Here are the tips she gives for localizing your site content:

Home page: While you’re out there telling people what you’re about, mention where you’re located. It shows customers you really exist, while also giving the engines’ local algorithms something to snack on.

About page: Your About page should not only tell people who you are, it should tell them where you’re located. It’s one of the many trust signals users will be looking for and it acts as a great citation for the search engines.

Press page:  Do you have a page on your site that encourages people to get in touch with you for media purposes? Don’t forget to include your address, phone number and email.

Contact page: This should be a no brainer but you’d be surprised how many people lose their brains writing Web copy. Include your location, a map, your cities served, hours, email address, fax number, phone number, directions and other any information you have that establishes your location.

To read Lisa’s full article, with a list of sites where you can create or claim your business listing, go to http://outspokenmedia.com/small-business-marketing/launch-your-small-business-website/

A couple of days ago, on Local Biz Bits, Larry Sullivan recommended a few articles on Twitter and how local businesses can use it to promote their business.  He starts with Dave Wallace’s Can Twitter Be Useful For Business, where Dave presents 5 points where Twitter can be useful for SMBs:  

Puts a Human Face On the Company

Community Outreach… Keeping in mind that you should work to build a community around your products and/or services anyway, Twitter is a great tool to help in this process. By setting up a Twitter profile for your company and then making sure you invite your active customers and prospects to follow you, you now have a direct connection to them.

Product/Service Promotion. Once you have a decent amount of followers, announcing new products and/or services, upgrades or even promotionals becomes a breeze. Also consider that many Twitter users will use specific search queries to locate topics that interest them. Therefore by associating the right keywords along with your tweets, you can attract those that aren’t even following you.

Brand Management. With so many people using Twitter, there are bound to be occurrences where your company and/or products will be discussed.

Polls/Surveys. This is one of the most useful functions of Twitter – the ability to gather feedback via polls, surveys or even by asking a simple question.

The other articles Larry recommends are also very interesting, presenting cases of SMBs who use Twitter for promoting their business, and giving more tips on how to use the word of mouth marketing opportunities Twitter allows.

To read Larry’s full article and his recommendations, go to http://www.localbizbits.com/2009/05/12/twitter-and-local-business/

They are a powerful first step in establishing believability, credibility, and a sense of security for new customers. They help to break down natural barriers and distrust new consumers feel with an unfamiliar merchant… The challenge is to leverage the enthusiasm of satisfied customers into goodwill in well-written testimonials, whether used for promotional materials or as an all-important new category of local business recommendations, review websites, or portals that now generate many millions of monthly visitors.

He gives a few tips on how to get satisfied customers to write good reviews and testimonials about your business:

#1: Point of Sale: Try to get customer testimonials as soon as possible, even at point of sale or within the first week. Satisfied customers are most motivated during this time period…

#2: Telephone/Email: Contact the customer as soon as possible after the sale, whether as a customer satisfaction follow-up or other. Make sure the customer still has the same warm feelings. Ask if he/she would be willing to share those feelings with others in the form of a testimonial…

#3: Persuasive Testimonials: Be discriminating. Personal and specific testimonials work successfully. Focus on key benefits. Vague, even enthusiastic testimonials do not have any impact. Have your customers be specific… Ask your customer to talk about the struggles he/she was having previous to receiving the benefits of your product or service…

Have your customer state his/her relevant background. This will make the testimonial even more persuasive because the comments will be perceived to come from a credible source…

#4: Testimonial Mechanics: Make sure you get permission to use you customers’ testimonials in your advertising. Ask them if you can not only use their name, but also the town (suburb) they live in…

#5: Leveraging Testimonials: It’s not enough just to receive customer testimonials. It’s knowing how to use them in your marketing activities that makes the difference…

 Brier also comments about the value of consumer reviews for local search rankings:

Some of the major local search engines spider other consumer review websites and include those reviews in its results. Higher rankings mean more traffic. More traffic should mean more happy consumers and more traffic and so it goes, steps leading directly to marketing heaven.

Satisfied customers can become a good promoter for your business – invest some thought and time in getting them to write about their good experience with you online, and gain more exposure and referrals.

To read the full article, go to http://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-search-customer-reviews/9466/

Following Yelp’s announcement a few weeks ago, saying they will soon let businesses respond to the reviews they receive from the site’s users, Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media, wrote a great article on when and how businesses should respond to negative reviews.

She observes that responding to every negative review of your business may not be the best course of action.

Not all bad reviews are created equal. Sometimes going in and engaging a disgruntled customer will help them see your company in a new light and other times you’re just opening yourself up to more negative attention.

Here are some of the situations that Barones list as warranting a business owner’s response:

You genuinely need to make amends: … If you goofed and someone is legitimately upset about it, it’s typically in your best interest to engage them and to do your best to make it right. It often doesn’t take much to smooth over one bad experience.
They’re misstating the facts: … If it’s a matter of bad facts, you should step in to correct them.
When the review develops legs: Sometimes things that shouldn’t be a big deal gain traction and “me too” responses anyway. These situations absolutely need to be addressed and need to be addressed fast…  

Here are the tips Barone gives for how to respond to negative reviews, once you’ve decided a response is appropriate:

Listen: Listen without reacting.
Be Honest: If you’re going to engage a negative reviewer, come at them completely honest, sincere and with your hands where they can see them.
Remain Calm: … The moment you lose your cool, you’ve not only lost the discussion, you’ve also just thrown 20 gallons of kerosene into the blaze.
Speak Like a Person: … People don’t like robots or spokespeople who think they’re smarter than everyone else. We like normal people.
Promise to be better: … [G]ive them a sign that you heard them, you care, and that you want to be better for them. It’ll go a long way in establishing some goodwill.

To read Lisa Barone’s full article, go to: http://outspokenmedia.com/reputation-management/respond-negative-reviews/

Earlier this week, on Techcrunch, Jason Kincaid wrote about the launch of MySpace Local, a joint project of MySpace and CitySearch that combines CitySearch’s large business database with the MySpace’s huge audience.

The new site

allows local businesses to take advantage of MySpace’s self-service MyAds product, which will allow them to selectively display their banner ads to local MySpace users.

This can prove to be a very powerful and effective tool for local businesses as according to Kincaid, in the first seven days the site was live, MySpace users wrote over 60,000 reviews.

MySpace is not the only site on which you can communicate with potential customers and spread the word about your business. Check out these recent articles on Search Engine Watch to see how you can use social media sites to advance your business:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/080429-105402

http://searchenginewatch.com/3633396

In an article on Just Behave earlier this month, Lance Loveday shares his experience of user studies and gives a partial list of problems in the design of websites and the perceptions these problems create in users’ minds: 

Poor layout alignment/Lack of visual hierarchy (disorganization)

Too many fonts (unprofessional)

Use of clashing colors (very small organization)

Dense blocks of text (difficult to work with)

Loveday also shares a very important conclusion that arises from these user studies:

Beyond the branding impact, the judgments people formed impacted the likelihood that they’d ever transact with the organization behind the site.

Give your website design great consideration as it is the gateway to your business and has to be welcoming and reassuring for potential customers. You can also check out an article that gives 9 steps to a successful site redesign, posted on IMediaConnections.

To read Loveday’s full article, with a very interesting discussion on what web users and professional athletes have in common, go to: http://searchengineland.com/do-your-landing-pages-%e2%80%9cfeel%e2%80%9d-right-17282

In a Locals Only column that was published yesterday, Ed O’Keefe  discusses the importance of online reputation management for local businesses. In the first part of his article, O’Keefe describes how easy it is for consumers to post reviews on user-generated local review sites – any consumer can write any review, positive or negative, about a local business.

This often makes business owners feel powerless as they have no control over negative reviews and comments. O’Keefe mentions a few local sites, such as CitySearch, OpenList and Yelp, who let businesses provide their own business profiles and even respond publically to bad reviews. However, O’Keefe says this is not enough – he calls for businesses to “be proactive for anything being said about their business online”. How?   

Jump in and learn… it is critical to do some level of monitoring, such as a regular search for your business name on multiple search engines…

Discover your web and mobile footprint. Another option to consider is investing in a reputation management service that can be your eyes on the internet, alerting you to any potentially slanderous or inaccurate content

Use the same web sites/medium to speak to your customers. Listen to what is being said and carefully consider whether a response from the business is even appropriate.             

You can also use free online tools such as Google Alerts to see what is being said about your business online. 

Your reputation is an invaluable asset – take the time to look at what is being said about your business and even about your competitors – this information can be a very effective tool for advancing your business.

To read the full article, go to http://searchengineland.com/online-reputation-management-who%e2%80%99s-talkin%e2%80%99-about-your-local-business-17698

If anyone can edit your unclaimed business listing, your competitors can easily “close” your business and prevent potential customers from coming your way.

Claim your business listing so that no one but you will be able edit it!

To read Barry Schwartz’s full article, go to: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019569.html

Lars explains that IYP and other local directory sites, who often feed off each other, have different methods of categorizing business listings, and that these methods are sometimes lacking and confusing – your business can end up in the wrong category.

His tip is simple:

go out to the top online directory sites… claim your listing(s), and check to see if they’re in the proper business categories!

Lars urges SMB owners to utilize as many category associations as directory sites allow and summarizes:

Imagine, if your company is only in one category and/or a wrong category, just by fixing this business categorization you could increase your referral rate by a few times over!

To read the full article, go to: http://seobylars.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/local-seo-tip-leveraging-categorizations-to-promote-your-small-business/.

Here are the 3 conclusions Larry draws from the survey:

Lesson 1: Shoppers want convenience. It used to be that consumers would rather visit the store to “look and see” a prospective purchase in person. The growth in local search indicates that times have changed.

Lesson 2: Local search means business. It appears that in many cases, local search is less about browsing your options, and more about closing the deal.

Lesson 3: As local search grows, so too will the demand for local business information.

As more and more consumers turn online for their shopping needs and the demand for information on SMBs grows, business owners should nurture their online presence.

To read the full article, go to: http://searchengineland.com/local-search-means-business-16917