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it is useful to encourage your customers to mention the service or product they experienced when publishing a review. This will allow the review data to be extracted for important keywords on your listing. It is, however, important to ensure your reviews come across as natural as possible, as not come across as spammy.

Effectively optimizing the content on your website for different keyword variations is important for triggering this feature. If Googlebot is unable to access this content, then it’s likely that this feature will not work. Likewise, it’s important to have a really solid internal linking structure so Google knows which pages on your website are associated with that particular Local Panel.

The content from a Google Post can be extracted even after seven days has passed and the Post is no longer appearing as active on a listing

Don’t set up a review kiosk in your place of business to ask for reviews. A single IP address being shared amongst multiple reviews on a given platform can lead to those reviews being flagged and removed.

Don’t narrow your focus to a single platform. Diversity in where your business has reviews posted is insurance against reputation loss should something happen to your reviews on any one of the platforms.

When a customer is willing to share an email, follow up within a few days to ask them to write a review about their experience. Give them a choice of platforms so that they can pick their favorite.

The 22 local search experts sitting on our survey panel also believe that a mix of different citations, from a range of industry and niche sites, is preferential.

For United States companies, these four map data aggregators provide a large amount of the map data for Apple, Yelp, Bing, Google+ local, Trip Advisor, and more. Express Update Neustar Localeze My Business Listing Manager Factual

Google, in their recent positioning of Maps as both a better local discovery and social play, may be trying to grease the skids of Maps ascendancy by directing more traffic to that subdomain.

But there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer. I use this all the time in an incognito browser if I want to just see what search results look like from a very, very specific location. Now these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it's really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.

The CID number is good to know and document for any business because: It helps you connect the different views (Maps, Local Finder, Search etc) for a single listing It helps you know if a listing somehow got a new record if something was merged.

Our financial client created COVID landing pages for both personal and business accounts. This client saw a 95% increase in organic goal completions from February to March. There was also a 97% increase in organic goal completions YoY. Google posts that focused on coronavirus-related services and products have also performed well.

Figure out the best method for earning reviews. Test email, texting, and in-person requests from your team, physical cards with a bit.ly link, etc. Test each one for a few months, then switch to a different method. Test until you find the method that works best for your customers.  The other thing that really needs to be considered is how to get customers to write about the specific services they used when working with your company. Little prompts or questions that they could answer when you reach out will help customers write better reviews.

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Google Business Profile will be the new name going forward for Google My Business. Google said the reason for the new name is to “keep things simple” and sometime in 2022, Google will retire the Google My Business app completely.

before that it was named Google My Business, before that, Google Places, and before that it was Google+ Local, before that it was also Google Places and then prior to that I think it was just Google Local

Google lets businesses manage their individual listings directly in the search results or directly in Google Maps, now Google is saying it prefers businesses with single listings manage their businesses in Search or Maps and not in the old Google My Business console.