LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing:

…you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea change could easily result in far lower numbers of organic referrals. Companies which aggressively have been marketing themselves have often enjoyed placement within the 7-pack, as well as having their homepage ranked in the top organic results—real estate on the search result page in multiple places. Some even enjoyed presence in the top directory and social media pages that were ranking highly for the term as well. Under the new paradigm, these companies could lose overall referrals along with the spaces they enjoyed on the pages.

It virtually goes without saying that the change would negatively impact the CTRs of the sponsored listings in the right sidebar which will be pushed down by the new map position, too!

Over the past year, the Google Maps team has been working to reduce the amount of MAPSPAM that is rampant throughout the service.  But I still see plenty of it - check out Tim Coleman’s analysis of “new construction” as one of the killer local search ranking factors.

If SMBs lose access to a significant portion of page one inventory and traffic from their optimized IYP profiles gets choked off, I can’t see how this will do anything but increase the amount of SPAMMY techniques being used to rank in Google Maps.

In case you were in doubt about this spammy technique for getting rankings check out the “News” results in this Google SERP for this highly competitive query:

I’ll be at HostingCon in Austin on Monday July 19th where I’ll be speaking on the Local Search Ranking Tactics panel along with Curtis R. Curtis (no relation to Sirhan B. Sirhan) of UBL.org and Lisa Maier of Local Directive.

If you are going to be there please stop by the panel and say hello.  We might do some site clinic stuff so if you are having problems with your local rankings we might be able to point you in the right direction. Should be fun.

To: Local Directory Sites

From: Google

Subject: A Little Head’s Up

As you may have heard, we’ve been testing a new design for the SERPs we display when we detect a query with local intent.  In the past these results have typically been a mix of local businesses, local directories and other random sites that figured out how to get in there by creating compelling content and earning the trust of the Web community while in no way engaging in shady backlinking tactics.

As you know, it is our stated goal to organize the world’s information while simultaneously doing no evil.  In the past we have been happy to display those local directory sites with enough resources to invest in a good SEO program.  Many of these larger players were in fact good for our ecosystem as they typically helped bring small businesses onto the Web where they could learn about Google’s services.  And to be honest, we were too busy figuring out what to do with YouTube, Android, Chrome and DoubleClick to spend much time worrying about catering to the SMBs.  Frankly, we had seen several investor pitches from local SEM start-ups and were totally not digging the churn rates and customer service costs.

Besides, these companies bought a lot of Adwords clicks to fulfill their inventory commitments for their SMB clients, so we did ok anyhow.

But now, since we couldn’t buy Yelp, we have come to realize that perhaps showing links to yellow pages-type sites for local queries may be a tad on the evil side.   [Read more →]

My latest Locals Only article for SearchEngineLand is Franchisee SEO - Can You Trust Corporate’s Recommendations?

I often get called by franchises and by franchisees to help with SEO and too often I see the two working against each other.  If you don’t feel like reading the piece here are key takeways:

1. Franchises need to educate their franchisee partners on SEO before trying to get them to invest in it
2. Franchises should not sell franchisees untested SEO services from a third party that they have a financial interest in
3. If franchises and franchisees work together they can create a very effective national/local seo program

I have often wondered aloud why there has been no competitor to Adsense in local search.

Well, it seems like the industry has been wondering the same thing. Over the past few months we have seen the launch of CityGrid and there are a variety of mobile ad networks out there that are targeting local such as Where.

Now search-based online ad network Chitika has announced its LAX Local Ad Exchange. The platform will target local sites, search queries and mobile users. As far as I can tell this is an enhancement of Chitika’s current ad exchange. Chitika currently claims 80,000 publishers in its network. My guess is that they are now targeting specific traffic as local (they claim they serve 100,000,000 impressions/month on mobile alone) and working with big local advertisers such as Yellowbook to present relevant local inventory when they think the query matches local intent. Here’s their nifty graphic:

[Read more →]

Cari McGee pens a New Yorker-worthy piece on how Facebook can create incredible social-local experiences as seen through the lens of a woman who was downsizing and needed help moving:

But another friend of hers, (we’ll call her Mary), said, “No, you won’t. I’ll get others to help. No biggie.” And Mary rallied the troops. She called and e-mailed and Facebook-posted “Our friend needs help!” She had a spreadsheet created, shifts posted, donuts and coffee procured, and she was ready.

AND WE SHOWED UP.

Not to put a business spin on everything, but can you imagine if a local mover had seen this message and donated their services? The publicity would have been killer.

Via @mattmcgee

Fred Wilson has a great local discussion going on the AVC blog about how to shorten a Google Maps URL to make it easier to send. One of the commenters suggested checking out http://amap.to/

Here’s the shortened link for Pleasanton, CA: http://amap.to/evtp9

Pretty cool.

While I was on vacation over the past week, the guys over at Praized Media had the audacity to both coin some new business lingo (social media is now the “need” medium) and launch a new reputation monitoring/social lead-gen tool called Needium. I haven’t used it yet but it sounds like a pretty good idea.  Here’s how Sebastien Provencher of Praized put’s it:

Needium monitors social media sources and detects business opportunities based on local user needs and life events. It also listens for merchant name mentions to enable reputation management functionalities. Needium aggregates and structures that information in a Web-based dashboard where merchants can log-in to easily join conversations (and more) without having to monitor all social media sites individually.

So what he’s saying is that merchants can see what people are saying about them in social media and they can be alerted to conversations where a person might be expressing a need for the merchant’s service.

This screenshot gives you the idea. Check out the “Opportunities” column to see where a Boston hotel might want to jump into the conversation and sell a room:

Needium seems pretty clever from a biz point of view. It basically qualifies social conversations for merchants. That said, it will be interesting to see once a need is identified how merchants enter the conversation. In the hands of the wrong guy, Needium could quickly become SPAMium. But with a little social media training, Needium could fill a need that a lot of SMBs didn’t even know they had.

Merchant Circle just launched a City “Mayor” program designed to promote the most connected SMBs in a service area on the site.  As Greg Sterling, he of the newly redesigned Screenwerk blog, put it:

Because MerchantCircle gets so much traffic from SEO in search results this will also be a major SEO play for the SMB that is the mayor of his/her particular city.

Merchant Circle has long been a favorite of mine and other local marketers for its ability to rank profile pages for a variety of local queries.  Using the Barnacle SEO technique (so coined by Will Scott of SearchInfluence), pages on Merchant Circle and similar directory sites can drive a lot of free leads if you know how to use them.

I like the SMB gaming element here because to date the problem a lot of local directories have is with attracting advertisers and once attracted, getting them to engage with the service.  By giving the merchant an incentive to network, Merchant Circle has the chance to get their hardcore users to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them.  Seems like it could be a win-win scenario.

Just saw this release that Chris Winfield, Dave Snyder, Brent Csutoras, Jordan Kasteler, Loren Baker, Tony Wang and Danielle Winfield along with their colleagues at their various companies have joined forces to form Blueglass, a full service Internet Marketing agency.

This may not mean much to my readers in the local search world, but each of these people is the equivalent of a rock star in the search marketing world.  In search marketing consulting there are a few types of companies - big agencies, small/midsized agencies and individual consultants.  Since the market has been growing so fast smaller and sometimes even bigger agencies often share and refer work to each other.  There’s just not enough expertise/hands/hours in the day in any one shop to fulfill demand.

While there will always be a place for big agencies I have found that many clients want to work with smaller, more focused shops to get hands-on experience from people who do this stuff all day long.  But I think those times are changing.  By merging so much firepower into one shop Blueglass is probably formalizing what already were several informal working partnerships. Now instead of competing against each other the partners can share the wealth and provide a compelling service to larger clients who want to work with a “big” company.

I think we are going to see this kind of consolidation over the next year at all levels of the search marketing food chain.  Many of us in the business are all coopetitioning with each other.  These kinds of mergers are ways to get more coop and less petition out these arrangements.

And the reason I am talking about this is because I think the same thing should be happening in local search too.

Oh, and congrats to Chris, Dave, Jordan and all the rest.  See you out on the circuit.

Ok, here is a poorly formatted liveblogging of this session:

Maile Ohye of Google sez:

Talking about ecommerce issues where we have a site with 158 products but because of filtering there are 380,000 URLs, so Google doesn’t know what to crawl.

1. Maintain a consistent URL structure
2. Directories and filenames are case sensitive.  http://apple.com/itunes/ & http://apple.com/ITUNES/ are considered to be different URLs
3. Keeping consistent reduces duplication, facilitates more accurate indexing and simplifies your robots.txt configuration
4. 301s & rel=canonical are crawled much less frequently than 200s
5. 404/410 URLs are crawled less frequently
6. 500 errors are treated as a transient error. Pages not removed from index.  We will retry in the near future.
7. Use standard encodings & key=value (e.g. /product.php?item=nexus-one&category=mobile) v. non-standard
8. Crawlers interpret standard keys & values.
9. Use the URL parameter tool with Yahoo & Google Webmaster Tools.   Tells bots which parameters are relevant and which they can ignore
10. Indexing priorities:  Googlebot looks for what users will find relevant:  URLs with updated content, URLs with unique/important content (as determined by linking signals); Sitemap info and bandwidth considerations
11. How to increase Googlebot visits: Strengthen indexing signals via uniqueness & freshness.  How well the page is lined from your site and other pages on the Web.
12. Use proper response coes
13. Serve content reliably
14. Prevent crawling of unnecessary pages

It’s all about user experience.  Users come first and then the SEO.

4 Big Issues with SEO & IA Right Now

1. Categorization, Search & Browse: Amazon provides key categories on the homepage but as you click into categories you get relevant sub categories and links to important product URLs in the category.
   
2. Make Use of Link Relationships
   
3. Know Your Internal Link Profile
   
4. Content is more important than ever

Image Search Signals:

Content signals (color, facila recognition, etc.)

Attribute signals (ALT text)

Textual signals (captions)

Quality signals (pixels, etc.)

XML sitemap

Images inside of flash/js are hard for the bots to access.

Provide dimensions of each image in the href whenever possible

Formats:
Use JPEG for photos (strip meta when appropriate)

Use PNG for graphics

Use GIFs for small and animated images

If you register image with Creative Commons you can add more data to your image.

Provide as much info as possible along with your image:

EXIF
Tags
Geo
Pics

Putting images in keyword relevant directories will help (e.g. images/lady-gaga/)

According to Maile, the major signal for site speed is client side rendering

Branko Rihtman of SEOScientist presented an interesting idea about how to test SEO:

He calls the method “Multi-directional” experiments.  Basically here’s how it works:

1. Benchmark where you are (e.g. rankings/traffic for a particular keyword)
2. Test your theory by changing from State A to State B
3. Wait a bit (at least until the changed pages have been crawled)
4. Compare results v. benchmark
5. Change State B back to State A
6. Wait a bit (at least until the changed pages have been crawled)
7. Compare results v. #4 & benchmark.
8. If the change back to State A is similar to where you started then this might mean that your test is valid.
9. Use a professional statistician to help validate your data
10. Avoid personal bias

Some of the more interesting data that Mehdi mentioned:

1. When looking for a lake tahoe house rental, in a four hour session, the searcher repeats some queries as much as 6 times
2. Mobile search behavior gets users to intent much faster than traditional search
3. 40% of purchases happen two weeks or later after product search query
4. 70% of mobile search intent completed in 1 hour
5. 80% completed in one day

David Mihm has done it once again and published another edition of Local Search Ranking Factors.  This year David surveyed 32 local search geeks to get their takes on the top factors for ranking high in Google Maps.  The entire set of results is well worth the time for any business that wants to do well in local search.  For those of you who just want the goods without the verbiage, here are the top factors:

1. Claiming your Google Place Page/Local Listing
2. Have a Business Address in the City That is Being Searched
3. Associate Your Google Place Page with the Proper Categories
4. Put Your Product/Service Keyword in Your Place Page Business Title
5. Proximity of Your Address to the Searched City’s Centroid
6. Product/Service Keywords in your Google Place Pages Description
7. Associating Photos with your Google Place Page
8. Associating Local Area Code with your Primary Place Page Phone Number
9. Associating Place Page with Marginally Related Categories
10. Location Keyword in Place Pages Business Title