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Jeff Ferguson of Local.com #ILM09

On December 9, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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 [...]

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.

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Is Sarah Palin Half-Cocked?

On December 9, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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 [...]

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.

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Wrong Local News in Google News? Here is Why.

On December 7, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Over the past few months, there have been sporadic reports on the wrong local news showing up in Google News. One such thread at Google News Help has several comments about the issue by a Googler named Inbal.

What appears to be the issue when Google shows non-relevant local news in the local search of Google News is that Google is matching incorrectly. Inbal from Google explains, most recently, the root cause of the issue:

The root of most problems reported in this thread is bad geocoding on zipcode: some zipcode maps to the right name (like xxxxx –> Springfield, Mass), but we then think that text is for some other place with the same name. Our engineers have been fixing these zipcode related bugs following your reports, so please keep them coming!

In other cases, the searcher has entered the wrong zip code – but that is not common – what is more common is the issue above.

Finally, the last reason why the local news in Google might not be local is because there simply is not enough local news sources for your area. Inbal said, “there are just not enough news sources to show from a small town, as we may not be indexing some local sources.”

Those are three possible reasons why Google News may not be providing locally relevant news for you.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.



Over the past few months, there have been sporadic reports on the wrong local news showing up in Google News. One such thread at Google News Help has several comments about the issue by a Googler named Inbal.

What appears to be the issue when Google shows non-relevant local news in the local search of Google News is that Google is matching incorrectly. Inbal from Google explains, most recently, the root cause of the issue:

The root of most problems reported in this thread is bad geocoding on zipcode: some zipcode maps to the right name (like xxxxx –> Springfield, Mass), but we then think that text is for some other place with the same name. Our engineers have been fixing these zipcode related bugs following your reports, so please keep them coming!

In other cases, the searcher has entered the wrong zip code – but that is not common – what is more common is the issue above.

Finally, the last reason why the local news in Google might not be local is because there simply is not enough local news sources for your area. Inbal said, “there are just not enough news sources to show from a small town, as we may not be indexing some local sources.”

Those are three possible reasons why Google News may not be providing locally relevant news for you.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.



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See You At Local Search Summit at SES Chicago

On December 4, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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.

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.

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How To Find a Domain’s # of Indexed Pages In Google Post-Caffeine

On December 2, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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 [...]

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?

  1. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and submit xml sitemaps for every URL on your domain.  The Sitemaps report in GWT will then show the number of indexed URLs from your sitemaps (btw it’s not clear that this number is accurate either).  My guess is getting more xml sitemaps submitted was one of the primary reasons that GOOG stopped reporting this number.  That and maybe saving bandwidth from all of those site: queries that nervous site owners did all day long.
  2. If you don’t want to give GOOG your data via GWT, then you can still do a fake site: query by using “inurl:<yourdomain>”. Make sure you don’t use “www” in the query (e.g. inurl:localseoguide.com).  This isn’t a perfect query – sites that incorporate your domain into their URLs will show up (e.g. www.alexa.com/siteinfo/localseoguide.com), but for most sites this shouldn’t be a huge number of URLs.  It’s hard to judge how accurate this query is but I have tried it for several client sites and it seems to square up pretty well with how many pages they seem to have.If anyone has any other ideas feel free to add them to the comments and/or put them on your blog, link back here and it will show up in the trackbacks.

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Newspaper SEO – Beyond The Basics

On November 30, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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.

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.

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Black Monday 2009 – Are You Going To Get Your Share Of Black Monday Sales?

On November 25, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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 [...]

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:

  1. Figure out the top relevant queries for your city or service area.  Check out useful tools such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Trends & Google Insights for Search to figure out hot keywords and which markets are looking for what.  According to Google Trends searchers in Michigan,  Missouri & Ohio have been querying “black monday” the most over the past 30 days.  Thanks GM & Chrysler!  Google Insights is showing a lot of “black monday” activity around Florida and Texas over the past month.  Maybe the Trends & Insights teams might want to coordinate their data a bit, but whatever.
  2. Once you have figured out the queries you want to rank for start creating content that targets these queries.  Maybe something like “Top 10 Cyber Monday Deals in Florida”.  Of course the whole idea of Cyber Monday is that people are looking for online deals so the queries might not be super local, but there more local signals your site sends off the more likely you are to rank in your market for “national” queries.  And if you can rank for these queries you have a chance to convince shoppers to get off their butts and head over to your store.
  3. Once you get your content up you’ll want to generate some links to it.  Call up your local paper and offer a version of the article to them.  Make sure you highlight other local businesses and their Cyber Monday sales so it doesn’t look like a self-promoting thing.  And make sure it has a link back to your article on your site.  If you don’t want to work that hard, just Tweet a link to it and make sure that it’s available in a RSS feed and shows up on your Facebook page, your Linkedin page, etc.  This won’t help it rank much, but it will help the search engines and others discover it.
  4. Don’t forget that even if you are primarily an offline business, you can still offer a Cyber Monday deal on your website.

    5. Happy Cyber Black Monday 2009 Deals Sales Shopping! ;)

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Yellow Pages Are What? Google’s Got Some Suggestions

On November 23, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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…

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…

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BIA Kelsey ILM 2009 in Los Angeles Coming Up

On November 20, 2009, In SEO, by Andrew Shotland

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 [...]

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.

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PubCon Live: Local Search and Mobile Optimization

On November 11, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Below is live coverage of the Local Search and Mobile Optimization from the PubCon 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Sheara Goldenthal of Promediacorp.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.

Local Search and Mobile Optimization


Below is live coverage of the Local Search and Mobile Optimization from the PubCon 2009 conference.

This coverage is provided by Sheara Goldenthal of Promediacorp.

We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage, please excuse any typos. You can also interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.



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