Local Search and Business Reviews - easier than ever

I've written previously encouraging businesses to get listed in the local listings at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com. I also have a How To eBooklet (called How to Promote your Business on the Internet: with or without a Website) on getting listed in Google Local and getting a review of your business linked to that listing through Judy's Book.

Well, getting reviews of your business linked to your local results is now easier than ever. Both Google and Yahoo have links directly on their local search results that allow you to quickly and easily add a review of a business. Encourage your happy customers to submit reviews to your local results... it will pay dividends in the long run.

For Yahoo, the link to write a review is right next to the local listing:

For Google, you need to click on the local listings details (reviews, directions and more) to get to the links to write a review:
The ease of having reviews linked to your business also opens the possibility of people posting negative reviews. Always be on the lookout for reviews of your business to manage your public relations. Search for your business periodically in local searches to make sure the news about you is Good News!

Keywords and Google Trends

Anyone who has listened to me for a while knows that I feel that optimizing websites for the search engines begins and ends with KEYWORDS.

A neat tool available from Google that I've probably mentioned before, but am starting to use more often is Google Trends. You can plug in any keyword or keyphrase and see a history of the number of searches on Google for that phrase.

You can see an entire history, view it by year or month, or narrow it down to the last 12 months. You can see all regions on the earth, or narrow it down to a specific country.

Google also includes notations of major news articles that contain the phrases you are searching on so you can see. You can compare several phrases on one graph to see the difference in search volume for related phrases.

Following is a screenshot of a search I did for the last 12 months in the United States for the phrases SEO, Internet Marketing and Search Marketing.


While a lot of the data is extrapolated and includes the following note: Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. Several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it. It can be a very useful tool for seeing patterns and trends in keywords and matching up spikes in search volume with significant news articles. Overall a great research tool.

See Also:
Free Keyword Research Tools

Internet Marketing 101 - Find Keywords!

Analytics - What is Bounce Rate?

There are several statistics that I recommend site owners pay attention to on a regular basis. They are: number of visitors, referring sites (where did those visitors come from), keywords (what keywords did they use and top content (what content was the most pertinent to your visitors.

Another statistic to pay attention to is the Bounce Rate. On Google Analytics, Bounce Rate is defined as:

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

Pay attention to your bounce rate - particularly if you are paying for advertising. A high bounce rate means that most people are NOT finding what they expect to find on your website.