Google Maps: Citations, Reviews, & User Content

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67 Responses to “Google Maps: Citations, Reviews, & User Content”

1. 

   UtteltNek November 25, 2009 5:57 pm

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   I highly enjoyed reading this blogpost, keep on posting such interesting stuff.

2. 

   Reseller Hosting January 5, 2010 5:38 am

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   Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

3. 

   valis January 13, 2010 5:22 am

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   thanks for the very informative post. I thought your offline review building strategy (handing out index cards and prepaid postage to get them to return it) is an incredible idea. Question about posting the reviews using your “maven accounts.” Are all of these posted from the same IP address? I was under the impression that these would look faked by google since most of the reviews would come from the same IP.

4. 

   Matthew Hunt January 13, 2010 8:37 pm

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   @valis Yeah we have hired people (mostly students) in each city to create some accounts and we send them the reviews to post. or we have our team use something like hotspot to scramble our IP’s. We are still testing and playing it very safe with this strategy, even though they are all real reviews it can still come across as being spammy if you don’t take the proper precautions. I still have no proof that a Google gives more credit to maven reviewers or not – just an interesting theory that is floating about out there. The number of reviews does seem to have an effect on Google Map rankings (good or bad), this is another reason to make sure your business has some sort of brand or reputation management strategies in place.

5. 

   Matthew Hunt January 13, 2010 8:42 pm

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   @reseller hosting – yeah thanks for the compliment. yes the old stuff not as good as the new stuff, it was a journey to understand this whole blogging thing. Get a better idea of it now. Finding my voice too. Took a while to figure where I wanted to focus our services too. Come back and comment often!

6. 

   Steven January 18, 2010 3:28 pm

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   I just spent the last 5 hours following your directions. You helped fill in the pieces to the puzzle. Great stuff. I’ll be reading the rest of your articles.

7. 

   Matthew Hunt January 18, 2010 3:50 pm

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   @Steven, Wow 5 hours! Good stuff. Let me know if you have any questions…?

8. 

   Michelle March 14, 2010 7:03 pm

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   HI Matt – great information. I am wondering how your ‘maven’ reviewers publish other people’s reviews? looks like most of your sites need logins, memberships, etc. So that they become ‘maven’ do they always login as themselves and then how do they sign the posts? Or do they create a new account whenever they post at a site (which would negate the maven-ness?)
   Seems like a good way to help people post reviews and they are more likely to get posted than if you just rely on the client to do it themself

9. 

   Matthew Hunt March 14, 2010 8:17 pm

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   @michelle Still experimenting with maven reviewers. The jury is still out. I would personally focus on getting lots of reviews from all different IP’s addresses in your local area (ideally your clients or customers do it) and try to get them to post reviews on all the major review sites b/c Google imports that data anyways and that way you protect your reviews by not having them all in one basket. Make sense…?

10. 

    Michelle March 16, 2010 9:42 pm

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    Yes – thanks Matt. Just knowing how difficult it can be to get people to make even a little time in their busy lives for a review, I thought your ‘do it for you’ service sounded like a terrific idea.
    Oh well, I guess we’ll see how it goes for you after a while.

11. 

    Shasha June 25, 2010 1:12 pm

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    We want to add review to a business listed with the Google map, but the business has no website.
    It is an Ireland based business.
    We are unable to do so.
    Can you help us

12. 

    Matthew Hunt June 30, 2010 1:07 am

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    @shasha You can get a listing on Google Maps without a website.

13. 

    Avio karte July 16, 2010 9:34 pm

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    great info man! but it takes time to get citations in all of those. I got a lot already but google doesn’t find them. Any idea why?

14. 

    Matthew Hunt July 16, 2010 9:44 pm

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    Google is finding them, they just to display in the maps right away. keep building them and the rankings will get better.

15. 

    business finance software August 12, 2010 11:25 am

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    good share, great article, very usefull for us…thank you

16. 

    Toxic Chinese Drywall August 12, 2010 7:55 pm

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    thanks for the helpful piece of writing. I had been pleased when i looked over your article and have absolutely made a subscription to it. Please update this informative article when you’re able to as I would like more information.

17. 

    jaywant August 19, 2010 5:16 am

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    Thanks for the great content. It really help me a lot.

18. 

    Patty September 6, 2010 11:08 pm

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    Great article! It sure made this entire process much clearer. I have a question about keywords being picked up from citation and review content.

    One of my customers has a chiropractic office. His Maps listing started showing up when someone searched for “bail bonds” in his zipcode. They have different business names and phone numbers but their FAX number was the same.

    I noticed that his listing had picked up a couple citations for the bail bonds office in his building. These had a few reviews that had the words “bail bonds” on the text.

    Could this alone cause his listing to show up under the wrong category?

19. 

    Matthew Hunt September 6, 2010 11:42 pm

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    Patty,

    Glad it helped. I am not sure if picking up citations from wrong businesses in the same office building would cause your listing to show up for unrelated keywords and categories. I guess it’s possible. I’d just try to keep the NAP info as unique as possible when submitting info across the web for citations.

20. 

    Name September 19, 2010 8:23 pm

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    Mathew,

    I have read every lesson twice – great information! We sell factory-built homes which means prospective customers come into our locations multiple times. I want to email them after the first visit and ask them to write a review telling how they were treated and surprise them with a $1,000 coupon. The problem: how can they find us on Google maps without also finding all of our competitors. Or, to ask the question another way, how can I provide something in the email that they can click and be taken directly to the review area of our Google Places name?

    Thank you in advance.

    Vince

21. 

    Matthew Hunt September 20, 2010 1:04 pm

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    Vince,

    Glad you are gaining value from the free google maps marketing course. We created a video tutorial like this one “How To Write a Review On Google Places” (feel free to use it) and then use the direct link found in your Places Page (look top right hand corner) and you should see a little word that says, “link”. If you click on that link, it will open a box that contains your direct url to your specific business’s Google Maps Places Page.

22. 

    Steve Amundsen September 20, 2010 7:36 pm

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    Thanks Matthew for some great information. I have been doing SEO for more than ten years for larger national clients and have now just started in the local SEO landscape. I have a client that has been in business 50+ years selling hearing aids. They have a lot of written testimonials from their customers that includes their exact testimonial with their name. They have permission to use these and have used them in the past in their offline marketing (newspapers, direct mail etc.). How can we go back and add these a little at a time? I have read all of the above comments and still am not quite sure the best way to do it would be. I think using a proxy service if we post them may not be the best as the IPs will come from a lot of geographic places that are not necessarily local. Your advice on this would be most welcomed. Thanks!

23. 

    Matthew Hunt September 20, 2010 7:50 pm

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    Steve, I’ll DM you on what we do. We don’t do anything spammy, but this is one of our trade secrets.

24. 

    Ganhe Dinheiro Online September 21, 2010 4:04 pm

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    Wow.

    Best information that I found about google maps ever!
    Thank you very much for providing free information about this Matt. I promissed myself that I would not spend another penny trying to make money online, and I was looking to do some offline consulting and this is just what I need to get started.

    I appreaciate you taking the valuable time off your schedule to provide this information for free. what goes around comes around, and you will be blessed ten fold.

    Thanks Again,

    Lucky

25. 

    Dave September 25, 2010 3:31 am

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    I’d love to hear how you get those reviews in. I’m frustrated becaus I have a client with a notebook full of testimonials but I don’t how to go about getting them in to the reviews. Does google know if I’m sending them in if I write one from my ip. ….let’s say one on judys book, then one to ,then one other on city search? Would they detect that?

26. 

    Matthew Hunt September 25, 2010 8:48 pm

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    @dave, that’s a part of the secret sauce we don’t reveal and hold for our paying customers. let’s just say, I’d be careful how you drip in your reviews and yes make sure they are not all coming from one IP address.

27. 

    red tube October 11, 2010 11:50 pm

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    I have browsed most of your posts. This post is probably where I got the most useful information for my research. Thanks for posting, maybe we can see more on this. Are you aware of any other websites on this subject

28. 

    Apartamenty Pozna? October 18, 2010 5:15 pm

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    Thanks Matthew for some great information.

29. 

    Vince October 19, 2010 4:59 pm

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    I apologize for asking questions rather than paying you. However the recession has brought us to our knees – some locations are not staffed. Hopefully, some day, I’ll be able to pay you rather than trying to do this myself. . . .so, here goes:
    1. How do I get your Blog – I’ve signed up for it each time I have written you but never see the blog – or don’t know where to look.
    2. Above you request “URL (optional)” – which URL? web site? Google Places?
    3. UBL asks for the corporate name (we have two different DBA’s and two web sites) – I don’t find a logical place for the corporate name in Google Places.
    4. UBL doesn’t seem to deal with multiple locations or DBA’s???
    5. How do I request a citation and which URL do I give them?

30. 

    max October 29, 2010 6:58 am

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    Really thanks for the tip as i m still new to local seo and i have seem protential in this area… Cheers..

31. 

    david christopher October 29, 2010 8:48 pm

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    You might also add Wimgo to the list of business directories where you can claim your page, get your address right in the citation and encourage users to submit reviews.

32. 

    Reece George November 2, 2010 8:26 pm

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    Hello, I came across your blog post on google whilst I was looking for a blog post. great site as an aside. It’s a good job I located you and i definitely will check back on your site when i get the time. Subscribed to your feed.

33. 

    Dave November 3, 2010 2:04 am

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    Hi Matt,

    Just finished your lessons…………awesome! but upon checking my citations we have over a 140 but the funny thing is only about 15 of them mention us. The rest mention our competitors and all come from the yellow pages. Any idea why this is?

34. 

    Matthew Hunt November 3, 2010 8:30 pm

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    Dave, Can you send me business listing and I’ll take a look.

35. 

    Steve November 17, 2010 6:33 am

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    This post is even more relevant now then it was when you first posted it because of the changes to the way Google displays local info in the SERPs. I set up a Yelp listing and within a week it was showing up in Google.

    Thanks again

36. 

    Intelisystem December 6, 2010 3:32 am

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    Hi,
    i have seen your blog. through googling. This is very nice blog. This blog gives to us very good knowledge about seo(search engine optimization). i really like this blog.
    This also gives very good knowledge for local search engine marketing.

    Thank you,

37. 

    Plumbers Toronto December 7, 2010 5:27 pm

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    Maybe ill look into this

38. 

    Christian December 15, 2010 10:57 pm

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    Hi Matthew Hunt
    I have completed all the requirements as described above (Maps).
    I’m going to last step – the business listing.
    My company is located in Denmark – Copenhagen. Can I have the same effect by using a company like Universal Business Listing to post my business listing two all major Online Yellow Pages and Search Engines?

    I look forward to hearing from you.
    Christian

39. 

    Matthew Hunt December 17, 2010 7:38 pm

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    Christian – you want to try to get the citations from local sources or directories in your country. I don’t think UBL would be a good match for something in Denmark.

40. 

    Chris December 27, 2010 7:56 pm

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    As a small business that is trying to get a decent ranking in the 7-Box, this information is phenomenal and relayed in an easily understandable way.

    In regards to the offline to online review management strategy… We send our clients an email survey after services performed. We’ve compiled some great comments from these surveys. However, there is no ‘star’ ranking like you would find if the client actually did a review online (Yelp, Maps, etc…).

    Thoughts on how would a decent review would convert to a star ranking?

    -CC

41. 

    Matthew Hunt December 28, 2010 2:19 am

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    Thanks Chris. Yes you can set-up your reviews with the proper rich snippet format and they may get picked up by Google Places. Now the best thing to do is to try to get you clients to post reviews on Google Places or other 3rd party sites that get imported into Google Places. Now I haven’t yet seen anyone’s reviews on their site get picked up when using the proper rich snippet micro formats, but I do typically see sites that are review/directory sites and sometimes even the odd: forum, blog get picked up who use the hreview format get picked up in Places Pages.

    Resources for Rich Snippets:
    http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
    http://microformats.org/code/hreview/creator – this will help your create your hreview rich snippet microformats
    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets – this tool will check to make sure your rich snippet is set-up correctly

    Hope this helps.

42. 

    Josee January 15, 2011 7:14 pm

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    Matt your short serie is just fantastic, Thanks you so much for your insane generosity
    I really like that you condense things into 3 parts instead of multiple long videos

    I love the ideal of a prepaid postcard and list building tactic; A welcome email for new clients with direct links where they can post there reviews (adding a little intensive like a monthly contest in the mix sure helps…real smooth )

    I recently got this tip and would like to run it by you first as I sure don’t want to get in trouble

    You could use eFax to generate a pdf of the client postcard, and post it on Posterous with the transcription of the card. ( is this kosher ) ?

    If so I have 2 separate business could I used one Posterous account to post all the reviews for both business or should I setup separate one for each business?

    Many Thanks Matt

43. 

    Matthew Hunt January 21, 2011 3:10 pm

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    Josee, You can post reviews on posterous or scanned faxes/postcards etc, but it’s not going to get picked up as a review in Places listings. Now I have seen some companies offering to post the review with a link back to a scanned review card that has been uploaded to free content sharing site like posterous, but this just not quite kosher. I know the scanned comment card review proves it’s real, but there is still a lot of grey area around whether this type of review posting is OK. Right now, my stand is “no” and you risk losing those reviews. There are other really creative ways to get customer reviews up. Education + ethical bribes can do a lot. Always best if get customers to post their own reviews whenever possible. Now there is nothing wrong with posting scanned reviews on your blogs, scribd accounts, posterous, own website etc – but just don’t use as a method to post reviews on review sites… make sense…?

44. 

    Tom Jacobson January 25, 2011 9:06 pm

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    Great blog on getting citations for Google Places. I am currently helping my son and his window washing side business get established. I have signed him up for a Google Places account but haven’t been verified yet. I recently added him to around 5 citation sources to get a foundation. After Google Places verification, I will add more citations sources.

    Thanks!!

45. 

    Matthew Hunt January 27, 2011 7:30 pm

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    Tom, great! Window washing gets a lot of searches every month locally!

46. 

    Sam January 27, 2011 7:31 pm

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    Great stuff. Really enjoyed the read.

    As a small business owner, just starting out, we really can’t afford to hire an SEO firm so we are doing everything by ourselves.

    We have created quite a few listings with Yelp, Kudzu, YP.com, etc. and are finding more places to list our business with (thanks in part to this blog).

    I have a couple questions to ask:

    1) We started our Google Places account and website around Dec. 28, 2010. On Jan.19,2011 was the first time we ranked on Google Places, page 7 albeit. Does that mean Google found our relevancy to be that low, or is it just because it was our first ranking?

    2) Is it possible to leap to the first page in a short period of time, or does it usually take a month or months?

    3) I have looked over my competitors Google Places and some of those ranking ahead of me have less detail, multiple listings, P.O. Boxes, no pics/vids. From what I have read, those are major no-no’s with Google. Surely I will rank better than those soon, right?

    Thanks for your great knowledge you have shared.

    Sam

47. 

    Matthew Hunt January 28, 2011 5:21 am

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    Sam,

    If you want to fast track your ranking results in Google Places then get your customers to write you reviews. This always works for our clients. Plus get more citations. Links to your site helps too, now often you can get a lot of citations and links at the same time so you can kill two birds with one stone.

    FYI, often it never to expensive to use a good Local SEO firm (like ours – wink, wink) because we often see our clients getting 8-20 times the ROI on their investments.

    Now anyone with enough time and a willingness to do this can learn SEO, the challenge is that learning curve is a little steep and often small business owners are too busy running their business. Sometimes finding a great local SEO’er is one the best investments a small business can make.

48. 

    Sam January 28, 2011 12:40 pm

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    Thanks for the quick reply.

    Would you mind taking a look at all I have done and give me an estimate to further optimize my situation?

    Unfortunately, I have plenty of time to do more right now, just not sure what else I need to do.

    Thanks again.

49. 

    Matthew Hunt January 28, 2011 2:10 pm

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    Sure Sam. I’ll contact direct via email.

50. 

    Boise SEO Company February 6, 2011 12:02 am

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    Matthew,
    Great article, we do SEO and local search for clients in the North West of the US. SEO and Local Search are still pretty unknown here. We have to educate most business owners before we can convince them that they should spend the money. You put out great information for all business owners if they actually want to put in the work. What we see is most business owners do not want to become a Local Search expert. They would rather just pay us a small flat monthly rate to do it for them. Most tell us that they got into that business because they love it not because they want to promote their own business.

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