Local Online Marketing

If you’re in any way social media-savvy, you’ve probably encountered Yelp before. (If you haven’t, it’s one of the leading review sites on the web. Users can post reviews of various businesses and interact with people who post other reviews. If you’re working with a B2C company and they’re not on Yelp, drop what you’re doing right now and get them on it!)

Last week, a new service called ChoiceVendor launched. Essentially, it’s the Yelp for B2B companies. Businesses of any size can create an account on ChoiceVendor and review other businesses they’ve worked with.

The implications for small and medium-sized businesses here are huge. As you know, Google Places leverages reviews from across the web to determine a company’s star ranking (hence, the importance of sites like Yelp for locally-focused businesses). Every positive review on Yelp can be extremely valuable to a company’s local search ranking, since Google places extra weight on listings with reviews.

Additionally, there’s an intangible value – the value of trust. If a customer finds a company where customers have gone out of their way to write 4- and 5-star reviews, they’re more likely to consider that company to do business with.

Which brings us back to ChoiceVendor. Up until now, small businesses haven’t had a great venue for their clients and customers to post reviews. With the deployment of this new service, that all changes. We expect to see Google indexing ChoiceVendor’s reviews sometime in the near future. If you have clients who operate in the B2B world, they would do well to make sure they have a claimed listing on ChoiceVendor, and try and solicit reviews from happy clients.

In the long run, the dividends will be huge.

**UPDATE 9/23/2010 – Looks like we weren’t the only ones to take notice – as of today, the ChoiceVendor team has announced that they’ve been acquired by LinkedIn. Congrats, Yanda and Rama!

Although the service is no longer available, we wouldn’t be surprised to see something coming from LinkedIn leveraging their data and technology soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet claimed your business on LinkedIn, now’s an excellent time to do it!

Tags: choicevendor, Google local, google places, local online marketing, local reviews, local search, yelp

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Latest trends, Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.