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.

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.

Contrary to what you may have heard, when it comes to small and local business marketing, Twitter is not for the birds. And it certainly is not a waste of time – as long as don’t become a social butterfly and you actually get down to the business of getting new customers. Let’s explore some ways to do that. This first blog on the topic will be on how to find your local prospects in Twitter first.

Find your target market in Twitter

If you haven’t defined your target market, then you’ve been amiss because it should have been one of your first objectives when you started your businesses. So let’s assume you have that, and let’s say for illustration sake that you are a local vegetarian restaurant. Your target market then might be everyone within 5 miles of your establishment who might be health conscious or have heart disease, or who might be a member of PETA. How do you find them in Twitter?

The following is my gift to Kim  Kennedy of Vacation Broken Bow Lake in appreciation for her generous donation to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society. Thank you Kim!

Vacation Broken Bow is coming up in the back stretch!

Good news. I’m seeing some things I did not see a couple of months ago when I first peeked at vacationbrokenbowlake.com‘s rank in Google. Back then for their main keywords, they only showed up in the PPC (pay per click) ads. Today, they are in tenth position in the organic listings (free) for “vacation rentals broken bow lake.” For “broken bow lake cabin rentals” they are in position 9. And interestingly, if you switch that around to “cabin rentals broken bow lake,” Google sees that as a local query and returns Place pages where Vacation Broken Bow is in position C and fifth on the page. Looks like the owner Kim Kennedy has been applying some of the things she’s been learning by following the SEO pros in Twitter.  Or maybe she hired out some help. Whatever the case, congratulations, Kim! Nice to see the improvement.

(And once found, how can it stand out in the crowd?)

This site audit freely given to Jen Jaciw in appreciation for your generous support of Team in Training and the Leukemia Lymphoma Society and Kat & Mouse’s ride around Lake Tahoe in support of the cause. Thank you Jen!

Challenge –

Lone Star Limousine runs their business in sprawling Silicon Valley and serves more than 26 cities. How does a local business serving local clientele get found in Google for queries on all those cities for all their services and keywords? Add to that the fact that there are literally hundreds of other businesses competing for that position. And then once found, how can they be the one that gets picked.

Problem – One physical location, many locations served.

How does Google know which sites to return in local queries?

This sponsorship offer has passed.

But local businesses, look for opportunities like this to get inbound links. Your business benefits, but so do those you support. It’s a win/win.

Here are some search queries to perform to find your own sponsor opportunities:

“become a sponsor”
“donate”
“our supporters”

And if you want to find those sponsorship opportunities in your city simply add + “your city” to those queries.

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You’ve heard it over and over again. You need links on other sites pointing to yours to climb in Google. And that in turn gets you seen and then brings you customers. And you’ve heard SEOs state over and over again that a great way to get those inbound links is by sponsoring a non-profit, an event, or your community’s little league, for example, because typically those organizations will list you as a sponsor on their website along with a link.

Today, I’m offering businesses something much more beneficial than your typical sponsor links.

If you know SEO at all, you know that you can increase the power of your link juice in the following ways: