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You may have seen the show Pimp My Ride, where they'd take a beat-up old car and turn it into a sleek, smooth-running street beast. But they wouldn't stop there. The custom-body shop might put a spoiler and monster-truck wheels on a sedan...or install a pool table in the back of a pickup...or put a giant fish tank in the back seat. Turning the ordinary into the overblown...AKA "pimping it out."

Your Google Places business listing may never be quite as wild as your dream car. But you can take your ho-hum Places page and make it not only better-performing, but also flashier than anything else on your block. You can pimp it out. By doing so, not only can you get your business more visible in Google Places, but you can also make it eye-poppingly flashy and more attention-worthy in the eyes of any potential customers who visit your page.

In no particular order...

here are 16 ways you can pimp your Places page:

1. Get your Google Places page to 100% completeness, before you do anything else. Your Places page isn't exactly "pimped-out" if Google itself is telling you you're missing some of the basics. (If you're not sure how to get to 100%, this pie chart will help.)

2. Make sure you get at least 5 Google reviews from your customers, so that your average customer-review rating shows up on your Places page and on the SERPs.

 

3. Get DOUBLE sets of average-review stars. You can do this by adding at least one customer testimonial to your website in what's called hReview microformat. Basically, hReview is a type of code you can use to tell Google "Hey, this is a testimonial from one of my customers...pay attention to it!" Having just one set of golden stars show up in the search results can boost your click-through rate; having two sets of can drive even more clicks from potential customers. See this excellent post by Linda Buquet for more on how to do this.

 

4. Upload as many photos as you humanly can to major third-party sites, particularly CitySearch, InsiderPages, and Thumbtack. You personally can only upload 10 photos to your Places page, but it's possible to have more than 10 show up on your Places page. How? Google pays attention to the info that third-party sites have on your business. If you can supply those third-party sources with plenty of photos, Google often will grab those photos and put them on your Places page (in addition to the 10 photos you personally can upload directly to your Places page. Upload photos as many different sites as you can (it's OK to reuse some of the same photos from site to site). By the way, you may be able to "feed" extra photos to Google by having a "Gallery" page on your website.

Bonus tip: before uploading, use GeoSetter to geo-tag them with the lat and long of the business, and add NAP and keywords to the meta data.

5. Add a "post" to your Places page that includes a link to a particularly cool page, photo gallery, special offer, or newsletter sign-up area on your website. One of the most basic purposes of your Places page is to get people to check out your site. It's easy to forget about the humble "post" feature-most business owners never even learn of it-but it's worth using if there's a specific area of your site you'd really like potential customers to see.

6. Reply to every customer review written on your Places page. Fine, maybe you don't have reply to every one, but you should get in the habit of thanking the customers who leave you nice reviews, and graciously responding to the few who don't. Most importantly, this looks good to potential customers. It's also good way to fill out the reviews area of your page a little more, and to slip in occasional tidbits about your services that maybe you didn't have a way to mention anywhere else on your page. See this great post from Andrew Shotland on how best to respond to negative reviews.

 

7. Get "Best Ever" reviews. These little badges make for nice "bling" on your Places page. Plus, they automatically count as 5-star reviews. Your customers need to go to places.google.com/rate and search for your business by name in order to leave you "Best Ever" reviews.

 

8. Turn a couple of customer testimonials into photos, and upload the photos to your Places page. I've never actually seen this done (though I'm sure someone's done it). This is useful if a great customer wrote you a shining testimonial (in an email, in a letter, on a grain of rice...whatever) that you'd like potential customers to see, but you never asked that person to post a review for you. (If you're interested, I discuss this technique more in this post.)

9. Get as many customer reviews as you can on 3 or 4 third-party sites. At the bottom of your Places page, Google features up to 3 links that go to third-party sites where customers have written you reviews. Up to 4 of these links also show up in your "preview" area, which customers see when they hover their cursors over your Places listing from the main search results page.

 

10. If possible, ask your most loyal customers - or bestest friends ;) - to upload photos to your Places page through their Google accounts. These will show up as "From a Google user." This is another approach to getting more than 10 photos on your Places page (which is the maximum number that you can upload personally). This can help potential customers realize "Hey, these people actually have customers who give a rip...they might be OK. Maybe I'll give them a buzz."

11. Add a caption to the first photo you upload. You'll want to pick this photo-and its caption-carefully because everyone who's on your Places page will see it. Unlike Bing, Google Places doesn't have a way to add captions to photos, so you'll have to save the caption as part of the image itself, and then upload the photo to your places page.

12. Add several different "Offers"-AKA coupons-to your Places page. You could absolutely go crazy with offers and add tons of them, if you wanted to: I once added 10 to my listing, just to see if I could. I'm sure I could have added many more if my trusty mouse finger didn't give out. As long as you comply with Google's guidelines, you can add a bunch of coupons to your listing (as long as they're semi-decent offers, and as long as you don't have so many that it just looks weird to potential customers).

13. Add photos to your "Offers." However many of them you have on your page, they'll be a little more noticeable and enticing if they're not just blobs of text.

14. Get enough reviews that the "At a glance" snippets appear on your Places page. I've yet to discover exactly how many reviews you need in order for "At a glance" snippets to appear on your page, but I do know these snippets are extracted from some combination of your Google reviews, reviews written on third-party sites, and other info on third-party sites (like business descriptions). If you're more or less diligent about citation-building and asking customers for reviews, you'll almost certainly get good "At a glance" snippets.

15. Upload a photo of a QR code to your Places page. Even these days, not everyone has a smartphone, so not everyone can scan QR codes, but many people just LOVE scanning them. QR codes are like catnip for some people. You can have the QR code take them to a page of your website, another website-pretty much anything. It doesn't really matter: the idea here is to boost engagement and make your Places page a little flashier.

16. See if you can snag an award, like "Best of CitySearch" or the "Angie's List Super Service Award," from third-party review sites. These often show up on your Places page-and look mighty nice if you can get them. Whether or not you can even find such awards largely depends on your industry: even if you're the best glass-blower or cape-maker in your time zone, there may not be an award that you can get displayed on your Places page.

About the Dude Who Wrote This

Phil Rozek runs LocalVisibilitySystem.com, a go-to resource for business owners who want more visibility to local customers. In particular, Phil's mission is to help businesses get visible in Google Places. Phil is so serious about this that next to his laptop is an IV-drip filled with Red Bull, which powers him through each and every blog post.

 

When you're running an Adwords campaign for a small, local-focused business, every dollar counts. You typically don't have much to spend, so it's critical to focus your spend on the people most likely to become customers.

Using negative keywords helps you zero in on actual customers and stop wasting money on anyone who isn't a good prospect for your business. When you add a keyword to the negative keyword list, your ad won't show if that keyword is in a person's search query.

How to add negative keywords to your local Adwords campaign

Adding negative keywords to your Adwords campaign is easy. You can do it one of two ways:

1) Simply add the keywords under the Keywords tab in the same place you add your regular keywords. To designate a negative keyword, simply add a negative sign (-) in front of it.

2) If you want to get more advanced, scroll to the bottom of the Keywords page of your Adwords campaign and expand the Negative keywords option. From here you can manage negative keywords on the ad group level or campaign level, as well as build out negative keyword lists that you can apply across different campaigns.

So what negative keywords should local Adwords campaigns use?

Employment searches - Job seekers in your industry can and will waste a huge chunk of your Adwords budget if you're not careful. This is especially true for professional services like accountants and dentists. Assuming you're trying to attract clients and not job applicants, you should load up on negative keywords like:

-career
-careers
-job
-jobs
-work
-employment
-employer
-salary
-salaries
-pay
-hire
-hiring
-intern
-recruiter
-recruiters
-resume

General information searches - When people perform general information searches, they're usually at the beginning of the buying cycle.

By eliminating these searches, you are able to focus your spend on people further along in the cycle. That means they are far more likely to convert into leads or customers. To stop your ad from showing when people perform general information searches, use negative keywords like:

-what is
-articles
-what are
-how to
-pictures
-photos
-review
-reviews

Training and education searches - People looking to learn things about your industry aren't typically good targets, unless you specifically supply education or training. Stop your ads from running on education and training searches like:

-training
-class
-classes
-course
-courses
-book
-books
-textbook
-school
-schools
-college
-university

Searches for areas you don't serve - For locally-focused businesses, there is no point to show your ad to people outside your service area. There are a variety of ways people will search for local businesses that you should be aware of when picking negative match keywords related to areas.

• Suburb - Searches by suburb are popular in mid and large-sized cities. Depending on your city and your industry, people may not be willing to travel far to do business with you. If that is the case, use suburbs outside your market as negative keywords.
• City - Add the names of cities you don't serve that people in your area may be searching for. For example, an Edmonton-based dry cleaner would want to add Calgary and Red Deer as negative keywords to filter out people in Edmonton looking for dry cleaning services in those cities.
• Zip code - Searches that include a zip code are common in local business searches in the USA - "lawyer in 90011" for example. As a local business, you may want to use zip codes of areas outside target market as negative keywords.
• Abbreviations - Don't forget to add the common abbreviations of areas outside your target market. These include two letter state (GA, NY, NV, etc.) or city (LA, SF, TO, etc.) abbreviations.

The usual suspects - These are the negative keywords almost every Adwords campaign should have. These are the keywords that will be a waste of money for almost any type of campaign.

-free
-craigslist
-ebay
-kijiji
-lyrics
-youtube
-sex
-nude
-porn
-torrent

Find even more negative keywords

Once you've launched your Adwords campaign, be sure to continually add negative keywords to your Adwords campaign. To find irrelevant keywords that are triggering your ads, click the "see search terms" drop-down on the Keywords page.  

This will give you a list of the actual keywords that users are searching that triggered your ads. When you see an irrelevant keyword in this report, add it to your negative keyword list.

Negative keywords are a great way for small and local businesses to get a higher ROI from Adwords. Stop wasting your money on Adwords, start using negative keywords.

This is a guest post from Andrew Breen, who runs Outshine Online Marketing, a Halifax online marketing company with a global client base. You can follow him on Twitter @breenandrew.

Why does Google display a 7-pack for some queries, and blended results for others?

I was testing out a search query from one of my Local Citation Finder users for 'santa rosa automotive repair' and I came across an interesting case where in one search I would get 7-pack, and then I'd search again and get blended. I've been perplexed about why Google shows a 7-pack for some queries and blended results for other queries ever since David Mihm asked about this on the 2011 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, so I played around for a while trying to identify what might be going on.

I was able to duplicate the results multiple times. If I searched one way, I'd get the 7-pack. Make a slight variation, and I would get blended. The difference in how I searched to get the two variations was so minor, that I was surprised to get a 7-pack on one search, and blended results on the other.

Screenshots with date and time recorded:

7-Pack (click to view details)

Blended (click to view details)

Here's the play by play:

Search 1:

• I put my cursor into the address/search bar in Chrome, and I type ' santa rosa automotive repair' and press enter.
• I get a 7-pack.

Search 2:

• I put my cursor into the address/search bar in Chrome, and press enter. Exact same query.
• I get blended.
• Huh?

Search 3:

• I press the back button.
• I type the search phrase into the address/search bar in Chrome again, and press enter.
• I get a 7-pack.

Search 4:

• I leave the search term in the field, and I press the search button on the results page.
• I get blended.

I was able to duplicate these results about 10 times (I was trying to get good screenshots).

Finally, about 4 minutes later, I was no longer able to get the 7-pack. I would get blended results no matter how I searched. So, what's going on here? First of all, I think it's possible that Chrome cached my first query, and that's why searching that particular way continued to bring up the 7-pack. Searching a slightly different way somehow told the browser to run a fresh request from Google's servers. I don't know very much about how Chrome's caching works, so this is just speculation.

Assuming it was just cached, why did I see a 7-pack in one instance, and then blended results a moment later? I have a couple theories, and I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments:

1. Split testing. I just happened to hit it at the right time when they were just switching the test over to a new version.
2. Query volume. Perhaps low volume queries get a 7-pack, and when I was hitting that search term, I just happened to catch it right as it passed the threshold to trigger the blended results.

I'm putting my money on split testing, because I have seen some queries that would definitely have high search volume return a 7-pack. For example, check out these two searches:
http://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+lawyer (7-pack at time of writing)
http://www.google.com/search?q=seattle+lawyers (Blended at time of writing)

Why Google decides to show a 7-pack sometimes, and blended other times is definitely still a mystery, but this is a case that seems to indicate, to me at least, that it's just split testing.

What do you think? Any other theories about what's going on?

 

The local citation finder is a great little tool for improving your local SEO rankings, and we just launched the new "pro" version which has lots of great stuff. I thought I'd take a minute to show you how the LCF can help you. 

What It Does For You

The LCF follows the process outlined in Garrett French's Phone Number Co-Citation Analysis for Local Link Builders article. Basically, for any local search query (ie. "edmonton greek food") it:

• Gathers the phone numbers of the top ranking sites
• Performs a search for each of those phone numbers
• Finds all citation sources which list the top ranking sites

Look at all of those juicy sources, just waiting for you to submit your site.

Now it's super simple to start plowing through that list, and building citations for your business. Click the "submit your business" link, enter your site info, and start improving your rankings. So easy!

Go Pro!

If you're really determined to dominate local search, we've added a few pro features to make it a little easier.

First and foremost: all pro searches go straight to the "pro" queue, which is way faster.

Second, you can sort citations by Majestic SEO AC Rank, and SEOmoz Domain Authority.

This is super handy if you're looking to evaluate the quality of a citation source. Now you can optimize your time by going after the citations that will offer you the most bang for your buck.

Third, we make it super easy to export our results as a CSV so that you can use them however you wish.

Saving the Best for Last

Why is my business ranking #3? Or, not at all? It's a tough question to answer.

Well, not only can you view all of the citations that all of the top sites have, but you can also run a direct comparison to see which citations the #1 and #2 site have that your missing.

Just run a phone number search for your business, and each of your competitors, then compare. Now you know what you're missing, and you can take action to fix it!

But Wait, There's More!

We've still got a few tricks up our sleeves. Coming soon for Pro users:

• Personalized Results
  Results will automatically mark citations you already have.
• Expanded Results
  Searching beyond 100 sources per phone number to find all citations.
• More Comprehensive Search
  Citations also pulled from Google's "More About This Place" and compared to the phone number results.
• More Sources
  New query types to find additional local citation sources like blogs, newspapers, magazines, and local websites.

If you haven't tried, go sign up for the local citation finder right now. There's a free demo version! Get crackin'!

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but we finally launched our new site! To celebrate, we’re giving away unlimited high fives. If you see any of us and say “hey dude, sweet site” you will be rewarded with an epic, Top Gun style*, high five. 

A little bit about the new site:

• It's written in glorious HTML5 with all sorts of tasty CSS3
• There are heaps of progressive enhancements
• We're dogfooding with a custom build of our CMS

If you're running a WebKit browser (Chrome or Safari), Opera 10, or Firefox 4 then you're really getting the best of things. There are a lot of neat little tricks scattered about, so take some time to look around.

Development was greatly eased by SASS, jQuery, Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate, HTML5 Reset, and TypeKit. 

* We get to be Maverick. Our site, our rules.