Business has always been a David v’s Goliath competition. The big boys have the money and the man power to hold on to their market. The small local businesses have a constant uphill battle to keep their piece of the pie.

I am sitting on the fence slightly here, as I am a big fan of small market towns and supporting local businesses. Sadly the reality of modern day life, and the time constraints we have inflicted on ourselves, means the internet has opened up a whole new world to consumers, often leaving the small local businesses out in the cold. Unable to compete with the prices big businesses can achieve through marketing products online.

Google seems set on bringing local back. One one hand I can see the advantages, it is brilliant for small local businesses and restaurants. The crack down on Google Places, Google HotPot (if it doesn’t disappear into obscurity) and the chatter about Google Offers (similar to Groupon, which allows consumers to be emailed daily of special offers in their area) are going to be useful marketing tools and potentially will finally give the David’s of the business world chance to compete with the big boys.

Sadly they seem to have neglected to remember that not all businesses are based in one location, for example consultants, and tradesmen such as plumbers, builders and electricians will often work throughout surrounding counties or even on a national basis. To some extent there are ways around this, you can set your Google Places listing to specify a specific area you cover. But it is by no means a solution.

Google’s answer to this is “you can always try AdWords” to me, this sets alarm bells ringing. With the recent (fairly) integration of the Places listings into the organic search, followed by the announcement of Google Boost (equivalent of AdWords sponsored listings) for Google Places, it possibly highlights Google’s intentions of making money out of the precious real estate page one offers.

SEO has always been about evolution. The future of a strong SEO campaign is going to be focusing on all aspects of internet marketing, from organic listings across all the major search engines, to social media campaigns, to email marketing, whatever I have forgotten and whatever next week throws into the mix. Google may have been the king pin of search for a number of years now, but Face Book has knocked them of the top spot for the most visited site on the net, Bing is putting in a strong fight. If Google prices everyone of the market their of plenty of other baskets we can put our eggs in!

It doesn’t matter how many thousands of happy customers you have had over the years, it only takes one disgruntled customer to leave you a scathing online review to tarnish your reputation. Very rarely will a happy customer take the time and effort to leave you a glowing review and one of the biggest downfalls of internet marketing is the missing trust factor. The lack of human to human contact, often means your business misses out on the all important relationship building that you can achieve through meeting someone in person. This is why reviews and testimonials have become incredibly important.

Most good business owners pride themselves on customer service, happy customers are returning customers, happy customers will recommend you to friends and family. At some point someone will feel you let them down. A bed review has the potential to turn customers away in droves, once posted online on sites such as Google Places, Qype, Trip Adviser, Hot Frog or similar what can you do to rectify the situation?

• Remain Professional: You may have had the worst possible day at work, you may have at the time done everything you felt you could to passify the person and make good a bad situation, yet still they have gone online and ripped your business to pieces. It is really important you step back, and take out your emotional involvement in the situation. Address their concerns and complaints in an calm professional manner, however tempting it is do not abuse them.
• Face it head on: Once a bad review is posted it is there to stay. It is human nature to want value for money and they will always check the negative reviews before the positive. Make sure you respond publicly, if customers can see you take feedback seriously and have taken steps to address the issue you can win them back.
• Apologise and explain: Explain how you have rectified the problems they have encountered. If most of your reviews are positive, the tiny bit of effort it takes to respond will show that you care what your customers think. I have written an example below:

Dear Mrs Smith

I am sorry to hear you encountered problems with our service today. We wanted to let you know you have addressed the points you raised, and we have made the following changes based on your feedback…… (insert a list of changes)

A lot of focus in life is based around negatives, but what about the positives? Have you thought about engaging with the happy customers, the ones who are likely to return and recommend your services? For example customers who have taken the time and effort to say “A great little cafe I buy my lunch here every day, staff are friendly and the salads are fab.” A short simple response of “Hi Vicky, really pleased you are enjoying our cafe, we are expanding our salad bar over the coming weeks and would be interested in any preferences our customers might have.”
Instantly you have made that customer feel special, you have highlighted that their thoughts are important to you, and you have told anyone reading that you are expanding your services.

Sometimes a bad review is not as negative as it might first seem, by reacting positively showing you take your customers feedback seriously, taking necessary actions to rectify their complaints, you have gone some way to restoring your reputation and improving your customer experience.

Benjamin Franklin once said “A small leak can sink a great ship” when the power that be “Google” made a subtle change to their Places guidelines mid 2010, it generally passed by unnoticed… initially. Even with the most ethical intentions it seems Google has asserted it’s authority, and the end of 2010 saw us suddenly dealing with rejection notices. I would like to hope you will jump on board as part of your renewed enthusiasm for life after a long Christmas break, and you will join us in facing rejection head on.

The subtle change I have mentioned is as follows: “Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your businesses title, address or category fields.”

In plain old English what this means is DO NOT repeat ANY words from your businesses title, address or category fields in your description. Simple enough??? (Or do I need to make the capitals bold and underlined?)

This is not a change that has only affected the usual unethical keyword cramming spammers, your standard SEO description for example: Abacus Carpenters have been established since 1984. Our team of carpenters work throughout Leicester. A very standard (all be it uninspired) description that is likely to be a minimum of 3 violations dependent on what you have included in your categories.

So time to go back to your Google places with your tail between your legs and rectify your mistakes with 3 very easy changes:

• Title: Exact registered business name.
• Categories: What your business is? e.g Plumber and Plumbing, Heating engineers, not a reflection of what it does e.g boiler repairs, system flushing, unblocking drains etc etc.
• Description: Describe the services you provide e.g boiler repairs, system flushing, unblocking drains etc etc.

Once you are sure you have met all of Googles quality guidelines you can request a review of your listing, and hope and pray that they will release you from your temporary humiliation.

Over the past couple of weeks we have seen Google integrate their Google Places listings in with the organic search results.

We believe that they have done this to reduce the amount of Google Places users spamming their service, by removing the block of 7 map results and combining the 2 results together.

This essentially means in order in appear in the Map listings you need to have an organic authority for a particular area and service before you will list with a map included.

The other dimension is that we now have a larger number of search results on page 1, with members of the SEO team at Creare seeing up to 17 page 1 results.

You can see an example of a regional search results for the query ‘builders Coventry’.

The key points to notice are that the page title and meta descriptions haven’t changed from the organic listing, the Google places listing has then been added underneath.

So, how does this effect your positions in Google and how do you ensure that you have every opportunity to have a combined listings?

Well we have previously done a video blog on optimising your Google places listing which we have linked on the supporting blog post.

Along with that we believe that as long as you are optimising for your local and surrounding areas, have clearly displayed your address on your website and URL on your Google places listing, you have every opportunity of seeing the combined result.

Thanks for watching this week, if you have any questions or recommendations regarding Google Places please leave your comments on the supporting blog post.

With the recent change in the Google organic search layout it alerts us to the immediate question of how will this effect SEO and Internet marketing campaigns? Will it change the way we work to get sites onto the top of the SERPs?

The changes that have happened are with searches  with a local area attached, as the organic listings themselves now have the Google places listing attached to the organic search listing. Secondly the google map will appear in the top right corner where the top AdWords listing would usually appear. This map stays in view even when you scroll covering the top AdWords position.

Various discussions have emerged across the Internet community regarding the effects this change will have on organic listings and different opinions have been formed on how this will effect organic SEO.

One view is that the new style listings are not going to effect organic SEO and may in fact assist the rankings, providing you have your Google Places account for your website completed fully and fully optimised. For guidance on how to optimise your Google Places account go to my earlier blog here.

I have noticed that certain clients of mine have actually moved higher up page one now the impact from their map has joined forces with the organic SEO giving their sites an edge over the competitors.

An alternative view of the impact of the new view on organic SEO is that Google are moving the listings to letting the Pay Per Click scene take precedence over the free organic listings. A new integration of something called Google Boost into the Google places account will enable users to pay for sponsored map links which will then appear at the top of the SERP’s with the PPC campaigns.

Some people believe that having the Google places listings integrated into the search is a first step to this whole page eventually becoming a paid listing which in my opinion would leave the search wide open to manipulation from anyone who can create a Google Places account.

Not good news for those who have used SEO best practise and have worked to get top quality content to achieve that page one listing organically.

We will all have to wait and see what Google decides to do with this integration of Google Places into the organic listings but as a final thought do you really think that Google, who prides themselves on being a top search engine that is able to produce listings on page one that have the best content and the most relevance to the visitors search, to be manipulated and controlled by the highest bidder of a keywords whose site may lack the quality of an organic listing?……..Time will tell!