For small businesses, your reputation is your livelihood. Your store (or website) doesn’t see the foot (or website) traffic like the major corporations see, which means that every set of feet that enter your store or every unique visitor that enters your website is crucial to your success. If any of these folks have a [...]

UPDATE: Here are the details of the Yelp & AdWords matching beta from Google. We are doing a 1% experiment of Reviews on Ads in which we match ads to reviews on various 3rd party sites, and display links to the review in a separate section in the ad. Advertisers cannot opt-into this experiment, but [...]

Big news for local businesses from Google this week, “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices”.  So, users with iPhones/mobile devices will be able to click-to-call the phone number associated with your ad. Specifics In your campaign settings, you must be opted into [...]

Reputation Management has become a hot topic over the past few years (hence the need for a blog dedicated to it), especially given the ability consumers have to create, and share, their own content. It’s scary if you’re a business, but even scarier if you’re a small business. Small business owners rely on user reviews [...]

If you haven’t noticed Google Maps has been busy making several changes that have increased the importance of local search.  In addition to the Google Place Pages, recent guidelines, local ads and mobile coupons Google’s new UI updates are propelling local search forward. You see that with the new layout the map is now wider [...]

This may seem obvious to many, but it never ceases to amaze me how many businesses neglect their reputation by not addressing negative reviews online. Seriously, FAIL. It has gotten to the point where I almost feel morally obligated to give the local businesses I frequent a heads up when I see a bunch of [...]

If you’re a business that doesn’t operate 100% online (i.e. you have a building or buildings where customers want to visit you), pay attention:  Google Place Pages are up and running. In late September, these pages came along and early buzz speculated that Google was either trying to overthrow Yelp or overthrow small business websites [...]

Well, that is in Google’s mind. So you have a hotel, restaurant, or run a local attraction? Then you need to read this very informative and in-depth report from Search Engine Guide. I don’t mind sending people off our blog to check this out, since Miriam did such a great job researching over 1,000 reviews [...]