We often hear local small business owners lamenting their presence on Yelp – and the strongarm tactics that some describe hearing from Yelp salespeople.  A recent ad in our local San Francisco newspaper proclaims: “Yelp is Evil.”  The ad was taken out by Brass & Glass, which currently has a 2.5 star average on Yelp.

Stomaching negative online reviews has got to be one of the most difficult aspects of small business ownership these days.  Readers, do you have any advice for companies like Brass & Glass?

Q: I’ve noticed that Google Product Search shows reviews of my online store.  Where do these come from and how can I get more of them?

A: Seller ratings on Google are an important part of your site’s presence on the search engine.  Google pulls these ratings from a  variety of sources, including the following:

• Google Checkout
• BizRate.com
• Epinions.com
• PriceGrabber.com
• ResellerRatings
• Rateitall.com

Nothing speaks to a potential customer like a testimonial!  In the physical world, a shopkeeper would probably feel comfortable approaching a satisfied customer to ask “would you be willing to recommend us to your friends?”  But online store owners may not know how to pursue seller ratings.

To put it very simply: if you want reviews, you’re going to need to ask for them.  Here are some simple steps to get you started:

• If you sell via Google Checkout, or any of the fee-based shopping comparison sites such as Shopping.com, you don’t need to take any extra steps to get a review.  These services will pursue a review for your business after any transaction.
• If you do not use one of the above intermediaries for selling, sign up with Resellerratings or Rateitall.com (or both) for a free or low cost reviews page for your business.  Make sure that your business name is an exact match in spelling and format (including “Inc.” or “.com”) to the name you use in your Google Product feed.
• After every transaction, send out an email request to the customer requesting a seller rating.  Include a link to your business’s page on Resellerratings, rateitall, or your seller rating venue of choice, to make it easy for your customer to rate your business.

Keep in mind that merchant reviews on Google Product Search are not the same as Google Local (a.k.a. Google Maps or Google Places).  In a future post, we’ll discuss customer reviews on Google Places.

Readers! Do you have any more tips on how to encourage seller ratings?

Here’s an easy, free way to monitor your business reputation online.

If you have a business, surely you want to know what people are saying about it online.  But staying abreast of all of the forum posts, customer reviews, or blog discussions that mention your business can be overwhelming.  We recommend consolidating all of this info onto an iGoogle page.  Why iGoogle?  Simply because this is already the homepage for so many people.

Here are step by step instructions for adding a feed to your iGoogle page:

1: Create a Google Account

Instructions can be found here.

2: Choose a feed page

Different businesses will need to monitor different venues.  A restaurant should probably be watching reviews on Yelp or Chowhound, while a hotel will monitor Tripadvisor and a software firm may watch conversations in relevant forums.  Let’s suppose your business is  Fuel City Tacos, in Dallas TX.  A search for your business name on Google shows reviews on Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Chowhound, as seen here:

Let’s choose Yelp for today’s tutorial.

2: Sign up for the Feed

With your company’s reviews page open in the browser, Look for the RSS feed icon next to the address bar where the page URL is displayed.  In Firefox, the icon looks like this:

Click on the feed icon and open the feed URL in a new window.  Select “Subscribe to this feed using Google”

Finally, select, “Add to Google Homepage”

3: Enjoy Your Feed on your iGoogle Homepage

Here’s how the Fuel City Yelp feed looks:

Keeping an eye on your reviews is a big first step in the important ongoing task of monitoring and managing your business’s online word of mouth presence.   We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful!

Many people come to us, discouraged and puzzled about why their site has fallen in the ranks even though their site is optimized for all the right keywords. Others reach out to us for help with keyword optimization of their site’s text, mistakenly convinced that this is the only thing their site needs to succeed. Here are five reasons that gaining ranks with standard ranking tactics is harder than it used to be for the average site owner:

Keyword Optimization Isn’t as Important

Identifying keywords and using them to optimize your text used to be two of the easiest SEO tasks for the layperson (as well as the not-so-technical SEO). If you were a halfway decent writer, and could figure out the right keywords to include in your text, you used to be able to make some headway in the ranks. However, where there used to be a relatively straight path from keyword optimization to improved ranks, there are now several complicating factors. Now your thoughtful keyword strategy is also vying with:

• Personalized search in Google, which causes a searcher’s past behavior to influence their search results
• Real-time results in Google, which sometimes give fresh content and tweets an edge over older pages
• Better contextualization: Type “corwin” into Google and you’ll get decent results for three very different Corwins: the publisher, the Animal Planet celebrity, and the town. Type “out of league” and Bing reasonably matches your query to results for the movie “She’s Out of My League.” The search engines have gotten much smarter about contextualization and phrase matching, and their ever-improving intelligence is becoming just as much of a rankings factor as your keyword optimization. (And, on a related note: remember when people used to optimize their sites for misspellings? The search engines make that irrelevant now.)

You’re Overloaded with Tools

You used to have only a few optimization tools to work with. Meta tags – go optimize ‘em! Links – go get ‘em! Thankfully, as SEO has gotten more complex, search engines are now giving you more tools and information to work with. But unfortunately, these tools and information can overwhelm and confuse. Canonical tags are extremely easy to use, and also very easy to mess up. Webmaster Tools give you tons of information, and at the same time lead many of us down the wrong path. (For example, with the data now available, you may be tempted to believe that a decline in site speed caused your ranks to plunge, but you’d probably be wrong.) With all of these elements to analyze and address, it’s difficult to identify what’s most important, which skills to brush up on (or outsource) and what’s worthy of your time and energy.

Web Technology has Outpaced SEO-Friendliness

E-commerce tools, blog publishing platforms and content management systems, AJAX, mobile devices, the proliferation of video…all of these technologies and more have made the web more exciting and dynamic! But in many cases, these features require specialized technical skills to prevent or remediate significant search engine indexing handicaps.

Everybody’s Doing It

After years of marginalization, SEO is finally on every website owner’s radar. SEO awareness has evolved to the point where most people are addressing keyword optimization and site indexing concerns when they build and maintain their sites. And I haven’t met a new client in years who isn’t already thinking through a link building strategy. Having an SEO-friendly site isn’t a competitive advantage for you any more; it’s a requirement. And, if my decade-plus in SEO has taught me anything, it’s this: when everybody is doing something, that thing becomes less powerful as a ranking factor. (See above – “Keyword Optimization Isn’t as Important”)

Rapid Evolution

“Hi, I’m Google, and I’ll be your search engine today. Our algorithm change du jour is the ‘Chef’s Surprise.’ Depending on your site, it will either be delicious or leave a foul taste in your mouth. You’ll be trying it whether you want it or not.” Yep, Google changes every day. I used to eschew algorithm-chasing, and refused to participate in obsessing over SEO gossip on a daily basis.  I knocked it as a pointless way of life, but these days I’m convinced that it’s important to embrace that mindset, at least a little bit. This is something that SEO specialists have built into their schedule, but it’s not as simple for the average site owner to find the time to keep up with latest developments in search.

***

It’s harder than it used to be to influence your site’s ranks using keyword optimization and link building tactics. So what should you do about it? Do what we do: Think big picture! Once you’ve nailed the basics: a search-friendly site, optimized text, and a well-targeted message, try something new to achieve a well-rounded online presence. Branch out into social media. Encourage positive reviews. Maybe shoot a little video if it’s a good fit for your audience.  And use the information you glean from your analytics to make real changes on your site, not just to gain better ranks, but to improve engagement for the visitors you have.

Matt McGee is an expert in SEO for small businesses, and runs a blog at SmallBusinessSEM.com. Here, we connect with Matt and find out more about the vibrant world of SEO for “mom-and-pops.”

Q: What advantages do small businesses have over big ones in the world of search marketing?

I think small businesses have a couple very real and very distinct advantages. The first is speed. Small businesses are able to move so much more quickly than bigger companies. A small business can analyze and act on data or new developments almost immediately, and I’d say the smaller the company is, the faster it can move like this. On the other hand, big business is a lot slower and quite often bound to internal procedures and protocols. Analysis and action is much slower because ideas and decisions may have to advance through two or three, or more, layers of committees and management. So when a new opportunity arises, I think small business is at an advantage to be an early adopter. And that’s something small businesses really need to focus on – being quick and using their small size to their benefit.

And the second advantage is somewhat similar: Small businesses can be more creative with their search and online marketing. They can try new things and take more chances without fear of negative public scrutiny, negative press, negative shareholder reaction, etc. There’s more freedom in being small, and more room for creativity.

Q: What are the greatest disadvantages you see for a small business marketing itself online?

Well, budget is an obvious one. A small bookseller just isn’t going to outspend Amazon or Barnes & Noble on broad book-related PPC keywords, and most probably don’t have the budget to put together a big organic SEO effort that would come close to what those kind of companies spend on SEO. Small businesses can’t just write a big check to solve a marketing problem.

Now, small businesses that don’t have money to spend can get around that by spending time – time learning SEO and SEM themselves, time on the web interacting with customers and prospects, and things like that. But that’s often Problem No. 2. Small businesses, generally speaking, have employees who wear many hats and work a full 40 hours per week at minimum – and usually a lot more! A big business might have the luxury of hiring 2-3 people whose sole job is to manage and promote the corporate blog, for example. I’d guess that most small businesses couldn’t do something like that.

Ultimately, there are more disadvantages we could talk about here, but I really think it all boils down eventually to a time vs. money problem.

Q: Can you give us an example of a small business that “got it right” in SEM and one that got it wrong?

In the interest of fairness, I’ll pass on mentioning any companies I’ve worked with over the years.  So, I suppose one obvious success story would be MyWeddingFavors.com. The site itself is really a great lesson in SEO-friendly design – great choice and use of keywords, correct use of page titles and meta description tags, solid content, and a ton of inbound links. If any readers are not familiar with the story, just do a search for the full domain and after the site itself, you should find several articles and stories that talk about how the site grew into the success story it is today.

As far as getting it wrong, rather than call companies out by name, let me say this: It’s been my experience that the companies whose online marketing efforts fail are often the ones who don’t try. And the reasons they don’t try usually boil down to one of these two things: either they assume they’ll never be able to compete, or they don’t understand that search marketing, and online marketing in general, is hard work. For a lot of small businesses, just getting a web site launched is hard enough. But that’s when the hard work really begins. “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work with web sites and search marketing! So the challenge for SEO or SEM consultants is to first convince small business owners of the need to market what the business owner thinks is a marketing tool, and then to convince the small business owner that being small is not a guarantee of marketing failure.

Q: What is the biggest misconception you’ve seen regarding SEO and SEM for the small business?

I’m not sure it’s a misconception, but I think there’s a general lack of understanding about how search engines work. If I had a dime for every time a small business owner has asked me, “How do I get my web site to be number one for such-and-such,” I’d be retired on a beach somewhere right now.

To the average user, Google is so good at what it does, that it looks easy – and I suppose that’s how it should look, right? But what happens is that Joe Business Owner gets this idea that, as soon as he puts up a web page about green widgets, Google (or Yahoo or MSN) will automatically pick it up and it’ll magically appear in the top 10 – because it all looks so easy.

I’ve actually had conversations with clients about some of the science behind search engine algorithms in an attempt to explain why it doesn’t work that way. In one case, I went as far as sending a client links to read the Hilltop and PageRank documents! I’m sure the client’s eyes glazed over in the first five minutes, but it definitely helped erase that misconception about how search engines work and how easy it should be to get to the first page of results.

Q: What, if anything, do you think that a typical independent, mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar (say, a neighborhood manicurist) needs to understand about search marketing?

First and foremost, that SEO is not rocket science. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. There’s a difference! There’s a small set of basic rules that apply to any web page or web site, whether you’re a small business or not. Your site has to be crawlable, your content has to be good – and I’d include things like page titles, keyword use, etc., under the umbrella of “content” – and you need quality, relevant inbound links. That applies to everyone. Come to think of it, I think the phrase I heard the most from other speakers at SES Chicago went something like this: “This is really basic, but no one seems to get it right” or “This is a simple rule, but so few web sites follow it” – stuff like that. So, if you just focus, at minimum, on doing the basics better than your competition, I think you’re off to a great start.

And then, using your example, the neighborhood manicurist probably also needs to understand what local search is, what the popular local search properties are, and how to market on those. And that, again, is not rocket science. It’s more about hard work and persistence.[editor's note: see links to major local search engines]

Q: Many small businesses can’t afford the fees for quality search marketing.  What options would you recommend to them?

You either have to spend money or you have to spend time. Your web site isn’t going to succeed on its own; you have to invest something in it after launch. So if you can’t afford to hire an SEO company, you have to spend time learning to do it yourself. And luckily for the small business owner in this situation, SEO/SEM is probably number one on the list of industries where experts are willing to give away their knowledge for little or no cost!

When I speak at SES on the “Big Ideas for Small Businesses” panel, I mention that there are a lot of SEO blogs, forums, and mailing lists where the small business owner can learn how it works and get great tips and advice. I mention that attending conferences is another good place to learn – and network – inexpensively. A third thing I discuss is SEO training classes; there are some great options that range from a couple hundred dollars to less than $1,500. And last, but not least, I mention three great books: SEO Book by Aaron Wall, Small Business Guide to Search Engine Marketing by Jennifer Laycock, and … drum-roll, please … Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day. I think you’re familiar with that one! 

I’ve read all three of those books within the last year, and learned something from each one. I really don’t think there’s a better value in terms of cost vs. benefit than these books, and any small business on a tight budget should probably begin by buying one or all three and going from there.

Q: How does the rise of social media optimization affect small businesses online?

It opens up some new opportunities and avenues for marketing, and this is one of those areas where the smart and quick small business can try out some of these new opportunities before big business muscles its way in.

But I have mixed feelings overall about social marketing. I don’t think MySpace, for example, is a legitimate opportunity at this point for the typical small business, and that includes small businesses whose target audience is the MySpace demographic. Yes, there are small business success stories on MySpace, but I think they’re the ones who started a year ago, trying it out to see what works and what doesn’t. Everyone’s trying to market on MySpace now, and I just think small businesses are smarter to try something else at this point.

I’m a big fan of Flickr, for example. Flickr is more than just a photo storage site; it’s a huge community of users built around the concept of “photo groups.” And there are groups for everything on Flickr – pet lovers, surfing enthusiasts, musicians, home aficionados, and so much more. So, let’s say I’m a small general contractor in Reno. I’d be taking photos of all the beautiful homes I build and sharing them in some of the photo groups devoted to houses and homes. More importantly, since I probably only do business in the Reno area, I’d also share those photos in a group(s) specifically for the Reno area. And then I’d be sure to join in any discussions in those groups and just make myself a visible, vocal, and active member of the community.

Some social marketing efforts require a bigger time investment than others, so I think the small business owner needs to try a few of them, and then analyze if there’s a benefit, and if the benefit is worth the time it required.

Q: Is there anything you would like to add?

I’d just encourage small business owners to make the most of their size. Nobody likes to deal with huge, faceless corporations. We all like the human touch, and that’s what small businesses do best.

Thank you very, very much for your participation!!

Thank you for the terrific questions!