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Websites, SEO, and PPC for Small Business Websites

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Warning: Google Carousel Gives Your Small Business Zero Photo Control

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google-carouselLast week I talked about Google Carousel and how local business owners should respond to it. One of the things I talked about was the need for business owners to add great photographs to their Google+ Business listing and on their websites so that they could take advantage of this very visual format.

Turns out this step may be more important than ever. JSO Digital ran a post noting that a business owner has very little direct control over which picture appears in the Carousel results.

JSO Digital pulled the information from the Google Products FOrum, where an answer to “how do I change my photograph” was met with the response that images are chosen via an algorithm.

In other words, you don’t. You don’t get to decide.

“Many of the photos are crowdsourced from Google, especially Google employees…Most of the remaining businesses listed in the Carousel’s top 10 display “local photos” rather than shots from Google users. Other sources of photos include Zagat and Panarimo.

The lesson seems to be that businesses who take the time to build good photos of their own are more likely to have those photos associated with their listing on the Carousel. When businesses don’t add photos, they are supplied by Google users. The problem for business owners is that the quality of user submissions varies.”

The takeaway? Take good photos now.

Don’t just take onephotograph. Take as many photographs as you can get on your Google+ Business listing and add as many as you can to your website without being obnoxious about it. (Make liberal use of your blog for this purpose, since photographs make for great blog content).

You won’t totally reduce your chances of having some crappy user-generated photo show up on your Carousel results, of course, but at least you’ll get the odds in your favor.

Carousel is unlikely to go away. Local University ran a recent heat map click study. As you might expect, Carousel dominated the clicks, taking 48% of them.

In my opinion this means that Google is going to expand Carousel sooner rather than later, so you can’t rest on your laurels even if you’re not a restaurant or a hotel. You’ve got a window of opportunity here to help Google make the right decision about which photographs you should be including.

The Fastest Way to Supercharge Local Small Business Marketing

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local-small-business-marketingMany of our customers ask us how they can make their local small business marketing start working a lot faster. It’s natural that you’d want results yesterday, since you need new customers to keep your business going.

Hearing us tell you that “SEO is a slow, steady process” is probably not something you enjoy hearing. It’s true, but there are ways to make the process faster.

As Phil Rozek mentioned in one of his recent “Lightening Round Q&A on Local SEO” posts, your first concern should be to clean up your citations.

As you may have spotted in other posts, a citation occurs any time your business name, address, and phone number appear somewhere on the internet.

In order for a citation to count for you instead of against you, it has to be accurate. It also has to match your Google+ Local address exactly.

How exact is “exact?”

Let’s put it this way. If your legal address spells out the word “Street” and someone else’s uses “St.,” there’s a problem. And when someone uses “Road” or “Rd.” by mistake, Google questions it and trusts your business listing that much less.

Maybe someday Google will change this up, setting their algorithm to understand that Street and St. are the same thing. For now, it’s the way that Google discourages fraudulent, fake businesses from littering up a tool that’s currently working reasonably well for end-users.

The task that’s ahead is time-consuming. You need to check you citations and claim listings across multiple sources. Each of these tools will basically help you build a list of sites to tackle:

There really isn’t a good way to automate this process. You’ll just have to get in there and do it (or have it done for you).

The process can take hours, and there are lots of subtle ways to make mistakes. That’s why many people do opt to get professional help.

It’s kind of like being a contractor. Sure, there are resources that will show someone how to do their own roofing, but mistakes are costly and there are a whole lot of nuances that the DIY guy doesn’t know. In the end, the DIY guy knows he’ll probably actually save money (and time) by letting a pro handle the job.

It’s worth considering if speed is your concern. It’s also important to remember that the Top 7 local listings are all that Google is showing anymore, so if you don’t handle this issue then you might soon find yourself invisible online.