For those of you who attended the SMX Local conference in San Francisco in July 08, you may have noticed Mike Jensen talk about how 5 Star reviews probably attracted more visits to the listing rather than listings without 5 Star reviews. After thinking about ths for a while I decided to put this to a test. Here is how the test went. I took 30 listings that I had at lest two months previous call tracking info on that currently had no reviews and were not Enhanced Listings on Yahoo! Local (I will explain that one later). The results from the test were quite interesting. Here was one of the listings before we started the process:
When you upgrade to an Enhanced Listing in Yahoo! Local not only do they give you a couple extra attributes that you can fill up your listing with, including a description about your listing, but they add a “Merchant Verified” badge to your listing which draws attention. The strange thing is that when you write your description, and of course you are going to write nicely optimized content, is that Yahoo! indexes it and shows an excerpt of that description if any part of the users search query, just like we saw in the reviews. Here is what the listing looked like after we were done:
So what does this mean for small business? Well simply doing the following resulted in an average increase of 1.8x
more calls across all listings tested. I had two months prior call tracking data without these changes. So to sum this up, here is what you need to do to get the most out of your Yahoo! Local Listing:
- Insert Keyword into Business Name
- Upgrade to Enhanced
- Write a well optimized description
- Get plenty of 5 Star Reviews
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