Why Online Customer Review Matter to Local SEO

 

Why Online Customer Review Matter to Local SEO -- outsource online marketing

 

Online marketing experts are saying that local SEO will be the “in” thing in 2013. And as many SEO specialists scramble to gear up for such imminent trend, they are discovering that customer reviews actually serve its two-fold purpose – it provides prospective customers the chance to know about the success of the business, and making the site look good in the eyes of Google.

Why Online Customer Reviews Matter  

Every SEO knows that search engine spiders like regularly updated unique content. Customer or user reviews are a great way to create more of this. Online users would normally refer to customer reviews whenever they are not sure about certain product or service offered by some unknown companies through their websites. Through such reviews, the online user gets an idea of how other customers rate the product or service. And from information gathered, an informed decision can be made. And since customer reviews serve as a powerful tool for increasing the website’s ranking and visibility, every review therefore, has an effect on your search engine optimization campaign. 

Customer Reviews Make a Difference on Your Site 

Exceeding Customer Expectation -- SEO company Philippines

The usual product search would often generate websites that offer similar if not identical description of a specific product category. This is because most businesses use the standard description supplied by the manufacturers for the product. And if online users are presented with pages that look essentially the same, nothing differentiates your site or page from the others. Thus, online users can randomly pick from the list regardless of other criteria. This issue can be countered by including customer reviews on your page for online users to see the difference. 

Search Engines Look for Fresh Content 

Customer reviews represent the opinion of the customer on your site. The customers not only provide fresh content but they also activate user engagement, which is an important factor in SEO ranking. For the search engine crawlers, the more comments and reviews your site generates, the higher ranking and visibility your site will enjoy. 

Gaining Effective Keywords

Another impact made by customer review is its usage of keywords. Usually, customers review your business by its niche, nature, product or service provided; this is a good point to take advantage of in increasing keyword density in your website. By doing so, search engine spiders will find your website more relevant to the keyword or keywords you wanted to rank.

To have an idea on how to choose the right keyword, you can click here.

Increasing Local Ranking 

Five Star Rating -- SEO outsourcing Philippines

Google and other search engines customize search results by geographic location. For businesses catering to local market and clientele, the customer reviews will help keep your site at the top of the local search results. If possible your site should encourage customer reviews from genuine local customers. Here’s the reason why local search engine optimization is important.

By encouraging your customers to provide reviews or ratings for your products or services, you are actually helping your site get optimized for search engines resulting to increased visibility and higher page ranking without having to do hardcore search engine optimization techniques because your customers are helping you with credibility and reliability.


SlideShare as the Fastest Growing Social Network

SlideShare -- SEO Outsourcing Company

Chances are, you have never heard of SlideShare although it’s possible that you have encountered it in one of your browsing sessions. SlideShare is projected to be the fastest growing social network in 2013 even if it didn’t enjoy such popularity in the past. The reason for that is simple, SlideShare caters more about business content. While this is true, the following figures according to some experts would say otherwise:

SlideShare fastest growing platform for social networking -- Social Media Marketing

  • SlideShare is one of the top 150 websites in the world
  • It has an estimated 60 million visitors a month
  • About 3 billion slide views are recorded per month

SlideShare according to Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder and co-editor is “The YouTube of PowerPoint Presentation”. It allows uploading of PowerPoint presentations into globally-accessed slideshow. Uploading a PDF or PowerPoint presentation on SlideShare, much like uploading a video clip on YouTube means sharing it with over 60 million monthly visitors. Imagine the media mileage your presentation will enjoy with that kind of audience. It has a highly visual platform which places it well in the social web that is always hungry for visually-appealing images and content.

To date, SlideShare is the world’s largest professional content sharing community. Unlike content done in regular text formats, using PowerPoint allows greater creativity and clarity in expressing new ideas. Users and readers are presented with easier ways to understand the message conveyed through appropriate visual and text representations. People can easily share ideas and discover some innovatively presented stories at the same time.

SlideShre The YouTube of PowerPoint Presentation -- Internet Marketing Company

No doubt, SlideShare is an effective platform for social networking but you should keep in mind that for that to happen, your presentations should be such that they are not slides after slides of boring stuff. The key to a successful SlideShare is creativity, innovation and high visualization. When using SlideShare, backgrounds and images are extremely important. The more colorful and meaningful slides you make, the greater attention it will gain from the visitors.

Some basic rules to follow when creating SlideShare presentations include:

  • New and Interesting Idea. This is the most important factor in creating a good slide. As it is, those who support SlideShare are similarly creative, intelligent and have very selective taste. Only brilliant ideas will gain support of such group or community of viewers
  • Text. It will always work out to have simple yet BIG words – in size and in meaning. There is not much need for too many words in SlideShare as it is more focused on the visual representation of the ideas and not explicit explanation of any sort. A few but strong keywords would be enough to put in between strong and powerful graphics. Also, equal importance in creating the text font big and yes, a little bit stylish.
  • Images. More than anything, the photo that will be used for each slide should be the accurate representation or visualization of the concept. An effective photo is one that users or viewers understand easily at first glance. The image should have strong co-relation with the idea and the words or text used on the slide to create a complete story.
  • The First Page. Like in a PPC ad where the landing page is very important, the first page of the SlideShare shares the same degree of importance. Users or visitors of SlideShare.net should be able to tell it upfront if the slides they are about to see are interesting enough to go on. The first page is like the cover of a magazine, so it should be attractive and appealing enough for the readers to continue flipping the pages to find out what comes next after the cover and the title.

A popular slideshow means you were able to hit right through the interests of the SlideShare users. And for many who use the platform to build brand awareness and strong online presence through the social media community, a highly-creative and visually appealing slideshow is the best way to engage the huge SlideShare community.


9 Feature Twitter Vine Should Change

 

Twitter Vine Features -- SEO Company Philippines

 

Vine is the latest and hottest new mobile service available in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch from Twitter that lets the users capture and share short 6-second videos. Expecting the same degree of creativity that people exhibited in their Tweets, Vine is yet to dictate the creative outcome from such time restriction in capturing motion and sound.

This new iPhone app promises a lot of potential as it encourages users to be creative in telling their stories aided by short span video clips. While this new video-sharing app from Twitter continues to attract people sharing moments in a rather unique way, some experts deem that some features that would possibly cause Vine’s unprecedented success are still lacking and keeping many users from really giving their all-out support to Vine. Some of the things to be changed about Vine should include:

1. Desktop Management. The app does not provide any feature for users sharing a vine to interact with. The link displays a user’s profile picture but that’s about it. The app should allow users to have the ability to manage posts, likes and profile and as an added feature, providing a way to organize all of the vines online would be pretty cool.

2. Ability to Save Vines. With all the apps available in the market today, users get frustrated with apps that don’t allow saving of content – text, image, video, etc. Regardless of the reason for such inability, Vine should have a feature that counters this disadvantage. Users should be able to save vines just like a Twitter draft before the bugs ruin it. The feature should also allow the users to craft quality content which will automatically encourage more creative contents.

3. Ability to Manage Multiple Accounts. Vine lacks sharing capabilities that cater to multiple accounts. While private Twitter account can be created solely for the purpose of uploading vines, the app does not allow the user to manage multiple accounts. So, users who have restrictions on sharing the vines now with the entire social audience may be a little short-handed by this lacking feature. It would be more functional if Vine will allow people managing a personal and business-related account to have the ability to select which account the vines should be uploaded to.

4. Audio. This is one of the distinct features that make Vine stand out from the rest. Users should be able to replace the choppy sound that usually accompanies cuts with a feature that allows laying of separately created audio over the post. The Vine feature should also provide the option for the users to remove sound as and when necessary.

5. Editing Functions. When recording a content, the users would love to have features that would allow them to zoom through a button on the bottom. The entire capture screen acts as a record button but it would be cool to have an omnipresent button to press when they need to zoom the video. Additionally, focusing the objects before recording will eliminate the blurry and distracting vines.

6. Using Front Facing Camera. iPhone has this feature and Vine should have taken advantage of it – being able to switch from the device’s two cameras. This could potentially open new avenues for creative dialogue vines.

7. Recognition Feature. While the app allows users to find friends, it does not have an accurate way of executing that. The recognition feature doesn’t seem to work and users eventually have to adopt manual search of people using the app. Users should have a platform that will search for their friends more accurately.

8. Access to New Content. Vine users navigate the “Explore” tab when they want to look for new and interesting content. But this tab relies on specific editors to hand-pick new vines. Users would prefer to discover new content and users through an enhanced browsing feature, which can be web-based.

9. Better Engagement/Interaction. Vine while intended to be a social app fails in this department. Aside from posting comments, no other form of engagement is allowed, not even tagging. Vine should at least allow users to tag people in captions and comments. In Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the symbol “@” is used as a way to tag someone. On Vine, the same “@” symbol just sync Twitter contacts to Vine.

An application’s success solely depend on its usability. If your application lacks in so much feature and if your developed application is supposed to work as a social media platform, then being really social and user friendly should not be eliminated. Yes, there will be suggested improvements once the developed application is out in the market and the catered market cries out for some added features. What is important is you know how to listen to have longer shelf life.


Does Google Automatically Localize Your Business?

 

Sample of Google Local Places -- online marketing outsourcing

 

There are two answers to this question – yes and no.

It is a Yes, in a sense that Google partially localizes your business automatically if the search query is made on a mobile phone with the GPS function activated. Local results will be shown based on the GPS location for their phone. If a search query is made, setting the location to a specific city or place will show local results.

Otherwise, it is a No, if the GPS function on a mobile phone is deactivated or if the search query is made on a desktop computer, which has no setting for a location, the searcher will be shown national results. In this case, Google does not automatically localize your business.

For many businesses, the process of localizing simply means registering with search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing so they can link your website with what they find in their search index. This will make it easier for the search engines to be more accurate in serving the search queries of the internet users.

Google Places -- SEO company Philippines

Search engines verifies the legitimacy of your business as well as the other information they’ve gathered on the internet to update the details which regards to your business. If your business do not register with those search engines, there is a risk of losing out on some search queries simply because your business has not been registered and therefore not verified. This could result a miss out on business opportunities.

Search engines are flooded with innumerable scams that they need to deal with on a daily basis. So, their priority when it comes to business websites is to validate or authenticate their legitimacy first. Those questionable websites will be sorted out as last priority. Therefore, if your business location has been registered with Google or other search engines, your online presence will definitely shoot ahead of those unregistered businesses.

If localization is done properly, traffic to your site may double. But if you have not properly localized your business with search engines, it could result to removal of your website from the natural search rank. To know more about local SEO, click here.

Below are 5 basic steps to localize your business.

  1. Registering your business for local listings -- internet marketing outsourcing
  2. Declare and register your location with Google. Make sure that your ‘place pages’ are properly optimized through adding descriptions, products, licenses, associations, hours, languages, etc.
  3. Add local tags and terms to your web pages together with the relevant keyword phrases. These are the physical address, contact details, zip code indicated on every page of your site.
  4. Build and create numerous backlinks to your site using local search links, social media listings, relevant anchor text which contains local terms.
  5. Promote and encourage customer reviews or comments. It’s important to see local people showing interest in your business.
  6. Adapt relevant content that promotes your services and products to include geographical area through localized photos and videos of the locality you serve.

Here’s how you can convert your Google Places account to Google+ Local to gain visibility locally. Remember, mobile searches has been dramatically increasing, you don’t want to lose opportunities by not being visible on local searches.



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