The local seo handbook pdf drive _

THE LOCAL SEO
HANDBOOK
A tactical guide to higher visibility in
local search results
D A V I D M I H M
F O U N D E R , T I D I N G S

First Edition
© 2017,Tidings Company LLC.
Excerpting with attribution is encouraged, but
please don’t reproduce or reuse without permission.
press@tidings.com
Intended Audience
This guide is intended to help local business owners, and the
marketers who serve them, better understand the mechanisms
by which Google generates search results relevant to their busi-
nesses, and how to maximize their visibility in those results.
It assumes a basic understanding of digital marketing concepts,
but is intended for a beginner-to-intermediate audience.

THE LOCAL SEO
HANDBOOK
Table of Contents
Introduction
Google My Business
Website Optimization
Inbound Links
Citations
Reviews
Social Signals
Behavioral Signals
Conclusion
05
13
27
45
59
73
89
97
113
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S 0 3

INTRODUCTION
The Context of Local Search
I N T R O D U C T I O N 0 5
For the last 9 years, I curated and published the annual Local
Search Ranking Factors survey1
, in which experts from around
the world ranked the tactics that have led to SEO success for
their businesses and their clients’ businesses.
The survey results have become a starting point for many small
businesses and marketers as they learn about how to get their
business more exposure with Google. (This year, Darren Shaw
of Whitespark took over data collection and analysis, and pub-
lished the results on the Moz blog.)
THE EVOLUTION OF LOCAL SEARCH
RESULTS
To give you a sense of how much the local search landscape has
changed since I conducted the first survey: back in June 2008,
the first Android mobile phone hadn’t even been released yet.
C H A P T E R 1

In that time, we’ve gone from a world where local search pri-
marily meant “10 blue links” for desktop searches, shifted to
local pack results on mobile phones, and now increasingly into a
world of single answers from voice-controlled assistants.
AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION:
ORGANIC VS. PLACE
You might say, “It’s all Google--how different could those results
really be?” And it’s true, at its core, Google has always tried to
provide searchers with the “best” result for a given query (though
that’s modulated slightly in the last couple of years as ads have
become more prevalent).
But the “best result” depends on the context of the query, and
the type of search and the location of the person searching pro-
vide Google with two very important pieces of context.
Consider a search like “get more followers on Instagram.” No
matter where I’m performing that search--mobile or desktop,
home or on the go--I’m looking for an answer to that pain
point, anywhere in the world. And those answers are largely
going to be found on webpages featuring products, case studies,
The evolution of 10 blue links to 3-pack to voice search.

or articles about how to do so (“10 blue links” that link out to 10
webpages).
With a search like “coffee shop,” though, Google can have pretty
high confidence that I’m looking for a place to grab a latte right
that moment. I probably want a place pretty close to me, no
matter where I’m performing the search or on what device.
Sure, it might be helpful to browse a magazine article about the
best coffee shops in my city or look at a full list of coffee shops
on a directory page, but it’s much more useful for Google to
return a list of places, rather than other websites about places.
Different algorithms for different searches yield different search result interfaces.
Google’s webpage-related results [Instagram followers] and its
place-related results [coffee shops] are generated by two differ-
ent algorithms. Searches with explicit questions like “How do
I make chimichurri?” are likely to trigger a third kind of result
called a Featured Snippet, but that is a topic for another day!

As a local business, you’re going to face tough competition in
the webpage-related results. If you’re a company that offers a
service to help get more Instagram followers, you’re going to be
competing with every other company on the planet to get your
website ranked by Google.
But in the second instance, when Google detects a search that
has local intent--note above, I didn’t even specify my city, Goo-
gle just inferred it--you’re only competing with other coffee
shops near you. And even though Starbucks has coffee shops in
just about every town and city in the world, it’s harder for them
to stand out against local brands in these place-based results --
which are also featured in Google Maps, in-car navigation de-
vices, Google Home/Assistant searches, and many other media.
Over the last few years, Google has gradually shown more and
more of these place-based results for local queries and fewer
webpage results, a trend I mentioned earlier and will discuss in
more detail in the last installment of this series. And even the
webpage results that show up beneath these place results on a lo-
cal intent search have been infused with local business websites
since early 20122
.
Regardless of medium (desktop, mobile, or voice), and regardless
of type of result (webpage or place-related), Google remains a
significant source of customers for many local businesses, and it’s
critical to put your best foot forward to attract those customers
in both algorithms.
A DEEP DIVE INTO LOCAL RANKINGS
The rest of this guide features a more detailed look at each of the
major building blocks of a successful local search strategy.
A DEEP DIVE INTO LOCAL RANKINGS

MAJOR ALGORITHMIC COMPONENTS
What are those components? Google likes to say “relevance,
prominence, and distance3
.” And while that’s not misleading, it is
an oversimplification.
Both the organic and place-related algorithms have become
staggeringly complex, and I don’t pretend to know all of the
signals that Google uses to inform these rankings. But I’ve
closely watched the algorithm mature over the last decade, and
have found it helpful to break Google’s triplet above into slightly
more granular components--most of which inform both rele-
vance and prominence. (Darren Shaw continued this categoriza-
tion in the 2017 survey.)
Over the next 7 chapters, I’ll be giving my take on the most
impactful tactics and techniques to help your business succeed
across each of these major algorithmic areas:
Breakdown of the 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors1
from Whitespark/Moz.

GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
Hopefully most of you know by now, Google My Business4
is an
online tool where you can tell Google about your business -- the
kind of business you are, where you’re located, the hours you’re
open, and more. I’ll look at the most important fields to fill out
and explain why they’re important.
ON-PAGE BEST PRACTICES
It’s important to structure your website in a way that reinforces
what you’ve told Google in your My Business listing. I’ll take
you through the key components of your website to focus on.
INBOUND LINKS
The foundation of Google’s organic algorithm is not going away
anytime soon. I’ll give you some ideas for how and where to get
people to link to your website.
CITATIONS
Citations refer to online mentions of your business that may or
may not include a link. I’ll explain why they’re important and
highlight the ones you should care about.
REVIEWS
Customer reviews are one of the easiest and most sustainable
practices you can implement to improve your SEO. I’ll show you
how to find the review sites that matter for ranking in Google
and give you some ideas for how to implement a consistent and
impactful customer review program.
SOCIAL SIGNALS
While not a major piece of the algorithm, I’ll highlight some of
the evidence that suggests that social media can improve your
local search visibility.
INBOUND LINKS

BEHAVIORAL SIGNALS / PERSONALIZATION
An emerging area of interest for a lot of professional SEOs, and
the piece of the ranking pie that I see growing the most over the
next few years.
R E F E R E N C E S
1 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey
Multiple Contributors
https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
2 Understand and Rock the Venice Update
Mike Ramsey
https://moz.com/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update
3 Improve your local ranking on Google
Google My Business Help
https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en
4 Google My Business
https://business.google.com

R E F E R E N C E S
1 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey
Multiple Contributors
https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
2 Understand and Rock the Venice Update
Mike Ramsey
https://moz.com/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update
3 Improve your local ranking on Google

G O O G L E M Y B U S I N E S S 1 3
GOOGLE MY
BUSINESS
Making the Most of Your Free Local
Profile at Google
Google My Business5
(GMB) is a free product that allows busi-
ness owners to verify and submit basic details about their busi-
ness to Google, and engage with existing and potential custom-
ers across Google’s properties.
After starting its life as a rudimentary web form called the Local
Business Center, Google My Business has matured into a highly
sophisticated product over the last decade, with many improve-
ments coming in the last couple of years alone.
GMB offers highly-rated companion apps on both the App
Store6
and Google Play7
, and also provides metrics about the
visibility and engagement with your business that no other prod-
uct does (including Google Analytics).
C H A P T E R 2

ELIGIBILITY FOR GOOGLE MY
BUSINESS
Any business with a bonafide brick-and-mortar location is
eligible for a Google My Business listing at that location. For
businesses with two or more locations, each location would be
eligible for a distinct GMB listing.
A common question I get from business owners at conferences
is, “I operate my business out of my house and I don’t want
people to know my address--what do I do?” Well, if you don’t
operate walk-up a brick-and-mortar location, but visit your
customers in a particular geographic area, you’re what’s called
a “Service Area Business.” Examples of common Service Area
Businesses are plumbers, carpet cleaning companies, and courier
services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing, but you’ll
want to choose “Yes” when Google asks if you deliver goods and
services to customers at their location.
The option to describe yourself as a Service Area Business (SAB).
Just because you serve customers in a given market does not
mean you’re eligible for a Google My Business listing in that

market (for an example, an eCommerce company based in
Chicago would not be eligible for a GMB listing in Dallas just
because they had customers in Dallas).
VERIFYING YOUR LOCATION
Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are
represented in GMB and requires anyone who attempts to claim
a Google My Business Listing verify their association with the
business in some way.
The easiest way to start the
process is to perform a desktop
search at Google for your busi-
ness name (for example, Pacific
Seafood Portland8
). In the
panel on the righthand side of
the page you’ll see a link that
poses the question “Own this
business?” Importantly--before
you click that link to begin
the verification process--make
sure you are either not signed
in to Google (you can create
an account in the next step), or are signed into a Google account
for your business as opposed to your personal Gmail.
It’s not a GMB requirement, but it’ll be much easier to share
access to your listing with employees or other agents of your
company from a business account.
Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what
these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone
The “Own This Business?” link in the
Knowledge Panel for Pacific Seafood.

number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN number
on screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone
number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard
within a week with instructions for how to PIN verify.
PRIMARY BUSINESS INFORMATION
NAME, ADDRESS AND PHONE
This sounds simple, but it’s always surprising how many business
owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them
in some way.
Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your basic thumb-
print online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately at
Google My Business, Google (and your customers) lose trust
that you are who you say you are, and they stop sending business
your way.
Do NOT stuff keywords in your business name. Repre-
sent yourself as you would answer the phone or welcome
a customer into your store. You probably see spammers
doing this and succeeding all the time, but at some point
it’ll come back to bite them. Google is monitoring for these
kinds of abuses all the time and getting better at blacklist-
ing the abusers.
Submit the same address you use on your website. Even if
you’re a service-area business, you’ll have to submit a physi-
cal address and not a PO box or other mailing-only address.
You’ll see a map displayed just alongside your address.
Zoom in and double-check that the pin is correctly placed
on your business. Google’s pin precision for U.S. addresses




PRIMARY BUSINESS INFORMATION

is typically pretty good, but it can be spotty in other coun-
tries.
Don’t use a tracking phone number in an effort to segment
customers coming from Google vs. other sources. There
are ways to do this, but they’re pretty advanced, and imple-
menting tracking numbers incorrectly can do tremendous
damage to your local search rankings.
CATEGORY
From an rankings standpoint, the category field is the most im-
portant attribute you can optimize at Google My Business.
In my experience, it’s best not
to listen to Google’s advice on
categories9
on this one, par-
ticularly since that advice has
changed so frequently over the
years. Certainly I have not for
my own consulting business.
Google maintains a taxonomy
of several thousand categories
to describe local businesses,
and by typing in a few char-
acters of a keyword that de-
scribes your business, you’ll
probably find a match pretty
closely.
Google suggests “using as few
categories as possible,” as well
as categories that are “as spe-

It’s best to choose as many relevant
categories as you can in the category
selection area of Google My Business.

cific as possible.” And while it’s true that Google can and does
“detect category information from your website and from men-
tions about your business throughout the web,” my advice is to
explicitly as many relevant categories as you can on your Google
My Business listing.
If you operate a small restaurant that’s open from 7am - 3pm,
select “Breakfast Restaurant,”“Brunch Restaurant,”“Lunch
Restaurant,”“Restaurant,”“Cafe,”“Coffee Shop,” and any other
relevant category.Take the time to enter multiple keywords that
describe your business and see which categories match. Use all
of them that are relevant.
Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from
your listing, but this is not spam--provided you select rele-
vant categories--and helps you show up for as broad a range of
searches as possible.
WEBSITE
Google calls this field “website,” but it doesn’t have to be your
“website” per se. In particular, if you operate more than one loca-
tion, you may want to enter the page on your website that corre-
sponds to the location you’re submitting to Google (rather than
your homepage).
Opinions are mixed as to whether listing your homepage or a loca-
tion page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospec-
tive customers.
If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of
your business, then submit that as your “website.” If a location page
(or even some other page) will give them a better sense, submit that
instead.

SECONDARY BUSINESS
INFORMATION
After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your list-
ing. But don’t stop there.There are a few other attributes that are
well worth your time to add.
PHOTOS AND IMAGES
Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all of local search.
The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any number of less-
er-known apps indicates just how visual our internet culture has
become. Consumers often select (or reject) a business because of
its photos--not only on the content of the photos, but their quality
and professionalism.
Photos are especially important in the mobile ecosystem that Goo-
gle My Business powers (including Google Maps), where they are
the dominant representation of a business in Google’s card-focused
user interface.
As with all local media or social media sites, Google My Business
has its own image format requirements10
.Take some time to review
them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format.
Optimizing your photos also offers a great opportunity to engage
your customers.
At the very least place the ones you’re considering at your point
of sale and ask them to choose which one they like better. Or get
even more creative and start a contest among your customers to
show your business in its best light, with the winner--as voted on
by other customers--receiving a cash prize or gift card.

HOURS
Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward, and Google
has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when
you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-
center wherever customers interact with your business on Google
so they should definitely be accurate.
You can now even daypart multiple times during the day, and add
specific hours for holidays and special events.
While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that
Google now displays the busy-ness of your business in real-time,
based on aggregate location-tracking of visitors with Android
phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.
MENU URLs
Certain categories of businesses will have the option to add a link
to a menu. If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories, I
highly recommend adding this link, as it gives Google an addition-
Google now displays the busy-ness of your business front-and-center in your
Knowledge Panel.

al set of keywords that your business for which should be consid-
ered relevant.
ADVANCED INFORMATION
The inputs for Store code,
Labels, and AdWords location
extensions phone are low prior-
ity fields that you probably don’t
need to bother with.
All three are geared primarily
towards large multi-location
businesses and franchises.
RANKING FACTORS BEYOND YOUR
CONTROL
Two significant ranking factors over which you have little control
have to do with the physical location of your business.
The first is the proximity of your business to the location where
your prospective customer is performing her search. All other
things being equal, Google will choose to display a business closer
to the searcher than one farther away from her.
In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses who
were located close to the center of a given city, or its “centroid.”
Google simply wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the
searcher, and so defaulted to showing businesses in the areas of
highest population density.
This factor has declined in importance, especially for mobile
Low-priority fields geared towards
multi-location businesses.
RANKING FACTORS BEYOND YOUR

searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google
has also gotten better and better at detecting the location informa-
tion of desktop searchers, partially through surreptitious means of
collection11
.
The second factor is having an address in the city in which your
customer is searching. If your customer is searching in Seattle,
your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop, simply because it’s not
relevant for that search.
Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high
concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much
you can do to optimize for these ranking factors, but you should be
aware of their importance.
GOOGLE MY BUSINESS INSIGHTS
Google provides a free lightweight analytics package as part of
GMB that gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential
customers are viewing and interacting with your listing.
Insights shows how many times your listing appears in plain old
search vs. Google Maps, as well as the number of clicks to your
website, requests for driving directions, and phone calls.
There’s also a simple breakdown of how many customers see your
listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discov-
ery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside
of Google is entirely sure how the discovery number is calculated,
it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your
local SEO as any, particularly if you track it over time.
Unfortunately this is more difficult than it should be, as GMB In-
sights are only visible as snapshots-in-time. Unless you remember

to check them regularly and transfer them to a spreadsheet along
with the date, it can be difficult to track your growth. Strangely,
there’s no default longitudinal view built into the product.
TROUBLESHOOTING GMB LISTING
ISSUES
The most common GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be the
existence of duplicate listings for the same business, and while it’s
gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close
them. (I’ll cover why duplicate listings are bad for your business in
future installments of this series.)
The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business
name on maps.google.com. You’ll see a little more comprehensive
list of potentially-matching results than Google is willing to pres-
ent on Google.com.
The flow of the duplicate listing closure process on Google Maps.

If it looks like there are multiple listings that refer to your business,
select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest
an Edit.” On the following screen, slide the “Place is permanently
closed or never existed” bar to “Yes,” and select the radio button
next to duplicate.
Google support staff are generally responsive to these kinds of
reports within a week. If you continue to have trouble, as multiple
people--coworkers, friends, family members, or relatives--to report
the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it.
If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a
response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support
channel for GMB. And if Google support just isn’t cutting it,
Joy Hawkins, who started her own company in 2016 after years
as the GMB expert at a large agency, is an invaluable resource
for troubleshooting additional issues.
THE FUTURE OF GMB
At various times in its past, Google My Business has seemed
like the hot potato no one wanted to wind up holding at Google
Headquarters in Mountain View.
That no longer seems to be the case, as GMB has become
Google’s front-line defense against Facebook’s overwhelming
mindshare among small business owners.The main product
has become much more robust, and Google released two ma-
jor sub-products within GMB--Messaging and Posts--within
weeks of each other in mid-2017.
The goal of both products seems to be to get small business
owners to engage with their customers via GMB on a regular
basis, as opposed to a “set it and forget it” basis.

We’re also starting to see a handful of third-party integrations
that allow customers to book appointments or order products
directly from the Google search result for select businesses.
While it’s too early to tell whether usage of any of these new
features might benefit your rankings, it’s something that experts
in the local search community will be following closely in the
coming months--more coming in the final chapter of this guide.
SUMMARY
Represent your Name, Address, and Phone exactly as
they appear to customers in the real world. These are not
attributes to optimize.
Pay special attention to categories and select as many
categories as are relevant for your business.
Upload great photos of your business, and if you don’t
have any, consider hiring a professional photographer to
do so.
Take advantage of the relatively new option to add a
menu URL if you’re in a relevant business category.
Consider using the Discovery metric from GMB Insights
as a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO.
Pay attention to new engagement features from Google
as they’re released.







R E F E R E N C E S
6 Google My Business App
Apple App Store
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id853371601
7 Google My Business App
Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.vega
8 Google Search for Pacific Seafood Portland
https://www.google.com/search?q=pacific+seafood+portland
9 Guidelines for representing your business on Google
10 Add local business photos
https://support.google.com/business/answer/6103862
11 “Google admits collecting Wi-Fi data through Street View cars”
Jemima Kiss,The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-admits-storing-private-data

W E B S I T E O P T I M I Z AT I O N 2 7
WEBSITE
OPTIMIZATION
Crawlability, Mobility, and Relevance
Your website is one of your most important pieces of digital
equity12
, and one of the fundamental components of a success-
ful local marketing stack13
. It’s a crucial communication vehicle
from you to your customers.
Regardless of changing consumer search and social media be-
havior over time, it will remain a place that consumers visit to
learn more information about and connect with your business.
All that being said, it may surprise you to learn that your website
makes up a relatively small part of Google’s local ranking algo-
rithm.
Google is famously secretive about how it ranks local businesses,
but the experts surveyed for the Local Search Ranking Factors
peg website influence at only around 14% for local pack results,
and only 24% for local organic results (more on the distinction
later in this chapter).
C H A P T E R 3

Your website is the ranking factor over which you have complete
control, however, which makes it an ideal asset from which to
begin your local marketing campaigns.
Let’s take a look at the most important website optimization
criteria (also known as on-site optimization or on-page optimi-
zation). Improving your performance across each of these crite-
ria will help you rank better for local searches, and attract more
customers.
CRAWLABILITY
Google has built a giant database of hundreds of trillions of
webpages which its algorithm then analyzes and ranks. It does
this by sending out scores of digital robots, or “spiders,” which
visit page after page after page and “click on” the links on each
page to see where they lead. We refer to this activity as “crawl-
ing.”
TECHNICAL ISSUES
As a business owner, you want to make sure that Google’s spi-
ders are crawling your website and storing its contents in their
database appropriately. The quickest way to assess your website’s
crawlability for major hurdles to Google’s spiders is to enter this
search at Google: “site:yourdomain.com.”
The “site:” search at Google offers an easy, valuable look at the technical health
of your website.

Before you even browse the list of results, take a look at the
number that Google returns and judge whether it’s more-or-less
accurate.
For example, if you have a 5-page website and Google returns
1000 pages, or if you have a 1000-page website and Google only
returns 5 pages, you have a major technical issue with your site.
If you use Wordpress to manage your website, you can install the
Yoast SEO plugin14
for additional technical advice. Other web-
site platforms may require outside assistance.
You should also register your website with Google Search Con-
sole15
for additional technical advice and other testing tools.
SITE ARCHITECTURE
The term site architecture, for the purposes of this guide, refers
to the arrangement of the functional and visual aspects of your
website. Essentially it’s the hierarchy of pages within your site,
and the hierarchy of content within each page.
When it comes to local search, there are a couple of key best
practices to follow when it comes to your site architecture.
First, you should place your basic contact information in the
header (usually at the top righthand side) and footer of every
page of your website. You want to make it as easy as possible for
customers who land on your website, no matter what page they
enter first, to contact you for more information or to make a
transaction.
My friend Willi Galloway’s Perch Furniture website does an
excellent job with this feature.

It’s also good idea to have a dedicated “Contact Us” page with
more detailed information about your business. Make sure you
link to this page from your homepage, and ideally from your
primary navigation menu as well.
CONTACT PAGE CONTENT
Your contact page should contain the same information you
submitted to Google My Business (address, phone number,
and hours). It should also contain an email address or contact
form for customers who prefer email to voice calls. If you collect
reviews and testimonials from customers, this is a good page to
include at least a handful of those.
Perch Furniture does an excellent job featuring its contact information at the top
and bottom of every page of its website.

If you’re a traditional brick-and-mortar business, you should
include written driving directions from population centers near
you.
These driving directions not only help prospective customers but
also help Google identify markets you serve (more on this in the
Relevance section below). Include an embedded Google Map16
too, as Google may track clicks for driving driving directions as a
ranking factor.
If you’re a Service Area Business, your contact page should men-
tion the major surrounding towns and cities that your business
serves. You might even consider building a unique page for each
of these major towns and cities (linked from your contact page),
filled with case studies and testimonials from customers in those
markets.
ADVICE FOR BUSINESSES WITH MULTIPLE LOCATIONS
If your business operates more than one physical location, it’s es-
sential to create a unique page for each one. Including a unique
page for each location you operate helps your customers (and
Google) avoid conflating contact information between them.
It’s also the best way to expand your local ranking potential to
multiple cities.
If you operate a handful of locations, link to the contact page for
each one from the footer of each page of your website. If you
operate more than a handful, link to a store locator page from
your primary navigation or other utility menu.
SPECIAL MARKUP: SCHEMA.ORG
Schema.org is a code protocol developed jointly by the world’s
top search engines to make it easier for companies to structure

the data they present on their websites. One of the most wide-
ly-used schemas is for business contact information.
As my friend Mary Bowling says, marking up your contact
information in schema.org “is like handing Google a business
card.” Google’s pretty smart, but rather than leaving to chance
that it will be able to crawl your contact info, why not do every-
thing you can to guarantee it?
It’s not clear that marking up your contact information in sche-
ma.org will directly improve your rankings, but it can give your
organic results some extra visual impact, which increases the
chances that customers will click on your result.
Implementing schema.org on your site is like handing Google a business card.

There are various schemas for LocalBusiness, with more added
every year, including LegalService, AutomotiveBusiness, and
more.
CRAWLABILITY MADE EASY: THE YOAST LOCAL SEO
PLUGIN
Whew! That’s a lot of advice to consider. You can use the Yoast
Local SEO plugin17
to take care of lots of it. You’ll have to add
the proper pages to your Wordpress-powered website and link
them appropriately from your menus, but the plugin handles
most of the technical details required for your contact page, and
I highly recommend it.
MOBILITY
At the moment, the average consumer is surprisingly forgiving
of non-mobile-friendly websites18
. But with 70% of all local
searches19
projected to come from mobile devices within the
next two years, businesses that fail to prepare their websites for
this reality are going to see customer conversions--and search
rankings--drop significantly.
While the SEO industry cried wolf on Google’s “Mobilegeddon”
update a couple of years ago, the tea leaves are very clear that
mobility will be a significant ranking factor in the coming years.
You can prepare for the inevitable by making your website faster,
and making it easier for mobile visitors to use.
TEST YOUR SITE’S MOBILE FRIENDLINESS
Google provides an easy-to-use free tool20
to test how friendly
your website is for mobile visitors. It warns you about any major

suboptimal features, and renders a screenshot of how your site
appears for the majority of mobile visitors.
IMPROVE MOBILE USER EXPERIENCE
Google also provides a detailed guide of how to improve the
user experience of your website for mobile visitors21
. Key aspects
of user experience to keep in mind:
Does the width of your website automatically adjust to the
screen size (“viewport”) of the visitor’s device?
Does text automatically resize for mobile visitors, so that
they don’t have to pinch-and-scroll to read it?
Are your calls to action and other buttons large enough for
people to click with their fingers and thumbs?
These kinds of adjustments for the mobile visitor comprise
what’s known as “responsive” behavior. If your website is not yet
responsive it’s time to upgrade it to one that is.
Google’s free mobile viewing tool provides an easy way to tell if your site is
friendly for mobile visitors to use.




MAKE YOUR SITE FASTER
And of course, one of the biggest website improvements you can
make is to get your site to load faster.
We’ve all been frustrated by sites that load slowly, or won’t load
at all, on slower data connections.
Sites that load quickly help build positive digital engagement
with your business, and there’s some evidence to suggest that
both load time and engagement with your content improve your
rankings.
Conveniently, Google provides another free tool to assess how
quickly your site loads relative to others, although this one is an
Google’s free page speed tool shows you how you can make your website fast-
er--though beware: it’s a very tough grader!

extremely tough grader! It’s rare to see sites score above the 75-
80 range. Nonetheless if you want to supercharge your website
speed, Google provides free advice for how to do it in the Possi-
ble Optimizations section of the this tool.
RELEVANCE
Thus far I’ve focused mostly on the technical aspects of your
website, but if your technically-optimized website features weak
or irrelevant content, you’re going to rank poorly and attract very
few customers.
From a content standpoint, the goal of your website is to com-
municate a strong “scent” to both Google and users about exactly
what products or services you offer, and where you offer them.
WHAT KEYWORDS (KEYPHRASES) TO TARGET
At the risk of stating the obvious: you want to be relevant for
keywords and phrases that your customers are searching for.
Unless you’re in a very niche business-to-business industry, this
typically means using generic layperson’s terms to describe your
products and services as opposed to industry jargon. An exam-
ple from the medical field would be to use “ear, nose, and throat
doctor” instead of “otolaryngologist.”
Keyword research is an entire sub-discipline within SEO and
it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole. But there are a couple of easy
sources for good keywords to target:
Pay attention to the language that customers use in their
phone calls with you (or your staff) and in the emails and
contact forms that they send you.


Pay attention to the category terms that Google My Busi-
ness returns when you type related keywords.
Perform a search for each of the terms above and scroll to
the bottom of the results page. Google will list terms relat-
ed to the one you searched for, front-and-center.


The bottom of every Google result page contains keywords related to the one
you just typed--a tremendous resource for content ideas and keyword research.
Build a master list of these terms and match them up with pages
on your website, one keyword to one page. It’s entirely likely
each page will rank for far more terms than the keyword you tar-
get, but it’s good to keep your pages focused on a small handful
of terms.
An example master keyword list with page name, its general theme, the keyword
the page should target, and its Title Tag.

In addition to talking about your products or services, you
should include your city and state or metropolitan area as part of
these keyphrases as well.
As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Google has gotten better at
detecting the area that a local business website serves -- par-
ticularly for websites that use schema.org -- but it’s still a good
practice to sprinkle these geographic keywords liberally within
your website.
WHERE TO PLACE YOUR KEYWORDS
Your Title Tags are far-and-away the most important places to
put your keywords. (Note that Title tags and the Page or Post
titles that you enter in Wordpress or other Content Manage-
ment System are not the same thing.)
To see what your existing Title Tags are, perform the “site:your-
domain.com” search I mentioned earlier in the Crawlability
section.
The “site:” search at Google becomes even more valuable when you use it to
review your Title Tags: the blue links associated with each page in the results.

The blue link text associated with each page in these results is
the Title Tag of that page.
Those of you using Wordpress to manage your website can use
the Yoast SEO plugin to edit your Title Tags: it’s an asbolute
godsend.
Pull up your list of keywords to target from the previous sec-
tion of this chapter and add them to the corresponding pages in
Wordpress.
Personally, I like to use the Yoast plugin Bulk Editor (SEO ->
Tools -> Bulk Editor in your Wordpress dashboard) to make
these changes efficiently.
Editing your Title Tags with the Yoast SEO Plugin’s bulk editor is a snap.
Unfortunately, those of you using other Content Management
Systems such as Squarespace or Wix are going to have a much
harder time editing Title Tags, if it’s even possible at all.
If you’re hoping to get a significant number of customers via
SEO and you’re on one of these platforms, it may be a worth-
while investment to switch to Wordpress.

Take some time in crafting each Title Tag, though -- don’t just
stuff your keywords in willy-nilly and then tack on your city and
state (or region or county) at the end.
Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms
for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the
phrases that your prospective customers will see when they’re
searching. So make these Titles enticing for visitors as well as
keyword-focused.
For example, which Title Tag would you be more likely to click?
Option 1:
Car Insurance Agent - Luxury Car Insurance Agent - Car
Insurance Agency - Portland, Oregon
Option 2:
Portland’s Top Locally-Owned Car Insurance Agency since
1954: Smith Insurance
I’d certainly choose Option 2, and most of your customers would
also.
It’s also a best practice to include your target keywords in your
page/post titles and other headlines (also known as your H#
tags), although it’s far more important to write these for your
visitors than it is to write them for Google.
The final place to use your keywords is within the text of links
you use on your website (known as “anchor text”).
So for example, instead of saying “click here,” you might say
“click here to contact our insurance agency” to help Google gain

a little more context about what services your contact page is
relevant for.
THE CHANGING PLACE OF YOUR
WEBSITE IN GOOGLE’S LOCAL SERP
TOPOGRAPHY
As I hinted in Chapter 1, we’re moving into a world with more
place-based (mobile and voice) results and fewer website-based
(desktop) results.
Increasingly Google is trying to extract as much structured
information as it can from your website and place it front-and-
center in the Knowledge Panel it constructs with the informa-
tion from Google My Business.
This Knowledge Panel information will form the basis for voice
responses from Google Home and other personal assistants--af-
ter all, listening to an assistant read an entire webpage after you
asked it a question would not be much fun!
Would you want your personal assistant to read you an entire website result?
Personally, I wouldn’t have the patience!

This shift is why the Crawlability section above was the longest
part of this article. It’s important that your website give Google
(and visitors) a strong sense of what you do and where you do it,
but it’s even more important that Google can crawl that infor-
mation, assimilate it, and present it in a structured format.
As a result, tactics like Schema.org markup that help structure
information about your business are becoming that much more
important.
Your content is still critical, but start thinking of your website
primarily as a data source for the Knowledge Graph and as a
customer destination secondarily.

SUMMARY
Ensure your website is crawlable with the site:yourdo-
main.com search. Note the number of results.
Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly and Page Speed tools
to ensure your website converts the most mobile visi-
tors possible, and make it easy to contact you from the
top and bottom of every page.
Build a unique contact page for each location that
you operate and mark up your location information in
Schema.org.
Use keywords relevant to your products and services
that your customers are searching for, especially in your
Title Tags and internal links.
Continue to monitor your Knowledge Panel, and those
of other businesses in your industry, for additional
structured information sought by Google.

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

R E F E R E N C E S
12 “Web Equity: Owning Your Local Web Presence”
Mike Blumenthal
http://blumenthals.com/images/upload/Web_Equity.pdf
13 The Local Marketing Stack
David Mihm
https://tidings.com/stack
14 Yoast SEO Plugin
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo
15 Google Search Console
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
16 Embed a map or share a location
Google Maps Help
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/144361?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
17 Yoast Local SEO Plugin
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/local-seo
18 “Survey surprise: Consumers very forgiving of non-mobile-friendly websites”
Greg Sterling, Marketing Land
https://marketingland.com/survey-surprise-consumers-forgiving-non-mobile-
friendly-websites-212015
19 Local search query volume in the United States from 2014 to 2019, by platform
Statista
https://www.statista.com/statistics/434152/local-mobile-desktop-search-query-volume-usa/
20 Google Mobile-Friendly Test
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
21 Google Mobile-Friendly Guide
https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/
22 Google PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

I N B O U N D L I N K S 4 5
INBOUND LINKS
The Keys to Credibility with Google
Since the ascent of Google as the world’s #1 search engine, links
have been the primary concern of most search engine optimi-
zation practitioners.The seminal idea behind Google’s ranking
technology23
makes it clear that inbound links are the primary
vehicle by which Google discovers new pages and websites on
the Internet, and they’re the primary way Google assesses the
credibility of a given website.
Google’s emphasis on links is the most significant area of over-
lap between its organic and local ranking algorithms. According
to the experts of the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, links
make up the biggest piece of the pie in localized organic results,
and they’re the #1 competitive difference-maker across all types
of local results.
Local businesses can’t be fully evaluated on the basis of links, for
reasons you’ll see in the next chapter, but there’s no question that
a strong inbound link profile (that is, links pointing from other
C H A P T E R 4
INBOUND LINKS

websites to your business) has a positive impact on how well
your business ranks at Google.
WHY LINKS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
I know you’re probably thinking, “hey, I want to rank #1, just tell
me what to do!” but understanding why Google values links so
highly can help you assess the strength or weakness of your own
link profile, and inform your link acquisition strategy.
Google’s robots, or “spiders,” crawl the Internet by “clicking”
one link after another after another, discovering new pages and
websites as part of that crawl, and storing the content of each of
those pages in a giant database.
The “site:” search at Google becomes even more valuable when you use it to
review your Title Tags: the blue links associated with each page in the results.
In addition to storing the content of each page, Google also
stores how its crawlers arrived on the page--in other words, the

pages and websites that were linking to it. A link from one site
to another is like a vote or endorsement for the credibility of the
second website.
Sites with the most endorsements, especially from websites that
are heavily-endorsed themselves (like the green circle in the
diagram above), tend to rank better than those with few or no
endorsements (like the yellow circle above). You need endorse-
ments in order to get elected, and you need links in order to rank
well.
LINK ATTRIBUTES
TOPICAL CONTEXT
Google counts thousands of Ph.D.’s as employees. And while its
algorithm over the years has been incredibly vulnerable to abuse
by spammers, increasingly it’s taking into account the context in
which a link appears.
Google largely devalues links that appear on completely unre-
lated websites (for example, a personal injury lawyer receiving a
link from a Russian real estate forum). In fact, increasingly these
kinds of links put you in jeopardy of a Google penalty.
Conversely, links that you acquire or earn that are likely to refer
you actual customers are increasingly the ones that Google val-
ues (for example, a personal injury lawyer receiving a link from a
neighboring chiropractor’s website).
Eric Ward a.k.a. “Link Moses,” was building links before Google
was even a gleam in Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s eyes. As such,
his still-highly-relevant advice is to build links as if Google
didn’t even exist. Living by this “first commandment” of link
LINK ATTRIBUTES

building makes it incredibly unlikely your site will ever be penal-
ized by Google and will make the impact of your link building
more permanent and effective.
PAGE / DOMAIN AUTHORITY
The source of a link matters a great deal to how much weight it
carries in Google’s algorithm.
Going back to my earlier analogy, endorsements from major
groups and figures help politicians earn votes more than do en-
dorsements from anonymous individual voters.
In the same way, links from pages and websites that are them-
selves heavily linked-to (such as BBC.com or WashingtonPost.
com) are going to benefit the linked site much more than a link
from a hobbyist blog or tiny startup.
In particular, links from government, school, and non-profit
websites tend to be particularly powerful, since these are high-
trust websites that aren’t going to link to low-trust businesses or
scam artists very often.
Websites that earn links from these high-trust, high-authority
websites, have a leg up on their competition.
ANCHOR TEXT
I mentioned the concept of anchor text briefly in the last chap-
ter. Anchor text is the words that make up the link itself: like
this.
The text of the link helps provide Google additional context
about the topic of the linked page--i.e. what keywords that page
should rank for. So links that contain keywords related to what

you sell or where you’re located--and even links for your brand
name--are going to help you rank more than links using generic
terms like “click here” or “read more.”
You have complete control of anchor text on your own website,
and you should use it to your advantage. But you don’t really
have control over what text people use on other websites.
In general, it’s not the best use of time for local businesses to
influence what text others who are linking to them are using. It’s
just a ranking factor to be aware of.
ASSESSING YOUR LINK PROFILE
In my experience, the tool that gives the most complete picture
of a local business’s link profile is aHrefs24
.
aHrefs gives the most complete picture of links for the average local business.
ASSESSING YOUR LINK PROFILE

It’s a robust product that provides more information than the
average local business needs, but take a free trial and capture a
high-level summary of your link profile (most small businesses
won’t need to continue usage beyond a day or two).
The key aHrefs numbers are in the top row of the screenshot
above: UR, DR, and referring domains. UR and DR refer to
Page / Domain Authority, and the number of referring domains
is the best heuristic for most local businesses as to how strong
their existing link profile is. Click the number under Refer-
ring Domains to view a list of the sites that are already linking
to you. Are there obvious sites not in that list that should be
linking to you? Consider reaching out to them to let them know
how much a link would help your business.
During your free trial of aHrefs, I also recommend researching
the profiles of the sites that are ranking above you in Google for
your target keywords and taking a look at their DR and number
of referring domains. In particular, comparing your numbers
to your competitors on those two metrics will give you a rough
sense of how much linkbuilding work you’ll have to do in order
to move the needle on your rankings.
LINKS THAT MOVE THE NEEDLE IN
LOCAL SEARCH
Google pretends25
that great content, and great businesses, will
naturally acquire links. But for 99.999% of businesses, that’s bad
advice.The old saw “If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s there
to hear it, does it make a sound?” applies to content and links.
If you produce great content, but no one’s there to see it, does it
acquire links?

The answer is a resounding no--businesses need to be proactive
about acquiring links. As long as you follow Eric Ward’s first
commandment and acquire links that will actually send you cus-
tomers, you shouldn’t fear a Google penalty.
Over the years, many local businesses haven’t followed Eric’s ad-
vice, have fallen victim to scam artists selling hundreds of links,
or have otherwise been too aggressive about acquiring links.
The reality is that, for many businesses, 10-20 high-quality links
will lead to top rankings in short order--sustainable rankings
will last for years.Take the time to earn these high-quality links
and don’t pursue those over-aggressive tactics.
INDUSTRY-RELEVANT LINKS
Industry-relevant links are often the easiest links for small busi-
ness owners to acquire, as many of them simply involve asking
your existing contacts at companies or organizations with whom
you do business.
LOCAL BUSINESS AND NEIGHBORHOOD
ASSOCIATIONS
Are you a member of your local chamber of commerce, business
association, or neighborhood association? Most groups like
these operate a member directory, and you want to make sure
that directory is online, visible to the public, and to Google’s
spiders. If the websites of these groups are not showing up in
your aHrefs backlink profile, bring up the issue with the director
or marketing manager of these associations and ask them to put
up a webpage that links to each member.
REGIONAL/NATIONAL CERTIFICATION BOARDS AND
INDUSTRY ORGANIZATIONS
Depending on your industry, you may also be licensed by, or

participate in, a regional or national organization.
Don’t just display your certification on your website -- link to
your business’s online profile on the websites of these certifying
boards and industry organizations. This not only increases the
credibility of your business to potential customers, but helps
Google’s spiders discover and crawl your profile on these high-
ly-trusted sites.
DISTRIBUTORS (DIRECTORIES OR ANNOUNCEMENTS)
For those of you who are retailers, think about the products that
you sell in-store.
Are you unique, or one of the few stores in your local mar-
ket that carries a particular product? If so, consider asking the
manufacturer or distributor of that product for a link from their
website, possibly from a “where to buy” directory.
At the very least these companies should partner with you on a
press release--containing a link to your website--to announce
to their customers (and Google!) where people can buy their
product in your area.
VENDORS (TESTIMONIALS)
Are there particular vendors from whom you purchase a lot of
goods or services? Ask them if you can contribute a testimonial
to their website, and if they really appreciate your business, that
testimonial will contain a link back to your site.
INTERVIEWS AND GUEST COLUMNS
Getting featured in a trade publication is not only a great driv-
er of business--especially referral business-- but can provide a
powerful link back to your website. These links are a little more

difficult to acquire, as they require building a relationship with
authors or influencers in your industry.
To get started, see if a friend can make an introduction on your
behalf to one of these key columnists. Intelligence Software
offers a free tool26
that taps some of Facebook’s more advanced
search capabilities. (LinkedIn Premium offers some of the same
features, but it’s a paid product.)
Essentially, you want to search for writers and editors who are
employed at some of the key publications in your industry to see
if and how you’re connected to them through friends. Once you
see how you’re connected, you can ask specific friends to put in a
good word for you.
Here’s an example of the output of an Intelligence Software
search for employees at Third Door Media (the parent company
of Search Engine Land, one of the top news outlets in SEO):
https://www.facebook.com/search/str/third%20door%20media/pages-
named/employees/present/intersect

As you can see, the search would be pretty complicated to type
in, but the tool from Intelligence Software makes it easy.
LOCALLY-RELEVANT LINKS
CHARITIES—OR SCHOOLS—TO WHICH YOU’VE
DONATED MONEY OR GOODS, OR VOLUNTEERED
WITH
Many of you, and perhaps many of your employees, are likely
involved in local charities on non-profit organizations.These
links are highly-valued by Google, as charities tend to be trusted
institutions in the offline world as well as online.
You want to make sure your involvement is acknowledged
online. As my friend Mike Blumenthal likes to say, “You don’t
need a thank-you from the executive director. You don’t need a
plaque. If they really want to thank you for your involvement,
they’ll give you a link from their website.”
GROUPS FOR WHOM YOU HOST EVENTS AT YOUR
PHYSICAL LOCATION
Hosting events for outside groups is one of the lowest-cost, low-
est-work linkbuilding initiatives you can undertake.
Chances are good that the business or group hosting the event
at your business will link to your website’s contact/directions
page when they post their invitation online.
Someone else is doing your linkbuilding for you -- and who
knows--some of the attendees may even turn into customers!
COMPLEMENTARY BUSINESSES
You probably have colleagues in related industries to whom you
LOCALLY-RELEVANT LINKS

refer business, and from whom you’re referred business, all the
time.
Make sure these referral relationships are represented online,
in the form of links, so that Google knows that your businesses
vouch for each other just as you do in the offline world.
INTERVIEWS AND GUEST COLUMNS
Local publications like newspapers and alternative weeklies or
monthlies are terrific places to get your business featured.
And the chances may be better, especially in smaller towns or
tightly-knit neighborhoods, that a friend of a friend may work at
one of these companies.
Using the same Intelligence Software tool I mentioned above,
you can perform searches like this to get a list of journalists (or
columnists) in your city, and see how you’re connected to them
through friends or family:
https://www.facebook.com/search/str/journalist/pages-named/employees/present/
intersect/str/portland%2C%20oregon/pages-named/residents/present/intersect

THE FUTURE OF LINKS AND
RANKINGS
Some SEO professionals have been predicting the demise of links
for a several years, but there’s little evidence to support this trend so
far.
Certainly Google has gotten better at penalizing low-quality links
over the course of various algorithm updates27
, but if anything,
high-quality links have been that much harder to come by, and
even more valuable to their recipients.
Links may very well become “democratized” as they become less
representative of the overall sentiment of the online world. A very
small percentage of internet users has ever published a link on a
website or blog, and more and more non-link signals are available
for Google to analyze to assess the popularity and credibility of a
local business (more on these signals coming in the final chapter of
this guide).
MORE ON LINKS
You can truly go crazy with linkbuilding, and there are entire com-
panies and agencies devoted entirely to this niche within SEO.
It’s probably not the highest and best use of your time as a local
business owner, or even a local business marketer. But it is im-
portant that every local business have a reasonable link foundation
underpinning their other marketing initiatives.
Here are four amazing resources for those of you wanting to take
an even deeper dive into linkbuilding:
MORE ON LINKS

SUMMARY
Inbound links pointing from other websites to your
website are critical to establish credibility with Google.
Build links as if Google didn’t even exist -- links that will
bring you customers in addition to rankings.
Assess your link profile, and those of your competitors
with aHrefs. Pay special attention to DR (Domain Rank
or authority) and the number of referring domains.
Seek out industry-relevant and locally-relevant links
from groups and websites with which you already have
an offline relationship.
Ask for introductions from colleagues, friends, and
family to key influencers who write for industry and
local publications.
Neil Patel has this great summary of linkbuilding tools and tech-
niques28
that have helped him build his, and his clients’, businesses.
The aforementioned aHrefs has published this excellent guide29
on
the discipline their company was founded to help master.
Phil Rozek has a terrific series of questions30
you can ask yourself
to identify what easy link opportunities might be available to you.
ZipSprout31
is a great product that helps you identify non-profits
who recognize supporters and volunteers online.






R E F E R E N C E S
23 “The Birth of Google”
John Battelle, Wired
https://www.wired.com/2005/08/battelle/
24 aHrefs
https://ahrefs.com
25 “Create valuable content”
Search Console Help
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6001093?hl=en
26 Facebook Search tool
Intelligence Software
http://www.intel-sw.com/blog/facebook-search/
27 “Google Algorithm Change History”
Dr. Peter Meyers, Moz
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
28 “9 Link Building Resources That’ll Increase Your Search Rankings”
Neil Patel
https://neilpatel.com/blog/9-link-building-resources-thatll-increase-your-search-rankings/
29 “The Noob Friendly Guide to Link Building”
aHrefs
https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building/
30 “The Best [BLEEP]in’ Local Link Questionnaire”
Phil Rozek, Local Visibility System
http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/02/05/the-best-bleepin-local-link-questionnaire/
31 ZipSprout
https://zipsprout.com

C I TAT I O N S 5 9
CITATIONS
Your Business’s Digital Thumbprints
I’d like you to think back 12+ years ago to early 2005. (Scary for
a guy who’s 35 to acknowledge, but some present-day readers
may still have been in elementary school!)
The Internet was a very different place. MySpace, not Facebook,
was all the rage, and Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram weren’t
even close to launching.There was no iPhone and there was no
Android.
In a nutshell, the world was far less digital. When you searched
at Google, it returned “10 blue links” of webpage results.The
authority of those webpages was largely determined by inbound
links.
C H A P T E R 5

But the launch of Google Maps in early 2005, and the subse-
quent release of the 10-pack in May 200732
, portended some-
thing entirely different. Google Maps and the 10-pack ranked
business listings, not websites, which required a completely
different algorithm -- an algorithm which remains distinct to
C I TAT I O N S 6 0
this day. After studying this algorithm in detail and discussing
it extensively with colleagues like Mike Blumenthal, I wrote in
May 2008 that “citations are the new link33
.”
The “10-pack” ranked local businesses based on a new algorithm and offered
incredible front page visibility alongside national brands.
The Web Pages tab has long since disappeared from contemporary Knowledge
Panels for local businesses, but while it was visible, it offered a key insight into
how Google was ranking its 10-pack results.

C I TAT I O N S 6 1
Google now obfuscates much of the evidence that prompted
my theory, but the underlying foundation of that Maps/10-pack
algorithm still seems to be in place today in the Maps/3-pack
interface that has succeeded it.
WHAT’S A CITATION?
My premise in that May 2008 column was that while inbound
links were the dominant ranking factor for “10 blue links” results,
Google’s listing-based results couldn’t rely primarily on inbound
links to determine rankings.
The reason? At the time, many businesses in Google’s business
index didn’t have websites (some still don’t). Without a website,
there’s nothing for other sites around the web to link to, so Google
had to develop an alternative ranking algorithm that wasn’t depen-
dent on links.
Based on information in a couple
of Google patents highlighted
by Bill Slawski, I theorized that
this secondary Google algorithm
focused on the number of times
Google’s spiders found referenc-
es to a business across the web,
largely through mentions of its
Name, Address, and Phone num-
ber (NAP).
I referred to these Name, Address,
Phone number mentions as “cita-
tions,” a term appeared extensively
in Google’s patents, and that term
has largely stuck.
“Fingerprint” by The Photogra-
pher, Wikimedia 2009. Used un-
der Creative Comons Sharealike.

C I TAT I O N S 6 2
Your NAP is basically your digital thumbprint -- it’s how Google
knows that a website is mentioning your business as opposed to
someone else’s.The more times Google sees your thumbprint on
reputable websites, the more confident Google is that it’s display-
ing a reputable business in its search results.
KEY CITATION ATTRIBUTES
The core citation attributes are your Name, Address, and Phone
number, along with your website.These attributes must be consis-
tent anywhere you expect Google to pick up your thumbprint.
It’s why using tracking phone numbers is such a risky practice--it’s
great to know where your incoming phone calls are coming from,
but implemented incorrectly, tracking numbers can pollute your
thumbprint. As can stuffing your business name with keywords
because you think it will help you rank for those terms.
The reality is that mixing and matching your NAP leaves makes
it much harder for Google to match mentions of your business to
your unique thumbprint, and give your business credit in the form
of rankings.
It can also lead to duplicate listings if those mismatches appear in
prominent enough sources -- a headache that no business wants to
develop (see Troubleshooting GMB Issues, Chapter 2).
NAP consistency--which appears twice in experts’ top 10 individ-
ual local ranking factors in the annual survey--is especially import-
ant between your own website and at Google My Business.
WHERE TO GET CITATIONS
Unless you’re blatantly spamming, there really isn’t a bad website
on which to acquire a citation. But as with inbound links, certain

C I TAT I O N S 6 3
citations are more valuable than others. Let’s take a look at the
most valuable citation types below.
The Local Search Ecosystem34
graphic illustrates the myriad of companies and
websites from which Google pulls citation information.
DATA AGGREGATORS
In most developed countries, Google has licensed existing databas-
es to build its local business index rather than starting from scratch.

C I TAT I O N S 6 4
In many cases the licensors are the largest traditional yellow pages
companies in each market. For example, Paginas Amarillas in Latin
America, YPG in Canada, and Telelistas in Brazil have all licensed
(or appeared to license) data to Google over the years.
In the United States, the primary licensors have been Infogroup,
Acxiom, Neustar/Localeze, and Factual.
Google has chosen to license data from these companies because
they tend to vet business information more stringently than the
average web directory, through phone and mailing address verifica-
tion. So Google has high confidence in the fidelity of the informa-
tion they license.
These aggregators also license business data to other directories and
mobile apps featuring local businesses, in addition to Google. In
turn, Google crawls those websites looking for citations.
These aggregators are not perfect, however, and because they’re
the original data source for so many websites, an incorrect Name,
Address, Phone, or website attribute can be amplified many times
over, creating all kinds of incorrect and mismatched thumbprints.
To reiterate, these mismatched thumbprints actually look like dif-
ferent businesses to Google, so it’s critical to get your information
correct at the source--the data aggregators themselves--if you want
to get credit for all of your thumbprints.
Many aggregators allow businesses to correct improper informa-
tion (or submit missing information) via online portals, including
Infogroup’s ExpressUpdate and Acxiom’s MyBusinessListing-
Manager. Others are either not publicly-accessible (Factual) or are
prohibitively expensive (Neustar/Localeze), in which case it’s best
to use a citation submission service (more on this below).

C I TAT I O N S 6 5
CONSUMER DIRECTORIES
In addition to licensing data, Google does what it does best--
crawls the Internet--looking for local business citations as well.
Citations from authoritative consumer directories (such as Yelp or
YP.com) carry much more weight in terms of helping your rank-
ings from weak directories you’ve never heard of like USCityNet or
ABLocal.
For U.S.-, U.K.-, Canada-, or Australia-based businesses, Darren
Shaw and Nyagoslav Zhekov of Whitespark have put together
great resources that delineate the top consumer directories on
which you should list your business35
.
The key point here is that the quality of the citation source mat-
ters far more than the quantity of sources on which you’re listed.
Despite the marketing of certain business listing services touting
“dozens” or “hundreds” of directories, the reality is that there are
only a handful of cross-industry consumer directories on which you
really need to be listed.
At that point you should move on to industry and local direc-
tories--which are largely outside the network of major listing
services. It won’t hurt to be listed on longer-tail directories, but
they’re just not worth your time or money.
INDUSTRY DIRECTORIES
As with inbound links, citations from industry-relevant websites
help build the authority of your business and give Google a sense
of the types of keywords for which your business is relevant.
Chances are that U.S.-based businesses can rattle off the important
vertical directories in your industry--sites like Avvo and Findlaw
for Lawyers, Houzz and HomeAdvisor for contractors, Wedding-
Wire and TheKnot for photographers, etc.

Basically, these are the directories that rank regularly for the key-
words that you want to rank for.
Businesses with an optimized thumbprint on these directories
stand a better chance of ranking in Google for industry terms than
businesses with a messy or missing thumbprint.
The team at Whitespark has also put together a list of the top in-
dustry directories36
, which is a great starting point no matter what
kind of business you are.
LOCAL DIRECTORIES
Citations from local directories also increase the authority and
credibility of listed businesses. As I mentioned in the previous
chapter, the member directories of your local chamber of commerce
and neighborhood association are great places to start.
There may also be business listing websites that are popular with
local residents. In my hometown of Portland, Oregon, the Orego-
nian newspaper maintains a strong directory at OregonLive.com.
Travel Portland and Supportland also maintain robust directories,
just to name a couple.
Seek out listings on similar sites in the towns and cities where your
business operates.
ADVANCED CITATION BUILDING
One of the advantages of citation building over other SEO tactics
is that it’s relatively non-technical, and any business owner with
enough time can be just as effective as an agency or expert SEO
consultant. It’s simply not that complicated to get your business
listed on major data aggregators, consumer directories, vertical
directories, and local directories.
C I TAT I O N S 6 6

There are a couple more advanced techniques that you can use to
either go beyond the basics or outbuild your competition, however.
UNSTRUCTURED CITATIONS
The four types of directory citations I covered above are all what
SEO professionals call “structured citations” -- sites on which NAP
attributes are presented in well-structured format by the sites on
which they appear, perhaps even in schema.org.
But mentions of your business name or phone number in general
web content (such as a blog post or media article) may be just as
valuable, provided there’s enough context for Google to identify
that it’s indeed your business being mentioned.
C I TAT I O N S 6 7
Note NW Golf Guys’ conversational reference to Seamus Golf in Beaverton, OR
above. This is a perfect example of an unstructured citation for Seamus Golf.
Many of the same linkbuilding suggestions I gave around finding
interviews and guest columns in the last chapter also apply to find-
ing good prospective sources of unstructured citations.

LONGER-TAIL INDUSTRY AND LOCAL DIRECTORIES
If you’re lucky enough to operate in an industry and a geography
covered by Whitespark’s lists of top citation sources, you can proba-
bly stop reading here.
If your business is in a country or market in which Whitespark has
not yet done research, you can perform similar research yourself.
Simply search Google for [your keyword] and [your city] and note
the directories that appear in the top 20 (or so) organic results. You
can even get more specific and add the word [directory] to the end
of your string, or [submit] to the beginning.
These are websites with a reasonable degree of credibility, on which
it would be helpful to place your NAP thumbprint.
Through a different, but equally effective, mechanism, Whitespark’s
Local Citation Finder37
can automate much of this research for
you.
PAID CITATION SERVICES
For those local businesses with a moderate budget, there are auto-
mated submission tools that can help get your thumbprint on many
important directories in a matter of days (or even minutes in some
cases).
My former product, Moz Local38
, remains an excellent baseline
Searches like those above can help you find credible industry citation sources.
C I TAT I O N S 6 8

citation submission service for U.S. businesses.
Whitespark’s service39
is a great option for those businesses with
slightly larger budgets or more tailored submission needs.
RULE OF THUMB[PRINT]
While it’s important to be represented as cleanly and as completely
as possible as many places as you can be online, it’s important to
weigh the benefit of citations against their cost--whether in time or
money.
My overriding rule of thumb[print] when it comes to thinking
about citation building is “be where your customers expect you to
be.”
That is, if you run a deli, and every other deli in your city is on Yelp,
you probably need to be on Yelp, too. If you’re a guitar instructor,
and every other guitar instructor in your region is on Thumbtack,
you probably need to be on Thumbtack, too.
Being where your customers expect you to be also means you’ll be
where Google expects you to be.
Citations beyond these obvious websites provide diminishing
returns, so be wary of that fact as you evaluate signing up with new
products or services.
THE PLACE OF CITATIONS IN THE
LOCAL ALGORITHM OF THE FUTURE
Citations are a rudimentary ranking factor in what is an increas-
ingly sophisticated local algorithm. Because they’re relatively easy
to build, most successful small businesses will already have a strong
citation profile.
C I TAT I O N S 6 9

In other words, citations have basically table stakes in the Local
SEO poker game. You need a strong citation profile to compete,
but if your business already has a strong profile, it’s unlikely that
building a few more citations will move the needle much on your
rankings.
Increasingly, Google is able to assess the veracity of a business’s
thumbprint from users of Maps, location-enabled Android devic-
es, Waze, and other mobile collection devices (such as StreetView
cars).
Thus, the competitive differentiators of the future are likely to be
of a different variety than the sought-after structured citations of
today.
My colleague Mike Blumenthal has rhetorically posed, “are words
becoming the new links?”
As Google’s algorithm gets smarter and smarter at detecting entity
mentions that appear in natural language (such as those in inter-
views or media articles), the disciplines of citation building, link
building, and social media could blend even further.
C I TAT I O N S 7 0

C I TAT I O N S 7 1
SUMMARY
Citations are your business’s digital thumbprint.
“Optimizing” that thumbprint via business name
keyword-stuffing or tracking phone numbers carries
substantial risk to your local rankings.
Your thumbprint should appear on data aggregators,
as well as prominent consumer portals, industry direc-
tories, and local directories.
My rule of thumb[print] for citations: be where your
customers expect you to be, and you’ll be where Goo-
gle expects your business to be.
Unstructured citations are likely to become more im-
portant in the future as more and more local businesses
achieve the “table stakes” of basic directory presence.

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



C I TAT I O N S 7 2
R E F E R E N C E S
32 “Google Launches ‘Universal Search’ & Blended Results”
Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/google-20-google-universal-search-11232
33 “Local SEO vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link”
David Mihm, Mihmorandum
http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/general-marketing/local-seo-citation-is-new-link/
34 The Local Search Ecosystem
Whitespark / Tidings
https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ecosystem/
35 Top Local Citation Sources by Country
Nyagoslav Zhekov, Whitespark
https://whitespark.ca/top-local-citation-sources-by-country/
36 The Best Citations by Category in USA, Canada, United Kingdom & Australia
Whitespark
https://whitespark.ca/best-citations-by-category/
37 Local Citation Finder
Whitespark
https://whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
38 Moz Local
https://moz.com/local
39 Whitespark Citation Building Service
https://whitespark.ca/citation-building-submission-service

R E V I E W S 7 3
REVIEWS
You Are What Customers Say You Are
Although they weren’t part of the initial release of Google Maps,
reviews have been a fixture on Google’s local properties for over
a decade. The reason is obvious: frankly, consumers love reviews.
BrightLocal consumer survey data40
suggests that over 90% of
consumers use reviews to evaluate local businesses, and 84% of
them trust reviews just as much as a personal recommendation!
So it’s no wonder that Google features them so prominently.
It stands to reason that if consumers love reviews so much, Goo-
gle’s ranking algorithm does too. Businesses with robust review
profiles on Google--and beyond--tend to be rewarded with
higher rankings.
C H A P T E R 6

Reviews create a virtuous cycle. More reviews lead to better
visibility, which leads to more customers, which lead to more
reviews. Quite simply, gathering and encouraging customer
reviews is one of the most sustainable marketing techniques your
business can engage in.
HOW GOOGLE EVALUATES REVIEWS
Only Google engineers know for sure, but local search experts
have theorized for years that Google primarily evaluates reviews
across the attributes below.They’re listed in order of importance
for competitive searches, according to the experts surveyed for
the Local Search Ranking Factors project.
VOLUME
Google’s entire local algorithm is designed to represent the
offline world online in the most accurate way possible. In Goo-
gle’s ideal world, popular businesses rank near the top of search
results, and less popular businesses rank further down. Reviews
are one of the easiest ways for Google to assess popularity.
All other factors being equal, popular businesses tend to serve
more customers than less popular ones. But remember as I said
earlier in this guide, Google can only “see” what’s represented
online.
So if your customers leave reviews of your business at a higher
rate than your competitors’ customers do, your business will ap-
pear more popular, and stands a good chance at outranking the
competition.
CONTENT
The area in which Google’s algorithm has arguably improved the
R E V I E W S 74

most over the past 3-4 years is in semantic analysis. And in fact
one of the earliest datasets on which Google trained its semantic
algorithm was local business reviews. As early as 2009, Google
highlighted key terms and phrases41
that it found consumers
using to describe local businesses.
So not only is Google looking at the number of reviews when
assessing the popularity of local businesses, it’s looking at what
people are saying about local businesses in those reviews.
For example, doctors whose patients frequently mention a par-
ticular kind of treatment in their reviews are likely to rank better
for searches for that treatment. Contractors whose customers
mention the kind of projects they execute, such as “kitchen
remodel,” are likely to rank better for searches for those kinds of
projects.
Google’s ability to semantically analyze reviews includes a sen-
timent filter. Adjectives like “great,”“terrific,” or “best” are likely
to move the ranking needle for your business more than reviews
with adjectives like “mediocre,”“average,” or “OK.”
The content of your customers’ reviews isn’t necessarily some-
thing you can control, but prompting your customers to think
about particular questions as they write their review (“What
service did we perform for you?,” e.g.) can help improve the
effectiveness of those reviews with respect to your rankings.
DIVERSITY
A common misconception--compounded by misleading testi-
mony from Google executives42
--is that Google does not use
third-party reviews to rank local results. This could not be fur-
ther from the truth. In some cases, reviews on third-party sites
R E V I E W S 7 5

can improve your rankings even more than comparable reviews
left directly at Google.
It’s not only a best-practice, it’s essential to earn reviews from
your customers on a number of sites beyond Google. (More on
this below.)
STAR / NUMERICAL RATING
You may be surprised to see star ratings listed this low as a
ranking factor, but generally speaking Google’s algorithm seems
to value volume and sentiment much more strongly than the star
rating that customers leave for a business.
With nearly 80% of reviews being three stars or above43
(even on
Yelp!), it’s not particularly useful for Google to split hairs be-
tween a 4.2 and a 4.4-star business, for example.
Where rating may play a larger role is in consumer choice--ac-
cording to BrightLocal, a majority of consumers see the rating
as the most important review factor in choosing a business.
THE REVIEWER
While Google’s review spam filter leaves much to be desired,
there’s some evidence to suggest that the account of the reviewer
may have some positive influence on how much weight his or
her review carries.
Reviews from more active reviewers likely carry more weight, in
much the same way that Yelp Elite44
(essentially, highly-active
Yelpers) reviews carry extra weight in Yelp’s algorithm.
Google has its own version of Yelp Elite called Local Guides45
,
and their reviews are almost certainly more trusted than others’.
R E V I E W S 7 6

VELOCITY
The velocity or frequency with which customers leave reviews
may also impact a business’s rankings.The BrightLocal survey
referenced above found that 73% of consumers think that re-
views older than three months are no longer relevant.
While Google’s “review expiration date” is considerably longer
than three months, especially in less-frequently-reviewed indus-
tries like DUI law or addiction treatment, it’s likely that business
with a steady stream of new reviews will outrank those with a
stale review profile.
WHERE TO GET REVIEWS
As I touched on in the Diversity section above, you don’t want
to focus your review acquisition efforts solely on Google. In fact,
reviews on prominent sites like Yelp have been proven to sin-
gle-handedly increase rankings for businesses in smaller markets
with limited competition.
See this empirical study by Mike Blumenthal46
showing the
impact of Yelp reviews on dive bar rankings in Mike’s hometown
of Olean, NY.
Just as with citations, you want to have reviews on the sites
where Google expects popular businesses to have reviews.The
only difference between the sites where you should acquire cita-
tions vs. the sites where you should acquire reviews is that data
aggregators don’t offer reviews as a feature.
CONSUMER DIRECTORIES
It nearly goes without saying that you should do your best to ac-
R E V I E W S 7 7

quire customer reviews on Facebook and Yelp -- two platforms
used to research local businesses by tens of millions of consum-
ers every month. Yelp syndicates its reviews to Apple Maps,
meaning even more consumers will read them. And of course,
Facebook is Facebook -- the app in which we spend one out of
every 5 of our mobile minutes47
.
INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC AND LOCAL REVIEWS
Beyond these two giants, you should look at the sites that show
up in Knowledge Panels for your competitors (and high-ranking
businesses similar to yours in other geographic markets).
R E V I E W S 7 8
Sites like the ones listed in the Knowledge Panels above likely
have direct relationships with Google to feed them reviews, or
mark their code up in such a way that Google can’t help but pull
in their review information.
Pay attention to the “Reviews from the web” of your competitors’ Knowledge
Panels for sites with particularly high value for rankings and conversions.

Also take a look at the review sites that show up for searches
matching the pattern
[your keyword] [your city] [reviews]
and note the review sites that appear in the top 20 (or so) or-
ganic results -- especially the ones with gold stars in the organic
results.
R E V I E W S 7 9
Simple searches like the one above give you a good idea of important review
sites in your industry and in your area for both Google and consumers.

CRITIC REVIEWS
In a limited set of categories relat-
ed to dining and nightlife, Google
also displays Critic reviews from
well-known editorial sites in those
categories. It’s likely that business-
es reviewed by these lists have an
advantage over businesses that don’t
appear. I expect we’ll see Google
rolling out Critic reviews to more
categories in the future.
HOW TO GET
REVIEWS
I can’t emphasize this point enough:
implementing an intentional
review acquisition process has
become an essential element of
success in local search.
Knowing the importance of customer reviews, you might be
tempted to blast all of your customers at once, asking them to
leave reviews. Or worse, you might be considering simply buy-
ing your way to the top with a bunch of fake reviews from Fiverr
or similar sites.These techniques will likely lead to success in the
short-term and dramatic pain in the long-term as Google and
other review platforms get better about cracking down on this
kind of behavior--which is fairly trivial to spot algorithmically.
Instead, a steady drip of reviews--depending on your industry,
this could be a handful per month, or a handful per week--is
R E V I E W S 8 0
Expect to see Critic reviews
roll out across more catego-
ries than just hospitality over
the next few years.

what will lead to sustained long-term success.
There are plenty of affordable software companies that can help
you implement this intentional review acquisition process. I rec-
ommend GetFiveStars48
, run by a team of local search experts.
Grade.us49
is an excellent option as well. But do a little research
and see which service is right for your business.
HOW REVIEW SERVICES WORK
The diagram on the following page, used by permission of Get-
FiveStars, shows how their platform works (and other similar
platforms work).
In a nutshell, review services automate the process of collecting
feedback from your customers, and prompt happy customers to
leave reviews on third-party review sites. Importantly, they can
also help you determine your Net Promoter Score50
, and identify
areas for improvement within your business.
Far beyond the ranking benefits that a stream of positive reviews
can have, review services can help you get out in front of bad re-
views with a controlled feedback mechanism.They enable you to
capture complaints and act on them before they spread around
the Internet.
GETTING YELP REVIEWS
Getting Yelp reviews can be a challenge, thanks to Yelp’s overag-
gressive review filter51
and historically asinine policy on review
solicitation52
. (Most review services don’t include Yelp in the list
of sites on which they solicit reviews.)
My opinion is that it’s well worth the (minimal) risk to ask for
reviews on Yelp, though, if you’re able to identify prospective
R E V I E W S 8 1

R E V I E W S 8 2
The review acquisition flow of a typical service. Reprinted with permission of
GetFiveStars (https://www.getfivestars.com)
CUSTOMER EMAILS
Single email entry, list upload, or
API automation with your CRM
SHORT URL
Use our short URL link to send
customers from the web
KIOSK MODE
iPad or Smartphone capture
customer feedback onsite
FEEDBACK REQUEST
Goal: User clicks CTA button to
leave feedback
FEEDBACK LANDING
PAGE
Goal: Capture NPS, segment
positive & negative experi-
ence, gather feedback &
testimonials
POSITIVE LANDING
PAGE
Goal: Ask and link positive
ratings to REVIEW you online at
Google, Facebook, etc.
POSITIVE FEEDBACK
EMAIL
Goal: Follow-up to landing page
steps, thank you and additional
review site links.
NEGATIVE LANDING
PAGE
Goal: Apologize to negative
rating customer and ask for
more feedback to help.
NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
EMAIL
Goal: Follow-up to landing page
steps, apology, and tell
customer you will follow-up.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
= Email = Web/mobile landing page
1
2
3
4 6
5

customers who already have a Yelp account, and provided you’re
emailing customers individually, one at a time, instead of a mass
solicitation.
Check out this excellent post by Phil Rozek53
on how to
pre-identify potential Yelp reviewers for your business.
You can also do a little research on Facebook using the Intel-
ligence Software tool I’ve mentioned in previous chapters. Just
select Like and enter the name of your business, and add another
line for Likers of Yelp.
Voila, you have a list of fans
of your business who are also
likely to be active on Yelp.
Letting them know how much
a Yelp review can help your
business increases the chances
they’ll leave that elusive Yelp
review.
Under no circumstances
should you offer an incentive
to leave a review on Yelp (or
any other platform).This is a violation that will get you black-
listed and if the incentive is not disclosed, may violate United
States FTC guidelines or similar laws in other countries.
RESPONDING TO REVIEWS
As Mike Blumenthal of GetFiveStars likes to say: “There are
two kinds of businesses in the world. Businesses that have gotten
R E V I E W S 8 3
Intelligence Software’s free tool makes
it easy to pre-qualify prospective re-
viewers who already like your business
and are active on Yelp.

R E V I E W S 8 4
a bad review, and businesses that will get a bad review at some
point.” No matter how great your business is, it’s bound to hap-
pen.
Many sites, including Google and Yelp, allow for you to respond
to that bad review as the business owner. The important thing
to keep in mind is that the real audience for that response is not
this particular customer, but the dozens or hundreds of prospec-
tive customers who read your response and evaluate your empa-
thy for the reviewer and attempt to resolve the complaint.
See this excellent guide on responding to complaints54
for more
best practices for review responses.
REPURPOSING REVIEWS
Another benefit of subscribing to a review acquisition service is
that many of these services include an embeddable testimonials
widget as part of your subscription.
This gives you compelling, keyword-rich content that can im-
prove your website’s position in organic search results, and
provides social proof to prospective customers who visit your
website.
Even if you don’t subscribe to a review acquisition service, you
can replicate this process by copying-and-pasting snippets from
some of your favorite customer reviews onto your website, but
make sure you get the permission of the person who left the
review before doing so.
This technique works particularly well for the reviews of your
business that Yelp has filtered.To find them, scroll down to the

R E V I E W S 8 5
bottom of your Yelp page and look for a link similar to this one:
Click that link to open an accordion-style window. Ignore the
propaganda from Yelp at the top, and scroll down to find anoth-
er link that looks like this one:
This will give you a complete list of filtered reviews, which no
search engine has indexed. Many times the customers who
left them are incredibly frustrated that Yelp has hidden their
comments, and are more than happy to give you permission to
promote their comments in full on your website.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR REVIEWS
As I brought up in the last chapter, words may be becoming the
new links--a trend which portends even more ranking power for
reviews.
The reality is that reviews are a far more democratic ranking sig-
nal than inbound links, or even citations. They more accurately
reflect the popularity of a business than either of these promi-
nent local ranking factors.
Half of consumers who’ve been asked by a local business for a
review have left one--an exponentially higher fraction than the
number of consumers who operate their own websites, let alone
have given a local business a link from those websites!
While Google still clearly has a long road ahead of it55
in fight-

R E V I E W S 8 6
ing review spam, its team of PhD’s will surely shut down the
most egregious spammers within the next couple of years. And
as long as consumers continue to make decisions at least par-
tially based on reviews, they’ll be a fixture in local search results
(and rankings) for years to come.
SUMMARY
The volume of reviews and the content included in
those reviews are two of the most important local rank-
ing factors.
Reviews on Google are important, but local businesses
should get reviews on other prominent sites, too.
Facebook and Yelp are important regardless of your
business category or location, but seek out key in-
dustry and local sites that show up in the Knowledge
Panels of your competitors as well.
Review acquisition services are a great way to auto-
mate your review process and make it sustainable.
Research existing friends and fans who use Yelp to min-
imize the risk that their reviews will be filtered.
Extend the power of reviews by posting them on your
site as testimonials, with permission from the reviewer.
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R E V I E W S 8 7
R E F E R E N C E S
40 Local Consumer Review Survey
BrightLocal
https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/
41 “Google Highlights Review Sentiments On Local Place Pages”
Matt McGee, Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/google-highlights-review-sentiments-on-local-place-pages-32027
42 “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?”
Senate Hearing 112-168, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-112shrg71471/html/CHRG-112shrg71471.htm
43 An Introduction to Yelp Metrics as of June 30, 2017
Yelp
https://www.yelp.com/factsheet
44 Yelp Elite
https://www.yelp.com/elite
45 Google Local Guides
https://maps.google.com/localguides/
46 “Moz Local 2017 Presentation -- Are Words the New Links?”
Mike Blumenthal, Blumenthals.com
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/03/06/moz-local-2017-presentation-are-words-the-new-links/
47 “One in every five minutes on a mobile phone is spent on Facebook”
Andrew Trotman,The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/dig
ital-media/11772072/One-in-every-five-minutes-on-a-mobile-phone-is-spent-on-Facebook.html
48 GetFiveStars
https://getfivestars.com
49 Grade.us
https://grade.us
50 “What is Net Promoter Score?”
GetFiveStars
https://www.getfivestars.com/what-is-net-promoter-score/
51 “Operation Clean Air: Clearing Up Misconceptions of Yelp’s Review Filter”
David Mihm, Moz
https://moz.com/blog/operation-clean-air-yelp-review-filter

R E V I E W S 8 8
R E F E R E N C E S ( C O N T I N U E D )
52 “Don’t Ask For Reviews: Why Yelp Does Not Recommend Solicited Reviews”
Yelp
https://www.yelpblog.com/2017/01/dont-ask-reviews-yelp-not-recommend-solicited-reviews
53 “How to Bulk-Identify Prime Yelp Reviewers with Yelp’s ‘Find Friends’ Feature in 7 Easy Steps
Phil Rozek, Local Visibility System
http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2016/03/15/how-to-bulk-identify-prime-yelp-reviewers-with
yelps-find-friends-feature-in-7-easy-steps/
54 “8 Steps for Dealing with Customer Complaints”
Mike Blumenthal, GetFiveStars
https://www.getfivestars.com/blog/8-steps-for-dealing-with-customer-complaints/
55 “The Largest Review Spam Network Ever Or Who Is Shazedur Rahman and Why Should You Care?”
Mike Blumenthal, Blumenthals.com
http://blumenthals.com/blog/2017/04/17/the-largest-review-spam-network-ever-or-who-is-shazedur
rahman-and-why-should-you-care/

S O C I A L S I G N A L S 8 9
SOCIAL SIGNALS
Do the Basics, Don’t Overthink It, and
Move Swiftly Along
Those of you who have made it to this chapter probably feel
like you’ve drunk from a firehose.There are a lot of angles from
which to attack Local SEO!
Generally speaking, though, social media is not one of them,
so this will be the shortest chapter of the guide. Marcus Miller
of Bowler Hat Marketing, a long-time participant in the Lo-
cal Search Ranking Factors survey, sums up the place of social
media brilliantly:
“Do the basics, don’t overthink it, and move swiftly along.”
Primarily, “the basics” have to do with optimizing your social
media profiles, as opposed to your social media activity.
C H A P T E R 7
SOCIAL SIGNALS

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