Optimizing your Small Business for Near Me Searches – Small Business Show #160

The Small business show episode 160 for Wednesday, February 28, 2018. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show by, for and about small business owners. Sponsors for this episode include smiles. Textexpander we're@textexpander.com podcast. You will save 20% off your first year of this awesome utility. Shannon and I can't wait to tell you about it. But we will.

That's right.

That's right, we will. We'll wait just a little bit. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

In Alafaya, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How's it going, man?

It goes, it goes. That whole back thing that I was dealing with, I'm still dealing with. Trust me, these things don't just go away. But it's way better than it used to be.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I don't have to podcast with a heating pad. Yeah, exactly.

Nice inflection in your voice, right?

Oh, well, I can have intended inflection as opposed to forced inflection. That's right.

Yeah. That's cool. That's good. Right on. That's good. Glad to hear it. Good to be healthy. And so today, you know, I want to talk about a search. Well, I guess a method or whatever that's being used more and more is people searching and using the terms near me and then, you know, inserting whatever you're looking for in front of that, you know, coffee shop near me, auto repair near me, landscape contractor near me, whatever, whatever you're selling, whatever service, computer consultant near me. You're really trending heavily on. On Google. And there's a lot of stuff you can do to help your business come up higher in the search rankings with that when near me is. Is used. So I thought we would. It was worth spending part of or maybe the entire show talking about it today.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. I've heard more and more people talking about this lately. And when I say lately, I mean the past few years, where.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, I was talking to a consultant down in Connecticut when I spoke at his user group and just asked him like, okay, so how do you get your business? And he said, well, you know, I like word of mouth and obviously all of that's good. But in terms of the new business, he said, yeah, it's mostly just like Google local searches. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

So speaking of that, you know, the first thing you want to make sure is that number one, you have a listing of your business on Google in the local search and we'll put a link to that in the show Notes today. And if you already have one of those things, your listing, which hopefully if you're in business, you do have that. Sure, it's critically important. But in addition, there's other sites you want to do the same thing. Apple Maps, really important to make sure your business listing is there and up to date. Because if you're searching on your customers searching on their iPhone and they ask Siri near what's near me, it's going to come up and search Apple Maps. It's not going to go to Google Maps. And the same with Bing. And you want to make sure these three major mapping platforms know everything about your local business. And we'll put some links to that in the show Notes. And so let's talk, we'll focus on Google, but this is the same for all these platforms. But we know Google's the 800 pound gorilla and love them or hate them, a little bit of both. You know, speaking 800 pounds, don't you know when you create your, your Google local page, don't use your 800 number. You know, this is all about local, it's not about finding nationwide stuff. You really want to tweak it to local customers. And Google suggests, you know, using your local area code, local number. And in addition, again, you want to personalize it. You know, you don't want to use, don't go grab stock photos of happy smiling people. Take pictures in your office, in your shop and you know, in your lab, whatever you've got, use custom images of your business and your people, your services, whatever it is, they're going to rank higher.

And I mean I'm asking some of these questions simply to prompt the conversation. But to be honest, I'm also asking some of these questions because I don't know the answer. So like this is, you're creating essentially a separate webpage in Google's search structures so that when, when people look for, for things locally, like when you, when, when I look for things locally, what comes up? There are things that either Google has just slurped. I see. I always assumed it was just Google had slurped these images or whatever. And maybe that's true.

Used to be. And they still do that. Yeah, you'll still come up in those rankings. But if you look on the right side. Yeah, Google is showing you like, okay, well here's the top three businesses that come up related to the term you're searching for. And so you know, they're trying to speed everything up. They don't want to have to go out and search. It's like the accelerated mobile pages or whatever.

Beyond that. Right. It's like you can go and edit these things to a degree as long as you stay within the Google framework, which is the whole idea.

That's right. And the same as with Apple Maps, you go through the Apple the Maps connect thing and they kind of prompt you with a bunch of stuff and, and you're basically, yeah, like you say, creating that little mini web page, if you will, or, or at least that record. And it's a good point you bring up because if you have multiple locations, you want a different record for every location.

Right.

You know, and it's kind of a pain and I always struggle with things like reviews and different things because, you know, you know, you. It's great. You want to aggregate those reviews to get the most mileage out of them. But if you're up in creating this local listing for each location, customers can be prompted to leave, you know, different reviews based on where they went.

Right.

Because those are different. Different experiences, different customer service people, different whatever. So it's important to. Because reviews are part of the process as well. And those reviews are going to help your rankings. The more activity that Google sees that's going on. Of course, the algorithm thinks, oh, well, this is relevant. And there's a lot of stuff people are talking about this business, so I should show this to them when they search near me for breakfast or whatever term you want. Computer repair. And so you want to promote that. And you need to promote it for each of your multiple locations.

Right? Oh, that's it. Yeah. Okay. So I mean, when you go and populate this with your pictures, you could, in theory, if you've got good pictures on your main website, you could certainly take those. And that way you've got some consistent branding that people might recognize if they go from. If they've seen one and then go to the other and all of that. But to your point, if you've got just like generic images on your website, this is not necessarily the right thing for your Google Local listing.

Yeah. You know, Google's all about relevance and they're really, you know, trying to make it super useful to whoever's searching.

Right.

Because that's their whole gig. And so you want to make it very relevant. So if Google looks at, you've got five locations and every single one has the same photo, perhaps that isn't as good.

Right.

Because they're not you, they're not unique. And, you know, if you're taking photos with an iPhone or Android phone or whatever, you know, it's going to have those geolocation tags. And I would argue that Google is certainly smart enough to look and go, hey, here's the address of this place. And this photo was actually taken there. So that's. I think that's important.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. And. And so along the same lines, you know, don't redirect your. Your URL, your website address, you know, don't get fancy or whatever. Google doesn't like it. You just want to use whatever, you know, web address you're going to use. And if you've got one main website and each of your locations has a different page within your site, which I would suggest is a good idea. Sure. You could use that. That address and you would just go. Right.

So if I have whatever, you know, davether.com Durham, New Hampshire, and then davedenard.com Austin, I mean, wherever I have locations. Right. That would be the. And then you use that. No, that makes sense.

Yeah. And you can even put.

I've never thought about any of this before.

Yeah, it's an interesting concept. I've spent hours struggling with this because there's nothing that frustrates me more. When you put all this data in, you're trying to tweak it and everything else, and your listing doesn't come up. When you grab another computer and flush the cache and go, what's near me for this? And you're like, why am I not coming up? So it's a constant, you know, tweaking of this, tweaking of that. And it's not one of those things that you can just do it and leave it alone.

I was just gonna say you can't do it. This is one of those things where it's sort of the fact of life now. Where. Yeah. Any kind of search engine optimization, certainly you need to do whenever the first time you do it is. That's going to be the first time, but you need to come back to it regularly in order to be successful. Yeah.

And they'll link to your. And I'm drawing a blank on this. Your Google Places. Is it Places. No, it's not places. Whatever page. You can post Google updates in your blog and all that kind of thing. Well, think of it. I'll put it in the notes. There's circle and all that stuff, but there's definitely ways to push some additional data up there. And you just want to go up and make sure it's accurate. And you can respond to reviews, which I think is very important, especially if you want to clarify something. You know, we've done a lot of shows about how to respond to reviews. You know, that that's not the place to get in an argument with a customer, but it's. And maybe not even thank a customer, but certainly there's some opportunity for clarification. Or sometimes you do just want to thank them, I guess.

Yeah, right.

And that's a great way to get some activity up there. But the reviews are really critically important to be listed up there. And when you're. When you're putting in your data, make sure you use your real address. You know, hopefully you've got a physical address. You P.O. boxes, mailbox numbers, all that kind of stuff, they don't rank as well because it doesn't work right with the search.

Right. Because it's not an actual location. It's not there.

Yeah. So if you're working out of your house or you're a consultant, I mean, it can be a little challenging. So you may have to think about, okay, well, what is. Like, I have a mailbox at my local UPS store because I'm currently. I don't have a commercial building, which is an entirely different conversation, but.

Right.

You know, so you could use that if it's in your local area. So you may need to think about, okay, I can get a physical street address at this, you know, UPS store or FedEx office or whatever it is. But is it in my geographical work area? You know, maybe it's not right next to my house because I want to be in the center of commerce, wherever that is near me. So you have to think about the placement of those virtual address, if you will, because that's what's going to come up in the search. So if. If your business is consulting with, you know, corporations, and they're all down in the financial district in San Francisco, and you live in, you know, a town or city, you know, a half hour away, where do you want your address to be? Well, your address needs to be where these people are going to search for you.

Oh. And you could hack that a little bit by. By just going and getting, like you said, you know, a box. Not a P.O. box, but a box at one of these. These mailboxes. You need a suite number. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And that's great. Like, I love the UPS store. They give you that. You know, you have a su. And it's just a mailbox. But, you know, you can Certainly get that. And I would say that's a. That's a. A way to, like you said, kind of hack that address, but it just may not be a convenient one. Like, there may be a UPS store five minutes from your house.

Yeah.

But if that's not where your customers are, don't get that one. Or don't. Or get another one. You know, use that for something. But yeah, get as many as you got.

Right, right, right.

Yeah. So you want to be in that address and be on that. On that map.

I never would have thought of that. Oh, this is fantastic.

Yeah, it's important. It's important. It's a constant mind bender trying to figure out when it works. It's awesome.

Sure.

When it doesn't work, there's nobody to call. There's no one to think. And speaking of calls, each of these places, whether it's Apple, Maps, Bing, Google Maps, they're going to want to make a phone call to your business to verify that everything is correct, at least that your phone number is correct. And they're going to give you a verification code and everything, which sounds really simple. Go ahead. You sound like you want to say something.

Well, I was going to say, though, you were about to get into a very interesting conversation, so. Yes, explain the topic that we're going to go into. Then I have something I want to do and then we'll revisit.

Yeah, sounds good. Well, what we're going to talk about is ways to get around these companies inability to understand how your phone system works.

Because so many of us have a number that's not really a number and you have extensions and we used to call it a PBX system. I don't even know if that.

That term is a virtual phone system, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's super convenient, but you got to kind of tweak, tweak it.

Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we will come back to that after we talk about our first sponsor here, which is textexpander. Textexpander is a tool. It's from a company called Smile. And man, it is the thing that makes my life so much easier. It's one of the top, like, it's one of the first five. It might even be like one of the first three apps that I install on any computer I use. Because what textexpander lets me do is I have all these bits of text and some of them are big, like entire letters or maybe just an address. Right. You know, especially like we're talking about here, you've got three different addresses. One for your customers, one for your mailing address, one for your home. You don't want to fat finger any of those when you're typing them in. So what you do is you put them into textexpander and then you assign them a shortcut. And so for me, like, I can have, you know, I type comma dhadd and that puts my home address out, but I can type comma dhpob and that puts my PO Box out, and I don't have to think about it. Right. And if.

Yeah, it's awesome.

You know, if I want to have something sent to Shannon, I can have Shannon's address in there. I could do comma, sg sj, add and then, boom, it puts your address in. I don't even have to remember your address. It's just right there if somebody's asking to ship us something or whatever. And it's not just that. Right. You've used it for customer service, too, which is awesome.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Keeping it a consistent message and way you want your responses phrased to your entire customer service team. And you can sit there, I mean, you know, be up in the middle of the night, create all these responses the way you want things handled. And they just pick and choose. Oh, this. When A happens, I use this response. When B happens, I use this response. It's phenomenal.

And you put them into your library, which is synced with the textexpander cloud. So that really, not only do you have it on all your machines, but like Shannon said, you've got your team has those responses on their machines updated. They don't even know that you've edited them necessarily, unless they're working. Makes a huge. In fact, there was an email I was writing this morning. Somebody wrote us and said, I want to advertise on the site. You know, we have to, like, suss these people out because so many of them are just fake queries or, you know, people kicking the tires or whatever. So I wrote a response and I thought, you know what? That's a really good one. And I just highlighted it and I went to the text expander menu and I said, create snippet from selection. And boom. Now that's in there. I can tweak it over time, but I start with this foundation of a sort of a natural email that I wrote to somebody, and now it lives. And I don't have to, like, copy paste it or anything like that. That's what Textexpander takes care of. So visit textexpander.com podcast, that's where you'll go. You get 20% off of your first year's subscription of the Textexpander service. Works on all your devices. Really, really great stuff. Again, visit textexpander.com podcast for 20% off. Our sincere thanks to the folks at Smile who make textexpander for sponsoring this episode.

All right, I just checked my Textexpander library. I've got about 185 snippets. It's a life changer.

Totally.

It's great.

Totally.

It's good stuff. All right, so back to the near me and getting your Google page and Apple Connect on Apple Maps and all stuff, as well as Bing. Each of these services is going to want to verify that number one, you have the authority to enter all this information and update and make corrections. You need to own this account, if you will.

Sure.

And they want to make a phone call and it sounds very simple. And if you're a consultant working with your cell phone or whatever, or you have one line, it's very easy. But if you're using just like a virtual address where you're hacking, if you're using grasshopper or phone.com or if you're one of these dinosaurs, that company's been around for a long time, you have a PBX where the phone comes into an auto attendant and it's routing through all kinds of extensions, which you know, we used to have.

Yeah.

It's. You have to be able to answer that main phone number.

Without Google having to enter an extension or anything like that. Right. Because it's a computer that's doing this.

It's not going to interact with anything other than a human. You're going to have to answer the phone. They're going to say, all right, if you're expecting this call from Google, bing, Apple, whatever, press 1 1. They're going to give you a code. You're going to it, you know, just like a, like a two step verification code.

Sure.

And then you're going to be the owner of this record. So if you've got like when we had a, our pbx, we literally had to shut everything down and just have one extension, one phone for, you know, this five minute window.

Yeah.

And you could do it anytime. You do it on the weekend.

I was just going to say you could do it on the weekend or the middle of the night or something when you.

That's right.

Chances are you're not going to get a call. And most of your phone systems, you know, Even if you've, like, we use phone.com, which we've used for years.

Sure.

And it's great, right, because it's super flexible. But to do something like this, it really isn't that difficult. Like, you don't have to break everything that you've done. You just create a new rule and make it the most prioritized rule. And so a call comes in, you say, any call that comes in, forward it to say your cell phone and you're done. That's it.

Yeah.

And it won't follow any of the other rules because they're. Because it's already done one. Yeah.

And then when you're done, when you do the verification, you turn it off for debt. But you need to be sure that that's going to happen and because the other way they'll do it, if they can't verify it, you know, they're like, well, we'll send you a letter and it'll have a code and this kind of thing. And it's a bit, it's a bit clunky. And so you, you need to be able to answer the phone, whatever number that you're going to put, and answer it directly.

Right, right.

So that's real important.

That's really smart, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never thought about that problem. But that's. I mean, it's a real. I've had to deal with that before. I don't know how I've. I know I've never done it this way. Until you started talking about it, I never thought to just, you know, temporarily redirect. I might have done it.

First time I. Yeah, first time I did, I was like, why am I not getting this phone call? You know, what's going on? And then it would be. And then we had, you know, this massive PBX that routed to, like, you know, 40 phones throughout area and forwarded to all kinds of salespeople and everything else. And I was literally there trying to grab the call before the, you know, before the auto attendant picked up. And then finally I just like, well, shut that thing down and, yeah, just turn it off. It works fine.

So.

So some more, some more tips. I mean, just a lot of this stuff is really basic and, you know, everybody's got the. I'm sure most of the stuff figured out, but I think it's definitely worth revisiting or if you're just getting started or building a new website, really important to do. Make sure your business name, your local address and your local phone are on every page. Of your website, you know, down in the footer area. Whatever you want, make sure it's accurate. Don't use, you know, if you're a corporation, don't use Inc. You know, if you're an llc, leave out the llc. Nobody cares. And Google it just messes things up when you have that. So just have your business name, local phone number, your address right in there and, you know, zip code, the whole thing. And I would create, you know, like we mentioned earlier, make sure you have different local pages for each location you have. Or if you have, you know, let's say you have a bunch of consultants working for you out in the field or technicians or whatever they're doing, and each one services a different city, town, county, whatever it is, you might want to have a location page for each of those people. And I would argue that it comes up, you might get a little better response in the, in those near me searches.

Huh? And then you just got to keep testing these too, right?

You do. You need to be searching.

Yeah, you need to be the one searching.

You need to be searching. And you can use terms like near me, nearby, near you. You can use that in your website in, you know, title tags, keywords, that kind of stuff. But I think it's better to create a specific page or section that just focuses on, you know, what are you near. Do you talk about local, whatever. I mean, you know, that's be a resource. So here's what is around us. Because if people are searching for things and they're around some other. You're trying to correlate your. Or triangulate, if you will, your location compared to other stuff. So if there's other monuments or places of interest around you, you can mention those on a local page that talks about, you know, near me. And I think that will help you. But you can't spam it. You can't just use near me, near me, near me 100 times and put it in clear text. It's not going to work. Google and all these mapping places, they're changing too. They're trying to give the most relevant search result. And those things like your reviews, how often you've updated your record current when people click on the call button. If you're searching on your phone and you find a business and you click that phone number and it's call, I guarantee you that's going in some record that says, wow, you know, X number of people, click that call me button. I need to show this result a little bit more. Or, gee, nobody's clicked that Call me button in six months. Maybe this business isn't around, you know, I don't know. And so all that data is being captured. And so you want to, you want to keep up on this stuff. And like I mentioned earlier, you know, I think it's great to create a local resource page that has content for people to learn about your area, what's around you, what's there to do, where to eat, tourist stuff. I mean, you can put it in your blog, you know, but, you know, become a resource. Not just, hey, I'm trying to sell you something. But you're like, well, here's. I'm proud of my town, my city, my county, what my state, whatever it is. And here's what it is. You know, we do vacation rentals, and I have a whole page for each of these rentals that lists here's stuff to do. And not only do I share it with people that rent these places from us and say, great, here's stuff to do when you get up to South Lake Tahoe, for example, but it helps us in the search rankings when people search for things to do, and we come up often on those searches. So you can be a resource and it'll help you in that near me game.

How would you. You've obviously stayed on top of this, right? I mean, you have to with.

You have to. I'm not, you know, I'm certainly no expert at it often I'm not very good at all at it, but you just have to keep tweaking and changing and trying to find what works and what, what doesn't.

So that's my question. Is, is in your opinion, and obviously everybody's different, but do you employ someone to manage this for you, to do this for you, or do you find that it's actually better to have hand, you know, even only sporadically, or I don't want to say sporadically, but maybe, you know, once a month you're. You're making sure you do this. Is there, is there a system that you follow?

I think it depends on your size. You know, if, if it's just you and a couple of people or your whatever, you might have the touch that's needed. But I also think it just, it needs to kind of. We've combined it with our social media, you know, program. It's just part of this kind of stuff. So if you've got somebody managing your Facebook, your Instagra, Twitter, your blog, all this kind of stuff, I would say you need to add it to that routine of, okay, every couple Weeks, I need to check this. Or every 30 days, what's going on? Or are we getting reviews and then cross linking? All that stuff is really powerful. Every time we got a new Google review, we would promote it. It's like, okay, well, maybe not every time, but maybe bi weekly. You look at it and say, oh, I got some new reviews. Let's push those off to Facebook and mention something, you know, tweet it out. And so you're kind of, you're kind of creating this circular thing, if you will, that there's all these references of good stuff, you know, about your, about your company. So that could be you if you want to deal with it. But if you have somebody that's. I usually try to hire people that are a lot smarter than I am and I can kind of fumble my way through this stuff, but I often get very frustrated when I don't see instant results.

Instant results, right. Yes, of course.

Man. It is a long game. It is a constant battle. And you know, you may need to hire an outside company to really help you at least build this foundation that you can then modify over time. You know, large companies that are very successful and very profitable are definitely having either in house entire departments that deal with this stuff or they're hiring outside companies. You know, and we've had some of those companies on here that, that are paying outside social media and search consultants a tremendous amount of money every month to be found. Yeah, it just depends your kind of what you're. What you're looking at. But.

Yeah, right, right.

But you can certainly do it yourself. I mean, you know, the key thing is just to have these things on your website and, you know, mention what you do throughout your, you know, create this local page and talk about what you do. Because the search engine is trying to combine your location information with these keywords. So if somebody's searching near, you know, computer repair near me, or you know, tree removal near me, well, that, that's what they need to find that. And if they're not around, you know, located or they can't find those keywords associated with location, I think it's more difficult for, for them to do that.

Yeah, right, right. I like your concept of a feedback loop like taking, when you see that review constantly, like linking like we should be doing that with this show. Anytime there's a review posted to, of course itunes reviews are nearly impossible to link to. But maybe just taking the text of the review and saying, or a screenshot of it and you know, posting it to our Facebook page and Our Twitter page saying, hey, you know, you know, Tim B. Reviewed us this way on itunes. If you want to review us, here's a link to, you know, get you as close as we. Yeah, yeah.

And we always just say, say thanks, you know, hey, thanks for this great review. Da, da, da, da.

Yeah.

And, and I would say that, you know, there's also a real good opportunity to show your authenticity if you have kind of a. Not, you don't want to, if you're having a trouble customer, you don't want to promote that. But if you have a customer that made some comments or, you know, some constructive criticism and you respond in a respectful way that like, wow, thanks for pointing that out, that our phones didn't get picked up during this time. Here's what, here's what, here's what we've done to fix it. That's a great thing to promote as well. And to say, oh, so and so helped us solve this problem. You know, thanks for pointing that out because it's real and people like that as well. You don't always have to promote the five star, glowing reviews, you know, and in fact, if that's all people see, I would argue that sometimes they think, well, it's not as realistic as if you've got a few three and four stars in there. Everybody has that there's no way you're going to be perfect. And, you know, and on this local page, you know, you can mention those reviews as well. Make sure you're. If you've got a Yelp page that you've, you know, again built up and focused on trying to get those reviews, which, you know, we've done shows on that as well. Link to that, link that page on your local thing, your local site, you.

Can link to things like Yelp in addition to linking to just your local page or your website page that highlights that location.

Yeah, yeah, link Yelp. You know, if the, if the Better Business Bureau has given you an A plus rating, even if you're not paying them, because it's a different. If you're not an accredited, you know, they want some money for that. But if they've given you a good rating, put that link on your local page. You know, our local Better Business Bureau has given us an A or an A plus. Check this out. Your Chamber of Commerce, if you're mentioned any of that kind of stuff, especially, you know, bigger sites, it's just, it's always great to have those links and that's the place to do it when it's local. If you were recognized that as a business there. You know, there's a company called Small Dog Electronics. I know. You know, Don Mayer and Happy Mayer, those guys are just brilliant at using awards they've gotten. They're really into causes and they have a multiple bottom line philosophy, which I really like. And they mention this stuff all the time throughout their site and I know it really must help them, so it's cool.

Fascinating.

And they do a good job, so.

They do. Yeah. No, and you're right, they're very good at promoting who they are, not just what they want you to buy. Yeah.

And what they believe in. And they're not, you know, and. Yeah. And some people, you know, are. May not like that, but I think overall it's a good thing to be authentic and to share some of that.

Well, people, we're humans. We like personality and we don't like everyone's personalities, you know, so it's gonna.

That's right.

Some people off. But. But we are drawn to, you know, we, we are naturally more able to trust something that has a personality versus just something that's a faceless entity or a black box.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

I always go back and forth because when you're small or when companies that I've started that are small, I'm always working to make us look bigger.

Right.

To instill trust and. Oh, we've been around. Look, and we do all these things and yet that's your website and how your phone system works and how you respond and all this stuff like we talked about. Right. And. And all these standards. But once you get to a certain size, then it almost flips because then you want to start promoting your personality and, and your people, you know, because. So, so there's this. I don't know when that time.

You know, I would argue that in many businesses that flip should actually happen right at the outset, that you just.

Yeah, you could be right.

Yeah, but I'm, I'm always. I always err toward the same thing you mentioned, where it's like, okay, we're small. We know how to make ourselves appear big. But then you appear faceless. Right.

Yeah. You have to do it in such a way that you could do it from the outside. You could say, look, we're big or we're established. Maybe that's a better. We're established and we're trustworthy. But check it out. Here's our barbecue on Friday and here's this costume contest or whatever you're doing to let people connect with your business beyond Just like you say, faceless entity, I think is important. And the last thing I want to point out is since you want to be sure you're doing regular updates to your blog and posting those on social media, and when it's applicable, you want to mention your location and mention that local page. And if you have multiple locations, maybe you kind of rotate and talk about stuff on your blog that's happening at your location. Because if your city is having some kind of festival or if you're your whatever it is, you know, that's around you, if they're building a new building, if something's going on, that's great stuff to mention. And then link back to that local page and it, you know, it kind of brings you in as part of the community. And the search engines love that stuff because they know people love it.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense, right? Yeah, just circular, kind of just making sure, not overdoing it. But anytime that's right. Makes sense to do it. It. Put it right there.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like I said, you can't be spammy. People know when it's spammy, you know, or it's automated. You can't do that stuff. And what I would love is, you know, if you've got other ideas or things that have worked for your business, you know, come share it with us, you know, feedbackusinessshow.co or jump on the Facebook, the small business support group@businessshow.co. facebook. We'd love to hear from you, share your story. Stories. Tell us, you know, what's worked for you, what hasn't. I'm sure. In fact, I guarantee it. There's a lot of people out there that are better at this than I am. And we'd love to, you know, have you on the show if you want to come on, or certainly share your story with everybody else. Be great.

Yeah, very cool, man. I. I feel like I learned a ton today. This is great.

That's good.

I don't know where I'll use it, but I. It's like I'm.

Yeah, that's.

Well, I mean, but that's the thing is, you know, like the reviews, things thing, it. That's applicable no matter how big you are, what type of company you are, just. But promoting your reviews so that people know they can leave them too. But it. It like. Yeah, like that's such a great thing, even separate from the whole local conversation. So.

And it's hard to get those reviews. You know, people get inundated with all the. Everything you do. They're like please leave us review. Leave us review. You buy, you go grocery shopping. Go. Please go review me. So you got to remind them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Right on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, you told them how to find us. I think that's. That's about all we got for today.

A wrap.

Please, please keep living that charmed life. And make sure you use textexpander. Textpander.com podcast for 20% off. Helps you with that charmed life. We'll see you next week, folks.

Yep. See ya.