Every business –restaurants, doctors, law firms, dry cleaners and other brick click and mortar businesses – wins and loses new customers every day before the potential customer even sets foot out the door. Their decision to do you business with your company is often made without ever engaging with your company directly. Some customers may even form opinions about your business without ever stepping a foot in your store. This is because online review sites make it easy for potential customers to look up businesses and compare ratings, all without ever leaving their home. And with so many businesses to choose from, being number one on google is almost never the only deciding credibility or trust factor.

When marketing your business these days, youre dealing with an educated consumer who does their research on review sites and does not really care what you have to say about your business. When friends and family arent readily available to ask for recommendations, where else can people turn but the local online community? welcome to the new word of mouth mouse marketing. When faced with too many choices, others will rely on the social proof of what others think, and online reviews are a perfect example. There are 10s of local business review sites and directories online, but there are some that matter more than the rest combined. Since a potential customers initial search still often starts with keywords typed into a search engine, while using a service oriented keyword followed or preceded by the city in which theyre searching ex: best mexican restaurant in dallas , you should first pay attention to the truly important keywords already showing up on google, yahoo.

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Once you have selected your keywords, here are ten major review and business listing sites that carry weight and have a huge online presence that your business should be taking advantage of: 1. Google places and google+ local for business what used to be google local has now been combined with the new google places, each bringing their own unique features to the mix. Google places and google+ local are two of the most important places to list your business online.

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They are free and easy, plus there are more than 343 million active google+ users as of january 2013. Google places allows businesses to register themselves with google, at which point they will be listed on google maps, as well as show up in googles search results with extended information and data available at a glance such as reviews and photos. Once listed, users will be able to leave reviews for your business directly on your google places page. Google+ local uses zagat summaries of user reviews to assign a business a zagat score. After signing up for this free service, simply describe your business with location information, a listing of services, hours of operation and a link to your business website. The next step is to verify your account so that google knows you are indeed authorized to create and manage this listing.

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Anytime you change your address or business name, you will have to go through the verification process. If you let google find your business first, youll be rewarded with better placement on the map. Much like google would rather find your website on its own through links rather than search engine submission, google maps will trust and more than likely post reviews from other review sites before submitting or modifying your listing. Often, the google places bot will scour the internet for other review sites for businesses already showing your companys offerings and experiences, so start building profiles on other business review sites first to begin compiling a healthy portfolio of reviews. Reviews are an absolutely essential factor in achieving top placement in the alphanumeric listing of the google places/google map listings, so be sure that your reviews are genuine – fake reviews are quickly recognized, and can not only hurt your listing position, but your reputation. A business name containing keywords and a complete google places profile also helps.

Since it was founded in 2004 to connect residents of san francisco to local businesses, yelp! has taken off and become a household name across the world. With 108 million monthly unique visitors in q2 2013 alone, the yelp! community has exploded into a full fledged social community, complete with the ability to add friends, earn community reputations, a robust commenting system, and picture profiles. Plus, because of its marked popularity – with over 42 million reviews posted as of october 2013 – yelp! reviews rank well with search engines, and are generally seen as reputable and trustworthy thanks to an algorithm implemented in 2006 that, while not necessarily perfect, helps to curb fake reviews. To gain control of your profile, first check to see if your business is already listed if so, then you must claim the listing with phone call verification.

Yelp also allows paid ads for businesses to be featured to the community and, therefore, increase visibility. Paying businesses cannot change their reviews, therefore they will still be genuine. Yelp also offers a full list of mobile apps that allow users to access it on the go. Consider the growing mobility market and claim your place on yelp! see what others are saying about your business and talk back on yelp.com yahoo! local listings are similar in format to google places. Complete with a map and full landing page, yahoo! local listings rank above organic search results and below the top three pay per click listings.

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Promote your yahoo! local listing by treating it like its one of the family – get reviews, flesh out the profile, add business information. Yahoo local also verifies every business that lists itself and ensures it is local. Therefore, e commerce businesses without a storefront will likely get denied a listing in this directory. Although yahoo! currently only gets about 13.5% of the search engine share, thats still represents a significant number of potential visitors to present your business listings to. While not as popular as it once was, this business review site has been around for many years.

Citysearch was founded back in 1995 and was primarily fueled by staff reviews of local venues. They also boast a best of citysearch competition, allowing local users to vote for their favorite businesses in various categories to a quest to win their favorite places the crown. Most importantly, citysearch listings tend to show up well in search engine rankings. If your listing is already on citysearch and you simply want to claim and update it, you can go here .

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However, if you want add your business, you have the option to manually email them with your business listing at [email protected]. You simply need to include your business name, address, and phone number, web address and category, then they will add it for you. It takes about 3 weeks total and you can check out your listing on citysearch.com. The other option here is to sign up for a paid service with yext.com facebook is one of the top business review sites online. Facebook boasts over 1 billion active users worldwide and can be found on 3 out of 4 smartphones.

Facebook pages for business is easy to use, lets you engage your customers, and allows for ratingss, reviews, updates, pictures, stories, maps, user uploads of pictures, tagging and much more, including hyper targeted ads to boost your pages exposure to a target audience. Create or claim your facebook for business page and connect to your customers today. Merchantcircle, founded in 2005, has been infiltrating search listings and growing ever since. Originally designed solely as a user review site, merchantcircle now sets itself apart from the rest of the review sites by touting the availability of deals and coupons available from merchants.

In february 2012, merchantcircle announced over 15 million monthly visits and 1.2 million active registered merchant users. Merchantcircle also lets you verify your account and assigns you a score from 0 100, 100 being the best based on reviews and a variety of other factors that can set you apart from others. Insider pages insider pages is another online local search service operated by iac/interactivecorp, owners of citysearch. Before its acquisition by iac the company was based in redwood shores, california, and had over 600,0 reviews of local merchants around the country. Angies list angies list was founded in 1995 in the form of a hard copy publication that solicited user recommendations for local businesses in columbus, ohio. The database moved to the internet in 19, and has since become a dominant force in local user review websites. Unlike other business review sites, however, angies list charges a membership fee for users to read and post reviews, though listings are free for companies.

Even with a fee, angies list claims over 2 million members as of april 2013, with over 40,0 reviews posted each month. Foursquare while foursquare may remind you of a social network, it is one of the top review sites for businesses. Launched in 2009 at south by southwest interactive in austin, texas, the community has reached over 40 million members, boasts over 4.5 billion check ins and has over 1.5 million businesses listed. You can connect with your customers or potential customers with a fully updated listing. The app also suggests places like best nearby or specials to people nearby, so this could be your businesses moment to shine. Local.com while local corporation was founded in 19, it wasnt until 2005 that the domain name local.com was obtained and a local directory was created. Growing fast, it can now claim over 1 billion ad impressions a month in combination with over 1600 partner sites.