Google has been very active over the past number of months rolling out further Panda updates, and introducing Penguin, all of which are keeping sites on their toes in terms of SEO. Our philosophy here at WhoseView has always been to produce strong engaging content in local reviews. For that we have been rewarded in 50% growth in Irish traffic since March 2012. Below is a snippet of our daily traffic, highlighting 14,596 visitors on April 30th. We have since exceed this, hitting close to 15,000 daily visitors.

Kerry Dean from Search Engine Land, wrote an interesting article highlighting Google’s recent updates. In it he mentions;

“On top of those changes that they have publicly documented, we are also seeing additional SEO-specific updates by Google. We’ve had a “page layout algorithm” update, Panda updates and even a bug in Google’s system that caused sites to accidentally be delisted.”

The article gives some interesting advise on how to ensure you stay on the right side of the path in terms of growing google organic traffic. At WhoseView, we’ll continue to stick to our principles of good content, all of which should continue to drive strong organic growth.

Recently we surpassed 50,000 local business reviews across Ireland and UK.  All 50,000 reviews are influencing close to 400,000 people who visit WhoseView every month searching for local services. With close to 14,000 phone calls being generated each month to local businesses, direct from WhoseView, you can begin to comprehend the importance of reviews in driving sales for local businesses.

While a large percentage of businesses still ignore the importance of online reviews, the business owners of tomorrow will embrace reviews as a key driver of footfall.

So what do I do all day on WhoseView where traffic peaks at 14,000 visitors on key days and members add an average of 100 new reviews every day (we now have over 42,500 reviews)?

The day usually starts off with reading of dozens of emails from members and businesses across Ireland and the UK. Emails from members vary…from asking how to edit a review, queries on their points, to queries on offers and vouchers. Every day we receive emails from businesses asking questions from how to claim their pages, to editing a photo or responding to a reviewer. With more and more businesses finding a higher organic listing on Google with reference to their business and reviews from WhoseView, the volume of queries has grown considerably. This is great for WhoseView as it allows us operate under a pull model of leads building.

As businesses can claim their page for free on WhoseView and members can add businesses, we have quiet a few requests each day, which requires us to verify the business listing before placing live.

Throughout the day, we are verifying business details as they are reviewed. As our site structure ensures only reviewed businesses rise to the top, we operate a daily process of checking a reviewed businesses details such as geocodes, phone, address etc, so ensuring our reviewed businesses are always presented with accurate business details. We also scan most reviews, although this is not always possible as some days you could have over 300 reviews posted.

On the development side we are liaising with our developers daily on pushing through enhancements to improve the user experience. On average we make about 15 to 20 minor changes a month, all with the objective of improving the user experience. There is also the new development work which I need to project manage on a daily bases. Although WhoseView is only 25 months old {in terms of public access), we starting the planning and building process over 44 months ago.

I try and spend time everyday analysing our analytic’s and sources of traffic. Today for example we are looking at a movement in our traffic from Google Local. With an agreement with Google (whereby we provide an XML feed of reviews into Google Maps/Local) we have managed to achieve prominence on SERPS where google presents a places listing. See an earlier blog post we wrote about this.

Later today, we are formulating our plan for targeting local businesses with our Big Deal Offering, coupled with recruiting businesses to test a new business product offering we are currently building. The objective being to better enable local businesses leverage their page and reviews from WhoseView.