Getlisted.org now works in the United Kingdom.

We are pleased to introduce uk.getlisted.org
There are different platforms in the UK than there are in the US, and we went with the platforms that we feel are the most helpful for the UK and EU markets to be included with our UK version. There are also some basic differences between the US and UK versions of GetListed.org.
The first is that you have to input more information about each business, but we feel this actually improves our initial accuracy. Once you have inputed your info, there will be the same information shown as the US version about each business.

Here is a screenshot of the UK interface:

The UK version is actually a sneak peek at our new layout for all versions of Getlisted.org with top navigation and a different layout of the info so that we have more room to add helpful tips and explanations. Here is what a “business snapshot” looks like in the new design:

As you can see the new layout is a bit different, but allows for more information to be on the page. US users will also be seeing this layout in the future.

We have also started a trusted local SEO company directory page for the UK, like the one we have for our US version.

This is a public beta, and we would love to hear your input. The quicker we hear about bugs the quicker we can get them fixed.

To see the UK version, please visit uk.getlisted.org

Update: Read about this event on the Google Blog.

GetListed.org has been announcing a few cities lately, but I just want to highlight the Getlisted Local University in Minneapolis is where local business owners can get answers from the search engine reps of Google and Bing. This event is happening next Thursday in the Twin Cities on May 13th.
During the sessions and after the morning session I will be helping business owners take the first steps to implementing solid best practices for their business.

I want to again thank our event sponsors Google, Bing, ReliaCloud, and Deluxe for their support.

Google representatives Ryan Hayward and Ari Bezman will be there. Mikko Ollila, senior product manager for Bing, as well as industry leaders like Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, David Mihm, Mary Bowling, and Ed Reese will be speaking there too.

Aaron Weiche of Five Technology is spearheading the logistics for this one as well as speaking, so a big thank you to him.

To get details, please see: GetListed Local University – Minneapolis

(You can use the code “gl” to save 50 dollars)

Here is some coverage of our last event:

• Photos of the event
• Small Business Wins Big With Local University
• Looking back at GetListed Local University Spokane
• Getlisted SEO WorkShop

This means that small business owners can now see their status with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web, and Yelp too.

Below is a screenshot of  what GetListed results looks like for a business with Yelp included …

You can also see your latest reviews, a photo and a quick glimpse of how your business is listed on Yelp by going to the detail page …

GetListed.org is a free resource that overviews and displays how effectively your business is listed online.

Check out our new version (now with Yelp) and examine your business online here.

Yelp for business owners is Great in My Opinion

The majority of business owners who interact with Yelp seem to like it. I have personally helped several business owners get on Yelp, and they pretty much all have thanked me for it.

I highly recommend Yelp to small business owners. I recommend that business owners get over to Yelp and claim their business and interact with their reviews.

I also suggest that business owners understand the Yelp review system. Not every bad review will end up on your page, nor will every good review.

Yelp Review Filter Explained

Yelp just put out a video that gives an overview of their review filter and which follows up on the reason business owners should not ask people to write reviews for them (this advice was given out last year on the Yelp blog).

There is very little value in a review system which is manipulated and just like some people are unhappy with Google that their site doesn’t rank well, some business owners are unhappy that their reviews do not always show up. If you are a business owner and you have your friends and family review you it can be seen as spam. Many people who are unhappy with Yelp are people who have even stated that this is exactly what they did, they asked people to write them good reviews, the people wrote the reviews, and some of them didn’t appear on Yelp.
They then assumed that Yelp is “withholding reviews” so they can get money out of business owners.

Which simply isn’t the case.

Just like Google identifies links that have value, Yelp identifies reviews that have value.

A review coming from a Yelp user that has been using Yelp for a long time and who has reviewed many businesses is considered a stronger review than one written by a first time user of Yelp.

Some sort of filter is naturally needed to ensure that reviews seen by users are legit. If they did not do this, then a business owners could just create a whole bunch of usernames and make bad reviews about their competitors.

The very same business owners who are complaining now about not having instant good reviews on Yelp would also be complaining if Yelp let reviews go up instantly that were negative about their businesses.

Use Yelp Well

Here is a great video of a business owner who is taking full advantage of Yelp for his business…

Yelp is great. I highly recommend it. They also have a great blog.

There are people complaining about Yelp right now, but not many people praising them for what they have done overall, which is create some of the most trusted reviews on the web and a wonderful resource for both business owners and business customers.

I will be conducting a workshop at the Getlisted Local University in Minneapolis where local business owners can get answers from me about their specific businesses.
During the sessions and/or after the morning session I will be helping business owners take the first steps to implementing solid best practices for their business.

I want to thank our event sponsors Google, Bing, ReliaCloud, and Deluxe for their support.

Google representatives Ryan Hayward and Ari Bezman will be there. Mikko Ollila, senior product manager for Bing, as well as industry leaders like Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, David Mihm, Mary Bowling, and Ed Reese will be speaking there too.

Aaron Weiche of Five Technology is spearheading the logistics for this one as well as speaking, so a big thank you to him.

Our Minneapolis event on May 13th will be larger than our first Local University we did in Spokane. I do advise, however, for you to get your tickets early (even though this event is two months away, people are already buying their tickets).

To get details, please see: GetListed Local University – Minneapolis

Here is some coverage of our last event:

• Photos of the event
• Small Business Wins Big With Local University
• Looking back at GetListed Local University Spokane
• Getlisted SEO WorkShop

How to reach normal business owners with real advice about local SEO?

Google representatives Ryan Hayward and Ari Bezman as well as industry leaders like Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, David Mihm, Mary Bowling, and Ed Reese are coming together to do just that.

We are pleased to announce to have Google as a sponsor for our first event!  Getlisted Local University

When David Mihm and I created Getlisted.org our main concern was about everyday business owners who were sometimes getting ripped off or at least confused about what to do and how much to spend on their web presence.
We knew that that really didn’t need to spend much.
But how to get the message out?
Well funded, big players were selling them snake oil, and we were just lil’ ole us.
One of the things we envisioned was a city by city workshop.

We also wanted to see chambers of commerce, local papers, and non-profit business mentors like SCORE come together and get the word out.

Getlisted.org Local University is an event that will cater to cities that don’t always get the attention they deserve. It begins with Spokane, Washington on Feb 4th 2010.

We aren’t doing this to make a profit. In fact, 10% of all ticket sales for this event will be donated to a local business charity for that city.

To learn more about our first event in Spokane and how you can attend or be involved, please visit our event page.

Incorrect or outdated data in the local databases of Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, Superpages, Yellowpages, etc. costs your business leads, customers, and income.

Getlisted Enterprise is a local search analysis tool which solves this problem (click the image to see more detail) by allowing you to upload an excel sheet of your business locations (and their phone numbers, URLs, addresses, etc.) and compares the data that you provide with what is out there on the web.

An overall accuracy summary of how your business locations are represented on the web can be quite an  eye opener. In initial testing of some brands and partners displayed inaccurate listings to be in the 20-40 percentile range.

For business decision makers, it is hard to know how much time and money to budget for local SEM if you do not know the extent of the problem. On the flip side, businesses and internet marketing firms who service large clients or who pitch to large clients can really get the point across to their clients / potential clients by providing such a report.

The reporting is quite robust, and will tell you individually by business or platform what is wrong with your listings.

Here is a peek of the reports, an overview by platforms (click image to see details)…

This summary tells you at a glance about how your collection of business/locations are represented in each platform.

• Percentage of listings that were found
• Percentage of listings that are accurate / inaccurate
• Percentage of possible duplicate listings

This summary also displays “action items”…

• Number of Listings Not Found
• Number of Inaccurate Business Titles
• Number of Inaccurate Addresses
• Number of Inaccurate City-State-ZIPs
• Number of Inaccurate Phone Numbers

The percentages and the action items all link to a more detailed report that identifies the problem/problems found and highlighted ( click  image to see details).

These reports can be displayed and interacted with by location or by platform.

The enterprise tool is designed to be used by companies with many locations or those who service such companies.

It was made in partnership between GetListed.org and UniversalBusinessListing.org who specialize in the submission and dissemination of business information to search engines, data providers, and mobile directories.

The tool is currently in private beta, but will soon be available in a public beta.

Note: I am keeping mum about some of the features until we release the public beta.

Please send inquires or beta requests to pat@getlisted.org

Just to the left of the above picture (taken from a kayak) is my house, and just to the right of this pic is where the monk seal comes up in the mornings and if you go a mile up the road you will find the trail to Kalalau.

The picture however is of the restaurant next door to me.

The regulars of the restaurant include Pierce Bronson (one of my neighbors) and Matt Damon showed up as well, both of whom I have talked with in the last couple of days.

I just like to drink here. The view is spectacular as you can imagine and as it is surrounded by ocean, every seat in the house has an ocean view, including my favorite seats…

Those at the bar

In any case, I overheard the owners talking about websites and marketing and I mentioned I might know a thing or two about such things and got them to agree to allow me to use their restaurant as a case study for GetListed.org and a tutorial for other restaurant owners in return for my services.

My goal is to only do things that are free as far as the marketing goes. So I built them a website, and I will be taking advantage of local resources like Google business center, Yahoo local listings, Bing, and other places like Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc.

Long story short, we are going to see what can come of a brand new website and how many diners we can bring to a restaurant using only free techniques. It is one of the most comprehensive guides I have ever made. It will come out soon.

Also of note GetListed.org is about to launch a new Enterprise version which features more platforms, accuracy checking, and things like a one stop place to enter your business info and be listed everywhere, and of course if you have 5000 locations, no problem, we will allow batch uploads and you will be able to get a summary of which locations are listed the best and worse.  Which listings have incorrect addresses? We have that covered. Which listings have inaccurate Business names? We check that too. We check everything and report it. It is impressive, David Mihm and I have been working on it for months. I am really looking forward to the launch of it.

Until then I will sip my beer and look at the sea, and wait for the damn Bing mail verification process so I can finish my guide to marketing a local restaurant.

The guitar and voice of my old friend Anjela is in the background right now, some of her music can be heard here. It is good stuff, take a moment to listen. I have been gone for five years and she is still here. Yum. She plays here at the restaurant.

I live in a good neighborhood.

Another change is …

It looks like Google is playing with not allowing anyone but the business owner to change the listings, which if they follow through with will come as a great relief to business owners who have claimed their listings. To illustrate this let’s go to a business listing like the one shown in the image.
It used to be that if you clicked “edit” you would get another screen that would allow you to do so, but look what I encountered this morning when I clicked “edit”…

Addresses are very important for small businesses when it comes to search engines and local SEO. We all know that, but there are many businesses who still do not put an address on their website. Many more still do display addresses, but use an image to do so which search engines can’t read.

This tool is a small piece of functionality that GetListed.org will use for some of our upcoming projects (GetListed has alot of things in the pipeline). I felt that this functionality could be a useful stand alone tool.

The algorithm it uses is quite robust and this tool also breaks down the addresses it finds into their natural or expected pieces (“city”, “street number”, etc.) and the lists warnings or potential problems with the address found. We will be offering an API in the future to use this functionality (and other Getlisted functionality) in your mashups and local SEO projects.

See the tool in action here

Please note that this tool currently examines single web pages, not websites. This is a beta project.