GOOGLE TESTING NEW LOCAL PACK IN SAN DIEGO WITH ROLLOUT OF ADVANCED VERIFICATION

In early October, Google announced a new test for service area businesses that offered direct consumer contact and exhibited lots of spam (ie locksmiths, plumbers etc) that involved an advanced verification process. The advanced verification process is similar to, although less rigorous than the vetting process involved with the Home Service Ads that were showing in the Bay Area. Along with this Advanced Verification test, Google announced that any plumber or locksmiths in San Diego that did not Advance Verify or did not meet the standard would be pulled from the index sometime after November 10th.

What Google didn’t announce but that has now become obvious from this screen shot provided by Joy Hawkins on Twitter is that were will also be a new local display unit, the Home Services Pack, that highlights SABs that have done through this more rigorous vetting.

The Home Service Pack lists just Advanced Verified local businesses and displays them with a check mark to signify the higher level of verification. And it appears that the unit can appear in addition to the Local Pack which shows store front businesses.

Since this has yet to really role out and seems to still be only occasionally visible we are not yet sure how many previously listed SAB Plumbers and locksmiths will be removed.

Test your site with Google and see how it works across devices

Did you know that nine out of ten people will leave a mobile website if they can’t find what they’re looking for right away?1 Now, think about your business’s site. Does it perform quickly on both laptops and smartphones? If not, you’re probably losing customers while the pages slowly load. But if you’re not sure how to make it run more smoothly, don’t worry – we’re here to help.

Today we’re introducing an easy way to measure your site’s performance across devices—from mobile to desktop—and give you a list of specific fixes that can help your business connect more quickly with people online.

You don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to understand your site’s performance. Just type in your web address and within moments you’ll see how your site scores. You can also get a detailed report to give you an idea of what to do next, and where to go for help at no charge. We recommend sharing it with your webmaster to help you plan your next steps and implement our suggested fixes.

Why you should test your site

Your customers live online. When they need information or want to find a nearby store or product, they grab the nearest device. On average, people check their phones more than 150 times a day,2 and more searches occur on mobile phones than computers.3 But if a potential customer is on a phone, and a site isn’t easy to use, they’re five times more likely to leave.4

To avoid losing out in these crucial moments, you need a site that loads quickly and is easy to use on mobile screens. The first step is seeing how your site is performing. We can help by scoring your site for mobile-friendliness, mobile speed, and desktop speed. Plus, it’s easy to share these scores. (By the way, if you’re a site guru, you may also want to visit PageSpeed Insights, which is the power behind the scores.)

What your scores say about your site

• Mobile-friendliness: This is the quality of the experience customers have when they’re browsing your site on their phones. To be mobile-friendly, your site should have tappable buttons, be easy to navigate from a small screen, and have the most important information up front and center.
• Mobile speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on mobile devices. If customers are kept waiting for too long, they’ll move on to the next site.
• Desktop speed: This is how long it takes your site to load on desktop computers. It’s not just the strength of your customers’ web connection that determines speed, but also the elements of your website.

Test your site and find out what’s working, what’s not, and which fixes to consider.

The world’s gone mobile. Now, it’s your turn.

Originally Posted by Yong Su Kim, VP SMB Sales Americas

How To Deal with Duplicates Listing in Google My Business

There are so many different scenarios that could exist in the Google My Business (GMB) world when it comes to duplicate listings. The approach you take with them could mean the difference between ranking and not ranking on Google Map Results.

Before doing anything listed below, always make sure you check both listings to see if there are reviews that need to be moved.

Listings for Businesses at Physical Locations (Have Storefronts):

2 Listings for the same business at the same address

• If they are both verified, you will first need to Contact Google My Business (GMB) to get ownership of both before they can be merged. The GMB team will have to merge the 2 for you.
• If only one is verified, go into MapMaker and get the URL for both the verified and the unverified one and write them down (save this somewhere). Go to the unverified listing and click the little drop-down beside the title and select “report this”. For the reason, select “Duplicate Exists” and in the remarks section, clarify that there is a verified duplicate that exists for the business and include a link to the verified listing.

2 Listings for the same business at different addresses

• If the incorrect address is an old address of the business (they were there at some point in time)
• Contact Google My Business through Twitter Support (@googlemybiz) and ask them to mark the old listing as moved.
• If the incorrect address is one that the business has never existed at, go into MapMaker and select “delete this” and then “place does not exist”.

Listings for Service Area Businesses (SAB)s Without Storefronts:

2 Listings for the same business at the same address or different addresses

• If they are both verified, you will first need to contact Google My Business (GMB) to get ownership of both before they can be merged. The GMB team will have to merge the 2 for you.
• If only one is verified, go into MapMaker and pull up the unverified listing. The verified one shouldn’t show up in MapMaker if the address is properly hidden. Go to the unverified listing and click the little drop-down beside the title and select “delete this”. For the reason, select “place does not exist” and clarify that this is a service area business and they are not permitted to be listed on the map.

*Important Note: Unverified listings for SABs should never be marked closed, they should always be deleted.

Listings for Professionals/Practitioners

• Public-Facing professionals (doctors, lawyers, dentists, realtors etc) are allowed their own listings separate from the office they work for unless they are the only public-facing professional at that office. In that case, there should only be one listing formatted as “Business Name: Professional Name”
• If you find an unverified listing for a public-facing professional who no longer works at your location but did at some point, contact GMB support and ask them to mark the listing for the professional that no longer works there as moved to the practice listing. In order to accomplish this, the practitioner listing *must* be unverified. If it’s currently verified you need to get access to it first and delete it from your Google My Business dashboard to make it unverified. For more details on why it absolutely must be done this way, read my case study here.
• If a listing exists for an employee who is not public-facing (ex: a hygienist, nurse, or paralegal) or someone who never worked at that address, you should go into MapMaker and select “delete this” and then “other”. In the notes explain why you are deleting it so the person reviewing it can verify the information.

Did I miss any scenarios you have come across? Tell me about it in the comments.

Originally Posted at joyannehawkins.com

Most Common Local SEO Myths

I regularly hear things in the Local SEO world that many people believe, but which are completely false. I wanted to put some of these myths to rest by listing out the top Local SEO myths that I run into most frequently.

Deleting your listing in Google My Business actually removes the listing from Google.

Business owners will often question how they can get rid of duplicate listings on Google. One of the more common things people try is claiming the duplicate and then deleting it from the Google My Business Dashboard. When you go to delete a listing, you receive a scary message asking if you're sure you want to do this.

Still exists on Google Maps and will often still rank, provided you didn’t clear out all the categories/details before you deleted it. The only time you’d really want to delete a listing via GMB is if you no longer want to manage the listing.

Google confirms this in their help center article:

When you delete a local page, the corresponding listing will be unverified and you will no longer be able to manage it. Google may still retain business information from the page and may continue to show information about the business on Maps, Search, and other Google properties, including marking the business as permanently closed, moved, or open, depending on the information that’s known about the business.

Failure to claim your page means your business won’t rank anywhere.

I’m sure most of you have received those annoying phone calls that say: “Your business is not currently verified and will vanish on Google unless you claim it now!”. First of all, consider the authority of the people who are calling you. I can say with certainty they are not experts in this industry, or they wouldn’t resort to robo-calling to make sales.

The Moz Local Search Ranking Factors does list verifying your listing as #13 for making an impact on ranking in the 3-pack, but this is often because business owners add more data to the listing when they verify it. If they left the listing exactly how it was before verifying, the verification “status” would not likely impact the ranking much at all. We often see unverified pages outranking verified ones in really competitive markets.

"Professional/Practitioner" listings on Google are considered duplicates and can be removed.

Google often creates listings for the actual public-facing professionals in an office (lawyers, doctors, dentists, realtors, etc), and the owner of the practice usually wants them to disappear. Google will get rid of the listing for the professional in two different cases:

• The professional is not public-facing. Support staff, like hygienists or paralegals for example, don’t qualify for a listing and Google will remove them if they exist.
• The business only has one public-facing individual. For example, if you have a law firm with only one lawyer, Google considers this to be a “Solo Practitioner” and will merge the listing for the professional with the listing for the office. Their guidelines state to “create a single page, named using the following format: [brand/company]: [practitioner name].”

In the case that the professional has left your office, you can have the listing marked as moved if the professional has retired or is no longer working in the industry. This will cause it to vanish from the search results, but it will still exist in Google’s back-end. If the professional has moved to a different company, you should have them claim the listing and update the address/phone number to list their new contact information.

Posting on G+ helps improve your ranking.

No, posting on G+ will not cause your ranking to skyrocket, despite what the Google My Business phone support team told you.

Phil Rozek explains this best: “It’s nearly impossible for people to see your Google+ posts unless they search for your business by name. Google doesn’t include a link to your 'Plus' page in the local pack. Google doesn’t even call it a 'Plus' page anymore. Do you still believe being active on Google+ is a local ranking factor?”

"Maps SEO" is something that can be effectively worked on separately from "Organic SEO."

I often get small business owners calling me saying something along the lines of this: "Hey, Joy. I have an SEO company and they’re doing an awesome job with my site organically, but I don’t show up anywhere in the local pack. Can I hire you to do Google Maps optimization and have them do Organic SEO?"

My answer is, generally, no. “Maps Optimization” is not a thing that can be separated from organic. At Local U in Williamsburg, Mike Ramsey shared that 75% of ranking local listings also rank organically on the first page. The two are directly connected — a change that you make to your site can have a huge influence on where you rank locally.

If you're a local business, it's in your better interests to have an SEO company that understands Google Maps and how the 3-pack works. At the company I work for, we've always made it a goal to get the business ranked both organically and locally, since it’s almost impossible to get in the 3-pack without a strong organic ranking and a website with strong local signals.

Google employees are the highest authority on which ranking signals you should pay attention to.

Google employees are great; I love reading what they come out with and the insight they provide. However, as David Mihm pointed out at Local U, those employees have absolutely no incentive to divulge any top-secret tips for getting your website to rank well. Here are some recent examples of advice given from Google employees that should be ignored:

• Duplicate listings will fix themselves over time.
• Posting on Google+ will help your ranking (advice given from phone support reps).
• If you want to rank well in the 3-pack, just alter your business description.

Instead of trusting this advice, I always suggest that people make sure what they're doing matches up with what the pros are saying in big surveys and case studies.

“More links are better than more content”

In the past, building as many links as possible without analyzing the linking domain was how SEO typically worked. By doing this, your website was sure to rank higher. Building links is still a very important part of ranking factors. According to Searchmetrics, it is still top 5 most important rankings factors, but you must build links in a much different manner than you used to.

This is something that often comes along with the question, “Which should I invest in, link building or content generation?” Links are an important part of your website’s authority (even with the changing link landscape). However, if you have budget to invest in your website, I would say, “Hire someone to write for you.”

Too often, when businesses hire someone to do link building, they focus on the quantity of links rather than their quality -- but linking is not a numbers game anymore (far from it, actually). You should focus on having relevant and diverse sources that link to relevant pages.

Setting a huge service area means you’ll rank in all kinds of additional towns.

Google allows service-area businesses to set a radius around their business address to demonstrate how far they're willing to travel to the customer. People often set this radius really large because they believe it will help them rank in more towns. It doesn’t. You will still most likely only rank in the town you're using for your business address.

When your business relocates, you want to mark the listing for the old location as closed.

The Google My Business & Google MapMaker rules don’t agree on this one. Anyone on the Google MapMaker side would tell a business to mark a listing as "closed" when they move. This will cause a business listing to have a big, ugly, red "permanently closed" label when anyone searches your business name.

If your listing is verified through Google My Business, all you need to do is edit the address inside your dashboard when you move. If there's an unverified duplicate listing that exists at your old address, you want to make sure you get it marked as "Moved."

Google displays whatever is listed in your GMB dashboard.

Google gives business owners the ability to edit information on their listing by verifying it via Google My Business. However, whatever data the owner inputs is just one of many sources that Google will get information from. Google updates verified listings all the time by scraping data from the business website, inputs from edits made on Google Maps/MapMaker, and third-party data sources. A recent case I’ve seen is one where Google repeatedly updated an owner-verified listing with incorrect business hours due to not being able to properly read the business hours listed on their website.

“Keyword optimization is THE key to Local SEO”

Until search engines are able to enter our brains and read our thoughts, we’ll always need to use written language in order to make search queries. We need to use keywords to communicate. It used to be important that you write your content with the keyword incorporated exact match, but now Google uses latent semantic indexing (LSI), which was conceived around February of 2004 and became more and more prominent within search through every update.

With this type of indexing, the contents of a webpage are crawled by the search engine and the most common words or phrases are combined and identified as the keywords of that page. LSI also looks for synonyms that related to your target keywords. Today, it’s important to optimize your page for the user experience; this means that you do not have to place your keywords word-for-word in the content. Write the content for the user. By using synonyms and related terms, the search engines will still understand what your goal is.

That being said, it’s important to realize that Google is no longer trying to match the keywords you type into its search engine to the keywords of a web page. Instead, it’s trying to understand the intent behind the keywords you type so it can match that intent to relevant, high-quality content. The bottom line: search engines of the future aren’t going to punish folks for under using keywords or failing to have an expertly crafted, keywordoptimized page title ... but they will continue to punish folks for overusing keywords.

“Local SEO doesn’t matter anymore”

This myth couldn’t be further from the truth. If you’re a local business, optimizing for local search won’t only help you get found, but it will help you get found by people who are nearby and more likely to buy from you.

If you are a local business, having a website isn’t enough to rank well in Google’s local search listings. If you want to rank well you need to unlock, verify, and optimize a Google+ Business Page (referred to more recently as a Google My Business Page). If you want to maximize your search traffic from Google, treat your Google Business Page as you would your website, and optimize accordingly.

Looking forward, Google will continue to take steps to bubble the best local content to the surface of search results. Need some proof? In July of 2014, Google took a major step in this direction with the release of its new Pigeon algorithm. The algorithm treats local search rankings more like traditional search rankings, taking hundreds of ranking signals into account. Pigeon also improved the way Google evaluates distance when determining rankings.

The bottom line: local SEO matters, probably more so now than ever before.

Google’s Five Keys To Success

This week, Google released its five “dynamics” that make for a brilliant and successful team. I wonder if they’ll surprise you.

1. Psychological Safety – Google’s Five Keys To Success

This, in Google’s definition, is the notion that taking risks and being vulnerable in front of others is encouraged rather than frowned upon. Humans aren’t very good at being forgiving, especially in atmospheres that are essentially competitive (you’ve seen The Hunger Games surely). It’s an art to allow them to be open and even themselves as they pursue a collective goal. Some friends at Google tell me that this works in some groups, but not others. There’s still a superiority complex that pervades certain parts of the company. Still, the goal is surely noble. Now, if only we could have the psychological safety that Google wasn’t spying on us 24 hours a day.

2. Dependability – Google’s Five Keys To Success

This one seems obvious. Yet some point especially to millennials as being poor examples of this trait. However, the essence of modern corporate life is that it’s corporations themselves that aren’t dependable. When you know that you could be fired at any moment in some random “rationalization,” there isn’t a perfect balance in the relationship between you and your employer. When you know that your company dedicates itself to quarterly results, you want to hang-and-quarter the system. For Google, however, the important thing is for employees to “get things done on time and meet Google’s high bar of excellence.” The result of this, sometimes, seems to be that Google releases products too soon without sufficient consideration for how real humans might receive them. This, so Google insiders tell me, is that too often the company is trying to solve problems that appeal to its own engineers rather than the world outside.

3. Structure and Clarity. – Google’s Five Keys To Success

You hear this one at every corporation. Everyone should know their roles, understand their goals and sacrifice their souls. That’s the ideal. The practical truth is that this doesn’t happen even half as often as it should. Short-term issues quickly dominate over long-term strategies. Real world events overtake good intentions. And suddenly you’re left fighting fires such as anti-trust lawsuits in Europe, rather than striving to ensure that humans are prevented from driving ever again.

4. Meaning – Google’s Five Keys To Success

This one’s tantalizing. There’s clear evidence that employees are increasingly seeking meaning in their work lives. That craving for meaning won’t necessarily correspond with salary. Google, though, says its most successful employees want their work to matter. To them personally, you understand. If you spend so many hours of your day — and, increasingly, your evening and even night — working on some project or other, you want to find soulful satisfaction in that. But in a corporate world that is becoming increasingly intrusive (in every sense), deciding what means something to you isn’t always easy and isn’t always personal for very long.

5. Impact – Google’s Five Keys To Success

It isn’t just about believing your work matters. It’s about believing that it creates change. The most motivated and successful team members need to see real-world effects. This is very human. You want to believe that whatever you do will have an effect out there, not just in your corporate cocoon. For Google, teams that are working on projects where each member believes they’re “making the world a better place” are likely to be more successful. And then there are the folks who work on Google+.

Original Source: These Are Google’s 5 Keys To Becoming A Success

How to Transfer Ownership of a Single Google Business Page

With the recent update to ownership settings of Google Business Pages the process of transferring ownership of a business page has changed slightly. Previously you had to add a user as a manager of a business, then wait 24 hours before being able to transfer the ownership of the page, the new update allows you to add multiple owners or transfer primary ownership immediately.

Follow the steps to transfer the ownership of a Google business page to a new owner as well as transferring ownership to an existing manager.

How to Transfer Ownership of a Single Google Business Page

1. Log into your account dashboard: https://business.google.com/manage/. Select the location you wish the manage – Manage Location. In the drop down hamburger menu (Top Right) select Manage Users.

2. A Manage Permissions pop up will appear detailing the current permissions. It will list the current Primary Owner and any managers, communication managers assigned to the page. Select the Add Users icon.

3. A new pop up will appear asking you to Add New Users. Add the email address of the user to whom you wish to transfer ownership to. The email address you add needs to be a registered Google user, it can either be a gmail account or their own email, but this needs to be activated as an email account with Google.

4. Assign the new user Owner permission. Then click Invite.

5. The Manage Permissions page will now show the new user as Invited and the assigned role.

6. The invited owner will now be sent an email inviting them to become an owner of the Google Business Page. The user must accept the invitation before permission is activated.

7. Once the invite has been accepted by user, you are now able to switch the permission assigned as Owner to Primary Owner.

The new primary owner can now remove the previous owner and the transfer of ownership is complete.

Transfer Ownership of a Google Business Page to Existing Manager

Transferring ownership to an existing manager follows the same path with the exception of the invitation.

1. Log into your account dashboard: https://business.google.com/manage/. In the drop down hamburger menu (Top Right) select Manage Users.

2. A Manage Permissions pop up will appear detailing the current permissions. It will list the current Primary Owner and any managers, communication managers assigned to the page.

3. Change the permission from Manager to Primary Owner.

4. Confirm you wish to assign Primary Ownership to user.

Once confirmed the previous manager is now the Primary Owner of the business page.

Originally Posted on http://onlineownership.com/

4 Things Small Businesses Should Know in A Mobile-First World

At the Google Performance Summit, we announced several new trends and product innovations that highlight mobile opportunities for advertisers. Here are the main takeaways for small businesses looking to make the most of the new mobile world:

1. Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches happen on mobile.

More searches happen on mobile than on desktop computers – which is no surprise when we think about our own behavior as consumers. Throughout the day, whenever we want to buy, learn or go, we turn to our phones first.

2. Mobile is local. Nearly one third of all mobile searches are related to location, and that number is growing.

Whether they’re researching pizza delivery on Friday night or trying to find an orthodontist near their pre-teen’s middle school, consumers are using mobile to direct their actions in the local world. Thirty-two percent of consumers say that location-based search ads have led them to visit a store or make a purchase. For small business serving customers in their area, mobile ads can offer a vital opportunity to connect with customers.

3. New local search ads help businesses bring customers right to their door.

As we announced at the Google Performance Summit, businesses using location extensions in AdWords can prominently display their business location when consumers search for things like “dentist” or “car repair shop near me” while on-the-go.

We’re also testing new local ad formats that make it easier for users to find businesses as they navigate on Google Maps. Consumers may start seeing experiments like promoted pins that allow businesses to strengthen their brand presence in maps.

4. AdWords is designed to help you succeed in a mobile-first world.

We also introduced innovations in both text and display ads to help AdWords work harder for you on smartphone screens. Look for these upgrades coming soon:

• New expanded text ads in AdWords provide extra ad space so you can showcase more information about your products and services before the click. The key changes include more prominent headlines and a longer description line in your text ad.
• Responsive ads for display will adapt to the diverse content, shapes and sizes of the more than two million publisher sites and apps on the Google Display Network. Just provide headlines, a description, an image, and a URL, and AdWords will create beautiful ads for you that looks good on every device and site.

To learn more about other exciting ads and analytics innovations announced at the Google Performance Summit, watch the livestream keynote here.

Posted by Soo Young Kim, Head of Marketing, Get Your Business Online