Steve Jobs – I’ll Miss You

By Guillermo Jose Ortiz  |  October 6, 2011  |  Uncategorized

Steve Jobs Tribute Apple.comToday the world has lost a visionary, a brilliant marketer, and a person who built a company that transcended branding. Steve Jobs has served as a personal inspiration to me in the realm of business and as I type this very blog post on a Macbook Pro, I can’t help but quickly recall the many different ways that his products and company have changed my life. From watching Toy Story for the very first time when I was younger, to crafting PPC, SEO, and web design projects on the different mac computers I have owned. One of the biggest things I admired about Steve Jobs was his dedication to his vision at Apple and how he would often personally respond to emails that people would send to his very well known email address. He was a man who was not driven by money, but ambition and that is a rare quality in today’s world where money is such a motivating factor for so many people. Watching Steve Jobs at work was like watching a master craftsmen outdo his last performance – everytime. I hope that in growing my company I can at times use Steve’s brilliance as an inspiration. I will miss you Steve.

Google Says 3rd Party Review Sites More Valuable Than Google Places

By Guillermo Jose Ortiz  |  October 2, 2011  |  Local SEO

The customer lobby blog has highlighted an interesting snippet of information regarding Google Places page reviews and just who gets the majority of clicks when a searcher is poking through the search results.

From Google’s Response to their Senate Hearing:

  1. CLAIM: “Is a consumer (or a small business, for that matter) well served when Google artificially promotes its own properties regardless of merit? This has nothing to do with helping consumers get to the best information; it has everything to do with generating more revenue.”RESPONSE: In fact, most of the click traffic (roughly two-thirds of clicks) from our local search result pages goes directly to small business websites, and review sites make up the next largest percentage (about a quarter of clicks). Less than 10% of clicks from our local results page go to Google Place Pages.

This just goes to show that it is extremely important to claim your Google Places page, but it is possibly more important to properly seek out citations and aggregate your business data to different 3rd party sources such as Customer Lobby, Insiderpages, and other local small business listing sites.