LOC@L SEO GUIDE

I just saw a press release that said something like “There’s more to life than Google - Try Zuula Search”.  So I had to check it out because the good lord knows that we need another search engine.  And while I can’t say that I’ll be using Zuula for everyday searching I do think it [...]

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Gyutae Park has interviewed a number of SEOs including yours truly about their favorite SEO tools and software.  Definitely worth a read if you are looking for some ideas of how to improve your SEO productivity.
Have a great weekend.

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After my earth shattering post on using phone numbers for SEO, where I discovered that Merchant Circle had been using small business phone numbers in URLs, Kevin Leu of Merchant Circle pinged me to offer a bit more insight into their SEO strategy. Here’s what I found:

17.5 million page views on [...]

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My good friend Chris Bennett over at 97th floor just launched a public beta of his cool new web analytics tool, BLVD Status.  Here’s his blog post about it.
I have checked it out a little and it’s got some pretty interesting reporting, particularly for those interested in social media performance.  It’s sort of like Mint [...]

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My post on Keyword Potential™ generated some great responses and some questions.  I was surprised by the number of emails I have received about Keyword Volume so I thought I’d spend a little bit more time on it.
Keyword Volume is defined as the number of phrases that generate search engine referrals for you over a [...]

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As I mentioned in my post on how to improve page 2 rankings, boosting the performance of keywords you already get traffic for can have a great ROI.  But how do you see beyond analytics data overload to figure out which keywords have the most potential?  Here’s one way to do it:

First group your referring [...]

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I like helping my clients.  I do.  It’s nice to be needed.
That said, I’d much rather help my clients figure out some crazy new strategy v. trying to bring them back to life after someone pushed live some code that totally tanks their search engine traffic.
Mistakes happen, but if you are about to release some [...]

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How to figure out traffic for a term:

expected clicks by Search Engine and Rank (overreports Google)

Run an adwords campaign

Webmaster Central All Query Stats

Download and run through the Google Webmaster Central Stats Converter

Sorry - listening more than typing.
According to Richard Zwicky links from locally hosted websites will help you rank for local searches although Rand counters [...]

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of Enquisite.
90% of the search engine referral traffic comes from page one of the SERPs.
Richard just walked us through the Enquisite search analytics system which was pretty cool.  You can figure out how you rank in Google for your terms in different states.

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Jonah is with It’s The ROI.
Five Forgotten Metrics
Customer Lifetime Value

    First touch v. last touch (persistent first touch cookies)

Stolen ROI

Keyword Evolution - Brand Claims ROI

Buyer starts w short tail searches
Next tries long tail searches
Then buys from Brand searches
So the brand search gets all of the credit for the buy instead of the initial non-brand searches

Coupons [...]

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Laura Lippay of Yahoo.
The SEO Performance Grid:

Use a grid to balance SEO, PPC and Paid Inclusion
Find SEO referral gaps
Find SEO content opportunities
Make SEO Traffic & value projections

Grid Data:

Keywords
# Searches
Conversion metric
PPC Data
Paid Inclusion Data
Algo (SEO) Data

Now she’s showing a very hard to read grid that uses all of this data to show how much you can [...]

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Brian Klais of NetConcepts.
There’s more to search than rankings:
How do we evaluate channel performance and determine investment?
Brand to Non-Brand Ration

Non-brand search can be 40x over brand search if done right

Unique Pages

How big is your site in Google’s eyes
How many pages are being crawled/indexed v. how many pages you have?
Why are some of your pages not [...]

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All the pundits agree that video is an enormous opportunity for local online media. One of the challenges with online video has been accurate measurement of video performance. The big analytics co’s provide some data but it’s very rudimentary. That’s why when I saw the new web video analytics service developed by GlanceGuide, I had [...]

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Greg Sterling recently posted his 2008 predictions for local search and I thought it only right that I take on the 2008 predictions for local search engine optimization, particularly because Greg’s post never even mentioned the subject. So here goes:
(updated 12/29/08 to see how I did) 

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I had a great conversation at SMX Local with Mark Barrera of Franklin-Spirko , a SEO/PR firm in Frisco, TX, on the topic of what I call “Keyword Expansion” - the art of coming up with new keywords that you can use to attract qualified search traffic that you didn’t have in your original business [...]

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