In the last 11-months, Google has made more changes than they had in the previous eight-years. Search optimization has been changing just as rapidly. Contrary to all the predictions two years ago that social media would be the predominant factor in search, social media hardly 'moves the needle' when it comes to search for most local businesses. Instead, it's online reviews that have grown in prominence both for local and organic search. Like it or not, Google has made a large part of your ranking based more on what others say about your business than what you say about it with your website. That being said, I'm sure everyone has experienced the frustration of how hard it is to get a consumer to leave an online review—only to see it filtered out, while bad ones seem to always get a free pass.

Unfortunately, Google's continual 'moving of the goal posts' and making online reviews more and more necessary in order to rank, maintaining visibility is not something we can make happen without you. Since your customers are the only people who can review you, it puts your technicians in the best position to get customer reviews for you. The reason for this is two-fold:

1. Your customers are twice as likely to take the time to leave a review to help the technician who just helped them than they are to help the company.
2. The best time to ask for a review is when your tech is standing in front of the customer they just helped. We all know that the minute your tech pulls out of the driveway—the customer has moved onto other things. 'Out of sight—out of mind' was never truer.

Because of this, we have spent a lot of time at Online-Access over the last seven months looking for, testing, and even working to create review acquisition systems that made sense for an HVAC company.

Early in March 2013, we found what we were looking for in an emerging system that made more sense than anything else we had looked at to date. It was a product that offered a system contracting companies could fairly easily implement to acquire online reviews. Best of all, it had some really amazing side effects as well! As we looked into it, and studied the few companies currently using it, we were 'blown-away' when we saw that, when set up right, it exponentially increased the company's organic search ranking in almost every city where the company using it worked!

The product I'm referring to is called Nearby Now.

Because I was so impressed, and saw what a positive effect this system would have on our clients' search presence, I began talking with the company to become a full reseller. Not only did we become their first 'agency' reseller, but we merged it into PagePilot so it would even function better than it does with its plug-in for WordPress.

Since reaching our agreement with Nearby Now, we have adapted PagePilot to work seamlessly with their system and put together training and marketing material to help make it easy for PagePilot subscribers to implement.