LOC@L SEO GUIDE

VCs from Canaan Partners (Warren Lee), Trinity Ventures (Patricia Nakache) & Comcast Ventures (Michael Yang):

Patricia Nakache:
no one has cracked local impulse purchases - mentions Groupon

Warren Lee:
Skeptical that growth will happen as fast as Kelsey predicts because access to venture capital is not as easy. Venture capital is going to contract by 20-30% and fragmented nature of local with big capital requirements makes it harder to fund. (sounds like a lot of VCs will be getting into SEO next year)

Michael Yang:
It is not for the faint of heart on the VC side to spelunk in the local space (truedat)

Patricia Nakache:
Making shopping fun has a lot of opportunity.   A more curated, better matching experience than Craigslist is needed.  See care.com

Warren Lee:
Video.  Oh yeah and did I mention video?

Michael Yang:
Stay away from search and ad networks.  Video.  Leadgen & email are still interesting.  Commerce is more interesting than directory/media in local.  You need to be >1MM uniques/mnth to be interesting.  SEOd directories are a dime a dozen.

Warren Lee:
Invested in Associated Content at 1MM uniques/mnth.  Need 10MM uniques/mnth to get attention of brand advertisers.  Need to break top 100 mark on Comscore to get attention of ad agencies.

Michael Yang:
slightly backpedaling on his “not interested in SEO plays” but likes Associated Content/Demand Media because they have systems v. 2-3 people start ups which don’t.  IMO AC & DM started with no systems but used SEO to justify building them.

Warren Lee:
Shared risk models with contributors helps you scale up because the upfront costs are lower.  Content on the web has a remarkably long shelf-life which makes the biz model more scalable/sustainable.

Michael Yang:
Streetview technologies that allow users to have a virtual experience with the merchant before they go there are interesting

Patricia Kanache:
There’s an opportunity for the companies that owns customer relationships to be the advocates for the SMBs to help them figure out the right mix and manage their reputations

Warren Lee:
There are too many options out there for SMBs. A large group of startups out there that haven’t been consolidated yet.  Over the next couple of years we’re going to see a lot of start-ups fail.

Nice cheery ending to the panel.

Liveblogging Matt Booth’s & Neal Polachek’s forecast for SMB/Local media spending.  Enjoy:

Total U.S. Local Ad Spend should grow from $136B in 2010 to $144B in 2013.  Scary looking drop from $155B in 2008 to $141B in 2009.  A result of the economy and shift to digital.

Local Ad Spend by Medium: All mediums losing share except for digital/online

2013 Interactive Ad Market $58.57B -Search= about $26B of that

[Read more →]

I am supposed to be up there but given my lack of voice I thought it not such a good idea.  Here’s the presentation I would have given

ILM 09 Local Media SEO Presentation (it definitely needs narration so feel free to ping me with questions)

it’s pretty much a rehash of my SEL post: Don’t Give Google The NoIndex Finger

Hanan Lifschitz of Palore is speaking in my place.  Showing some data on what they have discovered by crawling different local search sites:

1.Only 14% of SMBs have claimed their listings on local search sites

2.64% of all businesses are only listed in 1 or 2 categories

3.Searching 20,000 local keywords for Orlando businesses on Google Maps, remarkably 20% of all businesses in their database show up on the first page of Google’s SERPs.

Now demoing their visibility tool - AmIvisible.org
Kind of cool you can compare your visibility with local competitors.

Hanan just typed a auto dealer in Memphis’ phone number and the service quickly showed that this dealer is the most optimized dealer in Memphis.  We can see how many categories he uses, which keywords he is targeting and which sites he is advertising on.  Very cool.

Now we’re seeing a less visible competitor and comparing to the above dealer and you can easily see why he is less successful compared to the top dealer.

AmIvisible is beta testing in only a few small cities but should be available nationally in a few months.

That was much cooler than my presentation for sure.

David Mihm now stepping up to the plate:

1. Maximize Your Internal Linking Strategy
2. Be Keyword Focused with Title Tags
3. Enable User-Generated Contetnnt
4. See Google as a Partner - XML sitemaps

Any important page on your site must be linked from your homepage

No more than 4 clicks from homepage

Use geographic anchor text when you link

UGC is great for long-tail phrases and creates distribution possibilities

Citysearch images seem to be showing up a lot on Google Place Pages - is there a partnership?

Google is starting to use more rich snippets in their results.  Add a CSS class that Google recommends to try and get your reviews/stars to show up in search.  Also try the hcard microformat.

Use an XML sitemap

Use KML to get your data on MyMaps pages

Creating an interesting map on your site and it can appear in the User-Created Maps section on Google pages.

Scott Knowles of AOL Local talking about how to use social platforms to get your info into search results.

David Mihm on Video SEO: Youtube is the place to be.

Yellow Pages headings are not search friendly.  Tags are.

Sivan Metzger, GM of the just announced Kenshoo Local, is up and talking about the local search marketing challenges:

1. Massive programs/thousands of listings
2. Cumbersome on-boarding process
3. Resource intensive ongoing management process
4. Cross channel geo-targeting/tracking conversions
5. Manual keyword & bid optimization

Huge surge in demand for SEM services from SMBs, however:

1. 30-40 accounts per account manager
2. 40 accounts x $500/mth @20% margin
3. = no profit when you are doing it manually

They are trying to get onboarding of new advertiser to under 10 minutes v. 1:40 which is where they see things today.

He’s walking through the ad creation UI - looks pretty nice in terms of suggesting keyword & geo targeting. Lot’s of buzzwords re optimization/conversion, etc.

The presentation looked good - he definitely gets points for having a great presentation UI - but on the surface it’s hard to tell how different this is from other local SEM automation platforms (Matchcraft, Webvisible, Yodle, etc.).  It may be just the UI which could be significant.

Interesting point - as more SMBs get online competition for inventory will increase making it even harder for any of them to achieve their goals.

DirectoryM is a huge local search network that most people in the local search biz don’t know anything about.  Here’s waht Panos had to say:

It looks like DirectoryM takes in a lot of third party data to provide relevant content. They either crawl and suck it in or they have a deal with the partner to provide it.

The examples are a local newspaper that provides news around a topic like childcare in their city and a national vertical like ParentsConnect provides additional content.  For a local car search, Directory M pumps in content from Car & Driver and then grabbed data from a state car dealer association, state DMV, etc.

I like what DirectoryM is doing.  The problem with most IYPs is that they are very broad and therefore a mile wide and an inch deep in most categories.  By creating vertical-specific experiences with third-party content they are starting to provide an interesting user experience.

1/3rd of the Chamber of Commerces in the US gave DirectoryM their membership lists via a single email inquiry.  Data hounds fire up your email clients.

Lost my voice at SES Chicago yesterday.  Thankful I made it out of O’Hare.  Since I am effectively mute I will probably be doing a bit of blogging at the Kelsey ILM 09 show.

Just came in to the pre-conference at the tail-end of a talk by Jeff Ferguson of Local.com on the different local marketing opportunities in Google.  Jeff gave an overview of the different local marketing opportunities available on Google - Adwords, Adwords for Maps, and 10/7 Pack SEO.  Sorry I didn’t hear the whole thing but I liked the point about writing content that targets local terms v. national terms.

Perhaps the most important point was made by BIA Kelsey’s Mike Boland when he mentioned my SEL post on Newspaper SEO and how companies need to start a skunkworks to experiment with search.

OK this has nothing to do with local search but it does have something to do with your search for the perfect holiday gift.  David Zelman of Half-Cocked Concepts has a knack for turning coffee table books into firearms.  I am getting this for my father-in-law for Xmas and I think he is going to dig it.

If you are considering going rogue for the holidays you might want to pick one up for yourself.  Make sure you have one of these on you if you find yourself in front of one of them death panels.

And if you’re looking for something a bit less political, I suggest you go with the “Martha Stewart’s Christmas” glock.

I’ll be there this Tuesday helping Steve McStud Espinosa make sense of this thing we call “local search”.  More info on Local Search Summit here.

If you’re going to be at SES Chicago you should definitely stop by.

In the olden days, as in before this week, you used to be able to get an idea of how many pages you had in Google’s index by searching “site:<yourdomain>”.  The resulting page would say something like “results 1-10 of 1,390,000″ which while not entirely accurate gave you a general idea of how well indexed your site was. Now with the official launch of Google Caffeine (update: I stand corrected, this is not a Caffeine issue but a new GOOG UI issue that I neglected to stay on top of - thanks Rhaghavan), the site: query no longer displays the number of total results (update: at least it doesn’t work for me but as you can see in the comments others have not experienced this yet).

While many people were unduly obsessed with this number, it did have its uses.  For example, while big swings in the reported number say from 10,000,000 to 236,000 were scary but irrelevant, small changes in the reported number seemed to be more in sync with SEO problems or fixes.

So if you still want to find out how many pages your domain has in the index how do you do it? [Read more →]

Just put a new post up on Searchengineland on some advanced Newspaper SEO strategies as a follow up to Chris Silver Smith’s piece from a few weeks ago.

Each year I do a post on Black Monday Shopping and how to take advantage of high value seasonal searches to target shoppers in your market looking for Black Monday sales.  While Black Monday queries are typically “national” in nature, there is a lot of potential to convert these queries into local sales. This strategy applies to big sites as well as small sites.

If you haven’t done so already I recommend doing the following asap: [Read more →]

TechCrunch ran a Newspapers Are What? post last Friday that got me wondering what Google might suggest for a few yellow pages queries.  Who says algorithms don’t have a sense of humor?

Yellow Pages Are…

And for the Sarah Palin crowd:
Yellow Pages Is…

[Read more →]

I’ll be speaking at the BIA Kelsey ILM ‘09 Local Search “Preconference” - sort of akin to sitting at the kiddie table at Thanksgiving - along with Mr. David Mihm, Chris Spanos of AOL/Going.com and BIA Kelsey’s Mike Boland.  We’ll be doing a site clinic as part of the session so if you have a site that just can’t seem to get any respect from the search engines - and that’s most of you from what I can see - you might want to be there.

Peter Krasilovsky, the Larry King of local search, just announced the final line-up here.

If you’re going to be at the conference and want to connect let me know.

I just sent an email out to a bunch of local seo types and saw this on the “message sent” confirmation screen:

[Read more →]

The web is all abuzz today with the news that Rupert Murdoch is threatening to block Google from indexing NewsCorp’s content. Jason Calacanis & the Blogging Maverick have both jumped into the fray encouraging Rupe to go for it and give Google the NoIndex Finger.

It’s certainly worth a shot and if he can get a lot of other big publishers to do it with him he might have started a powerful movement, but there’s a reason why the original headline for this post was:

“Rupert Murdoch = Howard Stern Without The Lesbians”.
[Read more →]