As a service professional you do a lot of business from your car. So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if somebody kept you up-to-date during your drive on the recent Google changes and what do you need to know? So that’s exactly what I’m gonna do today.

Getting Reviews – Pillar 4

Interesting enough, there has been a lot about reviews come up recently. One of the reasons it’s a big deal is because Google decided that you need only 1 review to be able to start having your star rating show up in search results. This applies to your Google Maps listing and other listings such as Yelp and Facebook.

Here is what it looks like.

And

This matters if you have very few reviews on those sites and you get one bad review. That can really impact the perception of your business. So now it’s even more important to get a few reviews everywhere and to get them more reliably.

Here is what it looks like with 1 bad review.

Google Lowers Local Pack Review Star Threshold to 1

Harvard has actually done a study and found that having to overly positive reviews also hurt your business. This hurts in returns or clients being unhappy. It truly is better to under promise and over deliver. I’m sure a motto that you know well.

When Positive Product Reviews Backfire for Retailers

I went ahead and created a FREE 7 day course on everything you need to know about getting reviews. Essentially you put in your email and each day for 7 days you’ll get 1 email all about reviews.

• The secret to getting reviews
• Where to get reviews
• How to know when you get a review
• And more…

These are the secrets that I personally use and my clients have used to get more reviews. As an added bonus, I’ve made the emails easy to read.

I recommend you go check it out and get that going on your business.

FREE 7 Day Course – Secret To Getting Reviews

For those that are diehards, there’s also this great article about Facebook reviews and basically a deep dive there.

The Ultimate Guide on How to Get Facebook Reviews

Google Updates

Google recently did another update where if you have anything obscuring the view of your website on a mobile device (such as a pop-up),it is going to get penalized unless it is on exit.

Google’s Mobile Interstitials Penalty Starts Today!

Also see above for the 1 star reviews showing.

Competitor Tracking

This next one is a tool and it’s a doozy. Have you ever wanted to be updated when your competitor site changes at all?

Here’s a free tool, visualping.io, where you can automatically check two sites a day and get a notification if there are any image or wording changes on a page.

We monitor webpages… so you don’t have to!

Onpage – Pillar 1

There’s a really great​​ article on tracking leads and they cover everything from tracking customer calls to web from fill outs to to live chats.

How to Track Conversions (Leads) from Your Law Firm’s Website

My favorite free tool is Chatra.io and they do allow the tracking of events such as somebody interacting with you. I have found that if somebody can interact with you, they’re more likely to buy. It’s a very great tool to have and you can answer chats straight from your phone on the app.

I haven’t checked if Facebook’s free live chat can do that but that’s also great tool to look at.

Update: After this recording I decided to investigate live chat more. Turns out currently there is no way to track back to the source Facebook Live Chats. So I wrote this article comparing Facebook Live Chat WordPress plugins & Chatra.IO, “Should I Use Facebook Free Live Chat“.

For Beginners

For beginners this is a really great video from Matt Cutts who used to be with Google. He explains how the Google search engine works. It can be really insightful to understand all the different pieces that they’re looking at to make sure there’s a great experience online.

How Search Works by Matt Cuts with Google

Learn More

We scour the web for the best resources for your small business by topic. We call it a news pulse because we believe in the 7 pillars of online marketing that keeps your contractor business alive.