LOC@L SEO GUIDE

For those in the know, Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst Haus was the best place in Silicon Valley to get a smoked pork chop, a pickled pigs foot or a tub of duck fat. Unfortunately, last year a faulty smoker caused a fire and Dittmers had to shut down while it moved locations and rebuilt. During the agonizingly long hiatus, Dittmer’s has run a pretty awesome Facebook page to keep fans updated on when the new Los Altos location will reopen.

If you want to see how an expert social communications program is done, browse through their updates. All along the way they have been posting photos of the construction and asking fans to chime in. On July 5th, they unveiled the new smoker and asked for suggestions on what they should smoke first. 180 comments later, looks like they picked a winner:

I know, I know. You’re saying to yourself “But Dittmer’s is a legend. Customers loved them. Of course they have a loyal, active following on Facebook.” To which I say, “Exactly”.

Is your service as smoking as Dittmer’s?

I always get them confused…

Now that Marissa Mayer is taking the helm at Yahoo!, I wonder if this means Yahoo Local is going to get some much-needed attention.

A few years ago, an insider told me that Yahoo Local got nine million daily visits just from Google. That number has almost certainly declined, but I’ve got to believe the service still gets substantial traffic from search engines, third party sites and Yahoo properties.

There’s so much potential there and Mayer’s time working on Google Local could mean she might look to Yahoo Local for some quick wins (as if there were such a thing in Local).

To be continued…

  image from sodahead

 
16 years ago I participated in something called “Project Ohio” – the partnership between NBC and Microsoft to create the awesomely named MSNBC. Today NBC is buying full control of MSNBC from Microsoft and is changing MSNBC.com to NBCNews.com – only they forgot to tell the SEO guy.

Go to www.msnbc.com and you get 301 redirected to www.msnbc.msn.com – all good – and then you get 302 redirected to www.nbcnews.com. Oops!

So now when you go to Google and search “nbc news” you get this:

Looks like a rush job to me. Curious if their organic is tanking tonight?

1. Don’t block Googlebot or Bingbot from crawling your site in your robots.txt file

2. Don’t serve 403 response codes to a browser when the user-agent = Googlebot or Bingbot

3. Check out #1 Search Engine Ranking Factor: SEO QA

And every little thing gonna be alright…

This past February, in  The Non-Place-Place Use Case I posted about how Google was delisting businesses that did not service customers at their locations but had not requested their addresses be hidden on Google Maps.  Mike, Miriam and others chimed in on how lame this was.   Today, I got this email about this “recent” update:

Guess they were busy with the Glasses thing…

From the get-go, Yelp has always been a spammer’s paradise.  Within a day or two of Yelp launching member profile photos, Jeremy Stoppleman emailed me asking me to stop spamming Yelp simply because I used another member’s photo for my own to test out the functionality. I take great pride in having beem Yelp Spammer Zero.

Since then, as Yelp has grown in popularity and importance, the number of businesses and their agents trying to manipulate the service has gone through the roof.  Yelp has done a pretty good job of killing a lot of SPAM, but as we can see with Google, dealing with this stuff is like putting your fingers in the dike hole only to watch 1,000 other holes burst open.  With any popular UGC Web service SPAM is to be expected, but some of the stuff I have seen on Yelp is just plain ridiculous.

So when the lads at Dream Systems Media and I were talking about how bone-headed some of these Yelp Spammers were, they whipped up this classic collection of helpful tips on how to use SPAM Yelp.  Now I am no fan of spammers, but, as the great master himself, George Michael, said nearly thirty years ago, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”

Chuck Skoda on Apple Passbook from his post, A Week With iOS6:

Passbook is a bit of a strange one. To me, it’s this years Newsstand. Newsstand still sits empty on my last page of apps. There isn’t a single publication I’ve seen that has enticed me to pull the trigger on a subscription, and I haven’t seen any free content worth reading either. I can’t see Passbook being useful to me in the short term. Scott Forstall billed it as one place to store all your passes. Well, currently I already have that. The Starbucks app is the only “pass” that I’ve made any use of in practice. The airline I frequent doesn’t support electronic boarding passes, and my local movie theater doesn’t use Fandango.

As of today, it’s hard to imagine this helping me for at least a number of months if not years. In last weeks “Live From WWDC” episode of The Talk Show, John and Cabel talk about it as a “half-way point” to being able to leave your wallet behind. Maybe they’re right, but to me it looks more like an eighth-way point right now.

I’ll have to re-watch Forstall’s Passbook demo, but to me the whole Fandango/plane ticket thing is a bit of a red-herring, or at least an obfuscation of what Passbook in the hands of millions could do when it comes to local.

Groupon and its ilk have proven we are a deal-crazy culture.  ”Specials” are an important part of the UI in Foursquare’s new version.  We are up to our neck in customer loyalty start-ups.  And we need a better way than the SPAM filter to organize all of the local deal noise coming at us.

Once it launches, I am pretty sure that there is some kind of API involved that allows app developers content to show up in the Passbook app.  Sure, you still might use your Starbucks app, but why would you when your Starbucks points and your Groupons, Foursquare Specials, Level-Ups, etc. all start showing up in your Passbook?

It’s quite possible that soon after launch, Passbook moves way past the eighth-way point.

If Apple Passbook isn’t the future of local online commerce, it’s at least one of them.

Didn’t want to get anything done today anyhow. David Mihm’s latest edition of the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey is now out. As tradition dictates, I will summarize the findings and then send you over to David’s blog for the full Monty:

Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors for 2012:

1. Physical Address in City of Search on Place Page
2. Proper Category Associations on Place Page
3. Proximity of Address to Centroid on Place Page
4. Domain Authority of Website
5. Quantity of Structured Citations (IYPs, Data Aggregators)
6. City, State in Places Landing Page Title
7. Quantity of Native Google Places Reviews
8. Quality/Authority of Structured Citations
9. Local Area Code on Place Page
10. HTML NAP Matching Place Page NAP

Here’s the full Local Search Ranking Factors Survey Results.

Interesting to compare these to the Bizable Google Places Ranking Factors study that came out a few months ago:

For Blended Results:

1. Primary category matches a broader category of the search category = 1.42 improvement in rank. For example, primary category is set to “restaurant” and the search category was “pizza.”
2. The search category or a synonym in the business name = 0.64 improvement in rank.
3. The search category or a synonym in “at a glance” = 0.36 improvement in rank.
4. Five or more Google reviews = 0.31 improvement in rank.
5. At least one photo = 0.25 improvement in rank.Listings with all of these signals showed an improvement in ranking of about three positions – pretty high considering that on average there were five integrated local results in the main search page.

For Pure Local Results (GMaps):

1. Five or more Google reviews = 1.47 improvement in rank.
2. Search city in “at a glance” = 1.42 improvement in rank.
3. Search category or a synonym in in review content = 0.97 improvement in rank.
4. Search category or a synonym in the business description = 0.85 improvement in rank.
5. Search category or a synonym in “at a glance” = 0.85 improvement in rank.
6. Primary category matches the search category = 0.79 improvement in rank.
7. Search category or a synonym in the business name = 0.75 improvement in rank.
8. Secondary business category that was a broader category than the search category = 0.68 improvement in rank.( i.e. secondary category is “restaurant” when searching for “Seattle pizza.”)
9. At least one photo = 0.66 improvement in rank.
10. Owner verified listing = 0.52 improvement in rank.Listings with all of these signals showed an improvement in ranking of about nine positions. Given that they were in the top 30, an improvement of nine is significant.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to support The Oatmeal with targeted anchor text about how some crap site called FunnyJunk is ripping off his content. Reminds me of my buds at Sam Schwartz.

And don’t forget to donate to Operation BearLove.

Looks like you may need to start brushing up on your 3D Local SEO skills:

source: TheVerge

Seriously, between Apple Passbook and the upcoming Apple Maps, Apple/iOS stands to become a major force in local search (as if it weren’t already). Get ready for an onslaught of bullshit Apple Maps Ranking Factors posts like this one coming soon to a SEO blog near you.

BTW, of all the days to come out with a Local Search SEL post on local directories. #yawn