Uggh. I hate it when I get these emails from my clients:

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As evidenced by all their other 5-star reviews, my clients do great work, so great their clients or customers are motivated to take the time to go to Yelp and leave a review. These are real, honest, appreciative reviews. They’re not fakes. No one has been paid to leave those review.

And yet, Yelp hides them.

Years ago getting that #1 rank was easy.  But things have changed. Competition has  increased. And anyone in the  internet marketing field has learned the basics with most all of them saying “they do SEO.” Even business owners are doing it. So now to get Google’s attention – and, more importantly, your customer’s attention –  you have to step it up. I gave this talk at the Santa  Cruz WordPress Meetup group in September, 2013. These are certainly not all the SEO techniques you should be implementing, but here are a few that address the ho-hum approaches that everyone is doing now.

Reviews, good positive reviews are probably the most important and beneficial things you can get for your business. But how do you get them? Anyone with a complaint will eagerly leave a bad review, but getting a good one is like pulling teeth.

It’s easier with these easy-to-make review table tents and check sleeve inserts for restaurants

These table tents may help restaurants and any business that has tables where customers sit or transaction counters such as at doctors’ offices. Scanning those QR codes will land your customers right onto your Google page where it’s very easy to leave a review.

Mike Blumenthal recently drew attention to the lack of category choices we’re all going to have to get used to in the new Google+ Local dashboard. Previously, we’d be able to create an additional 4 custom categories to describe our business services more accurately besides the one that Google provides. And we did so in hopes of giving us a better chance of showing up for those keywords.

This lack of choice has gotten a lot of Local SEO’s up in arms because as Mike points out:

“Categories are a critical piece of how Google determines the relevance (not rank) of a listing in local search and there are so few categories that the consumer search results will likely not show businesses that should be shown.”

Who am I to argue with “Professor Maps” as the Local SEO world affectionately calls him (and he deserves that distinction), but this just doesn’t make sense to me. I must be missing something. Isn’t that like saying Google doesn’t know what a web page is relevant for without the meta keywords tag it deprecated so long ago? If we rely on custom-made categories to group businesses into buckets, then aren’t we turning over the wheel to reckless drivers? 

Nyagoslav Zhekov, a well-known Local SEO in the industry, recently wrote a blog comparing manual citation building with Yext, an online service that makes the normally long tedious process of citation building short and sweet.

(Citations, in case you don’t know, are mentions of your business throughout the web that include your name, address and phone number. These usually include listings in Google+ Local, YP, Yahoo, Yelp, Manta, Bing, Foursquare, Citysearch, and other hyperlocal directories and are important for helping local business get found wherever people are looking for local businesses. They also help websites rank higher in Google.)

Since there are literally hundreds of places your business can be listed, citation building is very time consuming, so when I first heard about Yext I was thrilled. Imagine being able to create and maintain 50 of these listings from one dashboard with just one account instead of 50. Truly a time and headache saver.

But, aside from the cost, Nyagoslav drew attention to something about Yext that really ‘got my goat,” so to speak.

The word is out. Google has released their disavow link tool, the SEO world is abuzz, and now you’re paranoid, thinking you should do something about it.

So stop worrying, already. You probably don’t need to do anything.

According to Google itself, “The primary purpose of this tool is to help clean up if you’ve hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building.”