Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi guys,

I am looking for a trusted, digital marketing company specializing in local search services and SEO. I would prefer to be from around Chicago due to the type of business we are in, limousine business, but ultimately, I would be willing to try someone from a different city but it needs to have experience in this type of business. If you know someone, please send me a private message and I will give you more info. I am not looking for a 2-3 man company, we are past that stage. I know about Moz's recommended companies, none of them are from Chicago, bummer.

Thanks!

Hi guys,

Is there any way I can respond or have a review deleted from one of my clients' profile on Indeed.com? Is there a mediation process of any sort?

Thanks.

Thanks Miriam, I actually reached out to Phil before posting here, I know he is very knowledgeable in this space.

Do you know anything about Facebook reviews? Are they important enough to go after them?

Thanks Cody!

The immediate goal is to gather more reviews, building a stronger brand presence falls on the second place. What would be the best social sites to share the content / infographics on besides Facebook and Twitter?

I found a way (finally!) to find out which of my customers who have a gmail account have also a Google plus account. That helps a lot. We use to send handout reviews or video instructions about how to create a Google plus account...and it didn't go to well.

Now that we know they have a G+ account , all we have to do is ask for a review; how to do this?
What are the latest strategies so that the review will stay there?

• have them log in, search for the business name and write the review?
• give them the direct link?
• is the searcher's path important?
• should we look for users who are engaged more in their circles?

Thanks!

We signed up with a reviews aggregator to try to leverage Adwords a little better.  We have a 2 months trial after which we have to pay the monthly fee.
Their technical department told us that we have to wait for up to 12 weeks for those reviews to be displayed along Google Adwords ads and of course, if we meet the other criteria, which we are.

I want to know where I can find that information about the waiting time and why there is such a long time?

Thanks guys!

I have gathered already hundreds of keywords relevant to my business, I will give Wordstream a try.

Thanks for the link!

Thanks guys!

I want to outsource my Adwords campaign and I have a few questions. I have been playing with it for a few days-weeks but didn't have enough time to fully engage.

Where would I start?
What questions should I ask?
Are there any general goals before setting specific ones?
How would I know their price is right?
How to measure what they do?

Thanks!

I would start by asking a few questions like:

• how long have you been having those links for?
• have you seen a important decrease in traffic or rankings since you acquired those links?
• is the anchor text the same for all of those links?
• have you experienced traffic and rankings decrease after Penguin 2.0?

You have to make sure first those links hurt you before starting disavowing them. Check your Google Analytics and Google webmaster tools for any warnings or penalties. If everything looks fine I wouldn't do it although I must say that many links looks suspicious.
Keep building links from trusted websites and create useful content, there is no way around it.

I was reading this post about press releases where Dr Pete Meyers - a Seomoz Associate, was expressing his opinion about the same subject, here it is:
"I have some smaller clients who have had limited luck with it, but I think it's best to just stick to one of the sites and do periodic releases (maybe every couple of months). If nothing else, it'll give you a sense of what's working, and you can take some of the popular releases and push to get them a broader market.
What I wouldn't do is go after multiple low-value PR services and plaster the same releases everywhere you can. At best, it's diminishing returns - at worst, they'll be devalued. I'm with Peter G. - the best press release opportunities come through relationships with the media. Obviously, though, that takes a lot more time".

You opinion is that "repeatedly submitting to a the same few press release sites is not going to be a sustaining source of power.  A lot of links on the same site are not as valuable as one link on each of a lot of sites"
I do not want to question your authority or his but there is a difference of opinions from to seasoned contributors. Any thoughts about this Dr Pete?

I checked it also, everything looks fine to me.

Same here.

I would say 3 months is not too much to wait to see some ranking movement. I have waited about the same for my first website.

A couple of things that I have noticed:

• your anchor text is targeting almost exclusively your homepage with little to no variation
• your Title needs a little work, try to have your targeted keywords at the beginning of the sentence
• you rank in page 8 for mobility scooter in Google UK

Depending where you want to rank for the keywords, I would start searching in the Q&A section for "co.uk", there are quite a few valuable answers like this one:

http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-best-way-to-rank-well-on-both-google-co-uk-google-com

One more resource:

http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/white-paper/google-ranking-factors-uk-2012/

Good luck!

Thanks Miriam

For citations I used Whitespark probably more than a year ago, with little success, maybe they fine tuned it since then, I will give it a try again.

As far as the reviews are concerned, we are already doing that, following up with the customers and asking them to post their reviews online . We figured Google, Yahoo and Yelp will help us the most so these three are the only options the customers have to leave reviews although I must say, I was expecting a greater number of reviews. Do you have any resources where I can learn how to craft those emails about reviewing our services?

On the other hand, I am not sure if even with lots of real reviews and citations we will be able to penetrate the 7 pack due to reasons that I just discovered, reasons which I will explain in a new question once I finish reading all the material. In short is about how Google is ranking companies in Google Places and what is it doing to verify that the information those companies are providing (and which helps them rank so high) is accurate.

Try to focus more on those competitors who don't have an exact match domain, it's much harder to rank when your URL does not contain at least a partial match. Google still puts a lot of weight on exact match domains. 
I would focus more on creating valuable content and post them on your site or use websites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon to get the word out. Put a snippet on those sites and the rest of the article on yours. In addition, if you can share it with minded-like people, such as through Facebook, I'm sure that will improve the results.

Try googling with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them if your website doesn't attract to many people.

I thought I would update your answer...

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

We all now how important citations are, structured and unstructured for local results. Oftentimes, as David Mihm said, they are the factor that could tilt the balance.
It is also true that the higher the authority of a website the more weight Google puts on a citation.

My question is, how far should you go after those unstructured citations, would you get them from everywhere you can if the number and not the quality would be the difference between number 1 and number 2 spot in Google local?

Is there a way to see what keywords I rank for in Google Places?