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Online Review Sites for Local Search

It’s becoming more common for your customers to rate you and tell all their friends about how good (or bad!) you are. Yelp is a very common tool that originally started as a place for people to praise or pan their local restaurant. It has quickly grown into all other businesses, and can be found around the world.

Yelp results typically show up high in the search engine results pages and direct searchers to a specific page. There the searcher will find a list of businesses, some good and some bad. As an example, “carpet cleaners, pleasanton, ca” returns this result:


This is free advertising for your business. Furthermore, the Yelp results get incorporated into your Google Places (maps) listing mentioned above as “Reviews”. Make sure you claim or create your own business listing in Yelp, or whatever your local favorite tool is. Again, add as much relevant information about your company that you can. You can include photos, videos, product information or whatever you want. Next, encourage your happy clients to review you. The more positive reviews you receive, the more you’ll bubble up to the top of the listing, and above all your competition.

Be very careful not to get too many reviews at once! They do monitor it, and if they see reviews coming from the same computer (like your own) or a lot of them at once, they may deactivate your listing for violating their terms of service. Ask your customers a few at a time, and spread them out over a long time (months).

An example of a carpet cleaning company that takes his Yelp listing very seriously is “Spotless”. The first one in yellow has a paid account, and shows up at the top because of it (yet his reviews are only 4½ stars). However, “Spotless” has five solid stars and 31 raving happy reviews, so he shows up at the very top of the free listings.


All of these reviews also show up in his Google Places listing, so whether his customers find him on Google or Yelp, they’ll see all the terrific testimonials.

Stand Out from the Crowd with Local Search

Even with all these steps, it may still be difficult to stand out from all your competition. Do what you can to make your business look unique from everyone else.

For example, Google Places has a new feature called “tags”. For US$25 per month, you can “tag” your business listing with a small sponsored link that takes the person either to your website or online video. When you’re being compared against all the other generic listings, this is a low cost way of getting your listing to stand out from the crowd (see red arrow in example search).

In your Google Places listing, it will ask you if you want to add a tag. You can point it to a photograph, a video or to your website. You can only point it to a video or a photo, however, if you’ve uploaded either or both into your Google Places listing:


As soon as you’ve set this up, your listing will now have a yellow tag and link next to it that makes it stand out from the rest of your competition.


This sponsored link does not in any way affect your position in the list of seven businesses, but when your listing looks like all the rest, the little yellow tag makes you stand out from the crowd.

Google also provides analytics data to see how many people actually clicked on your tag to look at your video or visit your website. This is very useful data!

Some Local Search Resources

The following web addresses are available for you to get set up. You must create an account for yourself on each site to manage your listings. In most cases, there are country-specific versions of each (like www.google.co.uk or www.yelp.fr).

Google Places (Maps): http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

Yahoo! Business Listing: http://local.yahoo.com

Bing Maps: http://www.bing.com/maps

Yelp: http://www.yelp.com