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Local SEO Tools, Tricks & Strategies #ILM09

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

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 [...]

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.

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Kenshoo Local Launches – Sivan Metzger #ILM09

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

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

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

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

30-40 accounts per account manager
40 accounts x $500/mth @20% margin
= no profit [...]

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.

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Panos Bethanis of Directory M #ILM09

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

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 [...]

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.

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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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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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