This week Ms. Marissa Mayer becomes the new CEO of Yahoo after 20 years with Google. This is big news for the struggling search engine. Now 37 years old, she may have what it takes to turn this ship around. Local business advertising has been a primary focus for her and all online media giants for several years.
As part of our SEO product, explorations optimizes about seven local listings for our clients including Yahoo Local. Up until this week, we were limited in what we can do to make this local profile stand out. Well that has now changed with the launch of their new Yahoo Small Business dashboard just launched this week…coincidence? Probably, but there is no better time than the present for this facelift.
Just finished this new local profile for a credit union client in Bucks County.
The new interface is looking very small business friendly and most of the data they request for the free profile is the same with a few additions like social media profiles. Then they start charging money to add or enhance your listing.
Small Business Marketing Dashboard
As you can see, they tease you with some very cool tools and information for free but the truth is that want you to spend $25.00 – $30.00/ month for the upgrade to the Pro version when you decide you want more details.
The online reputation tracker caught my eye.
Reputation Tracker:
- Shows customer feedback from up to 8,000 sources.
- Two most-recent online reviews and mentions.
- Chart of positive, negative, and neutral reviews.
- Average star rating for your business.
- Graph demonstrating review and mention counts.
- List of top review and mention sources.
- Words used most often to describe your business.
The choices I make for clients on what profiles have value depends partly on those sites where there may be existing reviews. Managing client reviews is very important to a local business owner trying to differentiate any way he or she can. I look forward to testing this application out in the months to come. There is no way we can monitor them all but perhaps Yahoo will make this task easier. I hope so.
What Business Review Sites Have Value?
Obviously search engine local profiles have value, each industry vertical has two or three relevant directories that can be very valuable and then there are those national resources that continue to appear on page one for market defining keyword searches like YellowPages, SuperPages and CitySearch.com. That evaluation process is very important, so choose wisely grasshopper.
Share with us your favorite business review sites in the comments.
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