Tag Archive for: Myles Anderson

Consumers Trust Online Reviews More Than Ever

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Reviews have always been important for reaching and maintaining success as a business, but since the rise of Yelp reviews have become essential. With the increased popularity of rating platforms and our rising reliance on them for online purchases, it is clear we are also beginning to put more trust in online reviews as well.

That is the finding of a new study from BrightLocal which highlights how consumers respond to reviews. This report makes the 4th year BrightLocal has conducted a study on consumer usage and attitudes toward online reviews and the findings overwhelmingly show that we trust online reviews now more than ever.

Myles Anderson shared the findings from the study on Search Engine Land, but the biggest highlight is the finding that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This is great news for businesses with primarily positive reviews, but that means negative reviews have more weight as well.

In the end, the findings just confirm what we’ve all suspected for quite some time. Finding ways to stimulate positive reviews is essential to increasing your online presence and driving new business. Otherwise, you might wind up with poor reviews and dwindling business.

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Forty Percent of Mobile Users Have Never Searched For Local Businesses

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Source: Phil Campbell

Source: Phil Campbell

There is no longer a question in analysts mind as to whether the huge growth in tablet and smartphone usage is changing how consumers behave. Mobile users are impossible to deny, and easy to actually observe. All you have to do is look outside to see the number of people with a smartphone attached to their hand as if they are glued together.

What is in question is just how consumers are using these new devices. Mobile devices change how we find businesses and services, especially locally, but they also affect how we interact socially, how we engage media, and how we organize our lives.

To try to understand how we are using mobile devices, and how they are changing the way we live, BrightLocal conducted a consumer panel survey. They investigated how consumers find local businesses, and what content is the most important to users while they are on the go. Myles Anderson broke down the result on Search Engine Land, but the most notable finding is that while mobile and tablet use is bursting through the roof, less than a third of users are regularly finding local businesses with mobile devices.

Forty percent of consumers claim the have never used their smartphone or tablet to look up local businesses. This should come as a shocker to any SEO analyst who has been keeping up with trends lately. There is a lot of discussion about mobile SEO out there, and plenty of people focus on the local capabilities of smartphones and tablet to find businesses while consumers are already out. They say “shoppers want to be able to find the store they want and buy now” or something like that.

Now, a fair percentage of mobile users are doing just that. Almost twenty percent of users have looked up local businesses at least once a week, and twenty-nine percent do so at least once a month, but the amount of users who have never looked up a local business should still be a very interesting statistic for SEOs.

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Why Do Some SEOs Still Gather Data Manually?

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SEO relies on data. That’s a pretty simple fact. Still, for some reason, some SEOs still do all their research by hand and manually track their performance, usually by making Excel charts that seem to stretch for days. I honestly don’t completely understand how they put the time into even trying to do this, at this point in SEO. So for this article I won’t be answering the question posed in the title, but instead showing why manual data gathering doesn’t make sense anymore.

To do well in SEO, you require fresh and accurate data to base your decisions upon. If you spend all your time and effort doing data gathering by hand, how do you have the time to make solid judgments and strategies for your customers?

SEO, of course, did start out with that exact manual strategy, but the reason it isn’t anymore is because this very problem I’m talking about. There is simply too much data, and data gathering can be easily automated, so doing it by hand is a waste of time and resources.

But, for those few SEOs out there still doing things the old fasioned way, there are pleny of ways to get all of your data gathering automated quickly. Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land gathered a quite a few tools you could use to get started, as well as answering just about any question about local SEO tools anyone has had ever.

It is a comprehensive guide, so if you just need the tools, head straight for that section, but if you need more convincing or don’t understand how the tools work or their benefits, Anderson makes a strong case with his explanations.

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The Basics of Good Local SEO

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Every topic I cover can be as complicated as you let them be. With the focus on minute data and snippets of code, SEO could easily be intimidating for anyone trying to get started learning.

This is a problem for local SEO because most business owners aren’t experts. If they think of local SEO as a daunting field, rather than seeing the opportunities it could open up for them, they are likely to shy away.

With this in mind, I’d like to take us back to the basics. We haven’t covered local SEO here in depth, so this will serve as a great place to begin exploring the topic. But, the tips offered here are valuable for broader SEO as well.

For good local SEO, there are really three major rules.

  • Get your website up to standards
  • Spread your business details everywhere
  • Use social media to get your customers to do promotion for you

Getting your website up to standard

Google is beginning to combine regular and local search results, and your website quality helps decide where you will land in the local search results, as well as more broad searches. Making a quality site relies on you doing a few specific things. For one, your site should have a clear and functional structure with a set heirarchy of pages. This will help Google’s crawlers go where you want them too, and know what is most important.

Another, more basic step in making a good page is just filling your site to the brim with quality content. Your content makes your first impression to customers as well as search engines. Putting out continuous good content keeps bringing search crawlers back to your page, and generate backlinks to your site from other pages.

Spread your business details

This one is quick and easy, so I’m going to let Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land sum it up. “Having your correct business details widely available is positive for local SEO and sets you up nicely to take advantage of the mobile-boom. Many of the same data sources which feed the desktop internet also feed mobile sites and applications so even if your website isn’t mobile enabled your business will appear on popular mobile applications.”

This is especially true for local SEO because people are searching to be able to contact YOU. Make it easy for them. Google will reward you for it. But don’t get lazy once your information is out there. Remember where you have put it by keeping a record. If you ever move, or change phone numbers, you will need to go change it everywhere the old information is.

Be social!

Just like everywhere else online, Google is becoming more and more intertwined with social media. If you don’t have a social media account for your business, it is time to get one. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are all very influential in your SEO status. From there, make it easy to share your content from your site with social media buttons prominently connected with content. Once you have a following, you will notice they share content for you. You still have to be proactive by sharing your content with them on social media in the first place, but if you connect with your followers, you will be shocked to see what they do for you.

Conclusion

Of course, there are a ton more things you can do to help give yourself a boost. It is high time you have a mobile optimized page for your site, and it is important to make sure you are listed on Google and Apple Maps. But, these first three rules will help you easily expand, and see what investing in local SEO can do for you.

 

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