Are Younger Consumers More Tolerant of Bad Reviews? Or Do They Just Understand Them Better?
If your business has an aggregate star rating of 3 or less, you need to be concerned that shoppers might reject you out of hand. If, on the other hand you have a star rating greater than 4 most shoppers will accept you on face value. However we are seeing dramatically different standards within different […]
Google Now Displaying Full Review Snippets in the Knowledge Panel
Off and on for the past few months Google has been showing reviews in the Knowledge panel for local searches. James Gibbons pointed out today that he was now seeing them more regularly. I would have to agree. This may be a more extensive test or it may be the new normal but many (not all) […]
Do Positive Reviews Motivate Consumers?
It seems intuitive that a negative review corpus would severely limit a business’s online opportunities. And likewise that a positive review corpus would expand them. But these recent surveys indicate that a negative collection of reviews is much more likely to harm a business than positive reviews are going to help them. In an effort to […]
Survey: 85% Of SEOs Shoot For 1-5 New Local Reviews Per Month
Managing reviews and reputation isn’t a new discipline for search consultants and agencies to focus on, but it is gaining prominence as reviews take on more significance in the world of local search. Consumers consult online reviews more regularly in their research process and put an…
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Reviews: Sometimes You Miss the Forrest for the Trees
American business is very focused on goals and measurements. This is particularly true is the sales world. Unfortunately when you treat reviews as the goal it can lead to bad outcomes. A review ask is one step in developing a long term relationship with a customer; it is not an end point. Making it a […]
Reviews: If it is Good Enough to Do, It’s Good Enough to Do in Excess
File this under: Bosses come up with the worst ideas category or perhaps in the “it felt so good shooting myself in the left foot, let me do it in my right one as well” category. This comment was recently posted on my GOOGLE: REVIEW CONTESTS VIOLATE GUIDELINES article from a Mrs G. Mrs G. (1 […]
Time For SMBs To Tackle – Or Be Tackled By – Online Reviews
So much of search focuses on being found. But being found doesn’t do much good unless you’re also chosen. The only thing worse than not being found is being found and rejected from consideration. There’s no doubt that online reviews play an increasingly central role in the consumer path to…
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Reputation Management Dilemma – The Review From Hell
This post recently showed up in the forums: Link to your local Google+ page Business name (as it is in your account): Bakersfield Funeral Home Business location: 3121 19th Street, Bakersfield, CA 93301, USA Business telephone: 661-871-8080 Business category: Funeral Home Website: www.bakersfieldfuneral.com An ex employee is trying to hurt the business after being fired for […]
6 Local Tips For Small Business SEO Success
We all know that a key component of any small business’ marketing strategy is to effectively position its brand in search engine results. But is it possible to dominate search results with content you control — or at least content you’ve influenced? The answer is yes. There are…
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Fake Reviews – Everyone is doing it, so it must be legal
I absolutely loved this thread at blackhatworld. The original poster asked: Hi, Does anybody know if it is illegal to sell fake online reviews? I have heard about companies getting fined for posting / buying fake reviews, but can the seller actually get in trouble? If so then why does Fiverr allow you to post […]
Reviews, SMBs & Google – Still Not Clear on the Concept
This story is so rich in the evolving complexity of reviews; the absurdly angry SMB, the frustrated poster and so rich a tale of service gone awry. A story of how decent service can become indecent service by the sort of reflexive behavior that is so common in the service industry. To say nothing of […]
Yelp Turns Up The Heat: 285 Consumer Alerts Issued Over Fake Reviews
It’s been almost a year and a half since Yelp began issuing Consumer Alerts when a business on its site has been caught trying to get fake reviews; but after a cautious start, that program appears to be turning up the heat. According to an interview with CEO Jeremy Stoppelman in The…
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Google Reviews – New Quirks
Last week, with the rollout of the Places Review Monitoring system, we started to see some quirks in review count difference between the monitoring dashboard and the + Page. Subsequently business owners, like Barbara Oliver, reported review count declines on their + Page and in the main search results. Barbara’s reviews went from 65 to […]
Google Intros the Mother of All SMB Review Monitoring Systems
Google has announced on the Google and Your Business blog today that they have rolled out what appears to be the mother of all review monitoring systems today. The system, a new module for the updated Places for Business Dashboard, not only shows Google based reviews to dashboard owners and managers, it shows every review […]
Get More Traffic & Social Shares with the OnePress Social Locker Plugin (a Review)
Honestly, I forget where I first encountered what’s referred to as a social content locker. I saw it on a blog somewhere and immediately wanted to know how they were doing it. A quick view of the source code led me to the OnePress Social Locker Plugin for WordPress where I promptly purchased a license […]
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Google Rolling out New + Page Layout – Reviews Lost in the Process
It seems that the new layout first reported on October 23rd is now rolling out world wide. As noted at the time The big difference is that the page now can be displayed in either a single, two or three column layouts depending on browser window width as opposed to the current fixed two column […]
Google: Reviews, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
If one stops and counts how many times the word review or the star ratings show on the front page of Google one can only conclude that Google not only thinks they are important but that they are of tantamount importance in local searches. These screen shots above the fold of local searches were done […]
How To Leave Anonymous Business Reviews In Google+
For a long time, I’ve had some doctor friends complaining to me that once Google Places changed over to the new Google+ format, all their patients lost the ability to leave anonymous reviews (thus hurting their business and their rankings). They asked me what to do; and I, in turn, asked my…
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SEMRush Review – A Kickass Keyword Research Tool, Rank Tracker & More
I’ve “known about” SEMRush for a long time. I’d heard people mention it and had seen the site, but I’d never really used it until my partner in PushFire signed up for it. He loved the service – and since we were paying for it – I decided to fully check it out. It quickly […]
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The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues
If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d…
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