Welcome to the Friday website review, where every week I randomly review the website of a local retail jewelry business somewhere in the US. The goal is to find something good, or bad, that we can all learn from and apply to our own business.

For this week's review, I'm heading over to Washington state and searching for "fine jewelry stores bellevue wa." When doing these searches, I always use the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode. This allows me to see non-personalized search results.

In case you don't know, Google trac...
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Local search results are BIG!

Okay, honestly they aren't anything big; they're not even new. Google started development on local search results way back in 2003. They called it Google Local back then, and they tried to educate owners that they should list their businesses in the system.

When did you sign up with Google Local, Google Maps, Google Business Center or Google Places? Those are all the names they've called the service since 2003. Have you even done it yet?

In this particular case, the jewelry industry is not alone. Even though most jewelers are slow to adopt new technology, Google discovered that only a small percentage of local businesses had registered. So in August 2010, Google loaded a database of about 50 million local businesses.

Literally overnight, every town had at least 1 new jewelry ...
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