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The 5 Most Important Things to Consider When Doing Localized SEO

By Mo Mastafa in Featured

First of all, let us just quickly define what Localized Search Engine Optimization (Local SEO) is. Local SEO is basically the process of optimizing your website to perform better in the search engines by allowing it to be found for the keywords which relate to the area in which you’re located.

To illustrate, if you were looking to be found locally when users search for SEO services in your area, and you’re based in Wales, one such search term you may look to optimize for may be ‘SEO wales’. This would naturally vary depending on the location in which you’re situated and what users are actually looking for.

So let us take a look at the 5 most important things to remember when optimizing for local search terms:

1) Keyword Research

It all starts with keyword research. This not only involves knowing your niche but also knowing the keywords that people use to search for your niche specific products or services. One great way to establish if there is relevant traffic for a particular keyword, before optimizing your site, is to use the Google AdWords keyword tool. A quick Google search will allow you to find the tool.

Let’s assume you are a Cardiff based company that sells second-hand cars throughout Wales. The first thing you’d look to do once you’ve opened the Google keyword tool is, adjust the search settings so that they are set to display only results relevant to the UK.

4 Ways to Make Sure You Beat the Competition in Local Search – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Matthew Meyer in Featured

Google Place Search (formerly known as Google Places) rules local search. Just try it. Go to Google and type in “Personal Injury Attorney Your City.” The first seven listings in the “natural search listings” are all Google Places pages. Since 20% of searches are local and the majority of their over $30 billion in revenue comes from small businesses, Google has decided to go hard after local small business advertising.

They started by creating 50 million Google Places pages using aggregated data from online directories and the Yellow Pages. These pages are mobile optimized and attached to Google Maps.

Only about 8% of local businesses have actually claimed their Google Place Search page. Even less have fully optimized their pages. However, this is changing fast. Local businesses are getting hip to the importance of Google Places pages. If you have a local business, the first place potential customers will start to find you is on your Google Places page from their smart phone. You want to make sure you are at the top of the list for your category. Here is how you get a jump on your competition in local search:

1. Stake Your Claim!

Google made the Google Place Search Page now you need to claim yours. You need to claim it because it is possible that the information listed is not correct and the more completely you fill out your page the higher it is ranked in searches. In order to be able to add information to your page you need to claim it first. Google verifies your claim to the page by sending you a postcard by snail mail with a confirmation code or by sending you a message on your phone.

Local Business Online Visibility Tips – Use What You Do Every Day

By Jan Kearney in Featured

When you think about online visibility for your local business it’s so easy to get wrapped up and overloaded with what you should be doing on the internet to promote your website. Yet, small changes to your every day business routine can make a big difference.

Often, business owners think about being visible online as a way of reaching people whom you have had no contact with at all. That’s true in many cases. Sometimes, online visibility is as simple as making sure that people you interact with (even briefly) as part of your usual business routines are aware of your online presence.

Not everyone wants to pick up the phone or call in to your premises to find out basic information like your opening hours or who to contact. Sometimes people just want to find out a bit more about you and your company.

In this day and age of always being plugged in to the Internet, your website is the first point of call. That is especially true outside of usual business hours. Make it easy for those brief contacts to find you, don’t make them search when they don’t need to!

5 Simple Offline to Online Visibility Tips

1. Your Business Card

Obvious isn’t it? Well maybe not. I have a mountain of business cards that have little more than an address, phone and email on them. Why force people’s hands and make them search for more information about you? Give them your online details upfront and include:

* Your website address.
* Your active social media profiles such as LinkedIn, FaceBook page and Twitter.
* Why not try a QR Code?

QR Codes can be as simple as a vCard with all your contact details, including your address, phone, email and website to store directly on the phone. You can also redirect to your website, Facebook Page or even Google Places review page. The possibilities are almost endless.

2. Your Business Stationery

Invoices, receipts, compliment slips, info leaflets, headed notepaper… How many of these have your online details displayed? Again, do not just include your email address, but also your website and active social profiles too.

3. Your Vehicle

You may not have the budget for a full designed vehicle wrap, but you can put your details on a decal or sunscreen strip.

4. Print Ads

Whether it’s the local paper or Yellow Pages, always include your online details when you advertise. Make it effective by giving people a reason to visit your website – and capture their email address in return for your offer!

5. Promotional Gifts

We’ve all done it at some point – trade shows, seminars, demonstration or open days give out what seems to be a ton of pens, badges, balloons, key rings, mugs – the whole she-bang all nicely printed with a business name. Make them work harder for you and at least include your website address too.

The great thing about directing people back to your website is it can be easily tracked when you implement it correctly. You’ll get a good picture of where people have come from, what works and what doesn’t.

Before you place the order to re-print your stationery or ads, think “online visibility” – your website is open 24/7 waiting for that 2am inspirational or emergency visit.

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Want to know more about getting the word out about your local business online? Help yourself to my “Getting Started Online” guides – they’re free => http://www.mylocalbusinessonline.co.uk/started-online

Jan Kearney specializes in helping local businesses take advantage of the worldwide web to grow their business. You are invited to read Jan’s blog at http://www.mylocalbusinessonline.co.uk

Regional Website Marketing And Advertising Basics- Helping Your Customers Discover Your Company On-Line

By Greg Newell in Featured

LOCAL Internet Marketing – Your Website

You should definitely have access to a website that you are able change by yourself! It’s no longer acceptible to use a hard coded website for small business reasons. Webpages which do not change at some point, contain recent material and continue being relevant quickly sink in the search engine ranks. A small business really should take into consideration its internet site application as no more challenging to work with than Microsoft Office. There are excellent content management programs available on the market. A couple of the most well-liked include DotNetNuke which is a Microsoft backed content management system and WordPress, a popular blogging system that can be extremely effective as a small business web site. Regardless of which alternative you select, you must be able to add, modify, delete webpages and be able to add things to the menu on the site without coding.

First – KEYWORD RESEARCH

Presuming you are a traditional local company that would ordinarily use the yellow pages, the yellow page categories are a good start for locating keywords relative to your company. Once you have the overall business categories which you are convinced people might be typing into the the search engines, you can go to Google’s Free keyword tool and find an immense quantity of data for the keywords you’ve got and recommendations for others you may possibly not have thought about. Your initial keyword research is just to get an idea of exactly what the most common phrases are. As an example, you could represent an HVAC business.

Keywords could possibly include “air conditioner repair”, “furnace repair”, “heating system installment”…etc. Google will give you loads of information relative to the terms you’ll want to be making use of.

Next – LOCALIZE YOUR KEYWORDS

Upon having developed a list of keywords strongly related your small business, you’ll want to localize your list. There’s no sense in showing up in a search in Chicago if your business serves the Dayton marketplace. So as an example, in the event the general keyword is “plumber,” your localized keyword is “plumber dayton” or “plumber dayton ohio.”

Manage YOUR SITE – Helping the the major search engines find your website.

Important keywords need to show up first on the home page. Making a “quick links” area on the home page can be quite useful because it links the keywords to internal webpages within your website utilizing the keywords you are attempting to promote. This is particularly crucial.

Generate or change an inner page of your site to discuss the relevant key phrase. A page in your site should be dedicated to a single keyword subject! Too many internet sites try to cram way too many keywords into a single page.

This only confuses the search engines which are trying to figure out what your web page is about. Make it easy. If you have a content management system, adding and editing a web page should be as simple as 123. Use the keywords in context on both the home page and the inner page of your site and be sure that your inner page has a hyperlink from the home page.

Market your new content

Google LOVES content…certainly good content. The moment you have finished the improvements to your site, you should then market your site content by linking to it from other web resources. These inbound links need to use the keywords you’re promoting if possible. If not, the next best thing is a direct link to the home page and the inner page.

Backlinking is often the toughest aspect of website positioning. You will discover a number of ways to build links but our favorite is to write additional articles and publish them. By doing this, you get to have additional web content material that is very relevant to your site information leading to your site.

In addition: MAPS MAPS MAPS

It’s equally essential to be certain that you have modified your local listings in the major search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and also a handful of the maps sites.

Of these, Google Maps is the most important. If you’ve executed a local search lately you’ll see the local listings predominant in the search results. Don’t ignore this. Further, these results also are used widely in mobile phone applications. Try browsing for your business using the Google iPhone app if you have an iPhone and you’ll see what I mean.

Web exposure is an constant activity. The set it and forget it concept used to work but now, your site will get buried by savvy rivals. You don’t get the luxury of an alphabetical listing either. You have to work a little harder than your competition. With a web site that you can manage on your own and perhaps a little instruction, getting your internet site to show up for specified Google searches should be part of your daily or weekly routine.

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Local Web Search Results is an Website Marketing Company located in Dayton Ohio focusing on LOCAL search engine results.. Check out their Results First program. You don’t show, you don’t pay! Local Online Web marketing Dayton Ohio.

Is Your Business Still Chasing Google?

By Roy Reyer in Featured

If you’re still chasing Google around trying to beat out their algorithm let me give you a little tip going into 2011, STOP!

Instead, here is a suggestion from Matt Cutts that he gave during his keynote address at Pubcon this year, “Don’t look at us where we are today, but look at the direction we are moving and what we are focusing on, the big five are the Mobile Web, Local Search, Social, Blended results in the SERPS and HTML5.”

The Mobile Web:

The mobile web refers to mobile applications or browser based access to the Internet from a handheld device, such as an iPad or a smartphone.

Morgan Stanley analysts have charted the most important online trends and they forecast that by 2015 the mobile web will be bigger than desktop Internet.

Reader Rescue : Why Do I Need Regional Search Engines for Link Building?

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Dear Kalena

You’ve mentioned on your blog about the importance of using resources to locate regional search engines for link building purposes. Could you explain a little further how one would use a regional search engine, and could you give a concrete example of finding one?

Thanks a lot.

Terry

————————————–

Hello Terry

The reasons you might want to locate regional search engines include:

1) Your / your client’s web site contains information limited to a particular region / country.
2) Your / your client’s business owns multiple web sites with different TLD e.g. widgets.com, widgets.com.au, widgets.co.nz.
3) Your / your client has multiple country target markets they wish to reach via search engines.

The situations above mean that you need to have the web sites listed in the relevant regional search engines so they can be found by the specific target markets. This is all part of the vital link building process – having your site listed in as many relevant locations on the web as possible. This is especially important now with Google placing more emphasis on local search.

Some regional search engines may find your site automatically using their crawler (e.g. Google.com.au, etc.) but others, such as niche search engines and hand-edited directories, may require you to submit the site/s manually. This is why you need to have a list of regional sites handy so you can check them all for the existence of your site/s and submit them if needed.

A couple of sources you can use to find regional search engines worldwide include:

• Search Engine Wiki – which is a crowd-sourced collection of search related resources founded by the team at Search Engine College.
• Search Engine Colossus – a collection of worldwide search engines.

These sites list different sub categories of search engines for various countries and regions. So, for example, if you were looking for a list of search engines and directories specific to Australia, you would click on the relevant country category and be taken to the Australian list. You could also simply type a search into Google for *list of Australian search engines* and find other lists.

You should do this for every country market that your / your client web site targets.

Kalena

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Got a Reader Rescue question of your own? Post it in the comments and you might see it featured here on the blog.

Google Place Search Changes How Local Searches are Displayed

By Peter Bowen in Featured

Google Local and Map have become a big influence on how people search and get results. We can demonstrate this by searching for ‘accountant’ and the search result returns a broad list of ‘accountants’, but perhaps too broad so we tend to search again by narrowing the result – adding a location to the search – ‘accountant in city’ and the results we see are now closer to home.

So it’s no surprise that Google should be taking a closer look at how we search and attempt to refine the process and provide a more meaningful search result by changing the Google Local search algorithm to make it easier for us to find what or who we are searching for locally.

Today, November 8, 2010 we see searches that reference local business and all the relevant places in that location in a new clustered visual display located in the upper right corner of a search result page. The now familiar map displays each business with red lettered pins, and links to each business. And as you scroll down the page the Google Places Map will scroll with the page so that it is always visible.

In addition to the way we see businesses displayed on Google Places, a new product is being launched – Google Boost.

How to Optimize your Website for Local Search

By Debbie Everson in Featured

As the search engines take “search” to next level, more and more people are beginning to narrow down their searches to their cities or neighborhoods. This is because of the rising need among visitors to know who they are dealing with. They want to personally visit your business location. Thus, targeting local visitors along with global visitors does help your website get the best of both worlds.

3 Reasons to Optimize for Local Search:

1. Build Brand Awareness. Optimize your website for local keywords to increase brand awareness geographically.
2. Leverage Trust. If local visitors trust your brand, this can translate on to the web and capture the attention of global visitors. This superiority will set your website apart from your competitors.
3. Increase ROI. A recent survey shows that, local seo tends to convert more often, is cost effective and leads to increased ROI.

How to Optimize your Website for Local Search?

Optimizing a website for a locally oriented business includes all the steps of on page and off page optimization along with a few tweaks and additions. The following steps will ensure that your website marks its presence in the local results.

1. Add Your City Name to the Meta Tags. It is highly important to add the name of your local city to your original keywords and place them accordingly in the title, keyword tag and description tag of the web page. While crawling and indexing the website, the searchbots interpret the emphasis on the name of the city; then use the city name for the search engine results pages from the database.
2. Use Other Localized Metadata Available. There are various other Meta Tags present in HTML which favor local website optimization. Some of them are present under the Meta name as ‘country’, ‘geo position’ or ‘ICMB’. Meta Name – country can be used to input the name of the country where your target visitors reside. Meta Name – geo position or ICMB can be used to input the latitude and longitude coordinates of your business city. Every country has its own unique ICMB code. These details give the search engines more favorable data to rank well locally.
3. Submit Your Website to Google Local Business Center. Google lets you submit your business listing free of cost to its local business center. You can add business details like address, area of operation, contact number and hours of operation to the listing. All these details are available on the screen with a snapshot of a map which shows the detailed location of your business. All you have to do is add the listing in the local business center by going through a quick verification process and the visitors will find their way to your business website.
4. Build High Quality Backlinks. Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. Search engines give a lot of importance to incoming links and consider it as a measure of a website’s popularity. You can build quality backlinks by submitting your site to high PR search directories, internet yellow pages, local search engines and Google webmasters tool.
5. Select the Correct Service Provider. If your business is based in UK and your domain (.com) is hosted with a service provider whose servers are based in its Australian data centers, then chances of your website ranking well in Australia are more. This is because; the search engine will interpret your website to be an Australian website making it harder to rank well in UK search engines (.co.uk). Thus, hosting your website in the country where most of your customers live is a practical decision.

Website optimization for local search is a must for websites with service based businesses to increase lead generation, sales and ROI.

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Debbie A. Everson is the CEO of SearchMar.com, experienced SEO Consultants and Search Engine Optimization Agency to over 2,000 small businesses. Learn about search engine marketing, paid search advertising, social media, and email marketing. Read my SEO Blog for hints and tips. Follow me on Twitter @searchmar. Call 1.866.885.6263 to speak to one of our SEO Consultants and receive your free consultation.

How to Solve Local Search, Once And For All

By Matt Greitzer in Featured

This month’s column was going to be about Facebook. I had about half of it written before I stumbled upon something unexpected that changed my mind, and the content below.

I’ll start from the beginning. I’m in the early stages of gut renovating my apartment. I’m very handy, and can do most of the work myself, including rough carpentry, drywall, and finishing work. I can even do moderate plumbing and electric. The former I am actually quite comfortable with, the greatest risk being flooding my downstairs neighbors (they are very nice people, and I’m sure they’d understand).

Electric work carries considerably greater risks, like fire, and death. The latter is a pretty big risk. My last electrician offered advice on this topic, and told me that if you grab a live wire with one hand you’ll be fine, as the electricity will complete the circuit through your hand. It’s when you grab it with both hands that you’re in trouble, as then the electricity completes the circuit through your chest. I found his theory intriguing but controversial. Regardless, I can’t do either plumbing or electric work in the city of New York, as building codes prohibit it. So I’m in need of a good plumber and electrician.

Though they must exist, I know implicitly that there is no way to find a good plumber or electrician in New York City. It simply can’t be done. I can find a plumber, any plumber, no problem. My Google query for “New York City Plumbers,” for example, returned 14,700,000 results. (How is that even possible)? But finding a good plumber, one who will show up on time and provide an estimate with fewer than five digits, can’t be done.

This is where I thought I would start writing about Facebook, and the opportunity Facebook has to corner the local search and services market. No one out there is doing this well — not the major engines, not the IYPs, not even the new(er) social search and recommendation engines like Yelp.

I was wrong about that last part, and I’ll return to this in a moment. The problem with local search is not in getting accurate listings, that’s easy. The challenge is in getting relevant reviews on those listings.

In order to do this, you need two key ingredients. The first is scale, as in a massive, active user base willing to inform objective business listing with subjective opinions. The second is relevance, as in some way to ensure the reviews you are reading are not written by shills, angry ex-lovers, or crazy people.

Facebook can address both of these challenges: It has a massive user base, and it’s networked, which provides all kinds of useful ways to vet the trustworthiness of a reviewer’s opinion. If Facebook jumped into the local search space I believe they could corner the market. But I think Yelp has actually beaten them to it.

I was going to put Yelp in my original column as an also-ran. My original thoughts were that Yelp did not have the scale to capture this opportunity. It was in digging around on Yelp looking for examples to prove my point that I realized I’d misjudged it. Yelp does have scale. Though not nearly that of Facebook, Yelp has almost 8 million monthly unique users (according to comScore), and has doubled its user base over the last year.

Yelp can scale content, too. I found a variety of listings for New York City plumbers and electricians (not 14.7 million, but enough) with ratings that looked plausible (i.e. not all five stars). And Yelp has a pool of users that seems, well, not crazy. That is, they seem to make rationale critiques and rate services appropriately (unlike some travel review sites that shall remain nameless). You can vet the reviewers’ quality by clicking on their profile, and their community is even self-policing, calling people out when they seem like phonies, and knocking them back in line when they stray from the site’s main purpose – real reviews about real services.

It was at this point that I realized I had to rework my column and develop a new conclusion. So I’ve revised my point of view. Facebook should not build its own socially powered local search engine; it should just buy Yelp. This combination makes both companies better. It would instantly propel Facebook into the local search space with the backing of an active reviewer base and a proven service model. And Facebook’s scale would rocket Yelp from niche to mainstream, making a good service even better by combining reviewer opinions with vetting via the social graph.

So Yelp, if Facebook calls you up on Tuesday and makes you an offer, you know who sent them. But I’m not greedy. In fact, in return for encouraging a nine-figure liquidity event in your favor, all I would ask is that you pay my plumbing and electric bills. You may think you’re getting off easy, but you haven’t seen these estimates.

Matt Greitzer is vice president and global discipline lead of search marketing at Razorfish. (mediapost)

Ins and Outs of Local Search

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

As the population with internet access explodes, and more and more people are using search engines to find what they need, the usage of local search also continues to rise. For any sites servicing a local or specific geographic audience, submission to local search based engines is becoming more and more important.

What is it?
In a nutshell local search involves the use of specialized search engines specifically created to focus on a selected geographic region to find local businesses and websites focused on your area.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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