LOC@L SEO GUIDE

IAC/Citysearch just announced a contest for third party developers to come up with “the next hot local guide app for the Web and mobile devices” on their Sidewalk.com domain.  It’s called the “Sidewalk: Right Here Right Now Contest”.

BTW - banana peel, fire hydrant & pigeon?  Subliminal messages?

Greg Sterling thinks this is interesting because it will help CitySearch come up with ideas that it never could do on its own.  This is probably true, but if I were a gambling man I would buy Zynga poker chips and bet there’s more to it than that.

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Geodelic, a local mobile search start-up, just went public with its funding and some screenshots.  I had the opportunity to get a demo from Geodelic CEO Rahul Sonnad about a month ago and I really liked what I saw.  While there is nothing really new about the basic idea behind Geodelic - find something local on your mobile device, what is new is their attempt at being a one-stop shop for local mobile search on your phone.

As anyone who has had a conversation with me about Web-based local search knows, I generally think all players in the IYP world have done a fairly poor job of [Read more →]

I just experienced a small earthquake in Pleasanton, CA.  My first instinct was to search “Pleasanton earthquake” on Twitter.  Here were the results I got:

I then did the same search on Google and found these results:
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Actually this conference was Steve Espinosa’s brainchild but he has brought in a bunch of luminaries including Greg Sterling, Atif Rafik of Yahoo Local & Steve Stukenborg of Google TV.  There will be a number of other local search rock stars including David Mihm, Will Scott, Gib Olander of Localeze, Mike Boland of the Kelsey Group, Court Cunningham from Yodel and more, including yours truly.

Local Search Summit is on July 17th, 2009 at the JW Marriot in San Francisco, CA.  Admission is $495.

Read the official announcement.

And here’s the agenda

And here’s how to get tix

Hat’s off to Steve for making this crazy idea of his a reality.

With the launch of Bing I was curious to see how much traffic it would drive to my clients’ sites.  So I dug into Google Analytics and pulled out the following data for ten sites of varying sizes (Note to Google Analytics team: please put Bing.com referrals in the Search Engines report instead of the Referring Sites report):

Bing Accounted for 5% of All Search Engine Visits
Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Bing Has Improved MS’ Share By About 2%
MSN & Live are still sending a bit of traffic to these sites.  If you bundle their referrals in with the Bing referrals and then compare them to all MS referrals from Monday May 18th, it appears that total MS share of search engine referrals has gone up 2.3% - I left out the data for one of the sites as we fixed a pretty glaring SEO issue that caused a dramatic jump in MS traffic.

Does Bing Have a Brand Preference Algorithm?
The sites that saw the most dramatic growth were “branded” local media sites (e.g TV stations, newspapers, etc.).  I asked one of Bing’s product managers whether Bing had it’s own version of Google’s brand preference algorithm (I am at the Microsoft Search Summit this week).  He speculated that these sites most likely saw big lifts because Bing has increased the presence of local news links throughout the experience.

Of course these first few weeks of Bingness (trying to work it into the vocabulary for you Microsoft) are more indicative of sampling and MS’ marketing push, so it’s all still up in the air, but I would say based on day one that Bing is well-Bung.

At least for one search…

Any of my readers who have sites that generate a decent amount of local search traffic and are looking for ways to increase their CPMs drop me a line at localseo-at-localseoguide.com.  I might have something interesting for you.

Update: This is not intended for local business sites (e.g. a local mattress retailer), but rather for local directories and similar sites

There are some great posts out there about how businesses can use Twitter, but I just stumbled across this LATimes article about a company that’s trying to get business by encouraging customers to stop using Twitter.

A boutique hotel chain, Broughton Hospitality, is promoting a “digital detox” called “Retweet With Broughton”.  They’ll give you 30% off a stay at one of their hotels if you hand over your IPhone, Blackberry, etc. when you check in.

I imagine some of the people I follow whose avatars appear regularly in my Twitter timeline might find this package enticing, if they could handle the withdrawal symptoms.

I could see this strategy working for restaurants and other places where all of us annoying mobile tweeters tend to congregate.

More on the promotion here.

David Mihm’s 2nd annual survey of my esteemed colleagues in the local seo world is now up. It’s a fantastic report and probably will do as much for the economy as the Stimulus and perhaps even more than TARP.  For those of you with ADD, here’s a summary of the top 20 factors on a scale of 5 to -5 where 5 means the factor has the strongest effect and -5 not so good:

1. Claiming Your Local Business Listing: 4.42
2. Citations From Major Data Providers + IYP Portals: 4.10
3. Associating Local Business With Proper Categories: 4.00
4. Product/Service Keyword in Local Business Listing Title: 3.56
5. General Importance of Off-Page/Off-Listing Criteria: 3.50
6. Positive Ratings Associated With Your Local Business Listing: 3.34
7. Volume of Customer Reviews Associated With Your Local Business Listing: 3.34
8. General Importance of Customer Reviews: 3.27
9. General Importance of On-Page Criteria: 2.98
10. Including Full Address on Website Contact Page: 2.86
11. Proximity of Address to City Centroid: 2.85
12. Quality of Inbound Links to Website: 2.82
13. Hyperlocal/Traditional Web Crawl Citations: 2.80
14. Product/Service Keywords in Local Business Listing Description: 2.77
15. Location Keywords in Inbound Links to Website: 2.71
16. Customer Reviews Left Directly at the Search Engine: 2.65
17. Location Keyword in Local Business Listing Title: 2.50
18. Product/Service Keywords in Inbound Links to Website: 2.45
19. Including City + State In Most/All Website Title Tags: 2.42
20. Customer Reviews Left on Third-Party Websites: 2.30

And the award for worst offending factor goes to…Multiple Local Business Listings With The Same Address: -2.02

Check it all out here

This post appeared yesterday on Merchant Circle as part of their “Guest Blogger” series but Tad Chef insisted I put it up on my site so I could get a link from him and who am I to argue with that? So without further ado…

SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search engines, is one of those things that is easy to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part. You’ve got a website and it’s not ranking in Google so well for whatever search term you are coveting. So what do you do?

Here are some (hopefully) simple things you can do, or even better tell someone else to do, to get your SEO strategy in gear:

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

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Update: This post may be out of date already.  Google just announced support for Microformats.  Doh!

You know I really should have written this post on HCards & SEO, but Michael Wolf Gray (oops) needs less sleep than I do. It’s a very fine overview of why using the HCard format on your website is probably a “rainy-day project” at best.

For the uninitiated, or understandably uninterested, the HCard is a way to add “structured data” to your site, meaning you define things like addresses and phone numbers in the code. In theory this makes it easy for robots to understand what your pages are all about without and could become quite useful as location aware browsers and the like try to figure out what’s going on.

I have not yet seen the use of HCard make a noticeable difference for SEO, except that it does make it a bit easier for SkyNet to become aware and destroy all of civilization in a ball of fire.

Here’s Michael’s actionable points summary:

* Put only one address on a page if possible
* For multiple locations give each location thier own address
* Try to match domain registration address information with on site information
* Make hCard formatting a rainy day project in the near future

But you should really read the whole post.

It looks like every search is indeed local now.  I just typed “andrew” into Google and I got a 10-pack with local business results with businesses that have “andrew” in their name.  Screenshot below: [Read more →]

Over the past couple of weeks there have been a number of new local search sites come out of the woodwork and I thought it was time to say hi and give them a little linkjuice.

Centerd.com - These guys just relaunched their site.  They are targeting things to do in New York and other cities across the US as the way for people to engage with local businesses.  They are doing some interesting things with local blogs and some nifty natural language technology to extract meaning from crawling what people are saying about the businesses on the Web.

GoMy - A nice-looking social-local reviews site for the UK.  Find reviews of The Selly Sausage Cafe (I need to check that one out definitely) and other restaurants in Birmingham.

YellowSpaces - I just got a note from CEO Constantin Manta that they launched today.  If you are looking for the best pizza in New York City, give it a try.

GenieKnows - Apparently these guys just got a facelift too. From what I can tell it looks like they are focused a lot more on social/reviews and de-emphasized the games and health content. Could be a good way to find Vancouver hotels.

Click2Connect - Another great way to find Houston restaurants.

I’m sure I have missed a bunch, so if you are new or just got a face lift, drop me a line and I’ll add you to the post.

Update: MyMapInfo, the SEO who was working on Artie’s site, commented on Will’s post that I had mistaken him for a spammer when he has been trying to get his client to rank well after the client was the victim of map spammers.  I’ll take him at his word and apologize for impugning his reputation on these hallowed pages.  That said, I do think MyMapInfo could have avoided this public flogging by not linking to his client’s site from the comment section of Will’s post which gave him the appearance of a comment spammer. And just to show him that my heart is in the right place if you need a 24 hour locksmith in New York I recommend Artie’s!

But read the post anyway - I think it’s pretty good.

Mike Blumenthal has written extensively about how locksmith spam has taken over Google Maps.  If they gave out Pulitzers for search bloggers, Mike would surely be in the running for this series.

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So Facebook and Twitter are getting all of the attention for providing APIs that let developers recreate their services on their own sites.  This strategy has in part led to Twitter’s growth explosion.  So giving away your data seems to work - and neither of these sites has a killer revenue model.

So why wouldn’t the big Yellow Pages co’s start giving away their data to smart developers who think they can build a better mousetrap - or perhaps a better way to find a pediatrician?  If this were the case I think 90% of the people I know in the local search/SEO world would spend the next 30 days launching vertical search sites.

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