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.

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 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:

I’m bummed. I had a client who probably spent an hour writing a glowing review at Yelp about what I did for his business with my KickStart consultation program. It was a full page filled with all the details of how I helped him and the embarrassing results he got – embarrassing because he commanded 8 positions on the first page of Google. He was aglow and went on and on and on. It was the kind of review that every business wants to get.

Sadly, I’m guessing that Yelp considered it too good to be true, so they removed it. That’s not all that uncommon. They do it in an attempt to keep out spam. Unfortunately, though, it may appear that they are over-zealous, some say unfair, and then come the conspiracy theories about Yelp.

I don’t want that to happen to you, so I want to share two pieces of advice with you and give you a REVIEW TOOL for FREE that might help you get and keep the great reviews you deserve – it’s just not going to be on Yelp.

Why is that? Because it’s against Yelp’s policy to ask for reviews.

“But I’m not prompting them what to say and I’m not only asking those who had a good experience,” you may argue.

Doesn’t matter. Requested reviews are just not as credible as those that come spontaneously by your customers.

Also, Yelp knows that businesses will actually incentivize reviews with things like, “Leave a review and get a free latte on us!” And then how authentic are those? NOT!

For the good this does for consumers and for businesses who have to compete against the unethical review practices of their competitors, I stand behind Yelp’s decision on this. I think they are doing a great job keeping the platform trustworthy even though to the business owner like me who gets their authentic review filtered from time to time, it may not feel so fair at times.

(Honestly I wish Google would be so stringent.  Fake reviews are easy to fake there. Just go google “how to buy fake review on Google” and you’ll see. In November 2023, Google announced that they are revising their review algorithms so we’ll see if this changes.)

But don’t despair, I’ll also be giving you a tip on how you can drive new business from Yelp even without asking for a single review.