Having correct and consistent online business listings and gaining positive reviews in those listing venues are an absolute must for obtaining higher rankings in the search engines these days, especially for companies who provide ‘local’ services such as practitioners, contractors, attorneys, repair companies, etc, or who sell products locally, for example restaurants, auto dealers, etc. Continue reading
When is a Duplicate IYP Listing Not a Duplicate?
In the world of online business listings there exists different definitions of what is a ‘duplicate listing’. Internet marketing professionals may view listings in a different light than an internet yellow pages (IYP) venue or a data aggregator might. That is understandable, since we each have different reasons for working with the data contained in said listings.
Some people understand the importance of not having incorrect/duplicate business listings in existence, however it appears that some venues or business owners seem to think it is OK for a business to be listed more than once in a particular business directory. Continue reading
How Can Online Business Listings Help My Website Rankings (vs Backlinks)
The interesting thing about citations in general is that they can help raise the trust of a company in the search engines, even without a link pointing to your website. Google sees mentions (aka ‘citations’) of your business name, address, and/or phone number (NAP) online as reinforcing the existence of the business. The web pages containing these mentions help to expand search engines’ knowledge of your business; thus adding trust.
Search engines can more confidently gather and interpret information about your business when there are more listings in existence that contain data about the business, and these listings contain proper data. For example IYP listings may contain your business’ hours of operation, description, category keywords, etc. Continue reading
Which IYP Listings are Most Important for my Business?
In the online business listing industry there is no exact standard for determining which internet yellow page (IYP) directories are the most important for citation building purposes. I’ve seen many ‘top 100’ IYP venue lists and even a ‘top 1000’ list out there somewhere. So how can we know where we should list a business online? Continue reading
What does Google’s Mobilegeddon really mean?
Hello!
This is Bill from the Orion Group. I am reaching out to as many people as I can to explain, in layman’s terms, what Google did on April 21st of this year. Some of you may have heard about Google’s “Mobilegeddon”. The title is most accurate because what Google did was literally pull the rug out on the entire internet affecting every website that exists today.
For those of us who do not understand, here is what Google did.
- Mobilegeddon refers to what Google did for searches done on mobile devices.
- Google has come out and said that web sites that are Responsive in nature, or mobile-friendly, will show up in search results on mobile devices unaffected.
- What Google is really saying here is that if your web site is NOT mobile-friendly “Responsive“, your site may not show up at all, or be buried in the results, on searches performed on mobile devices.
Why is this important?… because Google does not play around and make such announcements just for fun.
- Roughly 60% of ALL online traffic now comes from mobile devices.
- 48% of all mobile research for products or services start on search engines.
- This update is for ALL individual pages, NOT just your homepage
- Check this out! Google’s “Mobile-Friendly” Update Could Impact Over 40% Of Fortune 500 Websites.
Want proof this is happening?
- In the four days after the rollout, boxofficemojo.com lost roughly 33% of their website traffic. A 64% loss in ratio of mobile vs desktop.
- Another example of how NOBODY is exempt from Google. Here’s the traffic loss from a government entity, census.gov. 23% overall loss and 53% loss in ratio of mobile vs desktop.
All of this is because neither site was optimized to “mobile friendly” status before the algorithm update by Google.
Does this not make one think that if such a large percentage of web sites are not responsive, and only those that are will be shown in mobile search results, then we better get going and update our web site? We need to take advantage of being part of the small percentage of sites that will show up in mobile search results and capitalize while others are still playing catch up. In essence, the entire internet is starting over and only the smartest of companies that understand all of this will take advantage of such a small pool of competition showing up in mobile search results.
This is a chance that may never come around again. In order to rank higher in mobile search results and NOT be doomed to losing that traffic all together, you have to have a website that is mobile-friendly. When will Google say that they will be doing the same thing in Desktop and Laptop searches? It’s a scary thought but Google is scary.
I believe Google is forcing the entire internet to do it their way. It purifies searches and it will cost advertisers a lot more money as the field of viewership will be so much narrower for a while.
So, while you may have been putting off redoing your web sites for years, there is now an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot. When the wagons went west in the search for gold, it was the first ones there that got richest the quickest. Now this can be said for having a responsive, mobile-friendly website. If your business values mobile traffic, why wouldn’t you want to be able to cash in on being the only ones who come up on the mobile search results with little to no competition around you for the foreseeable future?
How can you tell if your current website meets Google’s definition of mobile-friendly? There’s an online tool for that. Visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/, paste or type in the URL of your website, and click Analyze. Does your site pass? If not, then it’s HIGHLY likely that your site is NOT showing up in mobile search results.
This was a collaborative effort by Emma Edgar, Adam Kuhn & Kevin Barnes
If your website is not mobile-friendly, Orion Group can help.
Call 262-820-9520 for a free consultation.
How To Encourage Customers To Leave Feedback For Your Business
Business want more engagement with their customers. Good feedback on websites increases visitor engagement, web traffic and increases time visiting the site. This helps search engine rankings and the ability to be found on Google. It helps to foster sales, creates new opportunities, and attract loyal customers that will support businesses for years to come.
Customer engagement like feedback has already helped companies like Netflix or Amazon grow rapidly.
The most important part about engagement, however, is that it can show you where you should take your business next. Feedback, which is one of the most valuable types of engagement you can have with your visitors, can do just that.
The problem is giving your customers the means to leave feedback. You don’t want to require it from them, but you do need a way to encourage and retrieve it. Continue reading
Adding a Puerto Rico Business to Online Business Directories & Major Aggregators
What do Localeze, InfoGroup, Factual, Acxiom …. and Yahoo Local have in common? They don’t seem to support Puerto Rico based businesses. For a typical United States ‘mainland’ client, we would use our standard tool set to publish and/or correct online business listings, however, for companies doing business in Puerto Rico, this IYP correction task gets more complicated. Continue reading
Fixing Business Listing Errors in Local SEO on Angie’s List Can Be Confusing
Dealing with local SEO issues like yellow pages tech support can be frustrating at times. That is a good reason to leave it up to the business listing correction experts, like us. It gets even more complicated when support staff are feeding their clients misinformation.
I believe that the tech support department of Angie’s List may be confusing their search engine terminology. I wrote Angie’s List to have them update the phone number in a listing for one of my clients recently. I followed up a few weeks later since I did not see the live listing data updated yet.
They replied saying that the listing had been updated. They also said that if you are not signed in to the website (as a member) and you are seeing outdated info (which they may have updated already), AND you found the page via a Google search, then it is a Google cached page that you are seeing. Huh!?! Continue reading
Best Practices for IYP Venues to Deal with Duplicate Listing URLs
In a white paper published by Yext called ‘The Definitive Guide to Duplicate Listings‘, Andrew Shotland suggests 3 ways that IYP websites can handle duplicate listing URLs. In the section called ‘Best SEO Practices for Publishers Dealing With Duplicates’ he recommends that publishers:
1. 301 Redirect Dupes To The Canonical Listing
2. Or Use Canonical Tags
3. Or 404 Them Continue reading
What Yext Does NOT Do For Your Online Business Listings
The YEXT Service
Is Yext, alone, enough to fix your online business listings once and for all? Using Yext to correct your company’s name/address/phone (NAP) discrepancies on internet yellow page type websites has many advantages. In a matter of hours your proper business info can be synced on at least 40-50 venues with another 10-15 venues corrected within a few days or a week thereafter. However, there are a few reasons why you should trust your business listing submission, correction and optimization work to professionals instead of taking a DIY approach and using Yext alone. Continue reading