By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of the new augmented reality app called Pokémon Go. If you haven’t, then you’re probably living under a rock. Anyhow, if you truly haven’t heard about it, Pokémon Go is a new mobile phone app that’s taking the nation by storm. Once installed, it’s a game that combines the “real world”, and allows players to play a virtual scavenger hunt of sorts, trying to catch animated characters. These animated characters appear in real locations, such as in a park, inside your home, or even inside a local business. If you have a retail location, you can take advantage of the Pokémon Go phenomenon, and entice customers to visit your location. This will increase foot traffic and sales. [Read more…]

When it comes to marketing your business online, building trust is a big deal. It’s something that not only will help you get more customers, trust is extremely important because if you don’t have it–it could be devastating. You could lose traffic to your website and you could lose sales. It’s possible that you don’t even know that you’re losing out on potential sales. More importantly, the search engines use trust factors as a part of their algorithms to determine your website’s positioning in their search results. [Read more…]

Update: I got a call from a someone who claimed they were a representative of Katapult SEO, based in San Diego. Apparently one of their employees had alerted them to this post, and they wanted to talk to me about it. During the call, I indicated to them that they needed to contact the original poster or recorder of the conversation, and that I was only reporting on this situation, as a blogger. [Read more…]

A court has ruled that Yelp must reveal the true identities of people who have left reviews on Yelp. Specifically, Yelp has been ordered to reveal the identities of 7 people who have left (bad) reviews of Hadeed Carpet Cleaning in Alexandria, Virginia. This court ruling sets a precedent for online reviews, and, more specifically, the reviews by anonymous reviewers on Yelp. [Read more…]

When you take a photo using your iPhone or Android mobile phone, the location data (latitude, longitude) of where that image was taken is usually saved in the photo file. Other information, such as the device that took the photo, and the image size, is also saved. The data that is saved in the image file itself is typically called “EXIF Data“. By editing image files before you upload them, you can add additional information to those files, which ultimately could help your local search engine optimization efforts. [Read more…]

I knew this was coming at some point, and perhaps we all knew that Google has been starting to crack down on local businesses who have their Google Maps listing using a UPS Store as their location. Now I have what I would call official notification from Google that this is not just a policy but something they’re starting to enforce: Google has rejected a new local business listing that has their address set up at a UPS Store. [Read more…]