We are excited to release our official Nearby Now plugin for WordPress.
Nearby Now for WordPress is an awesome way to add your live Nearby Now checkins and reviews right to your website. The plugin can be displayed in two ways:
Recent Reviews
One of the most useful features of Nearby Now is the ability to send your customers a review form before you leave their driveway. Since all reviews are tied to checkins, Nearby Now is able to geocode those views and display them on the Nearby Network map.
The Recent Reviews plugin allows you to display the recent reviews right on your website, including a map, and a listing of the reviews.
Here is an example of what the recent reviews plugin looks like:
Service Area Map & Recent Checkins
If you are using Nearby Now, it means you are building a service area that represents the area you work, and the neighborhoods you service the most. Your service area and heat map are displayed on the Nearby Now network, but we also want you to display the same service area and heat map on your own website or blog.
The Service Area & Recent Checkins plugin was built just for that. A simple way to display your service area, heat map, and recent checkins for your customers to see.
Here is an example of the service area plugin:
Configuration
Both plugins can be configured to display a certain location (city/state), as well as a map zoom level, a radius around the city, and the number of items you’d like to show. This is very helpful for those businesses that have multiple locations and host a page for each location and would like to display the plugin data in that locations context.
How do these plugins help you?
The Nearby Now plugins for WordPress help your SEO in two ways:
- You can create a web page for each city you service with unique reviews and checkins. Google and other search engines prefer that your website has unique content per page. Duplicate and static content is much less valuable, and Nearby Now is a great way to build that unique dynamic content and plug it into your site.
- The data that is published by the Nearby Now plugin is coded in optimized micro-formats. This helps search engines recognize the value of the reviews and checkins being published.
How do I get started?
It’s really simple. Download the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, install it like you would any other wordpress plugin. To get your API token, login to the Nearby Now Admin site and click on the WordPress tab. Your API key will be listed there. Copy that and paste it on the WordPress Settings page.
Once you have a token saved in the Nearby Now WordPress settings page, you can add the plugin to any web page or blog post. For example, if your business operated in Scottsdale, AZ, and you wanted to display your recent reviews for Scottsdale and the greater Phoenix area, you’d add a short-code to your post like this:
[[ recentreviews city="Scottsdale" state="AZ" radius="30" count="10" zoomlevel="10" ]]
If you have any questions or need any assistance with the plugins, you can leave a comment on this post, email us at wordpress@nearbynow.co, or post a message on our support site and we’ll help you out.
