1. Use Circles to target your audience. One of the key features of Google+ is Circles. You can use Circles to separate your followers into categories then choose who to share with. This helps you share information only with people who will find it interesting, rather than just everyone who follows you on the social network. It will help keep people (i.e. customers, prospects and employees) more engaged so they will be less likely to un-follow you.

2. Create multimedia posts. Google+ is integrated with YouTube as well as Picasa, which means you can easily incorporate videos and photos into your posts. Using videos and photos in your posts makes them more interesting for your followers.

3. Use Google Hangouts to connect with customers. With Google Hangouts you can video chat with up to 10 people, allowing brands to start chats with customers. This could potentially allow brands to use Google+ for customer service purposes. Google is also currently testing it’s “On Air” feature which will allow brands to broadcast video messages out to their followers on Google+.

It’s extremely beneficial for your business to be found on Google+ with the incorporation of information from the social network in the Google search results. The more interesting you make your content; the more users will follow you. Then when users are searching for information related to your business on the most popular search engine, Google, they will be likely to come across your Google+ page.

1. Link all of your social media accounts. Since Twitter’s user name policy doesn’t allow people to reserve user names, companies with a more generic name might find that their desired user name is already taken. According to Mashable, this might be a better opportunity for those businesses to better distinguish their brand if their business name is very common.

Another way to verify that your account is the official business account is to add a link to your Twitter account on your official website, Facebook, Foursquare or Google Places pages. Writing “official Twitter account for _____” in your Twitter bio is also a great way to indicate that this is indeed your business’s Twitter identity.

2. Customize your Twitter profile to make it more obvious that this is the official Twitter account of your brand. An impostor wouldn’t spend the time (or money in some cases) to customize a false Twitter account with your brand’s logo, colors, etc.

3. If you have a trademark over your business name or logo and another Twitter account is causing identity confusion, Twitter can step in. You can submit a help ticket and Twitter will examine the situation. If it finds the other account(s) is trying to cause a problem, it will likely suspend the account and give you ownership. However, this only applies if your name or logo is trademarked, otherwise Twitter cannot do anything.

Following these steps will help your brand keep its identity safe while social media marketing. When used properly, Twitter can be an excellent platform for reaching new customers, keeping existing customers engaged and enhancing your company’s image.

View in YouTube and while you’re watching, click the “like” button (thumbs up icon below “play”).

Google Maps shows two different listings for the same business. In some cases they are almost completely different records, but in other cases the listings are nearly identical. The most common differences are found in the business’s address or phone number.

We’ve grouped these phenomena into two categories: alias duplicates and exact duplicates.

In the case of the alias duplicates, the authentic listing shows up exactly as it is supposed to—the contact information and content we provided appear as expected. However, another business listing can be found that contains identical contact information and content; the only noticeable difference is the business name.

To determine if the listing is an alias duplicate, copy the permalink to the listing (which can be found in the link box). Travel to this link instead of the link you’re already viewing. There will be a question mark (?) in front of the CID and then a number. This number is the unique content identifier used by Google. If they are the exact same number, you’ll be looking at the exact same record, but with two different faces. The results shown depend upon the user’s query. To establish which record is the primary record, remove every part of the URL after the CID number. Traveling to this link will bring you to the primary record, which is the most trustworthy listing. The other record is maintained by Google just in case someone is to directly search for that business by its content alone.

For example, if ABC Plumbing was the primary record and Powerhouse Plumbing was the alias duplicate, Powerhouse Plumbing would only be viewed if someone directly queried Powerhouse Plumbing, since all of the content in the record would yield results for ABC Plumbing. It’s for this reason that a primary record and its duplicate listing will never be seen in the same search results.

Unfortunately, there’s very little we can do about this anomaly, but comfort can be taken in the fact that the alias duplicate can only be found when a user searches for that business name directly—there’s no other way to find the duplicate listing. On top of this, any attempt to utilize the contact information will result in contact with the business in the primary record.

Exact duplicates are listings that closely match the business name and contact information, but have entirely different content. They also have different records, or CIDs. At first glance, it looks as though Google has failed to compress these accounts into a single listing. This could be due to the fact that the two records do not have overlapping categories, or much of any other comparable information for that matter.

In order to let Google know about these issues, take the following steps:

When you notice these records on an A-J Google Maps search, go to the bottom of the page. Click the link that reads “Report a problem,” note that the search results contain multiple listings for the same place, and then note that the two records are exact duplicates.

Ranking Factors

Content is King

Having great content themed around, but not stuffed, with search terms that your prospects are querying to find your business is key. Even if you rank high now, without good quality content, Google will eventually penalize you for having a high bounce rate from their search results, or worse, if users vote/review your business negatively as a result of poor content.

For a local business, it’s important to include your business address and phone number in the global footer of your website, near the copyright (or anywhere really), to correlate with the other websites (and the GLBC) that share your business information. There are two critical fields on every page of your website that should have service-related keywords in them: The HTML Title Tag and the H1 Heading Tag. Both should be different, but contain the keyword someone in the context.

Example of a Good HTML Title:
Call Joe’s Plumbing in Anaheim, CA for Fast, Quality Service

GLBC Categories and Details

As you start filling out your Google Local Business Center listing, you’ll notice several fields. We at Local Splash literally live our lives mining the best content to put into these fields to support our goal of ranking higher.

If you want to rank higher in the GLBC, you’ll need to do some research. First of all, you’ll want to spend some time in the free Google Keyword Tool for AdWords to determine which keywords hold the highest search volume and directly correlate to your service (don’t use the term SEO if you sell SEO Services, use the term SEO Services instead).

Next, spend some time querying for the terms you believe will drive the best results from Google then analyze the categories of the companies that come up in the Google Local Business Center for those terms (pay attention to the order of the categories). Our leading-edge technology automates this process for you, insuring your categories are set and recalibrated continuously. This has been known to drive your competitors absolutely crazy.

Snapshot of the results our program produces for the best categories around the search query “local seo services”:

Details are important; just don’t stuff your profile with keywords. Work to get 100 percent completeness in Google Local Business Center. Videos, images, and so forth are all important. Our team of Local SEO Experts have already defined the best possible fields for hundreds of common industries, which explains why so many of our new customers come from referrals from happy customers.

Websites / Web References

As with Organic Search Engine Optimization, local SEO requires visibility (aka: links and mention) from other related websites on the Internet. The best place to get that visibility is from individual profile pages on other local-related websites (ie: Superpages.com, Clush.com, Yelp.com, Yahoo! Local, MerchantCircle.com, and so forth). Done with a little SEO magic, those profiles pass a “vote” to your website with verbatim business data, reinforcing your website’s creditability with the search engines.

If you didn’t get all that, just remember: The more other websites discuss your website in a way that influences the search engines to better understand your topic (also called “service tag” in the local SEO world), the more likely Google will be to reward your website with higher ranking.

User Reviews and User Content

We have seen a number of businesses rank higher than a business with dozens of reviews. So before you get nervous about the importance of reviews; keep in mind that this focal point is not the most critical ranking criteria.

That being said, a listing with more reviews is more likely to be clicked on than a listing with no reviews. Encourage your store visitors to post reviews, offer an online coupon that starts with instructions on how to review the business in Google Local Business Center. Capture email addresses for repeat customers and ask for reviews in periodic newsletters and offer emails.

Scrutinize Google Local Business Center Traffic Statistics

Once you’ve verified your listing, or have had us verify your listing with you, use the data in the GLBC to see if your business profile is appearing for the search terms you are targeting. The Google Local Business Center offers some incredible data, including Impressions (how many time your listing appeared for a query) and Clicks (how many times a searcher clicked on the listing to read more).

See a Screenshot Below

Our Local SEO Account Specialists spend an exhaustive amount of time trying to understand the GLBC traffic statistics to insure that our customers are appearing for the best possible keywords. Our Local SEO moguls (we like to call them “SEO Scientists”) analyze this data across thousands of accounts to create formulations and best practices, all of which are integrated into our leading edge local SEO applications.

Save Time and Money with Local Splash

The good news is that anyone can do their own search engine optimization using the strategies and techniques mentioned above. The bad news is that the time it will take for someone new to local SEO is a lot longer than you might think. Worse, for these techniques to sustain longevity, they need to be repeated month after month, meaning every month you’ll have to spend more time researching new destinations and insuring that you are using the right details in your GLBC profile and so forth.

Put your local SEO on autopilot with Local Splash. Our program is affordable and will save you valuable hours that you could be applying to running your business. Let our pros and our leading edge software handle your local search engine marketing, so that you can go back to business as usual while we help you rank higher in the Google Local Business Center. Call today at 877-635-6225 for more information or click Sign Up Now above.

How Search Engines Define Quality

Pay-Per-Click is no longer a bidding war thanks to the term “quality”. Google wants to return the most relevant search result to their users so they have defined criteria to reduce costs for those advertisers focusing on quality. For Google, this is defined as “Quality Score”, for Yahoo! it’s “Quality Index” (don’t get the two confused, account managers get snuffy when you use the wrong term).

To achieve higher quality in either engine, it’s recommended that you start by creating isolated pages on your website specifically for A/B testing landing pages. To keep these pages from being indexed in the organic search engine results, create or update a robots.txt file containing the following snippet of code:

User-agent:*
Disallow: /{adwords or other category name, remove brackets}/

How to Get Better Quality Scores (or Quality Index)

Below is a list of things that you can do to achieve improved performance from your PPC Campaign. Note that you cannot control the search engines, but implementing these best practices have shown improved results according to the search engine marketing community and particularly MarketingSherpa.com.

• Start with a template or from PPC Landing Page Examples
• Always include a way for the user to return to the main website
• To reduce SEO implications, add a “noindex,nofollow” meta tag to each page
• Include SEO best practices for keyword & ad-matching (titles, meta tags, headings, nomenclature, etc)
• Reduce the page load time as much as possible
• Use a conversion path or other engaging content to keep the user on the website as long as possible.
• Have a privacy policy anytime you are asking for information on a web page.

Higher Landing Page Conversions

There are other enhancements you can make to improve quality and conversion, the above lists just a few. The single most important landing page factor is conversion.

The best examples of websites made for conversion that we have found are listed below. Notice the clean appearance, videos, call-to-action (“Buy Now”) buttons, etc. You’ll notice that these landing pages don’t look like typical websites. They are built specifically for higher conversion rates.

Sample PPC Landing Pages / Websites

• See the websites powered by Livemercial here
• Try Vinotol landing page
• Miracle Blade landing page
• Softlux Pillow landing page
• Walk Fit landing page
• Light Relief landing page
• Bun & Thigh Roller
• Aqua Globes
• Steam Buddy
• Strap Perfect

The “As Seen on TV” industry has done a great job with optimizing landing pages. Apply some the principles used above toward your business to get the highest possible conversion rate.

The above PPC landing page best practices will not only help you to improve visit-to-purchase ratio, but may also lower your costs on PPC engines such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions and Microsoft AdCenter. Quality is everything, A/B testing to get the best possible quality with the search engines will make the difference between a successful campaign and an expensive, less successful PPC strategy.

When was the last time you did a search in Google for your company name? Try it now. Do you see anything negative appear about your company, such as a blog post from a customer who might have had a less than desirable experience? How about a BBB page or the infamous RipoffReport.com? These search results could be detrimental to the success of your online marketing campaign, especially for those users who understand that the true value of the Internet is not just information but diligence.

So How Do You Manage Your Online Reputation?

You can start by looking at your business and practices to make sure there is nothing in the way you do business that could be seen as unethical. If there are negative search results in Google, is there a common theme? Are your prices too high or your customer service not adequate? Look inside first.

Then apply some SEO best practices. Start by jotting down the web address of every website that appears when you search for your company name (or product brand). Spend some time analyzing the titles of the listing in Google and the page theme. Once you’ve compiled a list of web addresses, with columns for titles and page themes, start semi-duplicating the negative strategy but with positive content. Here is an example:

Sample Bad Listing

PizzaReviewGuy · Chucky’s [not] So Cheese Pizza
NEVER go to Chucky’s because the pizza is awful. We reviewed this place and were not impressed
by the service or food quality…
pizzareviewguywebsite.com/chuckys-pizza.html

Sample Replacement Listing

Read Reviews of Chucky’s Cheese Pizza in Anaheim, CA
NEVER go to any pizza restaurant in Anaheim until you have tried Chucky’s Cheese Pizza because
the pizza is fantastic. Read more reviews of this place and were prepare to be impressed…
betterpizzareviews.blogspot.com/chuckys-pizza.html

Follow this same exercise for each negative posting that appears in the search results. When done, you’ll need to do some periodic linking to move up the visibility of each new page you created on the web to push down the negative search results. If you link too quickly or all at one time, your page is likely to be filtered from the search engine results.

Link Strategy for Online Reputation Management

Follow these steps to build links over time to improve ranking in the search results. There are thousands of ways to build links, here are just a few methods that may make a difference:

• If you posted your better page on a blog, submit the RSS Feed all over the Web
• Favorite the page in delicious.com, digg.com, stumbleupon.com, and other social bookmarking websites
• If you use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or any other social network, get some linkage from those locations
• Find forums and blogs that talk about your industry, product, or service and engage in dialog with that community using a signature containing a link to the post(s) you want to have visibility
• Have all of your friends and family (not all at once) start linking from their own websites and social profiles.

Over time, Googlebot will hit your better listing through all of the above links far more time than they will hit the negative listings and eventually you will move up.

Repeat with other destinations, such as:

• Squidoo.com
• WordPress.com
• MySpace.com Blog
• Blogger.com
• LiveJournal.com
• Thoughts.com
• ClearBlog.com
• and more…

Online Reputation Management and the BBB

You might as well be competing with Wikipedia in the search results if your brand or company name appear in a BBB page at the top of the search results, since websites as large and reputable as BBB.org and RipoffReport.com have much more Google PageRank and trust with the search engines. They are also more likely get higher traffic volumes than an newer, smaller website.

To remove these 800 lb websites from the search results, start by contacting them directly to see what can be done. If you don’t get a response that includes an action item list, you’ll probably have to contact a lawyer and battle them out in court. The 1st amendment protects individuals, but only to the extent that it doesn’t become slander or a number of other scenarios your legal counsel will most-likely tell you about.

Worse Case Reputation Management Solution

The world is online. If you have multiple negative listings regarding your brand (or someone else using the same brand name), the worse case solution would be to change your name. Be sure to trademark your name if possible, so that your competitor doesn’t try to use your name in their own brand strategy later.

Understanding how important online reputation management can be is the first step to preventing negative search listings in Google. But if it happens to you, executing the strategy above could make an impact over time to the ranking of negative listings, while at the same time improving your own brand marketing campaign.

Learn 5 power techniques you can implement TODAY to get higher ranking in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines where people are actually searching for your product or service.

Also included in this Free SEO Guide is a list of what not to do to your website and off your website to avoid being penalized or banished from the search results. This guide on search engine optimization is your completely free. All you need to is provide us with your email address so that we can send the guide right to your email Inbox. Optionally, you can provide us with your phone number if you’d like someone on our team to call and discuss your SEO needs.

Where Should We Email Your Free SEO Guide?