Most of the ground you could win this month is sitting in a town you already drive through. Not a new service, not a bigger ad budget, just a place where almost nobody is competing for the search. Let's go find it.

A spam update finished running. Google's September spam update started on September 24 and finished rolling out on October 8, about two weeks. Google says it was a normal spam update, applied worldwide and in every language. Why it matters: if your rankings or your calls wobbled in that window, this is the likely reason, and it was not something you did wrong. What to do: before you change anything, look at your actual call and message count for those two weeks next to the two weeks before. Most of the time the dip people panic about never reached the phone.

Reported, not confirmed by Google: new merchant rules for listings and posts. A report says Google's content policy page for Maps and Business Profiles picked up a new section aimed at merchants. As reported, it tells business owners to keep advertising language out of the listing itself, things like limited-time deals, prices, and direct prompts to act, and to keep unrelated email addresses, phone numbers, and links out of posts. Offers and updates inside a post are still fine. The official policy page could not be opened when we checked, so treat this as reported. What to do: read your own business name and description back to yourself this week. If there is a price or a "call now" sitting in either one, take it out. That is good practice either way.

Here is an idea I keep coming back to, and it costs you nothing but five minutes.

Most owners pick their fights in the wrong place. You compete hardest where everybody else is already crowded in, usually the biggest town nearby, because that is where you assume the customers are. Meanwhile there is a smaller town twenty minutes out where two businesses show up on the map for your service, both of them sitting under thirty reviews, and neither one has answered a review in a year.

That is not a crowded market. That is an open door. Rankings are cheap where almost nobody is trying, and a business with thirty reviews and no replies is not really trying.

Your action this week: pick one nearby town you would happily drive to. Search your main service plus that town's name. Look at who shows up on the map and count their reviews. If the top few are thin, that town is worth a real push, and the push is the same thing it always is: ask the customers you already serve there for a review, and reply to every one. Your customers do your SEO for you. You just have to point them at the right town.

Today's post is the other half of that: Should You Reply to Every Google Review?, including what to write under a one star review without making it worse.

If you run that search this week and you are not sure what you are looking at, hit reply and send me the town and the service. I read every one.

Google Greg
Local Guide Marketing Academy

Idea spark: Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office.