Target High Conversion SEO Rankings

One of the things I see come up over and over (and over) again when people are discussing various domains and developments is that websiteA.com does not rank well in Google for the keyword websiteA, I thought I would explain a bit about why this is not a good way to judge rankings, because in reality 99 percent of the time you do not know what someone is trying to rank for unless it is a very small site with a single keyword targeted.

This typically shows me that someone is not familiar with the targeted marketing that is possible with SEO, and specifically how important that targeting is now that local search is growing faster than ever and will continue to become more important with the growth of smartphones and location based services.

Legacy advertising methods were not targeted, based completely on the number of eyes balls that may look at an ad in a newspaper or magazine during any given time frame. With search marketing this model is no longer the proper way to look at advertising, or traffic.

Twice lately I have witnessed people saying that Missouri.me does not rank for the term Missouri. Well you may be surprised but I could really care less. What I care about is ranking for very targeted terms in regions we are focused in promoting our services. We work to rank for terms that bring targeted visitors that will convert better for our customers.

We are not a Missouri tourism portal, if we were I would focus on Missouri and terms surrounding Missouri tourism. This post is not about Missouri.me but it gives me an example to work from that came up a few times lately.

Its not about the broadest term to bring the highest amount of traffic at all times, in many cases its about ranking for the terms that bring the BEST traffic that provides the most value for website advertisers.

With local search growing at a better than 50 percent clip local targeting is more important than ever. This means SEO for localized terms becomes more important than ever so those local businesses are found when customers are looking for them, or in the case of portals, that the highest value customers are finding the website when looking for a particular thing.

This post is not meant to be a knock on people that questioned rankings, etc but really to help people understand a bit more of how they should approach site developments and the targeting of the SEO around it.

Forget Hyperlocal Google Goes Statewide With Local Search

As much as I love all the hyperlocal buzz and things going more and more community focused I have reasons to love larger geographic regions as well, seems Google has some love for them too.

Over at SearchEngineJournal there was an interesting post analyzing Googles latest local search changes. Now they show local results for statewide searches, this is an interesting concept and one that I can already see ways to take advantage of for some of our customers.

Take a read of the linked post above, but here are a few quick tips they pointed out on how to take advantage of this:

1. Check and see if your Industry and State are showing local listings.
2. Make sure you aren’t stuffing location keywords into categories. If your category is city + keyword then what happens when someone does a search for state + keyword.
3. Do keyword research for city vs. state terms. Your business might benefit by trying to go after one or the other.
4. Look at citations from businesses in other areas of the state and see if you can use them.

I think number 2 is very important in this, in most cases people go straight to city level categories or keywords, but with Googles shift to show local search for statewide a business that is trying to take advantage of this is going to have to think a bit differently.

Yellow Pages 90 Percent Discount, Really?

Just a quick post to show you how the beginning of the year is going for the Yellow Page print business. So far in the first half of January I have had 3 customers tell me they have pulled their complete PRINT Yellow Page budget and a few more tell me that if they were in multiple Yellow Page (i.e. Yellowbook, etc) they have brought it down to one.

Well, today one of our really great customers came by to tell us something a bit interesting and I am sure if any of you have current Yellow Page spend and have not committed one way or the other for this years budget you will have happening soon, he got a call from his account manager stating they are offering a 90 PERCENT DISCOUNT for this year if he commits now.

He still said no.

I am not sure what different regions are being offered this type of discount or what level of customer, but WOW.  Aggressive.

Do you have any similar stories?

HyperlocalSEO.com Launches Today – Want to Write A Guest Blog Post?

I wanted to do a quick announcement concerning the "soft launch" of HyperlocalSEO.com. I had been contemplating launching a separate blog focused more on local seo and local search in general but wanted to make sure that I could put in the time necessary.

Well, the great news is thanks to George Pickering from LocalExperts.com I have a solid partner in this new blog who will be doing posts as well. George is a true success story in the development of geo targeted niche sites that generate real business for his customers.

Between the two of us plus a some articles some of my team will be doing I expect this blog to do quite well and provide valuable information to small businesses looking to grow their business online and take advantage of local search growth and the trend towards more hyperlocal content.

One of the problems with launching my initial blog on BruceMarler.com is I could not really have multiple writers on the site, with the launch of HyperlocalSEO.com I envision overtime having a group of contributors that all benefit from the successful site and I will just be one small piece of it.

There may not be much up there right now but look for tons more coming soon.

If you have interest in the local seo or geo targeted search market and would like to do a guest blog post or be an author on the site shoot me a message.

Measuring Incremental SEO Changes

One of the things that many people get frustrated with is measuring the progress of their search engine optimization changes. As we know it can take days, weeks, or even months to see results of the changes made to the site being worked on.

And to make matters even worse, it will also depend on how "important" the search engines see the site as well since a site that is visited by the search bots more frequently will be more likely have the results of the changes show up faster.

Recently I decided to test some incremental changes one by one, the site I was testing on is a site that has been established for some time, has a Pagerank of 4, but does not necessarily get updated daily or even weekly.

Since I am a big believer that the title tag is the most important single item you can do for on-site SEO (feel free to argue that one....) I wanted to modify one pages title tag from something that was less competitive to something that was more competitive but when the site was first launched the site would not of had the link juice to rank for.

The term is still directly related to the site content but is the higher searched version of the product term it focuses on.

One thing I like to look at before measuring anything like this is the number of Google search results for the term based on how a typical user would search for the term and not a techie  (without quotes in other words).

In the case of this term there are around 5 million or so results that show up with a solid range of companies on the first 3 pages. Overtime my goal is page one but for now I want to see what one little tweak can do, can that one tweak take the site from not showing up to showing up for the search (at least in the first few pages) and how fast will that happen, or even will it happen.

After I measure the initial tweaks results then I will do one more change, all "white hat".

Results? Well after just two days the site now shows up on page 3 of the Google SERP's for the term and that is before any further optimization is done and without waiting for any real aging on the term.

It would be completely expected, from past experience, that over time that ranking would do even better without any further optimization, since I have the benefit of time for what I am testing I am scheduling to check the results after one month then two months before making any further changes.

After that I will start to make further optimizations to the site, at times we tend to ignore the fact that we need to measure SEO results over time. We expect fast results and with competitive terms it may take time before you see those results.

Sometimes we get spoiled with long tail search terms ranking fast, but when working with more competitive terms it is best to measure over time and not get frustrated.

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

Local Search Thoughts

As we head into 2010 local search seems to be a hot topic. As search has continued to go more local it is more important than ever before to have  a plan for your business to be found when people search. One fact that brings this home is that in 2008 people searching for local businesses online grew by 58 percent, it will be real interesting to see what that number is in 2009 since so many have moved to the iPhone, with the ease of use of the current smart phones it is only natural that mobile searches will skew even more local.

I was reading a great post over at LocalSEOGuide.com and after preaching a lot of this over the last year to anyone who would listen it was great to see a leader in the space validate much of what we had been seeing.

A couple bullet points to point out:

SMB SEO Budgets Will Increase Dramatically
A number of misguided souls are predicting that personalized search renders SEO obsolete.  Bottom line: most SMBs don’t know what they are doing with search, are going nuts because some spammer or the guy down the street outranks them, want to spend more time with their kids and are ready to hire someone to make the problem go away.

And:

SEO Consultants Will Become Better Known as Marketers
2009 seemed like the year when a lot of SMBs woke up to the fact that SEO actually existed and could be an important part of the marketing mix.  In 2010 more businesses are going to start to realize that search and social media could be the biggest area of potential for their companies and they will pour more resources into these channels.  As a result search marketers are going to take on bigger roles helping drive comprehensive marketing strategies.

This last one is something I discuss often in my seminars to small business owners, when you start talking about search engines, the internet, or anything that relates to a computer most small business owners tune out immediately. To most people all of these topics are purely technical and seem to be of little consequence to them.

But after showing examples of businesses being found with local search and using real case studies it clicks with them that they are actually using the internet to find services and businesses JUST LIKE THEIR CUSTOMERS.

It clicks at that point.

The technology is suddenly a marketing tool.

We all know this, but to someone that is not involved on a day to day basis with this there is not an immediate link.

Once that link is created they understand that with the Yellow Pages print edition faltering they better start thinking about a plan to attract those that have went away, and to that great marketing tool called the internet.