As Nearby Now continues to grow, and our WordPress plugin is being implemented by new businesses every day, we are observing the various ways the plugin is being used. One setup that has become common is to display both the recent reviews, and service-area heat map on a single page. This setup works well, but we did not design both plugins to be used on the same page. So we decided to build a new plugin that provides all the features that both plugins have to offer, in a single easy to use plugin.
The Service Area and Reviews Combination Map
This is our most powerful plugin to date and comes with three sections that are sure to improve local rankings and help convert visitors.
- A large interactive service area heat-map combined with review markers.
- A wide column of your reviews, properly coded so that search engines recognize them as reviews of your business.
- A narrow column of your check-ins, along with related comments and photos.
To get the most of out the combination plugin, place the short code on a city-specific page to provide a unique, rich, dynamic, and micro-formatted content that is specific to that city in order to bolster rankings for each city your business services.
Here is an example of the combination plugin from a customer:
Service Area and Reviews Combination Map
You can see a live view of this plugin here.
Service Area and Reviews Combination Map ShortCode and Options:
The short code: [ serviceareareviewcombo ]
- state=”FL” – Optional. Must be used in conjunction with “city”. Indicates the city and state for which the review and check-in content will be rendered in the markup, and where the map will be centered. If no city and state are specified, review and check-in content will be rendered without respect to its local city/state, and the map center will be calculated based on an approximate center of all reviews.
- city=”Orlando” – Optional. Must be used in conjunction with “state”. See above.
- radius=”5″ – Optional. If specified, may be used to filter rendered review and check-in content based on its distance in miles from the map center.
- showmap=”yes” – Optional, defaults to “yes”. If specified as anything other than “yes”, then the map will not be displayed, and only the rendered review and check-in content will be shown.
- reviewstart=”1″ – Optional, defaults to “1”. Indicates the starting review number to render, based on a reverse chronological order, and may be used for paging.
- reviewcount=”15″ – Optional, defaults to 15. Specifies the number of reviews to render based on a reverse chronological order.
- checkinstart=”1″ – Optional, defaults to “1”. Indicates the starting check-in number to render, based on a reverse chronological order, and may be used for paging.
- checkincount=”25″ – Optional, defaults to 25. Specifies the number of check-ins to render based on a reverse chronological order.
- zoomlevel=”11″ – Optional. Indicates the initial zoom level of the map, and may be a number between 8 and 14, where 8 is a larger area with less detail, and 14 is a small area with more detail. If not specified, Nearby Now will calculate an appropriate zoom level.
- reviewcityurl=”http://www.mydomain.com/service-area-{city}-{state}” – Optional. If specified, a set of url’s will be rendered under the title “Our Reviews by City”. Each city that has at least one local review will be rendered as a link that fits the specified pattern, where “{city}” will be replaced by the lowercase name of the city, and “{state}” will be replaced by the lowercase two character abbreviation for the state. If a city name has more than one word, hyphens will replace the spaces. In the example above, the url rendered for Fort Worth, Texas will be “http://www.mydomain.com/service-area-fort-worth-tx”.
- mapsize=”large” – Optional, defaults to “large”. May be “small” to render a small map, “medium” for a bigger map, and “large” for a large map. The containing element of the shortcode dictates the width of the map – this parameter adjusts the height.
- mapscrollwheel=”no” – Optional, defaults to “no”. If specified as “yes”, then the mouse scroll wheel may be used to change the zoom level of the interactive map.
- fblike=”no” – Optional, defaults to “no”. If specified as “yes”, a Facebook like button plugin will be rendered below each rendered review.
- fbcomment=”no” – Optional, defaults to “no”. If specified as “yes”, a Facebook comment plugin will be rendered below each rendered review.
If you have any questions or need help implementing the combo plugin on your WordPress site, drop us a line over on our support site and we’d be happy to help.
