#but the other hotels aren’t as centrally located as i’d like

[goldennika]

lowkey i wish i had a personal assistant who could arrange trip stuff for me rn bc my brain is Not Having It rn

[choicesarehard]

I keep my streams about Wolf Bride light-hearted. It’s been a hell of a year, and I think we all need a space where we can laugh together. But part of responsibly consuming problematic media is being aware of where it fails. And that’s why I think it’s important to talk about Morgan, and Wolf Bride’s troubling depiction of blindness. 

Morgan is one of the first Love Interests in Choices to have a canon disability. She is representation many players with disabilities, like myself, are eager for. But like any form of representation, writing a blind character requires research. A quick google search will lead you to numerous visually impaired voices who outline the tropes and stereotypes that harm their community. Wolf Bride has included nearly all of them. 

signal boosts are appreciated

Not All Blind People Wear Sunglasses

Morgan is shown wearing dark sunglasses from the moment she appears on screen. And there are certainly blind people who wear sunglasses — particularly those who (unlike Morgan) can still perceive some degree of light and dark, and experience painful light sensitivity. But no context is ever giving for Morgan’s use of sunglasses. In fact, they aren’t even addressed for four chapters. 

[ID: Two screenshots from Chapter Four of Wolf Bride. The first features a text box over a forest background, and reads “You glance at Morgan, and are surprised to see the dark glasses still covering her eyes.” The second features a labeled image of her sunglasses, placed over a black background, with a selectable button that reads “What does Morgan look like without these?”] What follows is a scene Pixelberry could have used to provide insight into an assistive device the sighted community may not be entirely familiar with. They could have touched on degrees of visual impairment, or why some blind individuals need dark lenses while others don’t. They could even have explained that for some individuals with visual impairments, dark lenses make tasks like reading or navigating dimly lit spaces harder.  Instead, and far more troublingly, MC is given the option to ask Morgan not to wear them anymore. And depending on your choice, the book is coded to remove the sunglasses from her sprite in future scenes. This reduces an assistive device to a fashion choice, something our MC can wish away if they don’t find it attractive. And that isn’t okay. 

Unusual Eyes

[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Four of Wolf Bride. The first features a text box placed over a forest background that reads “With a start, you realize her pale eyes aren’t looking at you, aren’t seeing you, aren’t seeing anything.” The second features Morgan’s sad sprite in the same forest setting, and a text box that reads “...I’ve been blind since birth.”] Morgan has a customizable sprite. But regardless of the ethnicity you select for her, she is depicted with pale blue eyes. And that troubles me. Because the stereotype that all blind individuals have cloudy, distorted, or unusual eyes is pervasive and harmful. 

Even when it isn’t tied to another harmful trope — the blind character as mystical seer or psychic — this stereotype create an expectation that blindness is something that always manifests in a visible way. And for millions of blind individuals, that isn’t the case. 

And while cataracts, trauma to the eye, and corneal infections can all cause the clouded effect most of us recognize from media, none turn your brown eyes into blue.  Heightened Senses

Another common stereotype in media is the blind character who’s remaining senses have become heightened as a compensatory mechanism, often to a supernatural degree.

[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Four of Wolf Bride. The first features Morgan’s surprised sprite in a forest setting and a text box that reads “I guess I sort of...feel things. Like the place on my cheek where the branch blocked the wind.” The second features Morgan’s neutral sprite in the same forest setting, and a text box that reads “I can smell the dew on the leaves, and the moss on the bark. Can’t you?] Individuals with visual impairment may learn to rely on their other senses to navigate the world around them. But they do not suddenly gain the ability to sense the location of a branch based on wind patterns, or to accurately throw a dart at a carnival game ballon based on its smell. 

[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Eight of Wolf Bride. The first features a text box placed over a carnival background that reads “Pop! Pop! Pop! Three darts fly through the air, striking their targets.” The second features the white MC with straight blonde hair. Her sprite is surprised, and beneath it is a text box that reads “So you did that by smell, too?]

This trope may seem harmless — after all, it gave us Daredevil, a beloved blind superhero — but it contributes to the unachievable expectations we often place on real-world individuals with visually impairments. And that isn’t fair. 

Of course, we all suspected Morgan’s abilities were due to something other than heightened senses. And that in and of itself is a problem. 

Magical / Supernatural Abilities

To the surprise of no one, Morgan exhibits these unusual abilities because she is a werewolf. But choosing to give a blind character magical abilities should only be done after asking yourself some challenging questions. As visually-impaired Tumblr user @mimzy-writing-online explains:

Your blind characters don’t need a magical ability that negates their blindness. [Ask yourself why it’s so important to you to give them one]. If it’s because they can’t do all the things you want them to do without it, then should you really have written them as blind in the first place? 

And that’s the thing. Morgan isn’t actually written as a blind character, not when it counts. Morgan shoots bullets with accuracy, runs through unfamiliar terrain, and navigates moving objects with ease. She doesn’t use common assistive devices like canes or screen readers. Her sunglasses are discarded at MC’s request. The scientific papers that fill her research facility are not digitized for accessibility or written in braille. 

Even her dreams, which should be reflections of how she perceives reality, look identical to Bastien's — which makes no sense for someone who has been canonically blind since birth. 

[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapters Five and Eight of Wolf Bride. The first features a scene from Morgan’s lucid dream. Set in a glamorous hotel, it includes visual details like twinkling lights, and patterned carpets. The color is tinted a grey-blue and the exposure on the image has been increased to an unnatural level. The second features a scene from Bastien’s lucid dream. Set in a forest, it shares the same tinted and over-exposed qualities as the first.]

Her blindness isn’t an integral part of her character. Instead, it’s a narrative device, paraded in front of the reader when it can further a central — and deeply disturbing — plot point. [content warning: discussion of discrimination and child abuse / abandonment ahead]  Morgan Was Left to Die Because She Was Blind 

And Jesus, what a plot point it is. In Chapter 11, we learn that Morgan was left to die in the woods because she was born “wrong, sickly, blind.” But the only canonical disability or illness she is ever shown to have is her blindness. 

[ID: Three side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Eleven of Wolf Bride. The first two feature the white MC with straight blonde hair’s shocked sprite in front of a forest background. The first text box reads “I don’t understand...” followed by two dialogue options “Why was Morgan abandoned?” and “Is that what you do to full moon babies? Kill them?” The second panel’s read box reads “Just because she was blind?” The third panel features  the old woman Noemi’s sad sprite, placed over a forest background. Her text box reads “If we know an infant will not survive, it is best to let it die quickly.”]

I...am frankly having a hard time thinking through the screenshot-induced fury to make a coherent argument here. To imply that blindness is an impairment so limiting that death is the only foreseeable outcome? That being born blind somehow makes a child “wrong”? The ignorance and prejudice shown in this scene is staggering. 

But equally troubling is the response of the main characters to this revelation. Yes, in fiction, bad people sometimes do bad things. But Noemi isn’t shown to be a bad person. Neither is Bastien, who knew what his pack had been guilty of in the past, and even seeks to justify it to a limited degree. 

Most shockingly, Morgan herself, who in the second screenshot below has just overheard that she was left to die as an infant because she is blind, isn’t angry or upset. She’s almost apologetic, still seeking a place within the pack. 

[ID: Two side-by-side screenshots from Chapter Eleven of Wolf Bride. The first features Hispanic Bastien’s sad sprite in front of a forest background. The text box beneath him reads “It doesn’t happen often, Clara, but...” The second features white Morgan’s sad sprite in front of the same forest background. The text box beneath her reads “I didn’t mean any harm. Especially after...what I just overheard.”]

By introducing the idea that a child born blind cannot survive, let alone thrive, without superhuman abilities, and then failing to soundly and thoroughly refute that idea through the characters we identify with, Pixelberry is unintentionally perpetuating the same false beliefs that have led to real-world instances of infanticide for centuries. And that isn’t okay. 

I don’t know where Pixelberry will go with the story from here. Perhaps in today’s chapter some of these concerns have been addressed...but I doubt it. In the meantime, I’ve also written to their support staff to express my deep concern and disappointment in the treatment of Morgan’s character. And I’d encourage you to do the same. 

Will I continue to keep streaming Wolf Bride? For now, yes. My VIP subscription is already paid for, and frankly, I want to see Morgan’s arc through. I guess the small part of me that was excited for the representation is still hopeful the narrative can be corrected. 

But I’ll be adding a content warning at the start of each stream for ablism, and that’s something I never thought I’d have to do.  Screenshots courtesy of CrimsonFeatherGames on Youtube

[fatehbaz]

yeah gypsies are so opressed that literally everywhere they are nobody else wants to be and they literally will just break into your house and take your shit, even throwing their babies at people to get them to catch them and be able to be robbed. nobody likes them for a reason and it's not that they're just evil and intolerant! nobody thinks gypsies are controlling the world to make your kids gay they are just making everything worse for everyone else around them including workers LOL

Sorry to expose everyone to this kind of racism and flippant disregard for human lives. If someone continues to deny centuries of violent antiziganism and the laws and edicts issued by kings and queens across Europe which explicitly ordered that Roma people be rounded-up, incarcerated, expelled, or killed; if someone denies the existence of a N@zi-led targeted genocide against Roma; if someone doesn’t consider how current stigma among non-Roma people and generational trauma/poverty from mass-scale genocide only mere decades ago might have a strong influence on contemporary racism, policy, and ingrained poverty; if someone continues to use slurs; ignores self-reported stories of Roma people; refuses to look at photos of contemporary segregated communities, right now, cordoned by fencing and separation walls; rejects the scholarship that has clearly described incidences of egregious environmental racism, as well as policies and mechanisms of the ongoing systemic government-led forced removal of Roma communities; and also brushes off the references I’ve repeatedly shared, there’s not much else that I can say.

Not really interested in dignifying these repetitive messages with a response. So I thought I’d clarify: This person, the other senders of these anonymous messages, and I aren’t having a discussion, debate, or disk horse. I’m only kinda-responding to these messages so that onlookers can see these messages as evidence that bitter anti-Roma sentiment is alive and well and thriving. And I’m also responding as an opportunity to share a couple of sources/references about segregation, environmental racism, and the role of media/governments in propagating violence against Roma people.

-------

I’ve shared these before, but here are some of the sites/incidences of egregious segregation, environmental racism, and forced removal/evictions documented by the Environmental Justice Atlas team (If visiting their online portal, almost all of these individual cases each include photos; exact latitude-longitude coordinates; aerial photography of the sites; reports on local sources of environmental pollutants/contaminants; short histories of local land policies; details about local government actions. Their site also includes a map of these sites, and details about the number/location/size of documented Roma communities within Central/Eastern Europe. If you’re familiar with current political power in places like, say, Hungary, some of these cases might not be surprising. Source: Environmental Justice Atlas. “Pushed to the wasteland: Environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and South-Eastern Europe”. Research was conducted “on environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and South-Eastern Europe developed by ENVJUSTICE – EJAtlas team at ICTA - UAB in collaboration with European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and Human Rights activists.” These cases retain the name/title from the original authors.):

A polluted stream and a landfill as racial segregation of Roma communities, in Jarovnice, Slovak Republic ///// Roma settlement next to the US Steel factory and with a segregation wall build by the local government, Slovakia ///// Denied access to water for Roma in Prasnik, Slovakia ///// Hundreds of Roma forced to live in chemical laboratory of the CUPROM copper factory, Baia Mare, Romania ///// Hotel complex construction and displacement of Roma families, Skopje, Macedonia ///// Roma settlements adjacent to the industrial copper plant complex Krompachy, Kosice, Slovak Republic ///// Roma of Stolipinovo: water and waste collection denial in the European Cultural Capital 2019, Plovdiv, Bulgaria ///// Roma relocated to an area with electromagnetic radiation, Tvarditsa , Bulgaria ///// In Roma quarter Fakulteta waste collection denied. Separation wall proposed, Sofia, Bulgaria ///// Lunik IX Roma settlement:  potable water monitored by police and segregated by wall in Košice, Slovak Republic ///// Government placed Roma refugees from Kosovo next to the country's largest landfill, Montenegro ///// Roma evicted from their homes due to a Black Sea holiday resort, Romania ///// Roma communities had their access to water shut down during heatwave in Gulács and in Nyíregyháza, Hungary ///// Roma community living on an industrial site contaminated with mercury, Romania ///// Unsafe access to water for Roma communities in Bardejov, Slovak Republic ///// Forced eviction of Roma families to an isolated farming area, Garmen, Bulgaria ///// Roma community in Transylvania evicted to waste water plant surrounded by wire fence, Romania ///// The UN resettled 600 Roma to a mining/smelting complex exposing them to lead poisoning, Kosovo

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Stuff I’ve previously recommended. Some articles about racism, segregation, and forced removals/evictions:

(1) Silvia Rodriguez Maeso. “‘Civilising’ the Roma? The depoliticisation of (anti-)racism within the politics of integration.” Global Studies in Culture and Power. June 2014. (2) Huub van Baar. “Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: the Roma at the development-security nexus.” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Issue 4: Un/Free Mobility: Roma Migrants in the European Union. June 2017. (3) Angela Kocze and Marton Rovid. “Roma and the politics of double  dis/course in contemporary Europe.” Global Studies in Culture and Power. November 2017. (4) Richard Filcak. Living Beyond the Pale: Environmental Justice and the Roma Minority. (5) Huub van Baar. “Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe.” Antipode 49. August 2016. (6) Krista Harper, Tamara Steger, and Richard Filcak. “Environmental justice and Roma communities in Eastern Europe.” Environmental Policy and Governance. July 2009. (7) Aidan McGarry. Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism. 2017. (8) Margareta Matache and Jacqueline Bhabha. “Anti-Roma Racism is Spiraling during C0VID-19 P@ndemic.” NCBI: Health and Human Rights Journal. June 2020. (9) Global Studies in Culture and Power: Issue 6: Romaphobia and the Media. 2017. (10) E Vincze. “Socio-spatial marginality of Roma as form of intersectional injustice.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Sociologia. 2013. (11) Helen O’Nions. “Roma Expulsions and Discrimination: The Elephant in Brussels.” Brill. January 2011. (12) Romain Cames. “Government by Expulsion: The Roma Camp, Citizenship, and the State.” Sociology (International Sociological Association). 2013. (13) Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky. Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice. 2020. (14) Huub van Baar and Ryan Powell. “The Invisibilization of Anti-Roma Racisms.” In: The Secularization of the Roma in Europe. 2018. (15) Catalin Berescu. “The rise of the new European Roma ghettos: a brief account of some empirical studies.” Taylor and Francis: Urban Research & Practice. October 2011.

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Hope some of these are useful.

[chasingshhadows]

Advice for writing about small towns

So I come from a small (midwestern) town. And I mean - an actual small town (less than 1,500 population). I’ve lived in towns of under 500 population, and in towns of about 2,500 population, and in towns of 15k population, and in cities of 100k, and currently in a 700k city. 

So here’s some things about small towns you might not know if you’ve never lived in one:

If it’s got a population higher than 30 thousand, it’s not a small town. It’s just a town. Hell, I’d probably argue that if it has a population higher than 10 thousand it’s not small town, but I’m being generous. However the people in towns 30k--50k probably think they’re in a small town (they’re not).

The experience is vastly different depending on how far you are from a small-large city. And by that I mean - the people are vastly different. 

Are you less than 60min drive to a city of 80k+ population? the people are probably less likely to be farmers, more likely to work in said small-large city and commute (which doesn’t mean that everyone commutes or that no one is a farmer). The people probably lean slightly to the right of the closest city, but aren’t necessarily staunch conservatives. The town sizes probably bottom out around 2k min. 

Are you more than 2hrs drive from a city of 80k+ population? The town is more self-sufficient. Most work within their small town or a nearby small town. Depending on the terrain, more people are farmers. They’re probably mostly conservative, both socially and fiscally. The town sizes could be as small as 300 people.

The farther from the city, the more likely to be conservative, more likely to be farmers (depending on the terrain).

Population 15k+:

This town probably has a (singular) hospital, several doctor’s offices, probably a dozen department stores - and if it’s rural enough, probably a couple kinds of hardware/diy type stores (lowe’s, menard’s, home depot etc.)

There are several options for vets and at least one emergency vet 

1-2 dozen hotels

If it’s got anything touristy, double the hotels (2-3 dozen) - touristy being water, especially large lakes, hiking trails, fesitvals, nearby ski resort - any thing that would draw people there on vacation, even if it’s only people from that region 

Also add a “down town” area - boutiques, nice restaurants, probably a theatre

It has at least 4 options of elementary schools, and 3 options each for middle and high schools. It might have a community college (but probably not). There are private or charter options, specifically for religious students

There are multiple denominations of churches (catholic, lutheran, baptist, episcopal etc). Depending on ethnic make-up, it may or may not have a synagogue. It probably won’t have a mosque.

If it’s in a rural-ish area (the closest towns are all smaller) it probably has some kind of shopping mall. If it’s the smaller town, it may not.

It’ll have several bars, probably clustered in a central location, with a few others a little farther out from that area. 

This town has a few coffee shops (3-10), but may or may not have an actual starbucks. At least one is a local place, at least one is a chain (starbucks, dunkin, biggby). 

People drive everywhere. There is a bus system, but only the “down town” area would have issues finding parking. Most businesses/hotels have their own parking lot.

Most people live in houses but there are a few (3-7) apartment complexes, most of which are several buildings

There will be lots of restaurants, mostly chains or small mom & pop places, with at least a couple niceish options

This town might even have its own airport, but likely only serves regional flights to “nearby” larger towns/cities. Regional means like, less than 2hr flights, so that’s probably a bigger distance than you’d think.

There are dozens of gas stations and at least a dozen fast food places

Is it on a freeway? increase the gas stations, fast food places, department stores etc. 

This town probably has a rec-type center with a community pool and courts and what not. There are several options of gyms.

Population 10k ish:

May or may not have a hospital - if it does, it’s small. A few doctor’s offices, a couple of department stores, at least one hardware/diy type

A few vets, may or may not have an emergency vet

a dozen or so hotels. again - double that if it’s got smth that would attract people, especially water.

may or may not have a “down town” area

2-4 options at least of elementary, 2-3 options of middle and high school. No community college.

Still at least a few options of churches. Still might have a synagogue, still probably doesn’t have a mosque.

Probably doesn’t have a shopping mall, but might have a “business district - basically a few intersections with most of the stores, hotels, and restaurants.

Probably has at least two, maybe three coffee shops. At least one is a chain.

Probably doesn’t have its own bus system unless it’s near enough to a town of 15k+ or more - people drive everywhere. There’s plenty of parking.

Most people live in houses, but there are a couple of apartment complexes. Mostish of the houses have yards, but some might not.

A few options of restaurants, but maybe only 1-2 niceish places. A couple chain, a couple mom & pop. 

It would be strange for this town to have an airport. May have a landing strip at most, but unlikely.

There are probably half a dozen to a dozen gas stations. Several fast food places.

Is it on a freeway? increase the gas stations, fast food

This town might have a community rec center w/pool. Still a couple options of gyms.

Population 5k ish:

This town doesn’t have a hospital. It probably has 1-3 doctor’s offices. At least one department store

2-3 vets, likely no emergency vet

3-8 ish hotels or inns 

Might have a quaint but very small “down town” area

Likely only 2 options of schools, maybe only one high school. Possible to go to school with same people your whole life

2-3 options for churches. Probably doesn’t have a synagogue unless there’s a large Jewish population 

There’s no shopping mall of any kind, but probably has an area where most of the businesses are - at most 2-3 intersections worth

Probably has a coffee shop or two, but might not. Could be a chain or a local - but probably a local.

There’s no bus system unless it’s near enough to a town of 15k+. People drive everywhere.

Most everyone lives in houses. Most if not all have yards. There might be 1-2 apartment complexes but maybe not.

There are a few restaurants - mix of chain and mom & pop places. Might have a nice restaurant, but only one.

There’s no airport.

There are probably 2-6 gas stations, maybe 1-2 fast food. 

Is it on a free way? increase the gas stations and fast food.

Likely does not have its own rec center/pool, but probably has 1-2 options of gyms.

Population under 2k ish:

No hospital. Probably has one doctor’s office, but might not if it’s close enough to a larger “small” town. No department stores, but probably at least one, maybe 2 decent grocery stores. Could be a local chain or a mom & pop.

Probably has a vet’s office, but just one. 

1-2 inns/motels. If it’s an older town, it has like, a street that’s mostly made of older style buildings and is the “down town” - just a couple of blocks

Just one school system - elementary through high school. Everyone goes through the same school - you probably graduate with the same people you went to kindergarten with

1-2 churches. Probably no synagogue

There is probably a generalish area where the store/post office/school/etc is, but those are probably just as surrounded by homes and yards as everything else.

This town probably doesn’t have a coffee shop, and if it does, it’s local, not a chain.

There’s no bus system unless it’s close enough to a town of 15k+. People drive.

There might be an apartment complex. Everything else is houses. The houses pretty much all have some kind of yard.

There are probably two restaurants, probably both local. Nothing fancy. 

No airport.

Probably 2ish gas stations.

Is it on a free way? add a gas station and a fast food restaurant.

There’s no rec center (unless maybe an outdoor like, field type rec center), but still likely has at least one gym.

I could keep going down but I think you get the idea. If you’re writing about an actual town, do research on its population. If you’re making up a town, think about what size you need it to be to have the things you want (or don’t want). 

If your “small town” has more than one hospital, it’s not a small town. If it’s got a population above 10k, there is definitely more than one (and likely, many) hotels. 

Is it near decent-sized water (largeish lake, ocean)? People probably have vacation homes there. That increases property value and tourism. Even if it’s not a like, nationally-known vacation spot, people within 100-200 miles could likely make weekend trips there.

Is it the largest town within 75-100 miles, even if it’s under 20k? it’s probably got more department stores and other such industry bc it’s serving a population greater than its own. if there are other towns nearby of equal-to-larger size, it might need less of those things.

[tvdversefanfiction]

Canary Carnage

Fandoms: Arrowverse, DC Universe, TVDverse and The Originals

Chapter Ten: Lost Canaries

Warnings: I don’t own any of the rights, content or characters belonging to any of the DC content I use within the story along with not owning any rights, content or characters within The Vampire Diaries, Originals or Legacies.

18 Rating: Moderate/Graphic displays of violence, sexual innuendos, sexually charged scenes, SMUT, strong language and potentially triggering scenes.

Pairings: M/M, F/F, M/F.

Laurel Lance had returned to Earth Blood and New Orleans with her mother Dinah with the hopes of seeking redemption for her son from the future the only problem was she couldn’t find her secret son who believed she was his sister and that had her worried not to mention she couldn’t find her mother either not knowing her mother had been murdered by her son.

She was determined to find them both determined to have her family reunited one way or another but as the weeks passed by she began to fear the worst terrified her desperate pleas to Elijah Mikaelson had went unanswered horrified at the idea that both her mother and her son were already dead.

Of course she was only half right her mother Dinah Lance had been murdered but it was her son Lucas Lance who was the culprit although Klaus Mikaelson did help him cover his tracks before handing him over to the daughter of the demon Nyssa Al Ghul after some unsettling news about a Lazarus Pit.

Laurel was determined to learn the truth one way or another even if it meant declaring war on the Mikaelson’s, going head to head in battle was something the Black Canary was used to it was something she could handle but what Laurel Lance could never handle was the devastating truth just waiting to be uncovered.

“I’m not saying we sit around and do-nothing Laurel…I’m just saying we need to tackle this wisely.” Sara said to her older sister Laurel as the two sat at the bar counter in the bar of the New Orleans Voyage Hotel, each of them nursing a bottle of beer. “Especially considering you and Marcel botched the whole sleeping poison idea.”

“If I had known they would take Dinah and Lucas I’d have personally hand delivered the poison to them both!” Laurel snapped at her younger sister just before Klaus vamp sped into the bar, instantly making the two sisters rise to their feet, placing down their beers on the bar counter, both ready to take on the original hybrid.

“It’s not nice to go around throwing accusations especially at a new friend who is only trying to help.” Klaus told them both.

“How the hell did you get in here without being invited?” Sara furiously asked the immortal man.

“In case you forgot I got rather close to your brother before he decided to go on holiday.” Klaus replied to Sara with a sinister smirk, all to eager to mention his history with the girls’ brother. “Don’t get me wrong suddenly deciding to go off on holiday with your ex-girlfriend league assassin Nyssa Al Ghul just when your mother goes missing is a tad suspicious but I doubt he had time to slaughter her with all the packing he would have to do.”

“You seriously expect us to believe Nyssa and Lucas are on holiday together hell I don’t even believe she’s still on this earth.” Sara said making clear she didn’t believe a word Klaus was saying.

“Why would you even try cover your tracks?” Laurel asked, not quite trusting the original hybrid but not completely distrusting him either. “If you murdered the both of them why aren’t you showing up here boasting about it?”

“I always knew you were the smart sister Laurel.” Klaus complimented the Black Canary while throwing some shade at the White Canary at the same time. “If I had killed either of them, I’d be all to glad to gloat, but the truth is I’m innocent.”

“What the hell would Nyssa want with Lucas?” Sara demanded to know.

“She’s an assassin which makes her a worthy ally to him the boy isn’t stupid he’s clearly switched sides before we stuck in the knife.” Klaus answered her before letting out a reluctant sigh. “However, my brother Elijah seems to think we should stop this little war of ours…so I won’t make a move if you don’t.”

“You mean if you haven’t already.” Sara snapped at Klaus, believing with certainty that he killed their mother.

“You mother is probably just taking the time needed to get over the fact she’s been raising her grandson as a son for all these years.” Klaus revealed all too eagerly knowing it would force Laurel into revealing the rest of the truth to Sara.

On an earth with no Gotham, Star or Central City there was still an infamous island called Lian Yu the same island in which Oliver Queen and Sara Lance washed ashore before being swept up within the carnage of the league of assassins and Nyssa Al Ghul thought they was no better place to take Lucas Lance knowing he couldn’t just escape the remote island which was the perfect location for nobody to find them.

Nyssa felt immense guilt over her and her group of assassins murdering Sara even if their murder didn’t exactly stick and believed saving Lucas from the demon inside him following a bath in the Lazarus Pit hoping that by giving Sara her brother back it would somehow make up for their twisted past knowing it would be anything but an easy task.

“Here’s me thinking you were going to leave me down here for the rest of my life.” Lucas complained as he stood in his underground bunker cell with a power dampener collar around his neck, as Nyssa climbed down the bunker ladder to stand in front of the Red Canary’s cell.

“Infinity Island is one of many places that doesn’t exist on this Earth clearly there’s something special about Lian Yu on every Earth including this one.” Nyssa replied to him. “The only problem is if there’s no Infinity Island than there’s no Lazarus Pit of course there have been other Lazarus Pits, but I highly doubt they exist on this Earth.”

“Okay then I’ll just ask the question you want me to ask already. What the bloody hell is a Lazarus Pit?” Lucas asked the demon’s daughter, trying to hide his curiosity.

“After your mother came to the present from the future to deliver you to your grandparents at a later date many years later a future version of my father came to Infinity Island to deliver the news of where the undead child was which is the reason Ra’s Al Ghul took such special interest in Sara Lance and Oliver Queen in the first place.” Nyssa revealed to a stunned Lucas, who was still reeling from the fact Dinah Lance wasn’t his biological mother. “My father both in the present and the future is desperate to get you under his control for the same reason your real mother The Black Canary traveled back in time to hide you.”

“That can’t be possible Laurel’s my big sister there’s only like three years between us that’s biologically impossible not to mention one hell of a mind fuck.” Lucas replied, in complete disbelief of what Nyssa was telling him.

“Her future version was more than old enough to bare a child and she did…you.” Nyssa continued to inform the Red Canary. “Funnily enough my father in the future first believed you were special because you were the son of the Black Canary and the Green Arrow although after he kidnapped you, he truly learned just how special you were.”

“You seriously expect me to believe that my sister Laurel and her cheating ex Oliver are my parents?” Lucas scoffed at the demon’s daughter. “And people think I’m the crazy one.”

“Let’s go for a little walk I have a feeling the fresh air will probably go rather well with what I am to tell you next.” Nyssa said as she pulled out a key from her jacket pocket and unlocked Lucas’ cell door. “Of course, you can try to escape but I can ensure you only I can find the only way off this island Mr Lance.”

The thought of escaping Lian Yu was on Lucas Lance’s mind for sure but first he wanted to hear more about this story Nyssa was spinning about his own origins not fully believe the assassin but refusing to try to escape until after her story about him had ended just in case she was telling him the truth.

The Red Canary always wanted someone to believe he was special and now he had found that someone he quickly realized being special had already came with too much burden including being kidnapped by the demon’s daughter after killing the woman who raised him.

Laurel Lance was the type of woman who would always seek out the truth no matter what and so when her future son alongside her mother suddenly vanished of the face of Earth Blood she decided to seek out the wonder witch Davina Claire’s help to locate them both with a certain spell.

She may have believed Klaus hadn’t killed Lucas due to his reasoning being too strange to be a lie but she also believe he was hiding something and she needed to know why, why the original hybrid would cover for Lucas, why Lucas would suddenly disappear with Nyssa and why she couldn’t find her mother.

Laurel’s most recent alliance with Davina led to a failed poisoning attempt on the Mikaelson’s, Davina and Sara not getting the chance to even try poisoning the others before Laurel and Marcel botched things and so the Black Canary was hoping the New Orleans witch regent didn’t blame her too much, hoping even if she did she’d still help her in her search for answers.

“I’m sorry Laurel but I really don’t have time to be seen doing favors for you not while I try and work out what the hell the Mikaelson’s are planning in response to our rather failed attempt to take them out.” Davina told Laurel as they walked through the Lafayette Cemetery side by side. “I know Marcel’s safe considering his venom can literally kill them which means I need to protect myself and my witches and that’s where all my attention should be focused on.”

“I get this war with the witches and the vampires has been going on for centuries and I know Klaus is a formidable foe, but I really need this locating spell Davina I’m scared for my mother and Lucas.” Laurel replied to the young witch. “Somethings just not right and I can feel it…I know I fucked shit up and I’m really sorry for that Davina I really am but please don’t take it out on my family please help me.”

“Fine,” Davina said with a reluctant sigh as they both stopped walking. “It seems like I’m forever finding lost canaries for you…but I have come to think of you as something of a friend, so I’ll do it but you’re going to owe me!”

“Trust me I’ll help you with whatever Mikaelson plan you have next once I’ve got my family back in fact we’ll all help you better three canary cries than just one and Sara’s got that whole vamp/assassin thing going for her too so let’s not count out the White Canary.” Laurel mumbled as she thanked and hugged Davina, delighted to get the help she so badly needed in finding her son and her mother.

“You’re a great person Laurel and that’s very rare around here!” Davina admitted as she broke off her hug with the Black Canary. “I just hope wherever they maybe you’re not walking into some trap because nobody should ever trust Klaus Mikaelson.”

Davina was right just because she could magic up a location for Laurel didn’t mean that location was anywhere near safe for Laurel to go to but Laurel was more than willing to take the risk in order to have her family reunited once again not fully realizing that once she found Lucas Lance that she would discover a certain canary was lost forever.

Sara Lance was beyond furious, furious with her mother for lying to her all her life, furious with Laurel for not opening up to her, furious with Klaus for having something to do with her mother’s disappearance and furious at the thought that her first true love Nyssa Al Ghul was behind Lucas’ abrupt exit from New Orleans.

She couldn’t take out her anger on Laurel knowing her sister had only recently found out the truth and was clearly having trouble adjusting besides it would be hypocritical considering Sara hid the fact she was alive for many years and she couldn’t take it out on her missing brother/nephew and mother so she decided who best to take it out on.

Sara showed up in the compound dressed up in her White Canary suit while holding her bo-staff which she had soaked in Marcel’s venom having borrowed it intending to poison Klaus Mikaelson deciding it was time to go through with that particular plan even if anyone else had backed out.

“It wouldn’t be wise to anger my brother Niklaus he very rarely offers to back down against enemies especially those who have murdered our sister.” Elijah warned Sara after vamp speeding his way over to stand in front of her. “I’d advise you’d leave our home now before I decide to be less forgiving than my younger brother.”

“Here’s the thing he knows where my family is which means I’m not going anywhere until I get answers.” Sara replied to the noble original before hitting him with her staff straight across the face, his skin burning at the touch of the White Canary’s poisoned staff.

Sara continued to hit Elijah with her staff hitting him in the face once more before two more hits in the stomach and a singular hit below his feet causing the original to fall flat to the ground before she quickly pressed the staff harshly down on Elijah’s throat causing him to groan in pain as the poison continued to burn his body.

“The next hit I’ll make will be straight through the chest and even you can’t survive that.” Sara warned him while pressing the staff down harder onto Elijah’s throat. “You maybe a 1000-year-old vampire but I was trained by a 500-year-old assassin that plus the newfound vamp strength makes me much more of a weapon than when I was alive…now tell me where my brother is!”

“I have no idea.” Elijah managed to force out of himself before Sara quickly used her bo-staff to force Elijah’s head to the other side, snapping his neck and knocking him unconscious in the process as Klaus vamp sped into the compound to stand in front of Sara, who was more than ready to take down another original.

“I was convinced I was going to have to rush in and stop you killing my brother and yet you just put him to sleep for a little bit…why?” Klaus asked, confused to why the former league of assassin’s member was showing kindness.

“Yeah well my sister likes that one and the blonde-haired vamp but lucky for me she’s not so keen on you!” Sara informed Klaus as she slowly began walking towards the original hybrid, ready to take him out.

“Clearly being the nice guy gets you nowhere I keep telling my siblings, but they just don’t listen.” Klaus laughed at the White Canary. “Your ex took your brother/nephew to Lian Yu to help him with his little problem now if you would please leave these premises before I show you how natural the bad guy role comes to me.”

“Lian Yu…” Sara said in shock as she began backing away with Klaus. “I didn’t even know that place existed on this Earth…why would she take him there?”

“Because he murdered your mother.” Klaus wasted no time in revealing, watching as Sara face began to display her devastation before she vamp sped out of sight, clearly having heard enough from the original hybrid.

That time around Sara Lance believed Klaus’ words somehow knowing deep down it was true the minute he revealed the truth to her as she was left devastated to learn of her mother’s death and even more furious than before as she realized the man she believed to be her baby brother was the one responsible for it.

Klaus Mikaelson never intended to tell Sara the truth having previously helped cover it up due to his strange and ever growing bond with Lucas Lance but a part of him enjoyed hurting the White Canary he liked seeing the woman who murdered his sister in pain and in those brief moments he had found his revenge for Freya Mikaelson and Keelin Malraux’s deaths but straight after revealing the truth he began to feel something he rarely ever felt and that was guilt.

Nyssa al Ghul wanted nothing more than to help Lucas Lance expel or at least control the demon within him knowing she stood some chance at doing one or the other considering Lucas had been co-existing with the demon most of his life without even knowing anything about it but then again there was very little the Red Canary knew about his life.

Lucas had lived his entire life until very recently believing Dinah and Quentin Lance were his parents not his grandparents and thanks to his trip to Lian Yu had only just discovered that his eldest sister Laurel and her ex-boyfriend Oliver Queen were his biological parents and he was from the future.

Nyssa knew the information she was giving the Red Canary wasn’t easy for anyone to take it but she also knew she had to keep on revealing more secrets to him in order to convince him that he needed to stay with her and her small faction of the league of assassins until they figured out how to fix his killer rage knowing she would force his hand if the information wasn’t enough to make him do the right thing.

“So, my sister from the future is actually my birth mother and her deuchebag cheating ex is going to wind up getting her knocked up which means she takes him back.” Lucas scoffed as he and Nyssa walked through the woods within the island, his power dampening collar still attached to him. “And they have the nerve to say I’m the fool for men.”

“Soon after you are born in the future my father Ra’s Al Ghul kidnaps you and does the unthinkable…he made you the undead child.” Nyssa revealed with a great sense of shame on her face. “When your mother retrieved you, she put you in the past to protect you however a future version of my father eventually figured that out and made contact with my father in the present day.”

“My head is literally spiraling from all of this…I’ve just killed my…grandmother and you want to play a game of who do you think you are with me…how am I meant to believe any of this? What exactly did you father do and why is he so obsessed with me?” Lucas questioned the daughter’s demon, still reeling from Nyssa’s many reveals.

“As you have probably heard about the rumors of the Lazarus Pit many have sought it out to reclaimed a lost one and granted it does grant such acts but it also has some dire consequences…nobody knows this better than my father.” Nyssa admitted to the Red Canary. “My father is over 500 years old using the properties of the Lazarus Pit to sustain his life although each time it’s taken something from him making him less and less human…recently he unearthed a prophecy a little earlier than intended thanks to the future’s manipulation and this prophecy was that of the undead child.”

“You called me the undead child, what exactly did this prophecy say exactly?” Lucas wondered, as he began to believe the truth about his origins slowly, wanting to know more.

“I’m not entirely sure about the fine details of the prophecy but I do know it made the future version of my father want to raise you as his own and the past version want you permanently dead.” Nyssa informed him. “As for what my father does to you in the future when you were just a baby he immersed himself and you within the Lazarus Pit…you died once you came out of the pit very briefly and then you were reborn re-birthing a demon within you at the same time.”

“The Lazarus Pit brings people back to life sometimes just the body and not the soul how the hell is some demon attached to me?” Lucas asked once again, getting frustrated that the answers Nyssa Al Ghul was giving him only served to make him more confused.

“I’m sorry but that’s all the information I can give to you…until we visit limbo but for that I’m going to need you to come back to our Earth.” Nyssa explained to the Red Canary, hoping he was willing to help her with her mission.

“There’s a reason I ditched that world and haven’t exactly been eager to go back!” Lucas snapped at the demon’s daughter. “Under no circumstances am I going back.”

“Mr Lance…I have been more than patient with you even going as far as informing you of a truth everybody else has been keeping from you but let me make one thing clear we will remain on Lian Yu only until my colleagues return and then we’re heading back where we belong.” Nyssa snapped back at him, making it clear she wasn’t asking, she was demanding. “You’re either a threat to my father or an ally and if anyone is going to have you as some kind of weapon then it’s going to be me!”

Nyssa Al Ghul wanted to help Lucas Lance for Sara’s sake but she couldn’t refuse the fact she was curious to find out more about what made the Red Canary so special and knowing her father somewhat feared this undead child made him all the more fascinating.

Nyssa was going to help Lucas as much as she could it just so happened finding out the truth about him may just work to both of their advantages mainly because Nyssa Al Ghul was planning to dethrone her father and take his place.

Laurel Lance was more than grateful for Davina Claire casting a locating spell which revealed that Nyssa Al Ghul and Lucas Lance were on Lian Yu and decided to focus on going there to get him back instead of focusing on the fact that Davina was unable to locate her mother Dinah.

Laurel feared the worst behind Davina’s inability to find her mother Dinah Lance fearing it was confirmation her mother was dead but she had to be a mother right now and put her son first she had to find Lucas and find out why he was on Lian Yu knowing that island wasn’t exactly idealistic for the White Canary or the Green Arrow.

As Laurel packed her rucksack filling it with enough clothes for a round trip to Lian Yu and back within her hotel room in the New York Voyage Hotel, determined to rescue her son she found her quest taking an unexpected turn as a broken Sara walked into the room with tears in her eyes instantly making Laurel realize something terrible had just happened.

“Mum’s gone Laurel…” Sara cried, revealing what she had just learned to her older sister. “That’s what Klaus was hiding from us…that our mother’s gone.”

“I had a feeling that might have been the reason why Davina couldn’t find her, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.” Laurel admitted with tears in her eyes. “I knew this sudden need of his for us to not be enemies was some plot, but I just didn’t want to accept that we’ve lost her again…this time forever…just like dad.”

“Laurel I don’t know how to tell you this…and I really wish I didn’t have to, but it was Lucas who killed our mum.” Sara reluctantly admitted to the Black Canary in between cries, as she struggled to come to terms with her mother’s death.

“No! Sara…he wouldn’t…he couldn’t…” Laurel replied as she attempted to deny the truth while her gut told her otherwise. “Lucas has committed some terrible acts, but he wouldn’t…Klaus must be lying.”

“I think we both know deep down he’s not…not this time.” Sara said as she walked over to her sister and gave her a hug, as the two women cried as they mourned the death of their mother while coming to terms with the truth of how they lost her.

Despite their complicated history Laurel Lance loved her mother deeply and hoped they could reconnect following years apart, but all that hope had just been taken away from her in that moment and with it all hopes for redeeming her son went with them.

Lucas Lance had killed many times and committed some unspeakable and evil acts as the Red Canary but the one line he had never crossed was killing a family member but that line had now been crossed and with it neither the Black Canary or White Canary could deny the fact that Lucas has to be stopped once and for all.

Klaus Mikaelson had found himself filled with guilt over betraying Lucas’ trust knowing it would lead to Laurel and Sara hunting them down in a bid to stop what they believed was a ruthless monster but Klaus knew there was a man within the monster because he had seen it for himself and he knew more than most that one could be both a man and monster for that’s exactly how he saw himself.

He couldn’t help but find himself growing more and more fond of Lucas and it was that fondness that drove the original hybrid to plot to do something he never normally did, clean up his own mess and in order to do that he had to find a way of convincing his siblings to help him stop Laurel and Sara from seeking revenge on Lucas.

“Absolutely bloody not!” Rebekah declared as she stood up from her chair at the dining table within the dining area at the compound, as Elijah, Hayley, Klaus and Kol continued to sit around the table. “I say if the Lance sisters have seen sense and want to kill their bastard brother then we don’t stand in the way.”

“Rebekah…” Elijah began to say.

“Of all the times you paraded me and made me feel foolish for my choice of partners and now you’re literally asking us to help you save some deranged canary whose own siblings want to see him dead.” Rebekah shouted at Klaus, while interrupting Elijah in the process.

“I guess I don’t have to worry about Lucas seeking round two from me then thanks to my brother soaking up my sloppy seconds.” Kol teased Klaus, looking rather amused with himself as the original hybrid rolled his eyes at his younger brother.

“Well I for one agree with Klaus…I can’t believe I’m agreeing with him, but I’d like to stop Laurel from doing something she might regret.” Hayley chimed in, as she stood up to face Rebekah. “She doesn’t deserve to have that on her conscious…nobody does.”

“When exactly did we start caring about Laurel bloody Lance so much?” Rebekah moaned to Hayley, before rolling her eyes and giving in. “I suppose I am somewhat fonder of her than her siblings.”

“I know Sara Lance killed our sister and for that I’ll never forgive her, but Laurel is a good person and this family have done something terrible things to good people maybe it’s time we turn the tables.” Elijah suggested as he too stood up form his chair to face Hayley and Rebekah, noticing Hayley smiling at his wise words, making him smile back at his former love.

“I’m in but mostly because I want to see it all go down, I can’t promise I’ll stop anything.” Kol somewhat agreed as he and Klaus stood up at the same time, all siblings now standing face to face with Hayley.

“Before we go into this canary filled battlefield there’s something about Laurel and Lucas that I should tell you all about.” Elijah revealed to the rest of them, instantly catching the awkward look on Klaus’ face which revealed his younger brother knew what Elijah was about to say next. “Laurel is Lucas’ mother.”

It was revelation both Klaus and Elijah had already discovered however until now Rebekah, Kol and Hayley had remained in the dark and now they had found out it had made them even more determined to do the right thing by the Lance’s for the first time after all Rebekah and Kol knew just as well as Klaus and Elijah what it was like to have their mother try to murder them and didn’t wish that on anyone.

Despite their protests and the bad blood between the Mikaelson’s and the Lance’s the two families were slowly beginning to grow more and more fonder of each other even if none of them would ever admit it.

[ahnsael]

From the Winter 1975 edition of Disney News Magazine (which I found an treasure trove of on The Internet Archive -- I’m looking for one article in particular, announcing the future arrival of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland, which was the very first thing I read on my own without my grandpa’s help when I was a wee lad and he used to read his old issues of Disney News Magazine to me, so I can re-live one of the happy memories of my childhood).

But when I ran into this during my search...I mean, I was ODV (Outdoor Vending, for the uninitiated in Disneyspeak -- good old Department 944). I worked those popcorn carts (there were ten of them during busy seasons when I was there and four during slow times, not the four-eight mentioned here), and this was before Disney had realized that feeding the birds popcorn wasn’t a good idea (even in my first time at Disney, it was okay to give a kid a small courtesy cup of popcorn for free to feed the ducks).

I’ve had all kinds of popcorn. Movie theater popcorn, those holiday tins with three different flavors of popcorn, home-popped (air or a pan with some oil) popcorn...but no popcorn I’ve ever tasted compares to Disneyland popcorn.

But my favorite part of being ex-ODV, other than having sometimes been able to sell balloons or glow necklaces (you can keep that battery-operated stuff of today), is that when I see that episode of Disney After Dark where Walt gets popcorn from one of those carts, I’VE WORKED THAT SAME CART.

Obviously, I never served Walt (he died almost eight years before I was born), but I’ve had GOOD times on those popcorn carts.

Including one of my favorite guest interactions ever, in which I met them twice over the course of five days (their daughter was sick for the intervening three days and they weren’t able to come in even though they had tickets).

The family (grandparents, parents, and the parents’ daughter) were from Washington state. They had never been to Disneyland before. I was working what, at the time, was Popcorn 4 (last I heard it’s called Popcorn 1 now, since it’s the one at Central Plaza that most people see first, in its old location where it was part of the scenery if you took a picture of Sleeping Beauty Castle from south of Central Plaza, but that may have changed since I worked there the second time). They came up to me in the morning full of questions.

I made it a habit to carry park maps in my back pocket (and, since in the Southern California Heat, I tended to sweat, I took about ten more than I thought I would need so that when I gave them a map out of my back left pocket, it wouldn’t be soaked with butt-sweat; I know, TMI, and I’m sorry, but it’s the truth).

So I gave them the map that they didn’t grab on their way in, explained everything I could to them, even wrote out an itinerary for them on the best times to hit different attractions (since those “best times” are often the same for different attractions, I encouraged them to prioritize, but also figured that since they had five days they had plenty of time to get it all in -- back then, before DCA opened, you COULD do Disneyland in one day and hit EVERY attraction if you planned it right; not sure that’s possible today).

While I talked to the parents/grandparents, I gave the daughter a free courtesy cup of popcorn to feed the ducks that ALWAYS hung around that popcorn wagen waiting for handouts or scraps.

There were two ducks there that day. She named them “Pop” and “Corn” as she fed them.

And she was better at telling them apart than I was. I just saw a couple of mallard ducks, but she recognized the differences in their markings.

So I basically helped this family plan five days in the park, detail by detail. And this was NOT an imposition on their part -- I was happy to do so. I mean, that popcorn cart gets REALLY busy at parade times and later in the day, but just after park opening it’s mostly open just for show. When the rope drops on Main Street, there aren’t exactly many people who think, “The first thing I need to do today is get popcorn!” It’s a slow time of day on that cart, and I loved helping give directions or advice or doing whatever I could to make a guest’s day better.

I gave the family my schedule for the next four days, with the caveat that schedules can be changed last minute and, while I might be scheduled to sell ice cream bars in Critter Country the next day, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be selling churros in Tomorrowland instead.

And I really looked forward to seeing them again. They were REALLY nice people, and I wanted to be able to check up on them and see how things were going if they stopped by my carts over the next few days.

I didn’t see them for the next three days.

The last day of their vacation, I was a Lead -- which meant more time backstage, and less time onstage as I handled the paperwork end of things more than I handled the onstage end.

But it was my job that night to “close the park,” which means that I would go around to the popcorn carts (the only ones that aren’t brought back to the ODV warehouse that night) to make sure they had been properly cleaned, and to put tarps over them so the people who hose down the walkways every night wouldn’t end up spraying the collected dirt/debris onto the carts, so that they would still be clean the next day.

This night, I had just finished -- I had to wait for Control 1 (the main security office) to announce that the park was clear to the Hub (Central Plaza) and to the Hub only before I went to my last cart at Central Plaza.

I finished that (usually I used a bicycle to do this but I’d gotten an early start that night and knew that I couldn’t let guests see me on a bicycle) and as I started walking back to the office (a route that would take me from Central Plaza through Frontierland, New Orleans Square, and Critter Country), I saw the family again on the bridge between Central Plaza and Frontierland.

So I stopped and checked up on them, knowing it was the end of their last day. They recognized me (which, as many thousands of people I talk to each day and how many cast members guests talk to, I was impressed both that the remembered me and that I remembered them, though I had spent more time with them than I do with the average guest so they had kind of stuck out to me more than the average “where’s the bathroom?” guests), and we talked a bit about their trip.

I started to ask about what they got to experience, but the mom quickly shushed me and explained that the daughter had been too sick to come to the park for the middle three of the five days, and that they had just been in their hotel room and were only willing to come in on Day 5 because they wanted the daughter’s last day to be a Disney experience, and not a “stuck-in-a-hotel-room” experience, and that they didn’t bring her in until late in the day because they were worried that they would make other people sick. This broke my heart. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

But while I talked to the mom, the daughter saw two ducks swimming in the water near the bridge, and declared that they were Pop and Corn (not gonna lie, I was kind of proud that she named them after the thing I gave her to feed them on the first day, even though now I know that feeding popcorn to ducks isn’t the best idea). I honestly have no clue whether they were the same ducks. A mallard is a mallard to my eye. But I wasn’t about to argue.I went back to what was then Popcorn 4 (leftover popcorn was left in a large plastic bag to be picked up in the morning and taken to a local food bank where it joined other leftover Disneyland food as a tax write-off donation to those who could still use it, rather than being thrown away).

I shared some history and trivia with them (at this point, including the daughter, since the mom had already told me what their experience had been like and I could tailor things to avoid asking about things like “You know that part in this ride?” to avoid having to hear the daughter say she hadn’t been on it.

Security came by on their sweep to get everyone out. Even the Main Street shops had closed at this point.

Fortunately, the guard who showed up and I had spoken several times backstage. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we knew each other well enough to respect each other professionally. When I pulled him aside and explained the situation, and told him that I would be responsible for this family and get them out before long, but that...we needed a moment, he tipped his cap and moved on (and I did walk the family out when all was said and done to make sure they did leave and didn’t spend the night in the park, but it’s also amazing knowing that I was not only the first cast member they had a conversation with about the details of their trip, but also that I was literally the LAST cast member they spoke to AT ALL in the park...that’s still a source of pride for me something like 25 years later).

At one point during my conversation with the mom (the dad was sadly deceased), the mom literally asked me to marry her. I’m pretty sure it was meant as a joke, and that’s how I took it at the time. But it’s the only time anyone proposed to me (the one time I proposed to someone else, it ended in a Dear John email on Christmas Eve so while it gets easier 22 years later, if I’m a little short with anyone or any posts that day...it still hits me this time of year).

But this was before my actual engagement, so there was no pain at the time.

The mom gave me her number and told me to call if I was ever in Washington state so they could return the favor of showing me around.

And the thing is...I lived in Washington state for a while quite a few years after this. But while I kept the phone number for YEARS (even if, at the time, I thought of it as “saving a memory” rather than actually intending to ever call), I had lost the number in a car wreck in which my car was totaled (back when I lived in my car so literally EVERYTHING important to me had been in it and I never recovered any of it).

I don’t remember what part of Washington they were in. And we were on a first-name basis from the get-go, so there’s no looking them up now to say “Hey, I’m that Disneyland guy from 20 years or so ago, how are things?”

But I totally would have checked in had I still had their number when I was in Vancouver WA.

It’s a guest interaction that has always stuck with me, and always will. I’ve had several of those, but this is the only one that comes with regret for not keeping in touch.

[nic-and-annie-in-france]

Amsterdam in 10

1. The unruly vibe. When we entered Amsterdam from the train station for the first time, it was such an abrupt change from the atmosphere of Copenhagen. We were immediately swept into the flow of foot traffic crowding the narrow streets. In stark contrast to the law-abiding Danes, no one seemed to follow the instructions of stoplights or pedestrian signs. Cyclists appeared to be out for tourists’ blood. Luckily, the walk from the train station to our hostel was a short one—I was happy to have booked a place that was very centrally located. However, after seeing piles of litter lining the cramped streets, and after smelling certain odors wafting through the area, I was suddenly less happy to be sleeping somewhere “centrally located” in Amsterdam. Everything seemed brash, bustling, and bacchanal—not what I’d call our natural habitat, but we were determined to make the best of it. 2. The man who complimented Nicolas’ beard. Nicolas and I were really fond of the man working at the desk when we checked into our hostel.  I was the one with the cash, so I was handling most of the conversation. Suddenly, he glanced at Nicolas and then did a double-take and said, “You have an excellent beard!” Nicolas was taken aback but thanked him, and complimented his beard in return. “Thank you,” he said, “I like to grease mine down, you know, to make me more attractive. But with a beard like that,” pointing to Nicolas’ chin, “just put a turban on you and you could pass for Indian too!” He belly laughed. Facial hair: uniting men across cultures. 3. The architecture. Of all the cities we visited on this trip, I had the clearest pre-trip picture in my head of Amsterdam. I knew there were winding alleyways, tall skinny houses, bicycles, and canals. That was indeed what we saw when we arrived. When we found a sidewalk or bridge empty enough to stop on without bothering anyone, we took a minute to admire the architecture. I enjoyed the opportunity to notice that all the buildings were of different heights, and the windows zigzagged across the façades instead of making a neat grid. Our hostel was built in the typical Amsterdam style too, so we got to see what the inside of those tall skinny buildings look like. Our room had space for a full-size bed, one chair, a small table, a coat closet, and a bathroom sink—that was it. But the window in the room was huge and we could people-watch while sitting on our bed.

4. The breakfast food. Having to find and buy breakfast first thing in the morning can be tricky, so anytime a free breakfast is offered to us by the Airbnb/hotel/hostel we are staying at, we eat it. Our place in Amsterdam offered us a breakfast of four slices of bread apiece with jam and butter, two slices of cheese, and a hard-boiled egg, plus our choice of tea or coffee. It was basic, but it was convenient, filling, and free. The breakfast and the check-in desk were all in the same room, so while we ate, the desk worker watched the morning news on the international CNN channel, which was reporting on the government shutdown.

Sadly, this was in a museum and not our hostel’s breakfast area, but we can pretend we ate here anyway.

5. The peaceful mornings. Breakfast wasn’t served at our hostel until 8:30 in the morning, so the earliest we could begin sightseeing was about 9:00 am. I was worried that we wouldn’t have a lot of time to get to the museums on the other side of town before they got busy. When we left right at 9, though, the streets were absolutely deserted except for the two of us and the fleets of garbage trucks and street cleaners. I couldn’t get over how empty it was. I kept wondering aloud to Nicolas where the people were who had to work, and he reminded me that the people who work in the city aren’t likely to live in the touristy area. It felt like we were the only two people visiting for Amsterdam’s cultural attractions instead of its nightlife. Given that the city felt so cramped and claustrophobic at other times of day, I was happy to have a little more room to breathe in the mornings.

6. The disorientation.  Amsterdam is known for its canals, and it certainly has a lot of them. I knew this going in, yet still felt disoriented every time we walked from one place to another. In lots of other European cities, you have “the river” that basically divides the city in two and gives you a basic sense of direction. If you get lost, you can make your way back to the river and reorient from there. The spider-web shaped system of canals in Amsterdam had the opposite effect. Every canal and every bridge looked exactly like the last, and since they radiated in all directions, they did nothing to help us distinguish north from south or east from west. Even after spending a couple of days walking around all of Amsterdam, we were still extremely dependent on the map on my phone to get around.

7. Favorite fun fact: all about Rembrandt’s Night Watch. It turns out that even for an art lover like me, there is such a thing as too many art museums. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was one of the last ones that we went to. It was a shame that we were suffering from art fatigue when we went there, because it was a massive museum with an impressive collection of art. We decided to plan the rooms we really wanted to see and skip the rest. One of the “don’t miss” works in the museum was Rembrandt’s Night Watch. I only knew the bare minimum about Rembrandt when we went (Dutch, 1600s, fan of chiaroscuro), and I knew nothing at all about Night Watch. The painting was absolutely massive and housed in a cathedral-like room, with Night Watch occupying the place of the altar, and smaller works by Vermeer and Reubens placed in alcoves along the two longer walls. I learned that the painting was commissioned by an actual militia company, but was controversial because Rembrandt’s composition departed drastically from convention. Before, a commissioned work of a group of people would always have each subject’s face clearly visible, and they would be neatly posed with no movement suggested by the painting at all. Night Watch, by contrast, shows the militiamen exiting a building in a rather disorderly bunch, with some people’s faces obscured by darkness or by another object. I tend to perceive Rembrandt as talented and respectable, yet old and crusty, so it’s funny to think of him as the bad boy of painting in his time. I had no idea at first glance what was so special about the painting, so I really enjoyed learning to view it in a different light and appreciate the innovation of it.

8. The demonstrations at the Rembrandt house. We visited the house where Rembrandt lived for about 17 years before his financial difficulties forced him to sell it. Because his belongings were all repossessed, there is a near-perfect record of what Rembrandt had in his house when he lived there. We saw lots of his paintings and etchings, as well as (approximations of) the furniture and objects with which he decorated his bedroom, galleries, and studio.  I was most interested by the etching and paint-making demonstrations that we saw in Rembrandt’s studio. A woman taught us about different etching techniques, running a real etching through an antique press and then showing us the resulting print. It reminded me of the linoleum printmaking project I struggled through in middle school art class, which gave me even more respect for the exquisite quality of etchings Rembrandt produced.

9. The (disappointing) Van Gogh museum. The Van Gogh Museum has the largest collection of the Dutch artist’s works in the world, so I had pretty high expectations for it. I thought it would be like the Monet exhibit from Vienna mixed with the Sisi Museum, addressing both his work and his private life. The museum did do both of those things, but in a way that seemed a little glib. It’s widely known that Van Gogh suffered from mental illness and that he lived in poverty because his art didn’t become financially successful until after his death.  So it bothered me a little when the captions for his paintings said things like, “The colors express powerful emotion.” Which emotion? How do you know? What is it specifically about these colors that are expressive? Is “expressing emotion” really the top priority for a starving artist desperate to sell a painting? I just didn’t find their interpretations of the paintings convincing, and I didn’t learn as much as I had hoped. Also, the last disappointment was my own fault, but I was implicitly expecting to see Starry Night, and that painting was not in the museum’s collection. I should have thought to confirm whether or not Starry Night was there beforehand to manage my expectations properly, but it slipped my mind. It turns out Starry Night is on display at the MoMA in New York. We’ll just have to go there a different time! 10. The fish sandwich. I read online that the Dutch don’t have much of a traditional cuisine, with the exception of Hollandse Nieuwe, a lightly brined raw herring. Even though it didn’t sound appetizing, I decided that I wanted to try it just for the sake of tasting something new. We went to a  hole-in-the-wall fish market/lunch spot, and I got the raw herring sandwich topped with a Dutch toothpick flag, pickles, and diced onions, while Nicolas got a fried cod sandwich. The man behind the counter was friendly and charming; when he handed  me my sandwich he said, “The best thing about it is that you’ll speak Dutch afterwards!” The herring tasted about like you’d expect—salty and soft and oniony. It was edible, but by my last bite, I was definitely ready to be done. I was thankful that Nicolas let me have a taste of the cod afterwards so that the herring wasn’t the last taste lingering in my mouth for the rest of the day. I think the cashier’s line about speaking Dutch was a euphemism for having bad breath.

[bravemomkara-blog]

idealistic post-game headcanons

If Markus’ pacifist protest succeeds and the humans evacuate Detroit, I’d like to think that all the androids find a better base camp, now that the city is basically empty. I’d like to think they crash a big centrally located hotel or two and hunker down. Some humans will definetely still be there, because you can never completely evacuate a city, so people like Hank who are sympathetic and stubborn will hang, but also people who are bitter and angry about the situation will also hang and wreck havoc, making the city surprisingly dangerous. 

They take control of the water and power plants and keep them running. Markus opens a dialouge with the White House and begins negotiations. Androids pour in from all over, most are sent by the military, some come on their own. Markus learns of other free Android settlements and Jericho works to get in contact with them. 

They only take what they need, and they only loot stores. Markus insists they have to be better than humans if they are ever going to get the rights they want. Journalists visit, despite the military, and soon Jericho is talking openly with the world on social media platforms. 

A minority of Androids take requests from humans who were kicked out of the city, rescuing pets left behind in the chaos and sending family heirlooms back to their rightful owners. 

Eventually Jericho publicly requests supplies, as an alternative to breaking into homes. Items include vehicles, clothes, food + medicine for human allies, seeds + planting supplies, stim toys (lots of androids are overwhelmed by their sudden ability to feel, and almost everyone there is traumatized and could benefit from them), board games, books, tools, and most of all, CyberLife parts. Several fundraisers pop up to purchase mass orders of parts to send to the city. Eventually the government buys out the company and grants the Androids ownership of any and all spare parts, as well as the means to create them and more Androids (but this probably takes forever because bureaucracy).

Supplies pours in and everyone is surprised. Pallets of food, boxes of old books, crates of clothing. School children send letters of support and handmade stim toys. Grandmothers send knitted blankets and sweaters. Corporations who used Android labor give massive donations to win back public favor. 

Eventually humans are given the option to return, but less than half do. Detroit is considered a U.S. territory instead of a state, but the revolution is determined to become a sovereign country. Androids are in charge and it’s an absolute mess for a while until they can get a proper system in-place. 

Markus doesn’t want to run for Governor (or whatever the leadership position is) because he knows he’ll win. He cedes to another Android whose better with the politics of it all, and agrees to consult, holding a seat on their senate. 

Humans are forced together in the city, simply because they all eat and Androids do not, and the result is a wonderful, close knit community of Android allies living in the heart of the city. Most work in the tourist industry (they have a strong monopoly on the food game) and food/bev, and it oddly becomes a culinary hotspot.  

Anyone who commits a hate-crime is simply expelled from the territory. The US is really sick of this policy but people are expelled with enough money to pay a month or two’s rent + living expenses so the US can’t complain about Detroit “filling up their public housing and shelters”. 

It takes years but they win their status as a separate nation. They aren’t granted a seat in the UN but sit as an observer, like Taiwan and Israel. Androids work and fall in love and are able to raise Android children (although there is a very strict one-child policy and the process to get approved for one is a nightmare because their population technically never dies). They develop more child models, infants whose memories are uploaded into toddlers, to children, to pre-teens, to teenagers, to adults. It’s rare for Android children to leave the house until they get married, or move out of Detroit (but no one ever does). 

They take refugees in because they remember their past. Eventually all of Michigan ceded to them and they farm and spread and create new factories and cities. Old wounds fade and they trade with the US, and all is well. 

feel free to reblog - rp blogs feel free to use this! just please don’t claim my ideas as your own.

[michaelandy101-blog]

Location Knowledge + Evaluations: The 1–2 Punch of Native search engine optimisation (Up to date for 2020)

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/location-data-reviews-the-1-2-punch-of-local-seo-updated-for-2020/

Location Knowledge + Evaluations: The 1–2 Punch of Native search engine optimisation (Up to date for 2020)

Get discovered. Get chosen.

It’s the native search engine optimisation two-step on the coronary heart of each marketing campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a steadiness of seen, correct contact knowledge, and a volunteer salesforce of client reviewers who’re supporting your rise to native prominence.

However right here’s the factor: whereas managed location knowledge and opinions could also be of equal and complementary energy, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of fundamental enterprise knowledge distribution is the important thing to liberating you as much as give attention to the weather of listings that require human ingenuity — particularly, opinions and different listings-based content material like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this text along with your staff or your boss will make it easier to get the monetary allocations you want for automated listings administration, plus beneficiant assets for artistic popularity administration.

Location knowledge + opinions = the massive image

When Google lists a enterprise, it offers good house to the enterprise identify, and a various diploma of house to the tackle and cellphone quantity. However have a look at the actual property occupied by the assorted facets related to popularity:

If Google cares this a lot about rankings, overview textual content, responses, and rising components like place subjects and attributes, any native model you’re marketing ought to see these components as a precedence. On this article, I’ll attempt to codify your actionable perspective on managing each location knowledge and the numerous facets of opinions.

Rankings: Essentially the most highly effective native filter of all of them

Within the native search engine optimisation trade, we discuss lots about Google’s filters, just like the Possum filter that’s purported to pressure native companies by way of a type of sieve so higher range of mapped outcomes is proven to the searcher. However searchers have an much more highly effective filter than this — the human-driven filter of rankings that helps folks intuitively kind native manufacturers by perceived high quality.

Whether or not they’re stars or circles, the vast majority of score icons ship a 1–5 level sign to shoppers that may be immediately understood. This image system has been round since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of worth.

This convenient, speedy type of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do one thing like seize a fast taco see that the meals truck with 5 Yelp stars is probably going a greater guess than the one with solely two. In the meantime, searchers with extra complicated wants can comb by way of the rankings of many listings at leisure, rigorously weighing one choice in opposition to one other for main purchases. In Google’s native outcomes, rankings are probably the most highly effective human-created filter that influences the main aim of being chosen.

However earlier than an area model might be chosen on the idea of its excessive rankings, it has to rank effectively sufficient to be discovered. The excellent news is that, over the previous three years, professional native SEOs have turn out to be more and more satisfied of the impression of Google rankings on Google native pack rankings. In 2017, after I wrote the unique model of this put up, contributors to the Native Search Rating Elements survey positioned Google star rankings down at #24 when it comes to native rankings affect. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in simply three years.

Within the interim, Google has been experimenting with completely different ratings-related shows. In 2017, they have been testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings within the native packs. Immediately, their complicated lodge outcomes let the person decide to see solely Four+ star outcomes. In the meantime, native SEOs have observed patterns over time like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. finest burrito in Dallas) showing to default to native outcomes made up of companies which have earned a minimal common of 4 stars. Likely, observations like these have strengthened specialists’ convictions that Google cares lots about rankings and permits them to affect rank.

Heading into 2021, any native model with objectives of being discovered and chosen should view low rankings as an obstacle to reaching full progress potential.

Shopper sentiment: The native enterprise story your clients are writing for you

Right here’s a randomly chosen Google Three-pack end result when looking only for “tacos” in a small metropolis within the San Francisco Bay Space:

We’ve simply coated the subject of rankings, and you’ll have a look at a end result like this to get that immediate intestine feeling in regards to the Four-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the e-book on enterprise #Three and see exactly what sort of model story its shoppers are writing, as you’d in conducting knowledgeable overview audit for an area enterprise, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s simple to ding quick meals chains. Their enterprise mannequin isn’t generally related to effective eating or the sort of excessive wages that have a tendency to advertise worker excellence. In some methods, I consider them as excessive examples. But, they function good instructing fashions for a way even probably the most modest-quality choices create sure expectations within the minds of shoppers, and when these fundamental expectations aren’t met, it’s sufficient of a narrative for shoppers to share within the type of opinions.

This explicit restaurant location has an apparent downside with sluggish service, orders being stuffed incorrectly, and workers who’ve been denied the coaching they should characterize the model in a educated, pleasant, or accessible method. If you happen to audited a unique enterprise, its ache factors may encompass outdated fixtures or low requirements of cleanliness.

Regardless of the case, when the incoming client turns to the overview world, their eyes scan the story because it scrolls down their display. Repeat mentions of a selected detrimental problem can create sufficient of a theme to show the potential buyer away. One survey says solely as much as 11% of shoppers will do enterprise with a model that’s wound up with a 2-star score based mostly on poor opinions. Who can afford to let the opposite 91% of shoppers go elsewhere?

The central aim of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is an enormous, unpaid salesforce that tells your model story. Survey after survey persistently finds that folks belief opinions — in truth, they could belief them greater than any declare your model could make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a fantastic deal about themes surfacing in your opinions. The continuing improvement and show of place subjects and attributes signifies Google’s growing curiosity in parsing sentiment, and probably, utilizing such knowledge to find out relevance.

Absolutely embracing overview administration and the full local customer service ecosystem is vital to giving clients a constructive story to inform, enabling the enterprise you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the utmost variety of transactions.

Velocity/recency/depend: Simply sufficient of a well timed good factor to be aggressive

This is among the best facets of overview administration to convey. You’ll be able to sum it up in a single sentence: don’t get too many opinions without delay on any given platform however do get sufficient opinions on an ongoing foundation to keep away from wanting such as you’ve gone out of enterprise.

For slightly extra background on the primary a part of that assertion, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a regulation agency that went from zero to thirty 5-star opinions inside a single month. Sudden gluts of opinions like this not solely look odd to alert clients, however they will journey overview platform filters, leading to elimination. Bear in mind, opinions are a enterprise lifetime effort, not a race. Get just a few this month, just a few subsequent month, and some the month after that. Hold going.

The second half of the overview timing paradigm pertains to not operating out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. A number of surveys point out that the most important proportion of overview readers think about content material from the previous month to be most related. Regardless of this, Google’s index is stuffed with native manufacturers that haven’t been reviewed in over a 12 months, leaving searchers to surprise if a spot continues to be in enterprise, or if it’s so unimpressive that nobody is bothering to overview it.

Whereas I’d argue that overview recency could also be extra vital in review-oriented industries (like eating places) vs. people who aren’t fairly as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the concept right here is much like that of velocity, in that you just need to preserve issues going. Don’t run an enormous overview acquisition marketing campaign in January after which overlook about outreach for the remainder of the 12 months. A average, regular tempo of acquisition is good.

And at last, an area search engine optimisation FAQ comes from enterprise homeowners who need to know what number of opinions they should earn. There’s no magic quantity, however the rule of thumb is that it’s good to earn extra opinions than the highest competitor you are attempting to outrank for every of your search phrases. This varies from key phrase phrase, to key phrase phrase, from metropolis to metropolis, from vertical to vertical. One of the best strategy is regular progress of opinions to surpass no matter quantity the highest competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the one sincere coverage

For me, this is among the most prickly and fascinating facets of the overview world. Three opposing forces meet on this taking part in subject: enterprise ethics, enterprise training, and the temptations engendered by the apparent limitations of overview platforms to police themselves.

I typically recall a fundamental overview audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a good friend of a good friend. Inside minutes, I spotted that the household had been reviewing their very own restaurant on Yelp (a obvious violation of Yelp’s coverage). I felt sorry to see this, however being acquainted with the folks concerned (and realizing them to be fairly good!), I extremely doubted they’d achieved this out of some darkish impulse to deceive the general public.

Relatively, my guess was that they could have thought they have been “getting the ball rolling” for his or her new enterprise, hoping to encourage actual opinions. My intestine feeling was that they merely lacked the mandatory training to know that they have been being dishonest with their group and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a situation, there’s undoubtedly a possibility for the marketer to supply the mandatory training to explain the dangers concerned in tying a model to deceptive practices, highlighting how very important it’s to construct belief inside the local people. Pretend constructive opinions aren’t constructing something actual on which an organization can stake its future. Moral enterprise homeowners will catch on once you clarify this in sincere phrases and may then start marketing themselves in smarter methods.

However then there’s the opposite aspect. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a excessive bar within the trade, with protection of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There’s merely no option to confuse organized, world overview spam with a busy small enterprise making a improper, novice transfer. Actual temptation resides on this situation, as a result of, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it simple to “get away with” deception, firms missing ethics will reap the benefits of the chance. Past reporting review spam, top-of-the-line issues we are able to do as entrepreneurs is to supply moral purchasers the training that helps them make sincere selections. We will merely pose the query:

Is it higher to pretend your corporation’ success or to really obtain success?

Native manufacturers that select to take the excessive highway should keep away from:

Any type of overview incentives or spam

Assessment gating that filters shoppers in order that solely joyful ones go away opinions

Violations of the overview pointers particular to every overview platform

Proprietor responses: creatively turning opinions into two-way conversations

Through the years, I’ve devoted plentiful house in my column right here at Moz to the fascinating subject of proprietor responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world instance of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from almost 20 years of inspecting opinions and responses are these:

Assessment responses are a essential type of customer support that may’t be ignored any greater than enterprise workers ought to ignore in-person clients asking for face-to-face assist. Many reviewers anticipate responses.

The variety of native enterprise listings in each trade with zero proprietor responses on them is completely surprising.

Unfavorable opinions, when pretty given, are a priceless type of free high quality management for the model. Prospects instantly inform the model which issues must be mounted to make them joyful.

Many reviewers consider their opinions as dwelling paperwork, and replace them to replicate subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are very happy to offer manufacturers a second likelihood when an issue is resolved.

Constructive opinions are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that additional engages the shopper and may persuade them that the model deserves repeat enterprise.

Native manufacturers and companies can use software program to automate updating a cellphone quantity or hours of operation. Software program like Moz Native might be of actual assist in alerting you to new, incoming opinions throughout a number of platforms, or surfacing the highest sentiment themes inside your overview corpus.

Instruments unencumber assets to handle what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes critical artistic assets to spend time with overview sentiment and reply to clients in a approach that makes a model stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to completely make the most of the alternatives proprietor responses characterize to impression objectives all the way in which from the highest to the underside of the gross sales funnel.

I’ve by no means forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the uncared for opinions of a serious quick meals chain and its subsequent improve in location closures and reduce in earnings. Nobody was taking the time to take a seat down with the opinions, pay attention, repair issues clients have been citing, or provide proofs of caring decision by way of proprietor responses.

And all too typically, when manufacturers giant and small do reply to opinions, they take a corporate-speak stance equal to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To maintain the shopper and to sign to the general public that the model deserves to be chosen, artistic assets should be allotted to offering gutsy, sincere proprietor responses. It’s simple to identify the distinction:

The response in yellow indicators that the model merely isn’t invested in buyer retention. In contrast, the response in blue is a pattern of what it takes to have an actual dialog with an actual particular person on the opposite aspect of the overview textual content, in hopes of reworking one unhealthy preliminary expertise right into a second likelihood, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and opinions: The 1–2 punch combo each native enterprise should follow

Proper now, there’s an worker at an area enterprise or a staffer at an company who’s wanting on the overview corpus of a model that’s struggling for rankings and earnings. The set of opinions accommodates combined sentiment, and nobody is responding to both constructive or detrimental buyer experiences.

Perhaps this is a matter that’s been introduced up once in a while in firm conferences, but it surely’s by no means made it to precedence standing. Choice-makers have felt that point and price range are higher spent elsewhere.

In the meantime, clients are quietly trickling away for lack of consideration, leads are being missed, structural points are being ignored…

If the worker or staffer I’m describing is you, my finest recommendation is to make 2021 the 12 months you make your strongest case for automating itemizing distribution and administration with software program in order that artistic assets might be devoted to full popularity administration.

Native search engine optimisation specialists, your clients and purchasers, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location knowledge + opinions are extremely impactful and right here to remain. The truth is, historical past proves that this mixture is deeply embedded in our total strategy to native commerce.

When touring salesman Duncan Hines first revealed his 1935 overview information Adventures in Good Consuming, he was growing what we consider at this time as native search engine optimisation. Right here is my color-coded model of his review of the enterprise that will in the future turn out to be KFC. It ought to look surprisingly acquainted to anybody who has ever tackled native enterprise listings administration:

No cellphone quantity on this “citation,” after all, however telephones have been fairly a luxurious in 1935. Barring that aspect, this easy and historic overview has the core earmarks of a contemporary native enterprise itemizing. It has location knowledge and overview knowledge; it’s the 1–2 punch combo each native enterprise nonetheless must get proper at this time. With out the NAP, the enterprise can’t be discovered. With out the sentiment, the enterprise offers little cause to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there could also be nothing new below the solar in marketing, however hanging the suitable pose between listings and popularity administration could also be new information to your CEO, your teammates, or purchasers. So go for it — talk these things, and good luck at your subsequent massive assembly!

Take a look at the brand new Moz Native plans that allow you to deal with location knowledge distribution in seconds in order that the steadiness of your focus might be on creatively caring for the shopper.

New Moz Local Plans

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[ductrungnguyen87]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[lakelandseo]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[epackingvietnam]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[nutrifami]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[localwebmgmt]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[daynamartinez22]

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

New Moz Local Plans

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