Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media

Posted on May 3, 2011

Search and social media offer you great local marketing opportunities for branding and lead generation if you understand the new search paradigm and strategize accordingly. The leading search engines, namely Google and Bing, are now aggregating information from a variety of online sources to help determine the indexing and ranking of web pages not only for local search but for all search.
Chief among these sources are quality social media sites, which are platforms where real people talk about their knowledge of and experiences with products, services, companies, and people. The idea is that information that comes “straight from the horse’s mouth” is reliable and hence relevant to others searching for the same things. Not only is this information being used as criteria for ranking but it is also appearing in the search results.

By aligning your search engine optimization initiatives with your social media initiatives you are setting the stage for building your authority online for the terms that correspond to the content you present, namely information about who you are and what you offer. For example, if you a recruiter for top executives, you want to establish your online authority for the principle terms that clearly identify you with that service as well as correspond to the terms used by your target audience groups to search for what you offer. (Good “old fashioned” keyword research is key here)

If you have been following this series you will begin to see that the connecting threads that weave your online ‘identity’ and ‘authority’ fabric are keywords. All of the highly focused content that you develop and present on your website and all social media platforms must contain the keywords you have carefully selected from your comprehensive research and analysis. These keywords must accurately reflect
a) the content you present and
b) the language used by your targeted audience groups to search for what you offer.

The idea, as I will continue to state throughout this series, is to establish and maintain consistency across the internet so you are easily and accurately identified. The way in which to build your authority is to continue to develop and present highly focused content that speaks to the current interests of your targeted audiences. That means you have to produce new and engaging content on a regular basis. The best strategy is to develop a schedule of delivery that you are willing and able to stick to.

The formula for developing your audience – acquiring Facebook ‘Friends,’ Twitter ‘Followers,’ or blog subscribers, for example – is to present content at least once a week, but preferably twice a week or more depending on the platform and your strategy, that capitalizes on known trends and popular topics among your targeted groups. This content should invite comments, questions, or even shared experiences. In other words, you don’t want to speak at your audience you want to speak with them. Better yet, give them the opportunity to speak to you!

Bottom line – align your search and social media efforts. Ensure that the right hand is working together with the left to create and deliver topical content that contains the keywords and phrases for which you want to be a recognized authority.

In Part 5 of the Local Marketing Online series I will talk about City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations and how they can help to boost your online authority and rankings.

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Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Places

Posted on April 28, 2011

In Part 2: Web & Map Listings, I explained in detail the importance of claiming and managing your web and map listings. Well, Google Places is chief among those listings that you need to claim or ‘verify’ if you expect to enhance your local marketing search results.

For those of you who still may not know what it is, Google Places for Business is a free service that allows business owners to update and manage their physical business location information. Updating and managing this information ensures that it will post accurately to correlated services such as Google Maps as well as associated Google properties and search and Display Network sites that make up Google’s vast advertising network. If a general search in Google’s engine is either location-specific or made using a mobile device platform like iPhone or Android, local results are displayed along with the other results.

For the same reasons you ask site visitors to complete an online form so that you get the information about them that you need, your Google Places page, which is really a mini website, acts as a verification tool for Google (hence Google’s request to ‘verify’ your information) to ensure your company is being indexed the right way. Google will aggregate listing information it finds on other listing sites about your company to see if the content – profile description, local phone numbers, and addresses in particular – matches up. If it does not, it could hurt your chances to list prominently in the search results for the terms corresponding to your listing.

All of the preparation work I mentioned in Part 2 of this series is used to develop your Google Places page as well. Google, as well as Bing and Yahoo, are looking for consistency across the web. As I have stated previously, you are trying to establish your authority for the search terms that correspond to what you offer. So you must ensure your Google Places page includes as much of your optimized company information as can be added, including images and video if you have them. Because Google indexes these items, they could also appear in a relevant search result below your local listing information.

In order to get the most mileage out of your Google Places page remember to encourage your happy customers to leave reviews. Customer comments and reviews are published and heavily factored in search engine results ranking. Double lucky for you if you happen to be a local business that is also using Google CheckOut for online orders. If customers are giving you 4 or 5 star ratings on Google CheckOut as well as positive comments on Google Places you are greatly strengthening your chances for organic top ranking and lead generating.

The last item I want to mention is paid advertising. Surely you are all familiar with AdWords – Google’s pay per click search engine advertising program that displays your relevant ads in Google Search, Google Maps and across Google’s vast Display Network based on competitive bidding and the number of clicks your ads receive. Well Google has introduced a similar program called Boost. Google Boost is a form of pay per click search engine marketing that delivers an enhanced version of your Places listing in relevant Sponsored listing results on Google search and Google Maps (including Mobile). The ad content includes:

Name of your business
Address and phone number of your business as specified in your Google Places account
Short description of your business (Google will automatically generate an editable description based on your Google Places listing description)
Snippet from the Place Page detailing the average star rating and the number of reviews
Link to your business’ Place Page

I have helped many clients verify and develop optimized content for their Google Places page that has worked to achieve better rankings for local search. If you haven’t done so yet, verify your Google Places page. Remember to be consistent. Stick to your optimization plan!

In Part 4 of the Local Marketing Online series I will explain the inter-relationship between Search and Social Media and how you can improve your rankings by building and managing your authority score for the search terms corresponding to what you offer.

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Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings

Posted on April 27, 2011

Maintaining consistency across the web is absolutely essential if you want to take advantage of the local marketing opportunities online. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of web directories and map listing services on the internet that have acquired your business information from either a contacts list provider or an outdated, cached web page. More often than not this information is inaccurate and simply does not reflect your current business strategy. Why is this important? For two very important reasons which I will explain.

First of all, search engines are now aggregating information across the internet from a variety of sources in an attempt to accurately identify the relevant companies whose web pages they are indexing and delivering in search results. So, for example, if you cannot easily be identified because your address and/or phone number information is different in the web or map listings from your website, or the listing contains either no link or a dead link to your website, or the Profile Description doesn’t match up with your website profile, search engines will not feel confident to deliver your listing as a relevant match to the search made.

Secondly, inaccurate or misleading web and map listing information may cause you to lose prospective customers. I have told this story once before but it remains relevant. We helped a high end, local brick-and-mortar retailer client claim web listings that not only inaccurately categorized and described his company as a charity but also listed a phone number that was no longer in service. How did the web directories get the wrong information? They probably found it on a list of companies that had donated money to a charity.

Claiming and strategically managing your web and map listing information is a critical component to your success. Here’s what we typically find when we claim listings for clients:

Phone numbers that are wrong or incomplete
Addresses that are wrong
Inaccurate or incomplete company name
Listed in wrong categories
Inaccurate Profile Description or none at all
Information missing
Irrelevant images or none at all
Dead links to web pages
No link to website
No listing or wrong listing in Google Maps or Map Quest

You get the picture. So how do you know where to find these directories and how do you go about making changes? Well, that’s going to take a lot of your time so get a big cup of coffee for yourself and a comfy chair! But before you go online to search for the gaggle of directories in which you are listed, you have to work out your business strategy. The goal is always to achieve and maintain consistency across the internet so that you can begin to develop your online profile across multiple web directories and map listing sites.

What you will need to do to prepare:

Conduct a comprehensive keyword research and development to determine the terms that accurately identify what you offer as well as reflect the language used by your targeted audience groups to search for what you offer. The keywords you select will be used to develop your listings and should correspond to the content you present on your website and elsewhere on the web. They are the foundation for the development of your online authority.
Write out your Company Name exactly how you want it to appear on each directory site.
Using one or two search terms from your keyword research, develop a highly focused Profile of no more than 150 characters.
Develop another one of no more than 200 characters.
Prepare 1 to 10 professional, web-ready digital images that accurately reflect what you offer and name each one using one of your search terms from your keyword research. Although each web directory or Map listing site has different requirements, typically each digital image must be smaller than 1MB (and 1024 x 1024 pixels), and must be in one of these file formats: JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP. Since Logos are images, follow these same guidelines.
Although each directory has its own naming structure for Categories, using your search terms from your research as a guide, identify no more than 10 categories under which you would expect prospective customers to find you.
Make a list of your hours of operation for every day of the week.
Write down each location address. Indicate which one is your principle location.
Write down each telephone number, clearly identifying the principle phone number. Something to consider if you are using a toll-free number is local listing results prefer local numbers with area codes that correspond to the locale.
Write down the fax number.
Write down each email address, clearly identifying the principle one.
Write down your web address.
List each of your services exactly as you want them to appear.
List your principle product categories exactly as you want them to appear.
List any special items you want your prospective customers to know such as the principle Brands you represent, special Qualifications, Certifications, Professional Memberships, Awards, or other relevant information.

The above list represents the information you need to Claim Your Listings and ensure the information you present is consistent across all collateral web directory and map listing sites.

The benefits to maintaining consistency across web directory and map listing sites are many and include:

Supports the building of your online authority
Search engines can easily index and deliver your listing in search results
Prospective customers can find you and are clear about what you offer
Reach mobile users searching on portable phones and devices

In my next installation of the Local Marketing Online series I will take a close look at Google Places. You will learn why it is important to claim your account and how to take full advantage of all it offers.

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Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings

How Google’s Recent Changes Affect Your Business

Posted on March 2, 2011

Google recently announced important updates to its ranking algorithm (nicknamed “Farmer’s Update”) that will likely adversely affect website owners who do not provide users with a high quality and relevant search experience. The company stated:

“Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible.”

Currently released exclusively in the US, the latest Google update impacts 11.8% of user queries. The company stated the update is specifically targeting low-quality sites identified as “low-value add for users, copy content from other websites, or sites that are just not very useful” to reduce their rankings. At the same time, the new algorithm is designed to allow the “cream to rise to the top” as it were, specifically awarding higher rankings to high quality sites with “original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis, and so on.”

As always, if you want to be among the high quality sites rewarded with high rankings, you have to help Google to achieve their goal as stated above as well as support their efforts “to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.” So how do you do that? Here are some considerations:

Conduct comprehensive research to identify the language used by your targeted audience groups to search for what you offer
Conduct market research – send out surveys, study your (Google ;)) Web Analytics, study your inquiry and sales reports, monitor conversations and topics on social media related to your site / industry, monitor the news and trade journals that write about topics of interest to your targeted groups, etc. – to identify the interests of each of your targeted audience groups
Write professional, compelling, search engine optimized webcopy that covers the interests of your targeted audience groups
Include search engine optimized professional images that support your copy and allow users to identify their areas of interest
Create search engine optimized, user-friendly web pages that are designed to accurately represent what you offer as well as your professional image
Create search engine optimized calls-to-action (CTA’s) that guide users seamlessly through the conversion process to complete the action(s) you want them to complete.
Develop a flexible, search engine optimized site architecture that makes it easy for users (and search engine spiders) to visit (and “understand”) every page of your website
Develop search engine optimized off-site content (on websites other than yours such as social media sites or relevant third-party sites like news sites, journals, professional organizations, etc.) that establishes your authority for, and links to, the content represented in your search engine optimized website pages.

Google is working on many more changes that they believe “will substantially improve the quality of the pages” in the engine’s search results.

The key is to optimize for Google and for your targeted audience groups. An intelligent strategy requires the right mix of research, content development, and presentation.

Know who and what you’re targeting and present the highest quality possible to remain competitive. The formula is simple, but is takes discipline and ongoing commitment to be successful.

Danny Sullivan has a great write-up on the topic as well on SearchEngineLand’s site.

Ever worry if someone else is accessing your Gmail account?

Posted on December 26, 2010

Your email account contains a lot of personal information, from financial items to personal notes. To help you keep control of your data and its security, Gmail lets you track your recent sessions and sign out of your account remotely.
At the bottom of your inbox in Gmail, you can find information within “Last Account Activity” detailing the time and IP address of the last activity on your account and whether it’s still open in another location. Follow the details link to see more information and sign out of other sessions.