Updated Google My Business Guidelines

In December 2014, Google made some changes to Google My Business quality guidelines, including adding specific rules for multi-location businesses.

• In February 2014, Google announced that it would allow the addition of a single "descriptor" to the business name in Google listings. As of December 2014, Google abandons the use of descriptors and only the real world business name (legal business name) is permitted for use, again. This point is emphasised by Google: “Represent your business as it’s consistently represented and recognized in the real world across signage, stationery, and other branding”.

• Other point to highlight is that as of October 2014, you are able to add other users as managers to a business account and these managers will be able to manage locations in the business account simply by logging into their own accounts, which is good news for multi-location businesses. In December update Google clarifies it by saying “Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify and manage their business information on Google My Business. If you wish to share access to your local page with others, you can do so by adding a manager.”

• The update also includes guidelines for:

- Business information (Address, website, phone number, categories…)
- Service area businesses vs. Storefront businesses
- Chains and brands
- Departments within other business, universities or institutions
- Individual practitioners (doctors, lawyers…)

We suggest you check out the Google quality guidelines for business pages as soon as possible, as you may discover you need to make some edits to your Google My Business account to be guideline -compliant.

As we know, these guidelines are generally considered rules, not guidelines, as failure to comply can cause your listing to be suspended or removed.

If you’re new to Google My Business, check out our blog post about why you should get Google My Business and how to get started.

If you would like to discuss about your local marketing strategy with a professional, you are always welcome to give our Digital Strategists a call on 01202 678777.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Google My Business

In one of our previous blog posts, we had been talking about the Google Places updates saying that Google has been automatically upgrading Google Places listings from the old system to the new Google Places dashboard and creating Google Plus pages under the same Gmail address.

On the 11th of June, Google launched “Google My Business” which is a further integration for putting all Google services useful to businesses in one place, helping businesses connect with customers via Search, Maps, and Google+.

The former page management dashboard has been replaced by a cleaner-looking My Business page and it makes it easier than ever to update the business information. From that page, managers can post content, track analytics, respond to customers, and even launch Google Hangouts. The new system will also integrate with Google's AdWords platform and provide businesses with data about customers and engagement.



The main benefits of Google My Business for customer engagement can be summarized as below.

• Update your business info on Search, Maps, and Google+ to make it easy for customers to get in touch.
• Add photos of your business and a virtual tour of your business interior to help customers see what makes your business unique.
• Connect directly with your fans and customers by sharing news, events, and other important updates from your Google+ page.
• Stay on top of reviews from across the Web, and respond to Google reviews.
• Understand how people find and interact with your business using Custom Insights and integration with AdWords Express.

Signing up for Google My Business

You can simply click the “Get on Google” button at the top of the Google My Business homepage, and follow the steps to add your business information to Google. Please note that any edits will not appear on Google until you verify your business. If your business has ten or more locations, you can add them all at once using the bulk upload tool.

Business owners that had been using Places for Business or Google+ will be transitioned to the new platform. In other words, if you previously used Google Places for Business or Google+ Pages Dashboard to manage your business information, your account has been automatically upgraded to Google My Business.

This new platform will also be welcomed by people who manage non-local Google Plus pages.

If you have a local business and would like to discuss about your integrated local marketing strategy, you are always welcome to give our Digital Consultants a call on 01202 678777.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Quick Overview on Google Places Updates

As you may have noticed, Google has been automatically upgrading Google Places listings from the old system to the new Google Places dashboard and creating Google Plus pages under the same Gmail address. This resulted in the existence of two (or more) Google Plus Pages for a given local business - one for business and at least one for local.

Currently, it is not possible to merge two Google+ Pages (unless they are both of the type: local and for the same business at the same address). It is also not possible to pass followers from one page to another.

To make the decision to handle these accounts and to determine which of your pages should get the most exposure, you need to think about the following questions:

• What is the goal of your social presence and who is the target audience?
• Is the company national in scope or do most of its customers come from the immediate region?

Within this update , there has also been a change on the Google Places quality guidelines (changed on Feb 2014). You can now include a single descriptor to your business’ real-world title that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers. However, marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, or URLs are not valid descriptors.

Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in italics for demonstration purposes) are "Starbucks Downtown" or "Joe’s Pizza Restaurant". Examples that would not be accepted would be "#1 Seattle Plumbing", "Joe’s Pizza Best Delivery" or "Joe’s Pizza Restaurant Dallas".

If you are not sure about your Google Places settings, please review Google Places quality guidelines because failure to follow most of them will either keep you from being listed at all or from ranking well in Google.

If you have a local business and would like to discuss about your integrated local marketing strategy, you are always welcome to give our Digital Consultants a call on 01202 678777.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Geek Video of the Month

This month’s Geek Video of the Month is a Multi-platform 3rd person shooter-strategy game "HordeMaster" which has been developed by Gamester, the start-up company, based in Istanbul, Turkey.

“This browser-based Flash multiplayer game blends elements from the RPG, strategy and third-person genres together. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, gamers are tasked with building a base from which they can conquer the world. Half of the game plays like a Tower Defence title as players attempt to design a base that other users will find hard to penetrate, while the other half is styled as a shooter in which players raid other users’ bases”. Develop, 2014

This game can be played smoothly even on the devices with low configuration, and even though it has a high visual quality, it does not require any plug-ins to play on PC and mobile devices.

HordeMaster hasn’t been officially released yet, however, it has already won several awards:

• Best “Social, Casual and Online” game – Selected Projects, Game Connection America 2014

• Most Anticipated Facebook MMO – Level magazine, Turkey

A few months ago, a closed beta test was conducted by Gamester with a small group of players and lots of changes were made to the game taking the feedback into consideration.

HordeMaster beta will be live very soon, so stay tuned... In the meantime, you may want to sign up for Beta access to get notified when Hordemaster is available to play.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Useful Introduction to Google Analytics Custom Reports

A custom report is a report that you create in Google Analytics. Custom Reports can be incredible time savers if you have the right ones. Instead of spending time digging around for important metrics, you can find what you need separated neatly into columns for some analysis that will lead to some actionable insight.

You manage your existing custom reports from the Custom Reports Overview page. Click the Customisation tab, and then click Overview in the left navigation.

Create your own custom reports

To create a custom report, click the Customisation tab and then click Overview under Custom Reports in the left navigation. Click + New Custom Report to create a new report.

To build a custom report, you'll need to specify at least one dimension and one metric. Dimensions are ways of describing visits, visitors, pages, products and events.

You pick the dimensions (Visitor Type, for example) and metrics (quantifiable - Visits, Bounce Rate and Goal Conversion Rate, for example) and decide how they should be displayed.

You can also apply filters for each custom report to narrow down your findings.

If you would like a “how to” guide that shows you how to create one, Google Analytics help section explains how you can create a “Custom Report” in Analytics.

Download custom reports

You can also download already created custom reports. Below I have listed a couple of custom SEO reports we mostly use.

If you're signed in to the Google Analytics account of your choosing, you can click on the links below. They will be automatically saved into your Analytics account and can easily be found in the custom reports section inside your profile.

·         Customer Behaviour

·         Referring Pages

·         Link Analysis

·         Conversions

·         Top Converting Landing Pages

Moreover, you can also visit Google Analytics solutions gallery and filter custom reports to download based on your business objectives and marketing function.

Save time and contact us 

Google Custom Reports ultimately save you a lot of time and help you make actionable decisions that will help you improve your website's performance. If you would like to take advantage of the Google Analytics Custom Reports to pull out very valuable and actionable search marketing insights, but are finding it difficult to understand how to measure your KPIs effectively, feel free to give our Sales team a call to see how we can help. 

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Aysegul talks about Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search has been recently rolled out to everyone using Facebook in US English.

The tool lets users find specific information including their friends’ favourite hotels, restaurants, films and more, using filters such as location, gender, specific personal interests etc...

In some ways, Graph Search is a natural extension to the News Feed. However, rather than reviewing friend’s news feeds, now you can ask questions to Facebook about your friends and quickly find out the results. For example; searching 'Friends that have gone to Barcelona on holiday' would bring up a list of all the friends in your network who have either listed Barcelona as somewhere they have visited on their timeline or have checked in to a location in that city. You can then message your friend to learn more about it.

With its features, Facebook Graph Search is believed to be really big for marketing from creating awareness to purchase decision making process, as most of the people searching for pubs or restaurants etc... that their friends ‘Like’ when they’re figuring out where to go and in general friends’ recommendations are important decision making triggers.

Via this tool, people will be exposed to a huge range of new results.

Let’s try a research for hotels:

You can narrow it down by making it more descriptive:

What does Facebook Graph Search mean for brands and businesses? 

From a business perspective, whether you’re a small or a large business, you would really want to get your data into Facebook so that you’re showing up on the results pages.

Not all the businesses probably have physical locations on Facebook, so that they will need to think of clever ways to get themselves found in Facebook.

In terms of marketing, this change also support the need for an Integrated Social Search approach as this development is additional proof that the search and the social teams can’t be separated anymore. Brands and companies would want the SEO efforts to be taking into account what is happening in the search as well as in social media and in this case Facebook.

Below we have listed a couple of points about how your Facebook pages can best take advantage of the opportunities presented by Facebook Graph Search.

1)      Make sure your Facebook listings include the right information and are optimised.

This can be ensured by checking if the right category has been chosen and the added business address is correct. To fully optimise your page, suggest completing your profile including important keywords, posting and correctly tagging photos and videos, and encouraging your fans to add recommendations to your profile as the reviews will show up in Graph Search results.

2)      Encourage Check-ins

For local optimisation, encourage your fans to check in to your business page whenever they visit. It is one of the most important features as people mainly tend to search by location.

3)      Learn more about your fans to provide more value

This tool lets you learn about your fans’ interests and likes by sorting them into behavioural (hobbies, recent activities) and demographic segments (age, gender, location).

Fans interests can be used for Custom targeted campaigns, contests; and by identifying the other pages your fans like you can learn what content to share will be liked by your fans.

This may help you to provide more value to your fans and to increase brand loyalty.

For more tips and the possible search combinations you could use to help you conduct your research, suggest viewing the article 17 Ways Marketers Can Leverage Facebook Graph Search from Social Media Examiner.

If you have any queries on how social media can benefit your business, please do get in touch with our Sales team.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

Optimising for YouTube

We recently found a fantastic resource on YouTube to help people and brands ensure that their videos reach the widest possible audience.  And we just had to share it with you.

The useful content provides a comprehensive overview on YouTube video optimisation and discusses the importance of meta data and thumbnail optimisation.  The resource also provides additional advice on adding annotations, channel optimisation, how to maintain the channel feed and using YouTube analytics.

We are really impressed with the content. Hope you are too.  Please visit the YouTube optimisation guide here.

If you don't have time to digest the content straight away, but wish to launch/host videos onto a channel such as YouTube, then we have shared our "must do lists" for video optimisation below:

Video SEO Optimisation

• Add meta data information while uploading - title and description for your videos.
• Add links to your website
• Create a video sitemap and upload the video sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

Video Sitemap Requirements (Google)

• Title: This should be the same as the title of the page your video appears
• Description: Make this exactly match the meta description of your page
• Play Page URL:  The canonical URL of the page your video appears
• Thumbnail URL: By thumbnail they mean a high resolution image up to 1920x 1080
• Raw video location/URL: This URL is found in the embed src link you find when you go to share a video and click embed.

If you require further assistance with optimising one of your video channels to increase traffic and customer engagement, then please do get in touch.

Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi and Sarah Griffiths

Improving your 404 Error Message page

Image credit goes to NetDirekt and their 404 page design.

When a user lands on your 404 pages, it means that something went wrong. Either the user clicked on a broken link, or they may have mistyped your URL. For more information on what exactly a 404 page means, why not take a look at our "What's in a 404 page?".

Whatever the reason, landing on a 404 page is by no means convenient for user, or website owner. While a little humour – “WOOPS try again, click here” could be added to the 404 page, it's important to stress that the main message should be to let the user know that they haven’t reached the end of their journey and to provide useful options/navigation posts to help them find the page they seek.

Rather than just saying, this page can’t be found return to home page, we advise our clients to:

• Include a simple / apologetic statement.
• Add a site search box to the 404 page.
• Add a link to most popular category pages along with a list to the website onsite sitemap.
• Provide a link to a contact form, so that users can reach out to you directly.

Our favourite usability expert Jakob Nielsen, termed by U.S News and World Report as “the worlds’s leading expert on web usability” states that all error messages must be;

• Written in plain language that is easy to understand for non-technical users and that does not imply that the mistake is the user's fault
• precise in specifying exactly what was done wrong (that is, not be generic or vague)
• constructive in suggesting steps the user can take to correct the problem.

We advise our clients to regularly check their analytics to monitor the amount of times people have seen the 404 pages. If the error page is in your top 20 content pages, then there is a clear problem with your site's design or navigation.

The Flashlight team regularly send each other good looking 404 pages, please check out one of our favourite lists for creative error pages, although these 404 pages ooze creativity, some do lack some of the usability / useful features that Jakob talks about above.

One we particularly like from HootSuite includes the below:

• Starts with a simple / apologetic statement
• Explains: why the user has landing on the page
• Highlights where they could go next

If you think your website could do with some improvements, and not just in terms of 404 pages, why not get in contact with our sales and web development team here at Rocktime.


Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi

‘Street View’ Google Map Indoors Photos Go Live

After the Google Street View service that allows viewers to view the exterior of a business, Google adds a new feature to its Google map services by allowing users to see 360-degree street-level images of the interior of various businesses, including restaurants, hotels, retailer shops and gyms etc.

This new feature has been discussed in news and in social platforms for a while and we have been watching and waiting for this evolution since before April 2010 when Google invited US businesses to have their business photographed.

According to BBC news, Google officially announced a pilot project in selected locations including London, Paris and a number of cities in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

"Building on the Google Art Project, which took Street View technology inside 17 acclaimed museums, this project is another creative implementation of Street View technology, to help businesses as they build their online presence," a company spokesman told the BBC.

"We hope to enable businesses to highlight the qualities that make their locations stand out through professional, high-quality imagery." he added.

Having indoor photos on Google Maps, which are taken by Google photographers, will be valuable for local businesses that depend on local patronage. Customers check where to visit or eat/drink on the web and give importance to ambiance, merchandise, layout, or decor when choosing where to go. Thus, this application will definitely contribute to a businesses’ ‘online presence’. Businesses have an opportunity to become successful and benefit strategically from the interior photography.

This development made Rocktime Flashlight team excited as we optimise location based platforms like Google Maps as part of our local targeted campaigns created for various clients, in order to increase local awareness and reach. We have already applied to Google on behalf of our boutique hotel clients to have their beautiful rooms and sports facilities photographed by Google photographers. In brief, we, Flashlight executives believe that Google Map Indoors Photos will bring extra value to local businesses, and we hope this service will be available in more cities soon.

Our Google Places optimisation for clients usual results in page one positioning for preferred keywords, after a period of 4 to 6 weeks, depending on competitiveness. Please ask the Rocktime Flashlight Team if your business would like to achieve this success as part of an integrated digital marketing strategy.


Author: Aysegul Yigitbasi