Potential client talking about "Geo Tracking"

[Nat]

I met with a potential client to talk about online review management and some seo. He's a local professional who has some unfavorable review site results and has two sites that are unfavorable to be in the top 10 serp. He had just gotten back from some conference and told me about 'some way of getting to the top of Google... that you do with clients in-office.' However, that's all he could remember. I wasn't sure what he was talking about, so I asked him to shoot me an email later on when he found the name of whatever this "newest way to be at the top of Google."

I just got his email:

Geo Tracking is what I was told gets you to top a Google, the best {Name_removed}

What the heck is he talking about and what do I respond to this? Is he talking about paid traffic?

 

[Flex]

Maybe he is talking about local manipulation. Local businesses will rank higher in local serps. Only thing I can think of off the top of my head

 

[Nat]

Maybe he is talking about local manipulation. Local businesses will rank higher in local serps. Only thing I can think of off the top of my head

He might be. The main issues is that he really has no idea what hes talking about. I don't really know much about local manipulation. I don't really know much about local manipulation though.

 

[SmokeTree]

Could he be talking about "Geotagging" where you add in location-based metadata to images, pages, etc? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging) It's not really "new", but it could be what he's talking about.

Offhand it sounds like the recipe for a nightmare client. The kind of client that will likely bombard you with every "one simple trick to top of Google" they find.

 

[Nat]

Could he be talking about "Geotagging" where you add in location-based metadata to images, pages, etc? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging) It's not really "new", but it could be what he's talking about.

Offhand it sounds like the recipe for a nightmare client. The kind of client that will likely bombard you with every "one simple trick to top of Google" they find.

That actually might be what he's talking about, but it doesn't make sense in our conversation's context -- we were talking about getting customers to leave online reviews.

Anyways, thanks for another possibility! I don't think this guy will be too terrible of a client since he wasn't actively researching anything, he just happened to be at a conference that mentioned something.

Possibly was talking about this.....

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I've had the (mis)fortune to watch quite a lot of local seo presentations at conferences or in conference video packs and the only thing I can think re: tracking is that one guy was talking about how Google 'might' be able to tell who has actually been to your store when deciding what reviews are real or not using Android.

It all sounded very speculative to me and would require google knowing which businesses have customers go on site, and which have you go to them etc...

But it also seemed highly irrelevant... my customers would only ever be getting reviews from former, real customers, so they'd all have been to the store, if that was appropriate behaviour for a client...

[edit - I guess if it was a manipulation tactic of some sort, I'm not a good person to answer, since I do all that boring 'play by the rules' stuff for clients...]

 

[Nat]

I've had the (mis)fortune to watch quite a lot of local seo presentations at conferences or in conference video packs and the only thing I can think re: tracking is that one guy was talking about how Google 'might' be able to tell who has actually been to your store when deciding what reviews are real or not using Android.

It all sounded very speculative to me and would require google knowing which businesses have customers go on site, and which have you go to them etc...

But it also seemed highly irrelevant... my customers would only ever be getting reviews from former, real customers, so they'd all have been to the store, if that was appropriate behaviour for a client...

[edit - I guess if it was a manipulation tactic of some sort, I'm not a good person to answer, since I do all that boring 'play by the rules' stuff for clients...]

Thanks for the help! I'm planning on "playing by the rules," especially when doing stuff for a client.

I'm just going to shoot him an email and list the possibilities that I think he might have been talking about, and then explain that what I'm doing is quite different.

 

[LinkPlate]

You can geo tag pretty much any piece of content on the internet and you will still not rank. Unless you know what your doing, geo tagging is not gonna help you and it certainly isn't the only thing Google will look at when determining your overall rank.