GMS surveyed marketers from national brands in the U.S. with more than 500 physical locations; two-thirds of the respondents were from traditional retail.

While 70 percent of the survey takers said they spend more than 60 percent of their budgets on local marketing, the survey also revealed that many of these national companies aren’t doing some of the basic blocking and tackling of local search marketing.

I put an arrow on the graph to emphasize that these are the numbers of marketers not using these tactics.

• More than one-third are not actively marketing on local directories like Superpages.com or YP.com.
• Forty percent are not actively managing local business listings on Google Places and the Bing Business Portal.
• Forty-five percent aren’t doing local paid search.
• Fifty-five percent aren’t actively utilizing local review sites.

According to the GMS survey, the main reasons for this are lack of money (58 percent) and lack of awareness of local opportunities (32 percent).

The GMS survey reminds me of the stats I shared back in September from Marketing Sherpa, stats that showed how the local search ranking factors aren’t actual industry practices. In that survey, tactics like adding photos and videos to a local business listing, associating the listing with multiple categories, and building local citations were all used by less than 50 percent of the marketers who answered.

What does it all mean?

I think it means that a) local search remains a mystery to a lot of marketers, and b) there’s still a lot of opportunity in local for marketers of any size, from national brands down to as one-man shop working from home.

What do YOU think it means that so many basic local search tactics are still not widely used?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Lots of National Advertisers are Ignoring Basic Local Search Tactics

Some really smart people are developing software programs that aim to spot fake reviews algorithmically, and you can play with one of them yourself.

It’s called Review Skeptic, and it’s as simple as pasting the review text into the site and letting the computer guess if it’s authentic. The public website is out there “for entertainment purposes only,” the site says … and it is kinda fun to see how accurate it is.

The site says it’s best to use English-language hotel reviews, but I did some limited testing of my own using a variety of business types: I cut-and-pasted the full text of my 10 most recent Yelp reviews, and Review Skeptic identified all of them as truthful. Whew.

Review Skeptic is the work of a group of Cornell University researchers, and the result of testing on 400 fake and 400 authentic hotel reviews. There’s a link at the bottom of the site to their research paper, which explains that the software had 90 percent accuracy during testing.

How to Detect Fake Reviews

I’m no scientist, but the way I read the material in that PDF is that Review Skeptic classifies words and text patterns and looks for signs of authenticity or deception. And one of the researchers, Myle Ott, just explained it like this to TIME.com:

…the software takes note of subtle signs that most people overlook. “Truthful reviews tend to have more punctuation, such as dollar signs, which indicate a specific that’d only be known to someone who has been there,” he said. “There are also more specific details, like the hotel location or that the room was small or large.”

Fake reviews, by contrast, tended to have more superlatives and adverbs in the writing (makes sense) and more details that were “external to the hotel,” such as whom the reviewer was traveling with. The fakes were also filled with pronouns, rather than proper names — because someone who had never been to a hotel wouldn’t know the name of the bellman or the woman at the front desk.

Interesting stuff, but I kinda wish the “secret sauce” was kept secret.

That TIME article mentions that no “major websites” are using the software behind Review Skeptic, but I’d be shocked if Google and other major review sites aren’t also using algorithms to identify review spam. Yelp, in fact, is well known for having a review filter in place — although my understanding is that Yelp’s filter focuses as much, if not more, on the user than on the words used in reviews.

Anyway, if algorithms and software can do a better job than we humans of identifying review spam, here’s hoping Review Skeptic and similar products catch on more widely. On that note, one last thing: According to this New York Times article from last summer, the Cornell researchers have been contacted by Amazon, TripAdvisor, Hilton Hotels and other sites … and Google contacted Ott to ask for his resumé.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Review Skeptic: An Algorithmic Approach to Fight Fake Reviews

Google emailed to let me know the merged-with-Richland issue was being fixed. Sure enough, the Richland office now has its own listing, no sign at all of anything related to Cari’s account. Good for them.

In the meantime, I updated Cari’s business name while all this was going on. I removed “Windermere Real Estate” and replaced it with “Real Estate Agent,” which seems to have helped disassociate the listing with the Windermere office listings.

But her listing has been merged again … only not with the main Windermere office in Kennewick, and not with one of her fellow agents, but it’s been merged with two other agents in her same office. Here’s the link for the live version, and here’s a screenshot showing everything that’s screwed up with this listing. (click for larger version)

Google has Cari’s business name, street address, office phone and fax number correct. And the middle three images in the “Photos & Videos” section are hers. Yay! But the rest of the listing is a strange conglomeration of her listing with the listings that belong to two other agents in the same building: Dallas Green and Chris Powell.

It has Dallas as the main photo, and then Chris’ photo shows down below in the “Photos & Videos” section. The worst thing is that it has Chris’ mobile number, not Cari’s … ergo, no calls for her from Google Places.

There are several pieces of content not from Cari’s account, but I don’t know where they’re from: the business hours, the “Real Estate Agency” category, the description and the video down in the lower right.

As I said in the post a couple weeks ago … SIGH.

We still have some data cleanup to do on her non-Google listings, which probably still reflect the old Richland address. But, as best I can tell, that has nothing to do with this merging problem. She’s not being merged with anyone in Richland — this is a purely Kennewick address issue, and the problem is that Google still sucks at dealing with multiple business owners at the same address.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of a Google Places listing gone haywire….I’m going to go use the “Report a Problem” and troubleshooter form right now and will include a link to this post for Google’s enjoyment.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

As Promised, Google Unmerged and Re-Merged My Wife’s Google Places Listing

But it sounds like this is still a work in progress. Avvo says dentists from all over the country are available to take part in the site’s question-and-answer product, but the actual dentist business listings are only formal right now in seven states: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Washington, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Dentists in other states, though, can still claim their listing by searching for their name in the directory.

I don’t have a strong feeling right now about where Avvo fits in as a local citation source, or even a source of traffic. I do know that I continue to see Avvo pages rank well when I do searches for local medical professionals, ergo it’s a good idea to at least make sure the profile page is accurate, up-to-date and filled out as completely as possible.

Does anyone have thoughts on Avvo’s current status as a citation source? Comments are open.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Hey Dentists: You’re On Avvo

First, how many menus are we talking about? How many restaurants? Foursquare says it’s getting more than 13 million menu items from nearly 250,000 restuarants “in major U.S. cities.”

I don’t live in a “major” city, but I’m already seeing a couple menus here and there from restaurants in my small town. Bob’s Burgers & Brew is a small chain with about 8-10 locations here in Washington state (but none in Seattle). You can see the menu link on its Foursquare page, and when I click it looks like the full menu.

As best I can see, neither Google nor Yelp nor Urbanspoon have menus integrated into the local search experience like this. Here’s the same Bob’s location on the other sites:

• Google Places
• Yelp
• Urbanspoon

On Urbanspoon, users are encouraged to upload photos of the menu. But that’s nothing compared to the full-text experience that Foursquare offers.

Why This Matters

When I wrote about Foursquare Explore last week, you may remember the point about Foursquare offering full-text search of the tips/reviews that users share on the site.

With text-based menus, Foursquare can offer even deeper search of menu items and descriptions. They’re not doing this yet, but they can — and you have to bet they will.

Look at the menu page for Bob’s. Someone looking for “sliced kielbasa” or “jalapeno poppers” is going to find that menu when Foursquare makes it searchable.

Final Thought

If you’re scoring at home, Foursquare claims to have “tens of millions” of tips; Yelp has somewhere around 22-23 million reviews, as I understand, and Google has somewhere in the neighborhood of 13-15 million reviews and ratings combined.*

And Foursquare now has something that neither Google nor Yelp have: menus for a quarter-of-a-million U.S. restaurants. I’d say that the game is on in local search.

(The 13-15 million number is based on Marissa Mayer’s statement last March that Google Hotpot had 3 million user submissions at the time and was/is getting a million ratings/reviews per month.)

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Touché Google & Yelp! Foursquare Now Has Restaurant Menus

Yesterday, Google emailed me to let me know that they’re going to unmerge my wife’s listing, and then re-merge it with another listing. Here’s the email, and then I’ll explain after you see it.

Isn’t that the nicest email? I’m serious – that’s exactly the kind of informative, helpful thing Google Places should be doing in its communication with small business owners.

Except that, in this case, they’re not solving anything with the listing at all. Here’s the story….

First, The Background

For those who are new to this site, my wife is a local real estate agent with Windermere Real Estate.

There are two Windermere Real Estate offices in our area. They used to be partners (same brokerage) but are now, technically, separate/competing brokerages under the Windermere name. Here are their addresses:

Windermere Real Estate Tri-Cities
329 North Kellogg Street
Kennewick, WA 99336

Windermere Group One
490 Bradley Blvd.
Richland, WA 99352

Making matters worse? Cari used to work at the Richland office, but now works in the Kennewick office.

She switched offices more than a year ago, but knowing the inherent risk in updating a Google Places listing, I refused to change the address. Too dangerous. Too many stories of disaster from a simple address change. No thanks.

Everything was fine. She was listed with the Richland address, but it used her cellphone number so any calls would still come straight to her, not to the old office.

Then, Disaster Struck

In early December, the folks at her old office in Richland finally decided to create their own Google Places listing for the brokerage. It immediately consumed my wife’s listing. They used a different business name and a different phone number than what’s in Cari’s listing; only the address was the same. But the new listing immediately took over and Cari was nowhere to be found in Google Places.

None of my attempts to unmerge the two listings were successful. I used the “Report a Problem” tool on the listing, with no luck.

Mike Blumenthal suggested I use the recently added troubleshooter tool in the Google Places Help Center. On December 27th, I went through that process, indicating that I’d already used the “Report a Problem” button. I filled-in the parts asking for her business name and address. At the bottom of the form, I explained this:

My wife’s listing has been merged with Windermere Group One at 490 Bradley Blvd., Richland, WA, 99352 — my wife used to be at that address, but is now at the Kennewick address. Her photos are showing up on the Windermere Group One Place Page, while her own Place Page no longer appears anywhere.

Google’s autoresponder contacted me almost immediately, and then about 48 hours later — during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, which is quite impressive — I got another email from Google with this message:

We have taken the necessary steps to make sure that your business information will appear correctly in 4-6 weeks.

Oh, No You Haven’t!

That was the last email I received from Google until the one that came in yesterday. In reading the latest email, you can see that Google hasn’t done anything to fix the problem. Here’s what they say the listing will look like when it’s fixed … err, “updated.”

But that’s not Cari’s listing. That’s the primary listing for the brokerage where she’s at now. It’s the same address, but the business name and phone number are the brokerage, not her. This is what Cari’s listing looks like in the Places dashboard — the basic Name, Address, Phone (NAP) data hasn’t changed in years. Notice that the business name and phone number are different.

So, Google is basically going to unmerge her listing from the Richland office, then re-merge it with the Kennewick office. She won’t have her name nor her phone number showing up; it’ll be the brokerage’s listing, not hers.

SIGH.

This is 2012. Real estate agents, doctors, dentists, lawyers, hair stylists and numerous other local businesses work in situations where multiple independent business owners share the same building and physical address.

How long do we have to wait before Google Places figures that out and stops merging these kinds of listings?

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Google Emails To Let Me Know My Wife’s Merged Listing Will Be Merged Again