google reviews

New: Customers See Google Places Results When They Type “Review”

September 26, 2011 by Phil 4 Comments

I just noticed something that I’m pretty sure is new:

When you type in a local search term PLUS “review” or “reviews,” you see the Google Places 7-pack of local businesses.

Try it out. Type “restaurant review” into Google:

Then try it when you search for a service or product:

It even works if you type in “review” or “reviews” after a longer-tail, highly specific search term:

By the way, what’s interesting about the 2nd example is that “roofing” is an ambiguous term: are people looking for reviews of roofing services, or are they looking for reviews of different types of roofing materials? Google doesn’t know—and it includes search results for both, just in case—but it still includes results for roofing companies. A good example of Google trying to infer whether or not a customer is searching for something locally (AKA “local intent”).

Anyway, unless I’m going soft in the head (quite possible), this represents a change by Google. When customers type in a local search term plus “review,” no longer are they only shown a bunch of organic search results for websites that specialize in reviews (like InsiderPages). Those sites still show up, but the super-noticeable Google Places results now compete with them for customers’ eyeballs.

This seems to be part of Google’s recent hard push to get more people to write reviews through the Google Places interface (rather than through third-party sites like Yelp, CitySearch, InsiderPages and so forth). The same people who actively seek out customer reviews to read are the same ones who’ll eventually write the reviews. If Google Places is the place to go read reviews, it’s also the natural place to write them.

So what does this mean for your local visibility and ability to get customers? Depends on your answer to three questions:

1. Go to Google and type in a local search term you’re trying to get visible for PLUS the word “review.” Do you see the Google Places “7-pack”?

2. Is your business on the first page of the local search results?

3. Does your business have “Google reviews”? If not, you need to get some, or else local customers who type in your services + “reviews” will pass you by in favor of any of your competitors who do have reviews—which is what they’re looking for.

I don’t know the answers to these questions in your case. Only you do.

What I do know is any customers who search for “reviews” already have their minds made up: they know exactly what they’re searching for locally, and the only thing they’re not sure of is where’s the best place to get it. Google is now showing them their options—in the form of the top-7 businesses in Google Places. Without plenty of good customer reviews, you’re not the best option on the page. And if you’re not on the first page, you’re not even being presented as an option for local customers.

Great Infographic on Customer Reviews in Google Places

September 20, 2011 by Phil Leave a Comment

Here’s an excellent infographic on customer reviews and how they affect your visibility in Google Places, how reviews help you attract more customers, etc.

Take a second to look it over: you’ll probably see ways to get more and better reviews (resulting in more local visibility for your business and more customers, of course).

It was made by the local search specialists at 540SEO.com (thanks to Keith from 540SEO for passing this along).

It’s a great application of some of my data on customer reviews plus excellent info from Mike Blumenthal, David Mihm, and other really knowledgeable people. Enjoy!

Add this graphic to your site

Google Places Visibility as a Decathlon

July 26, 2011 by Phil Leave a Comment

I apologize in advance if sports metaphors annoy you.

But if you can tolerate them, I’ve got a good one: Getting your business visible in Google Places is like the Olympic decathlon.

(You know, that 10-event track-and-field challenge that’s as painful to watch as seeing someone eat a pack of Jolly Ranchers the day after getting a root canal.)

How is local visibility like the decathlon? For one thing, both demand balance—being strong in many different respects. You can’t win one event and win the decathlon. Same thing if you want to get visible in Google Places: you must do many things well, not just one or two.

You win the decathlon if you rack up the most points—points earned by performing at a high level from the 1st event through the 10th. Google has its “algorithm”: dozens of factors big and small that Google takes into account when deciding which local businesses get medals and which ones get a pat on the back. Bottom line: you don’t have to win every event. The winners are the ones with the most points overall.

Here’s how I’d compare each decathlon event to 10 of the biggest components of a top Google Places ranking:

Picking the right city to market yourself in = Javelin. Precision counts: you have to know exactly where you want to place yourmark. Anyone can chuck spears downfield, but a skilled javelin-thrower visualizes exactly where he wants the spear to go. In Google Places, you have to set your sights on a very specific local area: usually the one your business is physically located in. If you just try to get visible in “greater San Diego” or “within 50 miles of here,” you’ll end up disappointed, and you’ll lose business to any competitors who plan their throws with more precision and finesse.

Picking the right business “Categories” = 100m sprint. The 100m sprint is the first event in the decathlon. “Categories” are one of the first things you specify about your business when you create your Google listing. Both are quick and relatively painless, but if you screw up either one, you put yourself at a disadvantage. (By the way, in a nutshell, the way to pick “Categories” well is to pick only the ones that are dead-on relevant to your services. It’s easy, but many people screw it up.)

Listing your business on 3rd-party sites (AKA getting “citations”) = Shot put. The shot requires brute strength, but also plenty of technique. Likewise, you likely won’t get visible in Google if someone can’t muscle through the arduous process of submitting your business info to numerous directory sites (Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.). But this also involves technique, in knowing which sites can help you the most.

Making sure your basic info appears consistently across the Web = Long jump. Many business owners don’t know that their business is actually listed on sites they’ve never heard of. You have to reach far and wide across the Web to find these sites and make sure all your basic business info—business name, address, phone number, etc—is listed 100% correctly there.

Informative, useful, search term-relevant website content = 400m sprint. A short but intense race. Anyone can waddle a lap around the track, but to do it in less than 50 seconds is way harder than it looks. Anyone can get “content, but it’s hard to get good, relevant content on your website that appeals to local customers and helps answer their questions: it takes a little time and effort to write good stuff. It needs to be clearly relevant to the services you’re trying to get found for, but overloading your content with “keywords” will get you nowhere in Google. But with a few bursts of focused, intense work, you can get winning content—stuff that Google can tell is relevant to your services, and that’s helpful and informative enough to win you local customers.

(Effective) on-page SEO = High jump. The high jump takes technique and “feel” and is very tricky to execute properly. Brute force won’t help you clear anything higher than a baby bar. A typical SEO “expert” can apply simplistic tactics—like overstuffing your meta tags with keywords—but it takes more finesse and especially a light touch if you want to get visible in local Google.

Beefing up your Google Places listing = 110m hurdles. Hurdlers have to contend with lots of obstacles (each hurdle). Any one of them isn’t too hard to clear, but it’s much tougher to clear all of them smoothly while bolting full-throttle down the track. You have to optimize multiple little areas on your Google page: your “Description,” photos, etc. None is too tough, but you can’t take your eye off them, or else you get a scraped knee and lose ground to other people

Inbound links to your site = Pole vault. You have a few attempts to fling yourself over a high bar. Similarly, it may take several attempts to get some good, industry-related or locally relevant links coming into your site. It can test your patience. But once you have some relevant, quality links coming in, you can take a deep breath (for a little while, at least).

Continually adding content everywhere = Discus…wait. I actually don’t see how this is like the discus. Kind of coming up dry here. Anyway, what I will say is it’s important that you keep on the lookout for ways to add more and more relevant content to your site, and to add things like coupons, real-time “Posts,” and even videos to your Google Places listing. Keep it fresh and keep it coming. Google pays attention to activity and progress—and so do your potential customers.

Customer reviews = 1500m run. The last and longest event. You’re running on fumes. You have your hands full with running your business, and drumming up customer reviews is probably the last thing you feel like doing. But you’ve come this far and can’t quit now. It takes endurance, because you have to keep the reviews coming in on an ongoing basis. Like the 1500, reviews require you to pace yourself: if you try to get too many reviews at once, Google will likely conclude that you’re not getting them legitimately, and you’ll get nowhere fast. Impatient jackrabbits lose. Reviews can be tricky to get, but you’ll be glad once you have them—and you’ll enjoy watching your lesser competitors finish in tatters because they couldn’t hang on.

In the decathlon and in Google Places, it’s the big-picture that counts. You can win even if you only manage to blow ‘em out of the water in a couple of events, and you can win even if you do downright lousy in one event. But you will only emerge as a stone-cold butt kicker if you’re consistently strong.

Are there even more track & field events worth clobbering your competition in? Yes: you’ve got the 800m run, the 5000m run…and many others. Likewise, there are even more elements of getting visible in Google Places.

But if you shine in all of the above, you’re a regular Bryan Clay, and you’ll get that laurel wreath around YOUR neck—meaning more local customers coming through your doors.

Google Places Review Change: Test or Takeover?

July 21, 2011 by Phil 5 Comments

If you’ve looked up any business in Google Places today, you’d have noticed two BIG changes to the layout.

One change screams at users to write a review through their Google account—and not through a third-party site like Yelp or InsiderPages. The other change makes the reviews customers have written you through these other sites far less visible on your Google Places page.

Some more detail:

Change 1: Big Red Google Review Buttons

BIG buttons for customers to write reviews w/ their Google account s

Both of these buttons were there on the Places page before, but they were far less visible—appearing as small text links rather than as big, visible buttons.

It’s always been a little tricky for customers to write a review of a business through their Google accounts—especially if a business owner asks them to write a review but they don’t have a Google account set up yet and have to take the necessary detour to sign up for one.

For some time Google has been trying to get more of its users to write reviews. It’s all part of an effort on Google’s part to make the Places Page “one-stop shopping” for customers to learn about local businesses—so that they don’t spend as much time reading reviews on other sites. This is a step in the direction of making Google Places more self-contained, and not reliant on reviews written elsewhere.

Change 2: No More Review Excerpts from non-Google Sites

Gone are the review excerpts from other sites. They don’t show up on your Places page any more.

Until today, you could have a total of 8 review excerpts showing up on your Google Places page: a maximum of 2 excerpts written by customers with Google accounts, and another 6 excerpts from reviews written on sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.

Now your Google Places page can have a maximum of only TWO excerpts of reviews written by Google users:

New: no reviews excerpts from third-party review sites

Also, until today, all of your reviews would show up next to the little “average review stars.” That is, if you had a bunch of reviews written by Google users and a bunch of reviews that customers wrote through other sites, all your reviews would show up as one grand-total number–one big happy family:

The other day, if you looked at the Circus Circus casino in the local search results, you’d see that it has over 47,000 (!) reviews, written by its patrons on all kinds of third-party sites. Now all you see from the outside is “143 reviews”—the total number of reviews that Circus Circus patrons have written through their Google accounts:

New: total review numbers no longer include non-Google reviews

So Google is showcasing reviews written by Google users, and is paying far less attention to reviews written on sites like Yelp, CitySearch, and many others.

All this could be another one of Google’s tests. But if these changes are at least semi-permanent, they represent the latest step in Google’s effort to make itself the “one-stop shop” for information about local businesses—including the customer reviews that used to be the domain of other, non-Google sites.

—

By the way, I just noticed that Mike Blumenthal and Chris Piepho noticed this change a couple of hours ago. Credit to those guys for putting some great thoughts on paper regarding these changes.

I could blab on and on about the implications of this change–and I probably will in a subsequent post!—but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this change.

The Numbers and Facts on Google Places Reviews

July 2, 2011 by Phil 15 Comments

You may know that customer reviews are a big factor in how your business ranks in the Google Places local search results.

And I’m sure you know reviews are crucial for winning more customers—who often make buying decisions based largely on which local business has the best reviews.

But what facts do you have about reviews in Google Places? For instance, do you know…

—How likely you are to rank in the top-3 if you have the most reviews in your local market?

—How many reviews will you likely need if you want your business to rank on page one of Google Places?

—How many reviews does the average #1 business have?

A closer look at Google Places reviews

I was frustrated at not having the facts. I constantly tell my clients to get reviews, and they ask me all kinds of great questions, which I can usually answer. But when they’d ask me basic questions like the ones above, I was only able to give them partial answers. I don’t want anyone to think I don’t know what I’m doing 🙂

But you couldn’t just poke around online and find the answers to these questions. Sure, there’s a decent amount of general info about customer reviews and their role in Google Places, but I wasn’t able to find a satisfying amount of real numbers or specifics.

I rolled up my sleeves and looked at 1000 local markets in Google Places. I saw 7000 different businesses in all 50 states, and a grand total of 181,718 reviews between them. My goal? To get some concrete facts about the relationship between reviews and top rankings in Google Places.

It took me a while, but I finally got some facts. The numbers confirmed some things I’d suspected for a long time, but also overturned some assumptions I’d been operating under.

If you’d like more facts than you have today and want a better sense of exactly how many reviews you’ll need to rank more visibly in your local market, read on.

“I want my business on the first page of local Google. What’s the ballpark number of reviews I’ll need?”

About 26. The average business on the first page of Google’s local search results has 25.9 reviews, based on my calculations.

As you’d expect, the numbers vary widely from this average: some #1’s have just a couple reviews, whereas some businesses ranked #7 have a couple hundred. But after looking at 7000 businesses in 1000 local markets, I can tell you that if you get 26 customer reviews there’s a good likelihood you’ll get on the first page.

(By the way, if you’re interested in looking at the raw data to see how I arrived at these figures, you can download the spreadsheet.)

**“Which “top 7” ranking had the most reviews most often?”**

In other words, which position most frequently had the most reviews in its local market? The answer is A: 25% of the time the top local ranking (A) had the most reviews.

“How often did the other rankings have the most reviews?”

Of the 1000 local markets, B had the most reviews 160 times, whereas C had the most reviews 154 times. So for all intents and purposes, B and C are tied: each one has the most reviews about 17% of the time. 34% of the time, either B or C has the most reviews.

End result: in any given market, there’s a 59% chance that one of the top 3 rankings (A, B, or C) will also be the one with the most reviews in that market. Therefore, if YOU have the most reviews in your market, there’s about a 60% probability that you’ll rank in the top 3 in Google Places.

The next four rankings (D-G) had the most reviews only 41% of the time. Here’s the breakdown of how often each ranking had the most reviews in its local market (of the 1000 markets I looked at):

% breakdown of how often each local ranking has the most reviews

Note: there were a total of 71 “ties,” in which two or more businesses were tied for the greatest number of reviews in their local market. In most of these cases several businesses had one review and the rest had zero. Because each ranking had similar numbers of “ties” (ranging from 22 to 31) with other rankings, I didn’t include these relatively unusual markets when calculating how often each ranking has the most reviews.

“Which ranking had the most reviews, period?”

C—AKA the #3 ranking. In the 1000 markets I looked at, I counted a grand total of 181,718 reviews. Here’s the breakdown:

A = 33,218

B = 30,488

C = 33,913

D = 23,643

E = 19,522

F = 19,375

G = 21,559

How many total reviews each Google Places ranking has

As you can see, A and B aren’t far behind. If I looked at 10,000 local markets (rather than 1000), maybe A or B would have had the most reviews. Either way, the top 3 rankings all have roughly the same share of reviews, in terms of volume.

The key thing to keep in mind is that there’s a significant gap between the top 3 rankings and the lower 4. A-C had a combined total of 97,619, whereas D-G had a combined 84,099.

Total # of reviews each Google Places ranking has

The top 3 have more than the next 4 put together. That’s a big gap.

The bad news is the bar is pretty high to get into that A-C range. The good news is if you’re in the top 3 in terms of reviews, there’s a good chance your rank will float into A-C rankings in Google Places.

“I want to rank in the top 3. How badly do I have to squash my competition, in terms of getting reviews?”

My estimate is you’ll need about one-and-a-half times as many reviews as your competitors have on average. In exact numbers, the average business that ranks A-C has 33 reviews. The average business that ranks D-G (#4-7) has 21 reviews. You’ll have to outstrip those lower-4 guys by about 50%.

I assume you’d like to rank #1 in Google Places. The average “A” ranking has 33 reviews. The average B-G (#2-7) business has 25 reviews. Therefore, the average #1 business has about 33% more reviews than the 6 competitors right below him have on average.

Here’s what I suggest you do: figure out the average number of reviews that the top 7 businesses have. One-and-a-half times that number is what you should shoot for if you’re trying to outrank the local competition.

“That’s a lot to digest. Can you sum it up?”

Glad you asked! Here’s what I think all the numbers show, big-picture:

—They affirm what you may have known or suspected all along: that reviews clearly help your Google Places ranking

—If you can get 26 reviews or more, you’ll be above the national average for businesses on Page One of Google Places and will probably rank more highly than you do today

—In general, if you can get more reviews than the next guy, the chances improve that you’ll also outrank him

—To be more exact: if you can get 133-150% of the number of reviews your local competitors have on average, you’ll improve your chances of snagging a top 3 ranking

—There’s a big difference between ranks A-C and ranks D-G. The top 3 have more reviews than the next 4 combined. The average top-3 business in Google Places has 50% more reviews than the average business ranked 4-7. Plus, 60% of the time the business with the most reviews in its local Google Places market is ranked in the top 3.

“So what should my review strategy be from now on?”

You need a method for asking your existing customers for reviews. Maybe you have one already. I show you ways to do this in my free guide. If you don’t have it, download it. If you have it, apply the steps.

You need a specific goal number, at least at first. How? Look at the local businesses that show up on the 1^st page of Google Places (maybe you’re one of them), and figure out the average number of reviews those 7 businesses have. Have that number be your first goal, and then 1.5x that number be your next goal.

Keep the reviews coming. Don’t stop at the “finish line.” Your ranking probably won’t go up the day you hit your goal number of reviews. You have to get ahead of your competitors in reviews and stay that way. Google doesn’t like sudden changes, but it does reward long-term effort directed toward things like drumming up reviews: it shows that you’re trying to give potential customers as much information as possible from your existing customers.

If you’re already following this basic approach, hats off to you. In that case, just keep doing what you’re doing.

“By the way, what’s with the big gap between ranks 1-3 and 4-7?”

You may be wondering why there seems to be a gulf between the first 3 and the next 4, in terms of reviews. I have a few half-baked theories:

Theory 1: It’s possible that Google has run tests and concluded that spots A-C in Google Places get significantly more clicks. Therefore, it would make sense to make the standards relatively tough for businesses to get into the top 3, if it’s the case those positions get the lion’s share of the clicks and potential customers.

Theory 2: The top 3 may get significantly more visibility, more customers, and therefore more customers who end up leaving reviews—a nice upward spiral. The greater numbers of reviews may just be a byproduct of having a better ranking due to other reasons.

Theory 3: Google *may* be considering a 3-business layout for Google Places—in which only 3 local search results show up on the 1^st page. They did a brief test of it in early June (which lasted only a few hours), and on the same day I wrote about these possible “3-pack” search results. The tough standards for getting into the top 3 and the *possibility* of 3-pack Google Places results may have something to do with each other.

Possible ways to improve my analysis

My humble study isn’t perfect. Also, even though it was pretty ambitious and I wanted to “bite off” as much as possible, I didn’t want it to be more than I could chew.

Here’s what I think are the “boundaries” of my analysis:

I could have looked at even more markets. 1000 is good, but 2000 is even better. 10,000 is even better than that. Also, even though I examined probably 150 different industries and services, there are even more industries that are worth looking at. More data is always better.

I didn’t look at markets outside the US. I’d like to at some point, but I don’t expect to discover that Google handles reviews differently outside the US. Sure, other countries may have less-dense local markets, where it may be a bit easier to rank in the top 7 in Google Places. But the algorithms are the algorithms, and I doubt that there’s a different one in the UK, another in Australia, others in Canada and Japan, and so on. The specific numbers may vary from country to country, but the basic behavior of reviews probably doesn’t.

I didn’t factor in the quality of the review—whether they’re 1-star or 5-star. I’ve known for a long time that quantity matters more than quality, at least in terms of your ranking, and David Mihm’s “Local Search Ranking Factors” also supports this. (Obviously, you need good reviews or you’ll scare customers away, but that’s a separate discussion.)

I didn’t examine the behavior of reviews written directly on businesses’ Google Places pages versus those written through sites like Yelp, JudysBook, etc. For instance, I don’t know what percentage of #1 rankings have Yelp reviews, nor do I know how many different sites a top 3 business has reviews on. Again, I’d like to delve into this at some point.

I tried to avoid including too many statistical “outliers.”

Extreme numbers create too much noise in the data. For instance, in markets like Las Vegas hotels or casinos, the top 7 businesses listed in Google Places have an average of 2000-8000 reviews apiece. I’d have to look at these markets either exclusively or not at all, because the numbers of reviews in these markets are so far above average that they’d completely overshadow and outweigh the numbers for all the average markets I looked at.

It’s for the same reason that I didn’t include a bunch of uncompetitive markets in which the top 7 businesses all have zero reviews. Many businesses in small towns have absolutely no reviews, except for the most-frequented businesses in these areas, like restaurants and hotels. Maybe if I included the businesses with 10k reviews and all the goose-eggs my numbers would be slightly different—but only slightly.

The markets where the Google Places businesses have thousands of reviews or zero reviews are the exceptions, not the norm. I’m writing this for people who are in markets that are pretty competitive—but that aren’t bloodbaths like Vegas casinos or markets where you’ll rank well if you can fog a mirror. Maybe in another blog post I’ll look at the absolute extremes—but I wrote this one with average-to-tougher markets in mind.