One of the many factors that goes into ranking Google places is getting lots of reviews from lots of different sources. Online reviews are GOLD for local internet marketing. Google Places is now reaching across local blogs, portals and news sites and retrieving blog entries and comments for inclusion as reviews on their Places Pages. It can difficult and time consuming to find sites that Google draws information from (until now).
Follow these steps to easily find local sites get reviews on Google Places:
1. Search Google for locally prominent blog and news websites that have a strong presence in your city or area. For example: I live in Missoula Montana so I searched for “Missoula News”. Of course this resulted in all the top newspaper sites and blogs.
2. Go to maps.google.com and enter the URL of one of the news sites. For example: One of the free local papers in town is the Independent and their website is missoulanews.bigskypress.com. So I searched Google Maps, low and behold it showed several restaurants with reviews that were picked up by Google Places.
Note: If you only see the specific business listing for the site and don’t see listings for other local businesses then discard and try another one.
3. Now go create profiles, make comments, contact the blog owner/editor and do whatever you can to get listed on that site.
4. The last thing you need to do is tell all your loyal customers, friends and family to sign up and make comments on these local sites. You can offer discounts, Starbucks gifts certificates, cash etc. Just get as many reviews on as many different sites as possible.
