As part of your local SEO plan, we carry out a thorough analysis of your online competitors within your local market. Depending on the scale and competition for your market sector; the analysis will include:

Google Places should really be regarded as a BETA program – full of bugs – it is hardly supported considering the millions of users across the globe, with just a handful of American technical workers managing hundreds of thousands of complaints and problems.

1. Google do not care if your business is damaged by their ineptitude or the errors within their system.
2. In many cases, businesses who have relied on their website generating business from Maps and suffer a Maps bug which removes them from appearing, will be forced into buying Pay per click ads to keep their business afloat.
3. So in general, try to keep in mind these limitations when you have problems with your Google Places listing.
4. Read more about Google Places bugs that have caused major damage to small business owners http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-bug-listings-disappear.html

I generally use the 3,3,3 rule when assessing google issues that they have acknowledged as not right… Sometimes it gets fixed in 3 days as it was a minor issue. If not 3 days then 3 weeks as it takes time for the index to update and catch the changes If not 3 weeks then 3 months as it is is a serious problem and takes significant coding, debugging and reindexing.Google does not function on business time as we know it. Their fixes, annoying as they are, arrive due to the time frames dictated by internal demands and update schedules.After watching Google Places for 6 years I have come to the conclusion that most problems get fixed sooner or later… that is not very comforting to you as you are experiencing the loss caused by one of their bugs.

Take a look at some of the Places support forums:

• https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/technical-issue/mPz5bqu7ViM
• https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/technical-issue/9JszqkewMVU

This is a tough one, as they all offer different priced packages, for different locations of the UK and also for different business categories. And as you may already know – they have some very persistent salespeople to say the least!Offers really need to be considered on an individual basis – so please do get in touch with information of your package for a second opinion on anything.As a general rule though, these directories base their high prices on 2 benefits:

1. Having a listing on their site (especially useful to those companies who dont own a website) and also being featured near the top of categories within the directory
2. But more importantly – the high prices are based on the SEO benefits that these directory listings (used to) pass on to your business website – via the flow of authority through the link.

For almost a decade now it has been possible to buy these upgaded listings, from a few directories and as a result of the link authority passed over, your website could rank very high in the search results for your region. In effect, those companies who had the money to upgrade all their listings, would dominate the results in an unnatural way that does not offer Google’s users with the highest quality companies, but instead those companies who were prepared to pay.Fast-forward to 2012 and the search engine algorithms have advanced, to be able to minimise the unnatural influence of directory links on the search results. The directory companies know this, and are making their last ditch efforts to get some money out of customers not up-to-date with the increasing rate of change within the Microsoft and Google search quality algorithms.

1. So, if the SEO benefit from all these directories is fairly similar –
2. What are the viewing numbers of these websites – and which would be the best to advertise on?

Of course – getting a free listing on all of them is a great starting point – and this service is provided for you if you are paying for a monthly marketing plan. But as they all charge to upgrade -the difficult choice is prioritising which to invest in…In general my recommendations are as follows:

• Here’s the data the directory companies probably dont want you to know – it’s a year old but gives a good idea of the scale of readership and also rate of change.

Based on the following rates of change below – you can get an idea that even Yelp, would not likely be able to compete with Yell, Qype, hotfrog or Vivastreet.

On page SEO refers to optimisation of the content and coding of individual website pages to maximise the effects of all other search engine marketing efforts. On-page SEO can involve the following techniques:

• Adding metadata based on extensive keyword research
• Editing existing copy for optimal keyword density based on our recommended keywords
• Adding copy to enhance search engine relevance scoring factors
• Editing copy to improve customer conversion rates
• URL re-writing for SEO benefits including 301 redirects so you can keep getting the benefit and Page Rank flow from your old links
• Modification of navigation system for more indexable content by the search engine bots
• Improving landing page quality scores for PPC advertising campaigns

Off page SEO involves generating interest elsewhere on the web to attract traffic back to your website. Creating links that point back to your home page and product/service pages (we call this deep linking), serves the obvious purpose of increasing visitors onto your website. More importantly though, links between sites serve as a voting system and key part of Google’s Page Rank algorithm, a crucial ranking factor for search engine results performance.

• Link-building strategies aim to attract others on the internet to link back to your site
• Links from less popular or reputable sites are of little use to SEO but can boost traffic
• Links from reputable websites will boost your website’s performance

You will have no doubt received spam from companies offering link building services. 100 links from irrelevant, spammy or generally low quality sites will not be able to offer the same performance improvement as just 1 link from a high quality, reputable site. Our link building campaigns always obtain links that are of best-value, either for traffic generation or PageRank/SEO performance influence.

Online reviews are a great way of boosting your local SEO. Reviews on Google Places profiles, Bing local business listings and some key online directories that have review features can be collected and aggregated from across the web. Google collects this data then compiles it back on the Places profile page. These reviews, together with the signals that search engines gain from scanning page content, suggest whether a local business is relevant and should be offered in search results.