Which Social Media Platform Is Best for Your Business?

By Luke Chitwood at TNW:

It is commonly suggested that to increase your brand presence, you need to be active on all forms of social media. While that may be true, unless your company has a dedicated social media coordinator, finding the time to maintain every platform out there can be extremely time consuming.

If your company is just starting out on the Web and need to pick a few social media networks to rule over, here is our guide to choosing the best platform(s) for your business, and how to make the most out of them.


1. Twitter

Who should use it: Everyone – from individuals to the largest multinational corporations

What to share: Start, join, and lead conversations; interact directly with brands and customers

Post frequency: Multiple times per day

Twitter is the dominant democracy of the social-sharing economy. Relevancy, personality and brevity are the keys to making your voice heard.

Useful tools: Buffer lets you stockpile and schedule content in advance. Tools like this allow for posting around-the-clock, increasing the likelihood of snagging followers beyond your country or time zone without being working 24/7.

It’s a guarantee by this point that a conversation relevant to your industry or business is occurring on Twitter. The only question: are you part of it?



2. Instagram

Who should use it: Lifestyle, food, fashion, personalities and luxury brands

What to share: Share visual content, including short videos (less than 15 seconds)

Post frequency: Once a day

Instagram invites brands with visual content into their customers’ zone-out time. Create and post content accordingly.

You’ll want to experiment with your own userbase and followers, but it’s likely that the best time to target your posts will be to get to your audience’s eyes during their commutes, nights, and weekends.

Useful tools: While hashtags are clickable and useful for search purposes, links in comments and captions are not.

Instead, use the integrated sharing functions for Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter to repurpose your Instagram posts for more shareable media. Include a relevant hashtag to become more discoverable on Instagram and to track engagement across sites where you share the content.

Additionally, Followgram is a great tool for tracking your stats on the most liked and commented posts, along with top tags and locations.



3. LinkedIn

Who should use it: Businesses (especially B2B service providers), Recruiters and Job-Seekers

What to share: Job-postings, company descriptions, employer/employee research

Post frequency: Two to four times a week

LinkedIn is the online analog to old fashioned networking. People – and connections to people – are everything

Keep a company description and profile page mindful of keyword SEO, but your network of employees and contacts is your most valuable (and potentially damaging) content on LinkedIn. Make sure people in your organization are appropriate, professional and on-brand. There’s nowhere online where employers and employees are more intimately linked.

Company seeking clients and individuals seeking employment should grow their LinkedIn networks by adding as many real connections as possible. Use your second and third-degree connections to request personal introductions (when reasonable), and weed out the Internet’s infinity of companies and applications, focusing on opportunities where you have some real connection.

Top tip: LinkedIn shares more about your own electronic creeping than any other network. Paid users can see who’s viewing their profiles.

If you’re researching a competitor or doing some preliminary job-seeking you’d rather your boss didn’t know about, try a Google search specifically for the LinkedIn page you want to see.



4. Facebook

Who should use it: Everyone and their grandmas (literally)

What to share: All types of online content, events, ads

Post frequency: Once or twice a day

Consider advertising or paying to promote your page on Facebook, but don’t make your brand’s Facebook page itself look like an advertisement. Inspire conversations and shares – and be sure to ask questions.

Of all social networks, Facebook is best equipped to linearly share responses to a post asking a question or sparking conversation. Answers then appear in friends of your respondents, spreading the conversation.

Facebook offers personal connection and an enjoyable distraction amidst the work day, but use typically peaks outside of work hours. There’s no shortage of options for analyzing Facebook data. Track the success of your content by date and time to hone in on the best times for engaging your audience.

Useful tools: URL shortener Bitly does more than just shrink down links. Each time you convert a link, Bitly offers stats on clicks generated from that specific link, making it helpful to see how much traffic is brought directly from sharing to Facebook.

5. Google+

Who should use it: Brands already on the other major social networks, B2B networking, bloggers

What to share: More formal and professional than Facebook; Hashtags have major search value

Post frequency: Once or twice a day

As Google’s proposed alternative to Facebook, keywords and search engine optimization are central to the appeal of Google+. Link often to content on your own website to direct this search boost where you want it most.

Useful tools: Bloggers, set up Google Authorship to have your Google+ profile follow your content from across the Web in search results. More than any particular feature of Google+, users are enticed by integration with Google’s other products.

Case in point? Comments on this article’s next social network now link to Google+ accounts.



6. YouTube

Who should use it: Brands with video content and ads, anyone giving explanations or sharing expertise

What to share: Short (less than 1.5 minutes) video content

Post frequency: Once or twice a week

Google treats its own well, and YouTube is the prime example of this fact. YouTube videos feature prominently in Google search results.

Keep this in mind when naming and describing videos, and direct people looking for insight or explanations within your industry topics to your brand’s page.

Useful tools: A subscription widget or link to your website can help convert single views into long-term influence.



7. Pinterest

Who should use it: Fashion, food, design, travel and anything DIY; audience skews female by 4:1

What to share: Creative, visual content

Post frequency: Multiple times per day

Users pin and re-pin posts to Pinterest Boards, which naturally push the content on Pinterest into categories. This makes easily-categorized content most apt for sharing, and wisely-chosen keywords essential to successful post captions.

Pinterest differs from other popular search engines in heavily favoring recent content. Pinning and re-pinning frequently is necessary to appear within current results for a given search term, regardless of how popular your content is.

Top tip: That stunning visual content on Pinterest? Undoubtedly the hard work of a designer, photographer or videographer. Technically, you’re only supposed to pin content you own or that’s within the public domain. Be sure to attribute your pins appropriately.



8. Yelp and/or Foursquare

Who should use it: B2C companies, brick-and-mortar outlets (especially stores, restaurants, and travel/tourism related), reviewers and bloggers

What to share: Location-based business search and reviews

Post frequency: Before your physical business opens and whenever information changes. Otherwise, at least weekly.

Share details about your business on an official company profile page. Monitor customer feedback related to your business, and respond to concerns raised in reviews. Consider it free promotion and advertisement (although paid promotions are also available).

Keep your information updated, and pay attention to keywords and SEO in crafting descriptions – Yelp listings in particular feature prominently in Google searches for local businesses.

On the consumer side of these B2C networks, reviewers and bloggers can use Yelp and Foursquare to grow their following. You can’t post a link in a review (Yelp with flag those and potentially suspend your profile), but you can develop a reputation for reliable reviews.

Top tip: Both Yelp and Foursquare users tend to glance, so it’s important to get as many high numbered ratings as possible to gain a positive first impression. Add a link to your blog or personal website under the profile section to capture additional readership.

#Yelp Will Help Your Business [Study]

By Chris Crum at WebProNews:

There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding Yelp and the impact the online review service can have on small businesses. This has included everything from fake reviews to alleged extortion, with numerous businesses speaking out on the Internet, in the media and in the courtroom against the company and its policies.

But a lot of businesses are finding success with Yelp, and are gaining customers. Merchant Warehouse has put out results from a study finding that 90% of those polled say positive reviews on Yelp impacted their company buying choices, and 72% of them said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

According to Merchant Warehouse’s findings, 44% based their choices for what businesses to go to on text reviews, while 26% cited business ratings, 17% said quantity of reviews, and 14% said reviews from friends or family.

The study finds that 93% of people who conducted research on review sites “typically” make purchases at the businesses they look up. Here’s a look at the types of businesses that are being searched for most:

Merchant Warehouse also points to data from a Boston Consulting Group survey, finding that small businesses that took advantage of Yelp business accounts saw an increase in annual revenue.

According to the firm, 77% of small businesses that use Yelp say the site has changed the way they respond to customer issues and complaints, but many simply aren’t paying attention.

But other businesses are paying plenty of attention to Yelp, and they’re not happy with what they’re finding. Yelp has been going around the country holding town hall meetings, and according to reports, there are a lot of complaints being tossed the company’s way. The LA Times recently shared an account of one of the meetings:

Many slammed the company for allowing reviewers to post inflammatory comments — one restaurant manager said she cried for three days after a Yelper wrote that her restaurant was filled with Nazis. Others said they had been subjected to aggressive advertising calls from Yelp.

Vintage clothing shop owner Reiko Roberts said the advertising pressure amounted to extortion. She said that when she declined to buy ads, “the lower reviews go to the top and the higher reviews go to the bottom.”

Meanwhile, Yelp continues to maintain a focus on “closing the loop,” meaning getting customers to actually engage in transactions with the businesses they are looking at. It’s still early in the company’s efforts here, but already over the last couple months, Yelp has made acquisitions and launched specific features aimed at doing this.

#Yelp Update for iOS Adds Ability to Order Food From Within App

Yelp today issued an update to its iOS appthat now enables users to order food from within the Yelp app itself. The feature, however, isn't yet live in every city and will be starting out in San Francisco exclusively before rolling out to additional locations in the coming weeks.

So while most folks won't be able to take advantage of the new functionality just yet, Yelp clearly has ambitions to be more than a stop-and-go review site.

Read the full story >>

Yelp Optimization: How to Claim & Optimize Your Business Listing

By Amanda DiSivestro at Search Engine Watch: 

Yelp has remained a leading review site for local businesses for quite some time. Although the restaurant industry is no doubt the most present on the site, other businesses are beginning to take advantage.

With more than 100 million monthly unique visitors to the site (both on desktop and mobile), it's a great place to gain visibility for your company and create a place for reviews, ratings, and even some social engagement.

If your page is optimized correctly, you should start seeing reviews and clicks without having to do much managing to start. Here's how to get started with Yelp and how to optimize your business listing.

Claiming a Yelp Listing

Let's first go through the process of claiming a Yelp listing and filling out your basic business information. Below is an example of a fake business I created and the steps I took to make it happen:

Step #1: Visit the Yelp for Business Owners page and click "claim my business."

Step #2: You will then be taken to a page that asks you to find your business. There are three different scenarios that can occur:

• No Business Listed: Even if you don't have a Yelp account yet, you can still type in the name of your business. In the example below, you will see that Yelp didn't recognize my business for me to claim (it's a fake business, so no surprise there). If this happens to your legitimate business, you can click "Add your business to Yelp" on the bottom of the page.
• Already Unlocked: If your business shows up and it says that it is already unlocked, then someone has already claimed your business.
• Unlock: Unlock your business Yelp page by clicking "unlock" shown in the screenshot below. You will be able to unlock the page by giving your first and last name, email address, creating a password, and agreeing to the Yelp terms of service.

Step #3 (Optional): If you have to add your business to Yelp, you will be taken to a screen where you can fill in all of your information. You will only need to do this if your business does now show up on the similar businesses screen in step #2. Yelp will ask you what type of business you're trying to add (education, professional services, restaurants, active life, etc.), your email address, the address of your business, your business hours, and your web address. You will then click "add" and be sent a confirmation email. Once your email is confirmed, the Yelp team will look at your submission and get back to you before you can begin optimizing and making changes to your account.

Optimizing Your Yelp Listing

After you've claimed your Yelp listing, it's time to optimize that listing by filling in all of the information possible, uploading photos, and utilizing social benefits and the analytics available.

Here are a few ways you can get started optimizing your business listing on Yelp:

Fill Out All Information

This is the first and most important thing a company needs to do when trying to make the most of their Yelp listing. Below is a screenshot of one of my favorite coffee houses, Vinaka Café. You will see that there is quite a bit of information you can include, and they've done it all:

You can edit your business information by clicking the "Edit Business Info" link on the bottom left hand corner. What's interesting about this is the fact that anyone can click this link and try to change the information on your listing. Everything has to go through Yelp moderators, however, so you will be notified if something seems off.

Add Photos

Consumers love photos. No matter what business or what platform, the more high quality photos the more interesting your page is going to be. According to Review Trackers research, people searching Yelp for local businesses spend 2.5 times more time on a Yelp listing with photos.

Here's how you can add photos:

Respond to Reviews

Yelp is all about reviews (more on this below). Make sure if you're the owner to continually respond to reviews.

You don't need to respond to every review, but occasionally add in your two-cents or respond to a negative customer. Here's how to make this happen:

Utilize Keywords

Optimizing your Yelp listing is equivalent to optimizing your website for search engines such as Google. You want to utilize keywords in your business listing, and try to earn backlinks wherever you can either through guest posting, press releases, or better yet, naturally.

Extra: Yelp also offers social features for users to help them find their friends on Yelp and see what they have been reviewing and what they recommend in any given area. This is more of a feature for users than businesses, but it's good to know it exists in case your business ever wants to check out what people are saying about businesses in the area (your competition maybe?). You can check out these social features by clicking "Find Friends" at the top of a Yelp page. If you don't already have an account, it will prompt you to add in information and confirm your email address. You'll be set to go in less than two minutes.

How to Encourage More Reviews on Yelp

Having a larger number of reviews shows that your business is more established. It can be tough to get those first few, but there are a few things you can do to help get the ball rolling:

• Yelp Link on Website: Have a link to your Yelp page on your website. Make sure the button is prominent so that no one misses the opportunity to click.
• Yelp Link in Signature: Whenever you send an email, consider putting your Yelp link in your email signature. This is just another way to make it easy for customers/clients to find you and review.
• Flyers: If you feel comfortable with your regular customers and clients, you may want to consider creating flyers for your servers or staff to pass out that explains how to leave a Yelp review and why it matters to you. However, don't offer any free incentive for giving a positive review of your business – Yelp will not be happy.
• Encourage Check-Ins: Check-ins occur with the social network Foursquare. It allows customers to check-in to wherever they are and then post that check-in to Facebook for all of their friends to see (this is now more important than ever thanks to the Facebook Graph Search). You can encourage check-ins by offering daily deals on Foursquare, which you can learn more about here.
• Promote on Yelp: Businesses can place special deals on Yelp, which should help encourage users to visit your Yelp page. While they're there, why not write a review, right?
• SEO for Yelp: As discussed above, you want your Yelp business page to rank just like you want the pages on your website to rank. You can do this with the keywords the appear on your listing as well as trying to earn some backlinks for your page.

The best thing you can do is encourage engagement instead of blatantly asking for reviews. This will help keep things fair and unbiased, and you will be surprised at just how many people want to review your company on their own.

So what about negative reviews?

If you see something that is completely untrue, take the time to respond to that person and let everyone know what you did to make sure that particular problem won't happen again. After all, a Yelp review with no negative reviews and a perfect 5 star score will look worse to Yelp users than the business with a few negative reviews.

Reviews will only be removed if they violate Yelp's terms of service or content guidelines – or if the reviewer remove it. Certain reviews may also be filtered (these won't affect the overall rating of your business), something that Yelp has been criticized on in the past.

All you can do is continue to take steps to encourage positive and constructive reviews – most of them should appear on your page.

Overview of Yelp Optimization

So a quick overview of Yelp optimization:

• You first have to claim your listing. You can do this by either unlocking your business, adding your business if it was not detected by Yelp, visiting your already unlocked account, or taking steps to regain control of your already unlocked account.
• You should make sure your listing information is completely filled out. Add photos, add contact information, Wi-Fi information, noise level, etc.
• You then need to encourage more reviews. You can do this by encouraging Foursquare check-ins, making your Yelp link visible on your website and email signature, promoting your company on Yelp, and working to rank your account on search engines like Google.
• Some negative reviews are actually better than no negative reviews. Make sure you keep your business listing unbiased and always encourage engagement over asking for reviews.

Are you a company with a strong presence on Yelp? How do you make sure that your listing is fully optimized? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.

#INFOGRAPHIC: Social Media Explained With Cute Kittens

You might already seen the social media explained to layman chart before, but here's a new version of that presented by folks over at Avalaunch Media at SearchFest 2013. It includes new social media platforms like Yelp, Pinterest and Spotify. These kitties really explain the social media platforms nicely.

Infographic by Avalaunch Media
Submitted by Priyeshu Garg

INFOGRAPHIC: 2013 Geosocial Universe By The Numbers

By Megan O'Neill at SocialTimes:  
With 5.98 billion mobile devices in the world, geosocial networks and applications are more prevalent than ever.  Sites and services from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram, Skype, Gmail, LinkedIn and Yelp are making their way onto our mobile devices and creative agency JESS3 has outlined the scope and size of this “Geosocial Universe” in a new infographic.

Geosocial Universe 3.0 is the third in a series of infographics (the first released in 2010 and the second in 2011) created by JESS3 to reveal the biggest players in the location-based landscape.  This latest iteration lists the most up-to-date stats about active users on the biggest networks in the geosocial arena, mapped out according to percentage of users that are mobile users.

The infographic rounds up services that are purely mobile, like Instagram with 90 million active users, Snapchat with 2 million, Foursquare with 30 million and Path with 5 million, as well as services like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, email services, LinkedIn and others that serve customers both on mobile as well as on the web.  It also includes Skype, Yelp and Mixi, which have small but growing mobile user bases.

Check out the infographic below to find out more and let us know what you think.  How many of these services do you use on mobile?

2013 Geosocial Universe By The Numbers infographic by JESS3.

Yelp Officially Joins Apple Maps

By Devon Glenn at Social Times:
Local business review site Yelp has marked a pin in Apple’s answer to Google Maps. Now that Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 6, is ready for download, iPad and iPhone users will be able to check out Yelp reviews on Apple maps in 17 of the countries that use Yelp.

The feature will compete directly with Google’s integration of Zagat ratings into its own mapping system. Yelp has a thriving community of amateur critics whose detailed reactions to the food service in their neighborhoods keep local merchants on their toes, while Google blends anonymous user ratings with professional reviews from a trusted publication.

Though most iOS 6 reviewers have mentioned the Yelp integration only in passing, their responses to it have been favorable.

CNET: ”The integration with Yelp to show more information about local restaurants (like hours and cuisine type) isn’t revolutionary, either, but we do like the tight integration with the OpenTable app (an exceedingly useful service if there ever was one). To make it happen when looking at a restaurant, just ask for reservations.”

MacWorld: “Even better, you’ll get little icons that identify businesses, eating establishments, schools and other points of interest. Tapping on these brings up an address, contact information, and even Yelp reviews and photos where available; for more info, you can jump out to the Yelp app, if you’ve got it installed. Google Maps on the Web has offered a features like this for some time, but they never made their way to the iOS app. While this might be old hat to those who already use the Yelp app, there are likely plenty of converts still to be made by virtue of the built-in nature.”

Read the full story here

 

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Yelp

By Todd Wasserman at Mashable:
Next to Google, there’s probably no more important site for small businesses than Yelp. Yet perhaps no other site is as poorly understood. For instance, is it a good idea to encourage your customers to give you good reviews on the site? Does Yelp pay for reviews? How do you go about countering bad reviews?

Since Yelp is such a juggernaut, it’s important to get the facts straight. With that in mind, take a look at these 10 things you may not have known about the service.

 

1. Most of Its Traffic Is From Its Home Page

You might think that in 2012, most people would be accessing Yelp from their smartphones, but that’s not the case. Sixty percent of searches are from desktops, and the company’s mobile apps are used by about 7 million people. Yelp.com gets 78 million visitors per month. However, like other social media companies, the trend is definitely favoring mobile.

 

2. Restaurants Aren’t the Biggest Category

Yelp’s biggest category is actually shopping. Shopping reached parity with restaurants in September 2011, but has since surpassed that, says Darnell Holloway, Yelp’s manager of local business outreach. Though Holloway says that perception still lingers; he believes that restaurants have a natural advantage because they get so many customers compared to, say, a dentist. Says Holloway: “If I’m a diner, I’m probably going to see more people coming through the door.”

 

3. Encouraging Customers to Post Reviews is a Bad Idea

It might seem like closing a sale with “And don’t forget to tell people about your experience on Yelp!” is smart marketing, but Yelp discourages this practice and other forms of review coercion. “We recommend that people focus on awareness rather than asking for reviews,” says Holloway, “because then it becomes an arms race.” But wait, should Yelp want more reviews? After all, more reviews equals more traffic and, in theory, better reviews if you believe in the wisdom of crowds, right? Not according to Yelp. The company believes in quality over quantity. Moreover, “We don’t believe that consumers necessarily want to be seen as a promotional vehicle.”

 

4. Those ‘People Love Us on Yelp’ Stickers? You’ve Gotta Earn Them

The Yelp sticker pictured above is a genuine accolade designed to be akin to a high Zagat rating. That means that you can’t order a “People Love Us on Yelp” decal for love or money. Instead, the company doles them out twice a year to companies that get overall high ratings.

 

5. Yelp Provides Free Signage Via Flickr

Though Yelp discourages merchants from bugging customers to write reviews, it is a proponent of more subtle means of persuasion. For instance, the company provides downloadable signage via a Flickr stream. Holloway also recommends putting a Yelp link in your email signature and on your business card.

 

6. Yelp Has Paid For Reviews in the Past

Though Yelp strives to maintain the purity of its reviews, the company has in the past paid people to write them. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman told The New York Times in 2007 that “there was a time in our earlier days where we experimented with paying for reviews directly in cities outside of San Francisco to help get the ball rolling in our otherwise empty site.” However, the company has not done this for at least four years.

 

6. Customer Service Appears to Have the Strongest Effect on Reviews

Yelp’s research has found that a customer whose review praises “customer service” is more than five times as likely to give a 5-star review than a 1-star review. Similarly, nearly 70% of those who trash a business’ customer service wind up giving a 1-star review. In a May blog entry on the topic, Yelp featured a word cloud of terms that popped up in positive reviews:

Obviously, it seems to pay to be friendly, nice and helpful.

 

7. Every Star in a Review Leads to a 5-9% Jump in Revenues

A study by Michael Luca, a professor at Harvard Business School, found that there was a correlation between a high Yelp ranking and revenues. Luca just looked at the restaurant industry in Seattle, but his findings were a ringing endorsement for Yelp. Among other things, it found there were far more Yelp restaurant reviews than there were from Zagat or The Seattle Times.

 

8. Yelp Tends to Favor Independent Businesses Over Chains

If you’re a McDonald’s franchisee, don’t waste any time worrying about your Yelp reviews. According to Luca’s study, Yelp’s effect on chains is “statistically insignificant and close to zero.” Luca also found that when Yelp penetrates a market, “there is a shift in revenue toward independent restaurants.” This is not by design, but based on the fact that reviewing a McDonald’s in St. Louis is a rather absurd exercise since it will likely be very similar to a McDonald’s in Kalamazoo, Mich., or Newark, N.J.

 

9. Business Owners Can Dispute Reviews on Yelp

If someone trashes your business on Yelp, you don’t have to sit back and take it. In fact, Holloway recommends business owners go on Yelp and dispute. The reviewers can then answer the business owner if need be.

 

10. Legal Threats for Bad Reviews Can Trigger ‘The Streisand Effect’

Yelp reviews operate in a grey area between journalism and customer service. If you’re a business owner and see a scathing review that is completely incorrect, you may consider it akin to slander and be tempted to call your lawyer. However, Yelp cautions against this. In an FAQ on its site, Yelp evokes “The Streisand Effect,” in which an action has the unintended consequence of drawing more attention to the problem. (The term got its name from Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress photos of her home backfired.) As Yelp counsels:

“Far from being cowed, recipients will sometimes go public with them as a warning to others not to patronize your business. Second, beware of lawyers who are quick to file lawsuits without telling their clients that it can cost them dearly. Last, take a step back: if you find yourself insisting that a review is obviously untrue, there’s every reason to think that your customers will draw the same conclusion as you. Even if they don’t, Yelp’s review filter is always on the prowl, and it may be able to put enough pieces of the puzzle together over the long-term to filter out the bogus review.”

Yelp Has A New Redesign, And Here’s What It Looks Like

By Chris Crum at WebPro News:
Most of the time, when a popular site pushes out a major redesign, it gets a large amount of backlash from users who liked the way things were. Whether users like Yelp’s new design or not, I don’t think many would disagree that it was badly in need of some sprucing up from its very dated look.

“Over the years we’ve seen mobile contributions grow at a rapid clip,” says Yelp’s Mark Allen of the redesign. “Photos, Tips, check-ins and comments from your friends are a fantastic way to find great local businesses. We wanted to bring those to the front and center of Yelp.com and give you an easy way to share and explore your friends’ activity across Yelp.com and Yelp’s mobile apps.”

“You’ll notice that the new design places a greater emphasis on activity from you and your friends,” he adds. “In addition to long-standing favorites like Review of the Day, Hot New Businesses and Fresh Lists, now you’ll be able to see all sorts of new stuff, including (but not limited to) photos and Tips left by your friends, events they are going to, recent places you’ve checked-in to and Useful, Funny, Cool votes your reviews have received.”
Here’s what the new homepage looks like:



The new design will be rolling out gradually over the next few weeks. What do you think?

Yelp SEO Campaign Highlights 8 Local SEO Best Practices

By Miranda Miller, at Search Engine Watch:
Are you missing an opportunity to fully understand and take advantage of the impact of local on search engine rankings? A new whitepaper from BrightEdge shares insights into how Yelp.com optimizes for local and highlights best practices for marketers.

Yelp is a local review site with more than 30 million user-generated reviews and active communities in 15 different countries. Their reviews range over a number of verticals, including restaurants, retail, hotels and travel, real estate, education, and more. In the second quarter of 2012, they averaged 78 million unique visitors per month.


BrightEdge recently looked into search results across the travel, retail, auto rentals and other verticals, across five major cities. At that time, they noticed a high variation in Google search results in different locations. Based on that result, they estimated that brands “could boost traffic and revenue by as much as 30% if they close the gaps in SEO performance by ranking at the same level as their top city on each keyword across all five cities.”

 

Yelp’s Local Challenges Universal for Marketers

Optimizing pages for different locations isn’t easy; the challenge begins when marketers try to get an accurate snapshot of their visibility across multiple locations. SEO technology may deliver keyword ranking data at the national level, or marketers may try to qualify search terms by using the name of specific cities in their queries.

These methods don’t tell the whole story, though. BrightEdge notes, “When we compared Google results page for the search term 'burgers new york' to the page people who are actually in New York see when searching with the term “burgers” we found stark differences in rank performance.”

Yelp’s challenges are unique given the sheer size of their website, the volume of reviews and other pages they have to optimize, and the fact that they rely on ranking locally by their very nature.

 

Local Search Tips

Based on Yelp’s SEO campaign, BrightEdge gleaned the following local search marketing best practices:

1. Use software that allows you to monitor rankings across multiple locations and compare local and national results. You can try to work around this visibility problem on your own, but it’s time consuming, inaccurate, and not scalable.
2. Identify gaps and prioritize opportunities to improve your SEO across locations. Focus on cities with lower performance and identify keyword opportunities to maximize your efforts.
3. Identify and correct landing page misalignments. These are situations where the highest ranking page in one location is targeting another location, which can be frustrating to users who click through to information that doesn’t match their needs.
4. Understand how origin locations (where in the world people are searching from) affect the SEO performance of your popular pages.
5. Once you understand where your pages show up locally, drill down into off and on-page SEO factors in each location to optimize for that geo.
6. Register local businesses with search engines; fill out the online form for that engine and complete the confirmation by mail.
7. Use online local communities like Yelp and Google+ to claim your business listing. Go deeper, into smaller local portals and community sites. Wherever possible, add photos, business hours, and other information to fill out the profile.
8. Create local-specific landing pages to optimize for searchers in that location or searching with that location name in their query. BrightEdge recommends that “each page should be tailored with content that is specific to that location and that content should be compelling and refreshed regularly.”

Local and mobile advertising is projected to reach $24 billion in 2016. Clearly, the opportunity is huge for those who are able to overcome the challenges and discover areas of weakness to improve upon.

“Increasingly we are hearing that our customers need more robust and scalable local search insights,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. “We are thrilled to be able to work with Yelp, a leader in local services for both consumers and business, to share insights about best practices for local search.”

Upcoming Apple Maps To Include Yelp Ratings and Check-Ins

By Devon Glenn  at Social Times:  
Apple has officially ditched Google Maps. When the company releases iOS 6 this fall, the latest iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices will come standard with Apple Maps. And instead of Zagat ratings and Google’s user reviews, Apple Maps will be integrated with Yelp, a popular social network for rating local businesses. If the new map doesn’t work out, at least you’ll know where to send your complaints.
Apple announced the Maps feature at its annual WWDC conference earlier in June.
A preview of the tool shows a local business finder. You can tap on a location to pull up a phone number, address, website, and pictures. It’s very similar to what Google Maps already has, but it comes with the brutally honest reviews and ratings from Yelp, which read like brief food memoirs, complete with personal backstories.

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TripAdvisor Aims To Beat Yelp With “Local Picks” Facebook App

By Josh Constine at TechCrunch:  
Tourists rave about a city’s well-known restaurants and distort their review averages. So today travel site TripAdvisor starts highlighting beloved eateries from people who live nearby in Local Picks, a Facebook app it’s relaunching. Originally released in 2007 but shut down from 2010 until now, Local Picks pulls in reviews of 850,000 restaurants from TripAdvisor, re-sorts them to more heavily weight the opinions of actual locals, and auto-shares your reviews to your Facebook Timeline.

TripAdvisor hopes to mine the virality bonanza of Facebook Open Graph to beat Yelp, which has yet to implement the auto-sharing feature that’s helped other apps boost growth. In a video interview with the public company’s CEO embedded below, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer tells me Yelp “doesn’t in my view address the social aspect of where your friends’ favorite restaurants are.”



Both TripAdvisor and Yelp are Facebook Instant Personalization partners, allowing the websites to use vistors’ Facebook data and social graph to improve content relevance instantly without a separate authorization. But TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product Adam Medros tells me “people just don’t what to leave the Facebook chrome to go to another site, and their comfort level with some social elements is different.”

TripAdvisor hopes Local Picks’ algorithm that favors review by people who live near a restaurant will make the Facebook app worth visiting in addition to the main website. In its first three-year run, Local Picks hit nearly one million users, but TripAdvisor shut it down presumably to focus on making its primary website more social. Travel is inherently social after all, judging by the tourist destinations that dominate the list of most checked-in landmarks that Facebook just released.

But with its recent TripAdvisor update featuring friends of friends reviews squared away, it was time to revisit the Facebook canvas and resurrect Local Picks. Today the Facebook app becomes available in English on the web, with more languages and a mobile app coming soon. Medros tells me “Within the chrome, social is 100% natural” so Local Picks, which lives entirely within Facebook, gets people sharing more.



That’s definitely true thanks to Local Picks’ Open Graph Timeline integration which auto-shares when you post a review. That includes its clever onboarding flow that asks you to give a one-to-five star (or bubble in this case) rating and check off your favorite restaurant types. This lets the app show you Mexican restaurants instead of French ones if you’re a burrito lover.
Unfortunately, Local Picks crosses the spam line with an “Invite” button that pre-fills a Facebook request to check out the app with 50 random friends. I grill Kaufer over this in the interview and he says TripAdvisor be watching the data to see if people hate this growth tactic as much as I do.

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Yelp IPO Is Off To a Good Start

By Devon Glenn at SocialTimes: 
Since Yelp (YELP) made its New York Stock Exchange debut Friday morning, the local business review site has exceeded analysts’ expectations.
The company’s estimated value was $900 million. Although the IPO was priced at $15, Yelp opened at $22.01 per share on the New York Stock Exchange Friday morning, and the Washington Post reports that the stock swelled to $26 per share around 10:00 a.m.  By noon on Friday, 14.3 million shares of the company’s stock were sold at a price above the expected $12 to $14 per share. The Wall Street Journal noted that Yelp’s was only the fourth IPO out of 22 others this year to price above range.
The popular site boasts 66 million unique visitors per month. As of November, Yelp’s mobile application is listed as the No. 1  free travel app in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) App Store, with 5.7 million downloads to unique mobile devices.
Although questionable listings from the site’s users were a foreseeable problem, Yelp said in its IPO filing that it had filtered 5 million reviews and removed about 1.8 million of them to try and solve it.
The company’s revenue, which comes mostly from ads, rose 74 percent to $83.3 million in 2011, but the net loss was $16.7 million, compared to the $9.6 million the company lost in 2010.
Stocks for similar businesses like Groupon Inc. (GRPN) and Angie’s List Inc. (ANGI)  dropped after their first day of trading. Groupon saw a 30 increase when it debuted in November 2011, but as of Friday, its stock was still trading below its IPO. Angie’s List was ahead of its IPO at $15.79 per share, but was still trading three points below the initial 25 percent increase. The lasting effect of Yelp’s early stock market success remains to be seen.
For more in-depth analyses, check out the original stories at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Ahead Of Its IPO On The NYSE, Yelp Shows Growing Losses

By Rip Empson at TechCrunch:
It may now be obscured by all the hoopla surrounding Facebook’s going public, but back in November the popular user-generated review site, Yelp, filed to go public and planned to raise $100 million ahead of its IPO (at an expected $1 to $2 billion valuation). On Friday, Yelp filed an amended S-1 that shows that the company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “YELP.”
But, of perhaps greater interest to those following Yelp’s trajectory is the fact that the third amendment to the company’s S-1 includes full-year financials for 2011, showing that, while the company’s net revenues have continued to rise since 2009, its operating losses have continued to increase right along with them. Yelp’s total revenues in 2011 were $83.2 million, up 74.6 percent from $47.7 million in 2010 (and 25.8 million in 2009), but net losses were up to $16.9 million in 2011 — a 74.2 percent increase from a net loss of $9.5 million in 2010. (Adjusted EBITDA losses were $1.1 million.)

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PayPal to Challenge Groupon in Daily Deals

By Todd Wasserman at Mashable:
EBay’s PayPal unit plans to take on Groupon in early 2012 with a new service that will offer coupons based on users’ buying habits and mobile phone locations.
PayPal has partnered with 200 U.S. merchants for the offering, says Anuj Nayar, a PayPal rep. The service first reported in Bloomberg, will launch in the first quarter of next year. Nayar declined to say who the merchants are.
Though others, such as Facebook and Yelp, have attempted and failed to compete in the daily deals segment, Nayar says PayPal will use the knowledge of its 103 million customers’ preferences and mobile technology from the recently acquired Where to make the offers more relevant than what Groupon, LivingSocial and Amazon (which is also a LivingSocial investor), currently offer.
“As a 40 year-old male, I don’t think I’ll ever use a coupon for 50% off bikini wax,” Nayar says, referring to irrelevant deals from competitors. Nayar says the goal is to use laser beam-like targeting to make sure the offers are germane.
PayPal’s entry could shake up the daily deals category, which is estimated to more than double to $4.17 billion in 2015, according to researcher BIA/Kelsey.
The report comes after other recent attempts to grow PayPal’s estimated $4.7 billion total payment volume, including a Facebook app designed to send money to friends unveiled in November and a mobile payment system that made its debut that month.
Meanwhile, PayPal’s parent company, eBay, has been offering online daily deals for years, Nayar says.