gives you a rating of 3 or below, they will be thanked for their review and won’t be prompted to take any further action. That means you get to put your best foot forward on your own website in addition to spreading your positive reviews across various online platforms. Two birds with one stone!

No More Excuses!

You have a camera or smartphone for taking pictures. Now you have a review feature on your LeadTrax site for cultivating and sharing reviews. You officially have no more excuses for keeping a lackluster Google+ page! Get started today.

How Having a Large Number of Customer Reviews Can Save Your Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’re pushing to improve our own web presence through increased customer reviews and social media activity. As we embark on this long-term project, we thought it would be helpful to illustrate why it’s so important for your company to have a large pool of customer reviews online.
In fact, customer reviews might be what save your business one day. Here’s how.

A Lot of Good Outweighs the Bad

Negative reviews are like vinegar. If a salad dressing or cleaning solution had too much vinegar, what would you do? You would dilute it. Diluting the solution doesn’t change the amount of vinegar, but it does change the solution’s overall composition so that the bite isn’t as strong. The same logic applies to your company’s reviews: While you can’t extract a negative review from your listing, you can flood your listing with so many other customer reviews that a negative one has very little effect.
If you can acquire a large volume of customer reviews before a negative one hits, that’s even better.
Take Conner & Sons Repair, one of our esteemed clients, for example. Serving the Detroit area, Conner & Sons has an impressive Google+ Local listing with a rating of 4.8/5.0 stars from 29 reviews. Given that the overwhelming majority of its reviews are 5 stars, one or two negative reviews read like the flukes that they are. Without 27 or 28 other positive reviews surrounding them, those negative reviews would carry more weight in the eyes of prospective customers.
Note: The owner of Conner & Sons Repair actually responds to one of the negative reviews directly, which highlights the company’s attentiveness and commitment to customer service. Responding to negative reviews is actually a very smart strategy. Read more about it in our previous post, “Keep Calm and Carry On: How to Respond to a Negative Review.”

Boost Search Engine Rankings

Reviews are important as more than just a reputation defense strategy, however. They also pack a super SEO punch.
According to Jayson DeMers, a contributing writer at Forbes, “Regular reviews are important both in terms of your organic search rankings and new customer acquisition. Businesses who have frequent reviews are seen positively by Google and by potential customers. Thus, a herd of raving customers is good for both sales and SEO.”
In the same article, “Your Guide To Customer Reviews For Organic Search Rankings In 2014,” DeMers also adds that Google’s algorithms weigh recent reviews more heavily than older ones. He even suggests that the nature of customer reviews may soon matter, as well: “Google can measure whether a review is positive or negative. While they’re not currently penalizing businesses for poor reviews, they may in future algorithm changes.”
In fact, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, recently hinted at a future algorithm update that might reward merchants with positive reviews and penalize those with negative ones. In Danny Sullivan’s coverage of Cutts’s SXSW conference panel, Sullivan quotes Cutts: “We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results.”

Increase Your Reviews

We’ve written extensively on this topic before, but here are the basic ideas you’ll want to keep in mind:

Make it as easy as possible for customers to leave reviews.
Ask for reviews directly (particularly from loyal, repeat customers).
Act quickly, preferably as soon as your service is completed.

For more in-depth instructions, read our full post, “Make Your Presence Known: Get More Customer Reviews Online.”

The Takeaway

Having a solid reputation with your customers is great, but it isn’t going to help bring in new business unless prospects can also find you online. Collecting more customer reviews will make your listings more visible to those who are searching for your services. And for your future prosperity, you’ll want to make sure those reviews are as positive as possible. With an update to Google’s algorithms looming in the near future, you’ll want to take action sooner than later.

Hand Over Your Google+ Local Listing to a Pro

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

One of the great things about the Internet’s advancements is that average people have a lot more autonomy than they used to when it comes to handling difficult tasks. Various DIY repair guides, YouTube tutorials, and customized shopping options make everything easier to do on your own—whether it’s cleaning an A/C filter or filing taxes.
However, there are some tasks that are best left to the experts, no matter how many online resources you skim over. You probably shouldn’t attempt to install your own water heater or pave your own driveway, for example. Similarly, you shouldn’t attempt to perform high-level online advertising tasks on your own.
Optimizing your Google+ Local listing is one such task. It may seem straightforward at first glance, but the platform actually has quite a few nuances that are only apparent to experienced professionals.
With Google’s new dashboard setup, many business owners have the option of adding a second account administrator. Here’s why you should consider handing over primary administrator status to an online advertising professional, whether you already work with one or you’ve yet to sign up.

Two Lawyers and a Judge

It’s wiser to have a sole account administrator rather than two, equally active administrators because maintaining consistent, accurate information is crucial. You’ll need to take extra precautions to ensure there are no conflicts between admins.
Why? Think of two account administrators as two separate lawyers. Think of Google as the judge. The two lawyers are representing your “case” (i.e. your business’s listing). If they aren’t on the same page and, instead, are giving conflicting facts to the judge, then your case will crumble. Translated to our online advertising scenario, your listing will lose relevance and could even be suspended if Google deems your company’s information wrong. For that reason, it’s best to hand over administrator access to your online marketer instead of trying to have joint control over your listing.
Moreover, if you’re paying for professional online advertising services, it’s wiser to let your money work for you. You’ve made an investment in an online advertising company, so why not facilitate that company’s job to the best of your abilities? Rather than complicating matters by actively interfering with your own listings, you’re better off relinquishing control and letting your hired specialist do the work.
For more extensive coverage of what happens when more than one party tries to work on the same online advertising campaign, read our previous post, “For SEO Companies, Two’s a Crowd.”

Keeping Up With Google’s Guidelines

Not only do you want to make sure there’s one consistent story throughout your online advertising campaign, but you also want to make sure your listing is always in compliance with Google’s guidelines. Unfortunately, staying in compliance with Google’s guidelines isn’t as simple as reading through them once and remembering the important points.
In fact, Google amends its guidelines almost as frequently as it updates its algorithms. If you want your Google+ Local listing to remain in good standing, then you’ll need to stay on top of the many guideline changes—most of which happen overnight, without warning.
Here’s a recent example of what we’re talking about: Google used to push business owners to gather customer reviews as a way to boost their listings’ relevance. Then one day, without notice, they changed their policy to explicitly forbid soliciting customer reviews. If you were caught requesting reviews from past customers, you were suddenly breaking the very same rule you thought you were following.
This is where an Internet marketing professional comes in handy. It’s our job to keep a watchful eye over your company’s Google+ Local listing and to constantly update our knowledge of Google’s best practices. Most small business owners don’t have the time or resources to do this on their own.

We See Things You Don’t

An Internet marketing professional knows what works and what doesn’t when it comes to Google+ Local listings. That’s because we see literally thousands of listings and are trained to identify various patterns and trends. By comparison, when the only listing you manage is your own, you’re limited to just one data point. This makes it impossible to spot a trend until your listing is actually affected by one. It’s a good idea for business owners to let experienced online advertisers handle their Google+ Local listings if for no other reason than the fact that a professional online advertiser has much more data to work with and knows which warning signs to look for.
The same rule applies to most other skilled trades. For example, the more car inspections a mechanic performs, the better he or she will get at identifying red flags. Likewise, HVAC contractors are always the best resource for troubleshooting furnaces because, through repetition, they’ve learned how to connect the dots between certain symptoms.
To put it simply, practice makes perfect—and you can trust that your online advertising professional has had a lot of practice.

Stick to Your Strengths

Every company specializes in a niche skill. Let flooring contractors do the tile installation, let appliance repairmen fix broken refrigerators, and let online advertisers handle Google+ Local listings.
For more information on this matter, please don’t hesitate to contact us! A Prospect Genius representative will be happy to help you get the most out of your online advertising.

Make Your Presence Known: Get More Customer Reviews Online

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Day in and day out, you’re churning out terrific work for seemingly appreciative customers. You have no shortage of confidence in the quality of your services. So how come your online presence doesn’t reflect that? Why aren’t your company’s customer reviews pages brimming with five-star ratings?
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to perform dependable dryer repairs or to install central air systems flawlessly. You also have to get the word out about your satisfying work. That’s why getting online customer reviews for your company is now a critical part of promoting your business. When prospective customers find your company online, they want to see how previous customers fared before they make an investment.
As David Streitfeld of the New York Times wrote in a recent article, “If you provide a service or sell a product and you are not reviewed, you might as well not exist.”
It’s simple: If you want to attract more customers, you need to get more customer reviews. Here’s how.

1. Make it as easy as possible.

Most people are short on time and patience, so make it as convenient as possible for them to leave you a review. After all, they’re doing you a favor. Don’t make them search high and low for your Google+ listing or Facebook page. Instead, there are a few ways to streamline this process for your customers:

Use an on-page feedback feature (like the Prospect Genius one!). Chances are, your customers are already familiar with your company website, so they’ll be able to visit your page, submit a review, and disseminate it to other review sites in a few simple steps—all without having to navigate away from your page.
Add a QR code or shortened URL to your business card and other handouts. Customers can use their smartphone to scan the code, sending them straight to your website or Google+ listing. This removes the steps they would normally take to type your URL or find your listing elsewhere. Alternatively, if you use a shortened URL (from bit.ly, for example), they’ll be able to type it into their navigation bar without much confusion.
Send an e-mail with direct links to your preferred platforms (e.g. Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch). When you send a follow-up e-mail to a customer to ask how their experience with you went, include a link to one or more of your business listings. This way, the links are already provided, and all the customer has to do is click their mouse to get to a review page. Plus, if you want, you get to influence where the reviews are posted.

2. Ask directly.

Most customers aren’t going to take the initiative on their own, so if you want a review from them, you’ll have to ask. You can call them, e-mail them, ask in person, or even put a reminder at the bottom of their invoice. This can all be done once the job or transaction is complete. However, many business owners have actually seen an increase in reviews by asking for a review before the job even starts. For instance, if you’re an appliance repairman, you could say to the customer, “If you’re happy with our work at the end of the day, would you mind reviewing us on Facebook?” With the idea in their head early on, they’ll be more likely to pay attention to your work and write a more thorough review.
Bonus: Directly asking for reviews also emphasizes your concern for customer satisfaction. When you call or e-mail a customer to see how their experience was, it shows that you care about them even after they’ve paid you. This helps to ensure repeat customers.

3. Act quickly.

A customer is most likely to write you a review when the experience is fresh in their memory. If you wait even a couple of weeks after the house cleaning, car stereo installation, or gutter repair is complete, your customer might have already forgotten important details about the experience and therefore be reluctant to leave a review. Capitalize on their initial impressions and how they feel about the finished product before their enthusiasm wanes.

4. Offer incentives.

This tactic is pretty divisive, as many review sites forbid giving rewards or special treatment to customers who leave reviews. Sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and even Google all explicitly stipulate in their terms and conditions that they want honest, unbiased reviews that are free from any conflict of interest.
However, a major conflict of interest only seems likely if there’s a massive contest, prize, or future discount on the line. We recommend staying away from lavish incentives like that. Instead, you might consider offering a small, $5 coupon to the local coffee shop in return for a review (no matter what the review’s content). This gesture is enough to show that you value their feedback without it coming across as a bribe.

Two important notes when soliciting reviews:

Don’t ask customers to create new accounts (especially on Yelp) just to leave a review for you. Strict spam filters will peg the first few reviews from a brand-new account as spam until the user proves his or her legitimacy. In the meantime, their positive review of your company will probably be filtered out, rendering it invisible to others visiting your page. In short, it will be a waste of a good review.
Spread your reviews around. Don’t ask all of your customers to review you on Facebook, as that will leave your Yelp or Google+ listing totally useless to prospects who prefer those sites. Moreover, if you rely solely on one site, that leaves you completely at the mercy of that site. If there are any guideline changes or technical glitches, your listing could be ruined. So instead, give your customers options of where they can review you. Chances are, the reviews will stay pretty evenly distributed on their own. But if you do notice that one of your listings has significantly more reviews than the others, you can always stop asking for reviews on that particular site and let them pile up elsewhere.

Getting reviews isn’t easy, even when you’re consistently providing stellar customer service and results. But by using these fundamentals, you’ll be able to slowly and steadily pull in the quality customer reviews you want.

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