For years Blizzard has been advising our clients to respond to reviews placed at websites like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Yellowpages.  Until today – reviews left at Google Maps (now called Google Places) were the stepchildren that didn’t offer this feature.
Belabor the fact no more!

Announced today at the Google Lat Long blog, Google now offers verified business owners the ability to respond to reviews made directly on their Google Places page!

Responses will be featured below the review:

At Blizzard, we recommend everyone: 1) be aware of all reviews made of their business, 2) respond to reviews in a public forum where appropriate; and 3) understand that all feedback is valuable.

Google agrees with this stance and gives some helpful tips for responding to reviews:

1) Be Nice - This isn’t just a guideline – it’s a good idea.
2) Don’t Get Personal – Remember that you’re replying to feedback about an experience, not about you as a person.
3) Feedback is Helpful – Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow.

If your business listing isn’t verified, we advise you to do that as soon as possible.  If it is verified, start responding to reviews  – both negative and positive – to engage with your audience and ensure future viewers of those reviews see you care about each and every guest.

Search Engine Results Saturation (SERS) refers to how many spots in the search engine results are about you.

The more spots in the search engine results that are about you, the better!  We already know that:

• If you have an organic AND a PPC ad on the same page, you get a lot more clickthroughs.
• Consumers reached across multiple publishers were twice as likely to convert as those reached only on a single publisher
• Sponsored search clickers were 22 percent more likely to convert if they were exposed to display ads

Managing a stable of high quality listing sites not only drives you qualified traffic and helps you in the search engines, it also improves your click-through rate and your conversion rate.  Search engine saturation works!

Listings sites like VRBO, Bedandbreakfast.com and TripAdvisor  will all help you garner more spots in the top-10 and improve your brand recognition.  Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Flickr are also excellent resources for increasing your search engine results saturation.

As you go out and build links to help you rank better in Google, don’t forget the other key benefits of getting listings that will rank directly in Google:

• Increased brand recognition and online visibility
• Increased Click-throughs to your website
• Increased conversion rates
• Increased interaction with your visitors

Building quality listings, links and referrers is the top technique hotels and resorts use to increase their online visibility and improve their search engine rankings.

The following lame techniques probably won’t help and could even hurt, or penalize you.  Avoid these 5:

#1 Article Farms are websites that let anyone post (lame) articles to.  The hope is that they will give a good link. They are pretty much a waste of time and can even be dangerous. Here is an embarrassing example article from ArticleBase that looks like a foreign-based copywriter posted crap up for a link (we edited out a few paragraphs of junk).  Don’t let your SEO company do this for you!

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I wanted to share this awesome resource with our readers because it really sheds light on the analytical process we follow when determining how hard it will be to rank for a particular term.

In some cases just putting the keywords on a page and building a few links is all you need to hit the top 10.  More cases than not – the keywords that will bring the most traffic are MUCH harder to rank for – hence the concept of Keyword Difficulty.

If you’re looking for insight – check out The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Competition: Tips from 35 Experts on Analyzing Competitive Keywords.

This comprehensive article gives a snapshot of the ideas surrounding Keyword Difficulty from 35 SEM industry leaders.  There’s some great insight here to put your quest for that number one ranking into perspective.  There are so many factors to consider, beyond the metatag and the link.

Some of my favorite points are highlighted below:

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At Blizzard Internet, we really love using WordPress to build hospitality websites. It is arguably the most popular content management system (CMS) in the wide world and it has several advantages.

There is a large world of developers who are creating upgrades, plug-ins and furthering the usability platform. Our favorite WordPress features are that it is easy for our clients to update and it is search engine friendly.

Trent Blizzard and Lindy Norris, our Director of Web Development, have created a video to walk though the dashboard and the backend of a WordPress system to help you get the most out of your website.

Get the video: An Introduction to Managing the Content on Your Website with WordPress

If you are looking for a new website platform, watch our webinar on-demand: 10 Reasons to Use WordPress to Manage Your Website

WordPress TShirt Photo by  Titanas

Local Google Map listings are essential for your web site’s local and overall visibility; make sure that your information is accurate and in accordance with the guidelines.

Here is an overview of the new guidelines:

• The business name must be the full legal business name.
• No stuffing of keywords into the business name, Google recognizes that you are trying to manipulate the search results. “Key West Vacations by Antlers Realty” is a no-no.
• No stuffing of URLs or phone numbers into the business name.
• A property for rent isn’t considered a business; use the main office for the address. This is a big one for vacation rental companies and real estate agents who have tried to list every property in their inventory separately in the past.
• If your business operates in several cities, don’t create a listing for each city, use the main office location.
• Physical business locations only, PO Boxes don’t count.
• Best practices have always been to use an email address that
  matches your business’s URL, so for www.AwesomeRentals.com use Info@AwesomeRentals.com.
• It’s also best to use an email address that is shared by people in the company. For example Info@BlizzardInternet.com is shared between the business development and marketing team.
• When choosing categories only choose those that apply to your business, and not related categories
• Use the description and custom attribute fields for additional information about your listing; don’t stuff it into other fields.

Photo by  Spencer E Holtaway

When our search marketing team got back from Pubcon in Las Vegas this month, they were all kinds of excited to share what is new in the world SEO.

One hot topic of the conference was page speed load time and that pages with a slow speed are likely to drop in rankings.

Blizzard Internet’s Director of Search Strategies, Carrie Hill, writes about the importance of page speed in her monthly SearchEngineWatch.com article: What Small Business Web Site Owners Need to Know about Page Speed.