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vividgovtech1 · 6 months ago

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Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas & Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas by Vividgovtech

In today's competitive business environment, the leverage of powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce will make a difference in terms of efficiency, bettering customer relationships, and ultimately revenue. However, the potential is best realized when companies are equipped with the right kind of expertise, support, and guidance to be able to fully utilize their capabilities. This is where Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas and Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas come into play, providing businesses in the region with essential services to maximize their Salesforce investment. At Vividgovtech, we specialize in offering these crucial services to help you navigate, implement, and continuously support Salesforce in your business operations.

Why Choose Salesforce for Your Business?

Salesforce is the world's #1 CRM, for good reason. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools intended to streamline business processes and enhance customer experiences while working towards increased productivity. You can be a small business or a large enterprise; whatever it is, Salesforce can offer solutions that can suit your specific needs.

However, buying Salesforce alone is not a solution. To maximize its potential, businesses require guidance in implementing it, continuing to optimize, and getting the support that keeps the system running for them. It is where Vividgovtech's Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas and Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas are to be needed.

Advisory Services for Salesforce: Why Dallas Businesses Need It

Many questions are faced by you the first time you use Salesforce. Which of its features do you need? How will you tailor Salesforce to align with your business process? How can you guarantee that the migration from old systems is smooth? It's complex and needs the help of an expert, so Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas is essential for you in answering those decisions and ensuring that Salesforce serves the business goal.

1. Customized Consultation for Your Business Needs

The Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas at Vividgovtech is customized advice tailored to your specific industry, business model, and unique challenges. Our experts will work closely with your team to understand your goals, processes, and technology needs before recommending the best Salesforce strategy. From sales to marketing to customer service, our advisory services help you build a roadmap that integrates Salesforce seamlessly into your business operations.

2. Optimized Salesforce Implementation

One of the large components of advisory services is ensuring proper implementation of Salesforce during its first deployment. A non-optimal implementation often leaves businesses with low adoption, frustrated users, and subsequently, a failed ROI of the platform. Vividgovtech's expert consultants in Dallas ensure that the process of implementation is optimized, customized, and aligned to the business objectives.

We invest our time into researching your existing workflows and systems to ensure that Salesforce improves upon efficiency and productivity immediately after implementation. In this approach, we will further identify the proper execution of any necessary third-party applications integrated with the platform so you might create a completely connected space.

3. Strategic alignment and scalability

The platform is very robust, but the needs of your business will evolve with time. Our advisory services help you set up Salesforce to meet your current needs but ensure that the system is scalable. As your business grows, you can expand, adjust, and customize Salesforce to meet new demands. Whether you're adding new users, expanding your product offerings, or venturing into new markets, our advisors ensure that your Salesforce platform grows with you.

Dallas Ongoing Support for Salesforce Success

Salesforce is not the "set it and forget it" type of solution. It does need continuing support, updates, and improvement to keep being operational. That's why for those businesses in Dallas wishing to ensure their Salesforce system keeps on getting optimized, secured, and effective in business, then it calls for the importance of Dallas Ongoing Support for Salesforce success.

1. Active System Monitoring and Maintenance

With Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas, your Salesforce environment will continuously be watched over for the existence of possible issues or performance inefficiencies. Thus, a potential problem identified in time could be treated before it happens and adversely affects the activities of the business. The managed services team of Vividgovtech keeps tabs on your Salesforce instance around the clock to run smoothly and securely.

2. Regular System Updates and Customizations

Salesforce is dynamic, and it is evolving with new features and updated versions to enhance functionality. With our Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas, we ensure that your system is up-to-date with new features, patches, or enhancements of Salesforce. Any changes in your business process or requirements can also be implemented by our team, including customizations.

If your business needs change, or your team identifies new pain points, our managed services can help ensure that your Salesforce instance is adapted quickly and effectively to meet new needs.

3. User Training and Support

Even with the best system in place, success depends on the users who interact with it. Our Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas includes continuous user training, support, and resources to ensure that your team is comfortable and proficient in using Salesforce. Whether it’s onboarding new users or providing advanced training for existing employees, we’re here to ensure everyone can take full advantage of the Salesforce platform.

4. Data Security and Compliance

Salesforce contains sensitive customer data, so ensuring that your system is secure and compliant with all industry standards is very important. Vividgovtech's ongoing support service includes regular security audits, data backups, and compliance checks to ensure your business meets all the relevant data protection regulations. We can guide you on best practices for securing data and minimizing the chance of breaches.

5. Performance Optimization

Ongoing support is not only about fixing problems but also about continuously optimizing your Salesforce instance. Our team of experts identifies inefficiencies, slowdowns, and other performance-related issues. We fine-tune your Salesforce instance to improve speed, streamline workflows, and ensure that your system delivers the performance you need to stay competitive.

Why Choose Vividgovtech for Salesforce Advisory and Ongoing Support in Dallas?

Vividgovtech is the kind of trusted partner that has been sought after by Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas and Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas, thanks to a very unique combination of expertise, experience, and dedication to customer success. Here are just a few reasons why Dallas businesses turn to us for Salesforce consulting and support:

1. Expert Salesforce Consultants

Our team of certified Salesforce consultants brings years of experience in helping businesses across various industries get the most out of Salesforce. We’ve worked with companies of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises, and have helped them implement and optimize Salesforce to meet their unique needs.

2. Customized Solutions

At Vividgovtech, we don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. We take a personalized approach to every project, ensuring that the Salesforce strategies we recommend align perfectly with your business objectives. Whether you need a full Salesforce implementation, integrations with third-party tools, or ongoing support, we provide tailored solutions that work for you.

3. Managed Services:

With our Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas, you’ll get access to a comprehensive suite of services that cover all aspects of Salesforce management. From proactive system monitoring to user training and security audits, our team is dedicated to ensuring your Salesforce platform is always performing at its best.

4. Local Expertise with a Global Reach

Although we are headquartered in Dallas, our office has international reach and works with clients all over the United States and abroad. We have a sense of the peculiar challenges that businesses operating in Dallas face and will therefore be offering exceptional service as tailored to the needs of the region.

Whether you're looking for an Advisory Service Salesforce Dallas to guide the initial implementation or Salesforce Ongoing Support Managed Service Dallas to ensure the system stays optimized, we are here at Vividgovtech to help. The experts at our company ensure that Salesforce is tailored exactly to your business needs, ensuring you get the tools and support needed for long-term success.

Ready to take your Salesforce system to the next level? Contact Vividgovtech today to learn more about our advisory and ongoing support services for businesses in Dallas.

By focusing on both strategic consultation and hands-on ongoing support, Vividgovtech offers a complete approach to Salesforce management to help businesses in Dallas get the most out of their CRM investment and thrive in a dynamic business landscape. Reach out today to see how we can support your Salesforce journey!

#Salesforce ongoing support managed service Dallas #advisory service salesforce dallas

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michaelandy101-blog · 5 years ago

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Location Knowledge + Evaluations: The 1–2 Punch of Native search engine optimisation (Up to date for 2020)

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/location-data-reviews-the-1-2-punch-of-local-seo-updated-for-2020/

Location Knowledge + Evaluations: The 1–2 Punch of Native search engine optimisation (Up to date for 2020)

Get discovered. Get chosen.

It’s the native search engine optimisation two-step on the coronary heart of each marketing campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a steadiness of seen, correct contact knowledge, and a volunteer salesforce of client reviewers who’re supporting your rise to native prominence.

However right here’s the factor: whereas managed location knowledge and opinions could also be of equal and complementary energy, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of fundamental enterprise knowledge distribution is the important thing to liberating you as much as give attention to the weather of listings that require human ingenuity — particularly, opinions and different listings-based content material like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this text along with your staff or your boss will make it easier to get the monetary allocations you want for automated listings administration, plus beneficiant assets for artistic popularity administration.

Location knowledge + opinions = the massive image

When Google lists a enterprise, it offers good house to the enterprise identify, and a various diploma of house to the tackle and cellphone quantity. However have a look at the actual property occupied by the assorted facets related to popularity:

If Google cares this a lot about rankings, overview textual content, responses, and rising components like place subjects and attributes, any native model you’re marketing ought to see these components as a precedence. On this article, I’ll attempt to codify your actionable perspective on managing each location knowledge and the numerous facets of opinions.

Rankings: Essentially the most highly effective native filter of all of them

Within the native search engine optimisation trade, we discuss lots about Google’s filters, just like the Possum filter that’s purported to pressure native companies by way of a type of sieve so higher range of mapped outcomes is proven to the searcher. However searchers have an much more highly effective filter than this — the human-driven filter of rankings that helps folks intuitively kind native manufacturers by perceived high quality.

Whether or not they’re stars or circles, the vast majority of score icons ship a 1–5 level sign to shoppers that may be immediately understood. This image system has been round since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of worth.

This convenient, speedy type of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do one thing like seize a fast taco see that the meals truck with 5 Yelp stars is probably going a greater guess than the one with solely two. In the meantime, searchers with extra complicated wants can comb by way of the rankings of many listings at leisure, rigorously weighing one choice in opposition to one other for main purchases. In Google’s native outcomes, rankings are probably the most highly effective human-created filter that influences the main aim of being chosen.

However earlier than an area model might be chosen on the idea of its excessive rankings, it has to rank effectively sufficient to be discovered. The excellent news is that, over the previous three years, professional native SEOs have turn out to be more and more satisfied of the impression of Google rankings on Google native pack rankings. In 2017, after I wrote the unique model of this put up, contributors to the Native Search Rating Elements survey positioned Google star rankings down at #24 when it comes to native rankings affect. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in simply three years.

Within the interim, Google has been experimenting with completely different ratings-related shows. In 2017, they have been testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings within the native packs. Immediately, their complicated lodge outcomes let the person decide to see solely Four+ star outcomes. In the meantime, native SEOs have observed patterns over time like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. finest burrito in Dallas) showing to default to native outcomes made up of companies which have earned a minimal common of 4 stars. Likely, observations like these have strengthened specialists’ convictions that Google cares lots about rankings and permits them to affect rank.

Heading into 2021, any native model with objectives of being discovered and chosen should view low rankings as an obstacle to reaching full progress potential.

Shopper sentiment: The native enterprise story your clients are writing for you

Right here’s a randomly chosen Google Three-pack end result when looking only for “tacos” in a small metropolis within the San Francisco Bay Space:

We’ve simply coated the subject of rankings, and you’ll have a look at a end result like this to get that immediate intestine feeling in regards to the Four-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the e-book on enterprise #Three and see exactly what sort of model story its shoppers are writing, as you’d in conducting knowledgeable overview audit for an area enterprise, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s simple to ding quick meals chains. Their enterprise mannequin isn’t generally related to effective eating or the sort of excessive wages that have a tendency to advertise worker excellence. In some methods, I consider them as excessive examples. But, they function good instructing fashions for a way even probably the most modest-quality choices create sure expectations within the minds of shoppers, and when these fundamental expectations aren’t met, it’s sufficient of a narrative for shoppers to share within the type of opinions.

This explicit restaurant location has an apparent downside with sluggish service, orders being stuffed incorrectly, and workers who’ve been denied the coaching they should characterize the model in a educated, pleasant, or accessible method. If you happen to audited a unique enterprise, its ache factors may encompass outdated fixtures or low requirements of cleanliness.

Regardless of the case, when the incoming client turns to the overview world, their eyes scan the story because it scrolls down their display. Repeat mentions of a selected detrimental problem can create sufficient of a theme to show the potential buyer away. One survey says solely as much as 11% of shoppers will do enterprise with a model that’s wound up with a 2-star score based mostly on poor opinions. Who can afford to let the opposite 91% of shoppers go elsewhere?

The central aim of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is an enormous, unpaid salesforce that tells your model story. Survey after survey persistently finds that folks belief opinions — in truth, they could belief them greater than any declare your model could make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a fantastic deal about themes surfacing in your opinions. The continuing improvement and show of place subjects and attributes signifies Google’s growing curiosity in parsing sentiment, and probably, utilizing such knowledge to find out relevance.

Absolutely embracing overview administration and the full local customer service ecosystem is vital to giving clients a constructive story to inform, enabling the enterprise you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the utmost variety of transactions.

Velocity/recency/depend: Simply sufficient of a well timed good factor to be aggressive

This is among the best facets of overview administration to convey. You’ll be able to sum it up in a single sentence: don’t get too many opinions without delay on any given platform however do get sufficient opinions on an ongoing foundation to keep away from wanting such as you’ve gone out of enterprise.

For slightly extra background on the primary a part of that assertion, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a regulation agency that went from zero to thirty 5-star opinions inside a single month. Sudden gluts of opinions like this not solely look odd to alert clients, however they will journey overview platform filters, leading to elimination. Bear in mind, opinions are a enterprise lifetime effort, not a race. Get just a few this month, just a few subsequent month, and some the month after that. Hold going.

The second half of the overview timing paradigm pertains to not operating out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. A number of surveys point out that the most important proportion of overview readers think about content material from the previous month to be most related. Regardless of this, Google’s index is stuffed with native manufacturers that haven’t been reviewed in over a 12 months, leaving searchers to surprise if a spot continues to be in enterprise, or if it’s so unimpressive that nobody is bothering to overview it.

Whereas I’d argue that overview recency could also be extra vital in review-oriented industries (like eating places) vs. people who aren’t fairly as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the concept right here is much like that of velocity, in that you just need to preserve issues going. Don’t run an enormous overview acquisition marketing campaign in January after which overlook about outreach for the remainder of the 12 months. A average, regular tempo of acquisition is good.

And at last, an area search engine optimisation FAQ comes from enterprise homeowners who need to know what number of opinions they should earn. There’s no magic quantity, however the rule of thumb is that it’s good to earn extra opinions than the highest competitor you are attempting to outrank for every of your search phrases. This varies from key phrase phrase, to key phrase phrase, from metropolis to metropolis, from vertical to vertical. One of the best strategy is regular progress of opinions to surpass no matter quantity the highest competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the one sincere coverage

For me, this is among the most prickly and fascinating facets of the overview world. Three opposing forces meet on this taking part in subject: enterprise ethics, enterprise training, and the temptations engendered by the apparent limitations of overview platforms to police themselves.

I typically recall a fundamental overview audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a good friend of a good friend. Inside minutes, I spotted that the household had been reviewing their very own restaurant on Yelp (a obvious violation of Yelp’s coverage). I felt sorry to see this, however being acquainted with the folks concerned (and realizing them to be fairly good!), I extremely doubted they’d achieved this out of some darkish impulse to deceive the general public.

Relatively, my guess was that they could have thought they have been “getting the ball rolling” for his or her new enterprise, hoping to encourage actual opinions. My intestine feeling was that they merely lacked the mandatory training to know that they have been being dishonest with their group and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a situation, there’s undoubtedly a possibility for the marketer to supply the mandatory training to explain the dangers concerned in tying a model to deceptive practices, highlighting how very important it’s to construct belief inside the local people. Pretend constructive opinions aren’t constructing something actual on which an organization can stake its future. Moral enterprise homeowners will catch on once you clarify this in sincere phrases and may then start marketing themselves in smarter methods.

However then there’s the opposite aspect. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a excessive bar within the trade, with protection of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There’s merely no option to confuse organized, world overview spam with a busy small enterprise making a improper, novice transfer. Actual temptation resides on this situation, as a result of, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it simple to “get away with” deception, firms missing ethics will reap the benefits of the chance. Past reporting review spam, top-of-the-line issues we are able to do as entrepreneurs is to supply moral purchasers the training that helps them make sincere selections. We will merely pose the query:

Is it higher to pretend your corporation’ success or to really obtain success?

Native manufacturers that select to take the excessive highway should keep away from:

Any type of overview incentives or spam

Assessment gating that filters shoppers in order that solely joyful ones go away opinions

Violations of the overview pointers particular to every overview platform

Proprietor responses: creatively turning opinions into two-way conversations

Through the years, I’ve devoted plentiful house in my column right here at Moz to the fascinating subject of proprietor responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world instance of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from almost 20 years of inspecting opinions and responses are these:

Assessment responses are a essential type of customer support that may’t be ignored any greater than enterprise workers ought to ignore in-person clients asking for face-to-face assist. Many reviewers anticipate responses.

The variety of native enterprise listings in each trade with zero proprietor responses on them is completely surprising.

Unfavorable opinions, when pretty given, are a priceless type of free high quality management for the model. Prospects instantly inform the model which issues must be mounted to make them joyful.

Many reviewers consider their opinions as dwelling paperwork, and replace them to replicate subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are very happy to offer manufacturers a second likelihood when an issue is resolved.

Constructive opinions are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that additional engages the shopper and may persuade them that the model deserves repeat enterprise.

Native manufacturers and companies can use software program to automate updating a cellphone quantity or hours of operation. Software program like Moz Native might be of actual assist in alerting you to new, incoming opinions throughout a number of platforms, or surfacing the highest sentiment themes inside your overview corpus.

Instruments unencumber assets to handle what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes critical artistic assets to spend time with overview sentiment and reply to clients in a approach that makes a model stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to completely make the most of the alternatives proprietor responses characterize to impression objectives all the way in which from the highest to the underside of the gross sales funnel.

I’ve by no means forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the uncared for opinions of a serious quick meals chain and its subsequent improve in location closures and reduce in earnings. Nobody was taking the time to take a seat down with the opinions, pay attention, repair issues clients have been citing, or provide proofs of caring decision by way of proprietor responses.

And all too typically, when manufacturers giant and small do reply to opinions, they take a corporate-speak stance equal to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To maintain the shopper and to sign to the general public that the model deserves to be chosen, artistic assets should be allotted to offering gutsy, sincere proprietor responses. It’s simple to identify the distinction:

The response in yellow indicators that the model merely isn’t invested in buyer retention. In contrast, the response in blue is a pattern of what it takes to have an actual dialog with an actual particular person on the opposite aspect of the overview textual content, in hopes of reworking one unhealthy preliminary expertise right into a second likelihood, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and opinions: The 1–2 punch combo each native enterprise should follow

Proper now, there’s an worker at an area enterprise or a staffer at an company who’s wanting on the overview corpus of a model that’s struggling for rankings and earnings. The set of opinions accommodates combined sentiment, and nobody is responding to both constructive or detrimental buyer experiences.

Perhaps this is a matter that’s been introduced up once in a while in firm conferences, but it surely’s by no means made it to precedence standing. Choice-makers have felt that point and price range are higher spent elsewhere.

In the meantime, clients are quietly trickling away for lack of consideration, leads are being missed, structural points are being ignored…

If the worker or staffer I’m describing is you, my finest recommendation is to make 2021 the 12 months you make your strongest case for automating itemizing distribution and administration with software program in order that artistic assets might be devoted to full popularity administration.

Native search engine optimisation specialists, your clients and purchasers, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location knowledge + opinions are extremely impactful and right here to remain. The truth is, historical past proves that this mixture is deeply embedded in our total strategy to native commerce.

When touring salesman Duncan Hines first revealed his 1935 overview information Adventures in Good Consuming, he was growing what we consider at this time as native search engine optimisation. Right here is my color-coded model of his review of the enterprise that will in the future turn out to be KFC. It ought to look surprisingly acquainted to anybody who has ever tackled native enterprise listings administration:

No cellphone quantity on this “citation,” after all, however telephones have been fairly a luxurious in 1935. Barring that aspect, this easy and historic overview has the core earmarks of a contemporary native enterprise itemizing. It has location knowledge and overview knowledge; it’s the 1–2 punch combo each native enterprise nonetheless must get proper at this time. With out the NAP, the enterprise can’t be discovered. With out the sentiment, the enterprise offers little cause to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there could also be nothing new below the solar in marketing, however hanging the suitable pose between listings and popularity administration could also be new information to your CEO, your teammates, or purchasers. So go for it — talk these things, and good luck at your subsequent massive assembly!

Take a look at the brand new Moz Native plans that allow you to deal with location knowledge distribution in seconds in order that the steadiness of your focus might be on creatively caring for the shopper.

New Moz Local Plans

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ductrungnguyen87 · 5 years ago

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Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

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lakelandseo · 5 years ago