Posts Tagged ‘listings’

Local Search Engine Optimization for The Sam’s Club Crowd with Barnacle SEO

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

wscott-barnSmall business owners are generally a frugal lot.

Of course there are some who’ve got the budget to invest heavily as long as they see a return, but what about those who don’t?

A long time ago someone coined the phrase “Parasite SEO” talking about the abuse of Blogger and WordPress.com to get better search term positioning. I love the term, but “parasite” is just so ugly sounding. I prefer “Barnacle SEO.”

Barnacle SEO: attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current.

As we know, there are lots of large trusted sites out there which, by virtue of all those factors we know and love, take very little coaxing to rank well for long-tail phrases.

And if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times.. “local search IS long tail search.”

So, here are a few of those large fixed objects:

Local profiles have a lot of benefit for Barnacle SEO. In many instances they play supporting roles — helping to increase the number of web references, or “citations” as David likes to call them.

The following examples are from real, ‘Main Street’ clients who pay less than $500.00 per month for SEO services. Obviously these are not our most competitive categories, but we’ve found that for many small businesses it doesn’t take a lot to move the needle.

Clearly we could (and will over time) better optimize the profile pages themselves. And amazingly, in one of these cases the site uses a bad CMS so we can’t even control the on-page content.

Merchant Circle and Yahoo in supporting roles:

wscott-goog1

Notice the client, Puroclean RI, has top billing in both Organic and on the Map for “Property Damage Rhode Island,” even with a very bad title tag, and is present with both Merchant Circle and Yahoo! Local listings. So, with a little Barnacle SEO, we’ve got 30% of page 1 (and this is just one of many search terms) without breaking the bank.

Merchant Circle in a leading role:

wscott-goog2

wscott-palin
As you can see, with the Merchant Circle listing we have two of the top three for “Accounting Firm Louisiana” for ASU, LLC in Metairie, LA. And this one is very early in our process. Within 60 days or so we would expect his listing to supplant the Merchant Circle listing and hopefully knock out that top one as well.

Like all SEO it’s not a case of “build it and they will come;” each of these listings needs to be cultivated, linked to and promoted around the web.

But, as the above examples demonstrate, a little bit can go a long way when you first attach yourself to a big heavy object. With Barnacle SEO, even a Sam’s Club shopper can compete with the Neiman Marcus set.

Image Credit: Gooseneck barnacles taken at Limekiln Point on San Juan Island

Will Scott is president and founder of Search Influence, a website promotion company in New Orleans, LA focused on local search engine optimization for small business.

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Posted in Local Search | 8 Comments »

Web Reference Building Tips

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

One of the first things most local search marketers have on their to do lists is getting their listings to appear in a Google Onebox at the top of Google’s search results. To be in the box, you usually need to be in Google’s top local search results. And one of the major factors that influences that are “web references.” Web references aren’t links, but in local search results, they act similarly to how links can boost a page in “regular” search results. Here are some ways of quickly accumulating some great web references and bump your local listing towards the top in Google

What is a web reference?

Google crawls local sites, internet yellow pages (IYPs) and other sources to gather as much information as it can about all the local businesses it has in its index. When it finds a page referencing a business it knows of, it then places that page in the “Web Pages” section of the Google local listing and adds whatever data it has gathered as it sees fit.

1) The more categories the better naprosyn

When creating your local listing in internet yellow pages or local search channels, make sure to add as many relevant categories as possible. Most typical IYPs will have City+Category pages made throughout their website for Google to index. So if you add your listing to two relevant categories, when Google crawls those pages, they will both be added as to separate web references.

2) Coupons are more than just an incentive

Google allows you to create coupons to add to your local listing to use as an incentive for customers to choose your business or help market current promotions. What they don’t tell you is that Google also crawls its own coupon pages and can also apply them as a web reference, as well as you can see at the bottom of this example:

google-coupon-reference

3) Throw a party

After you have been successful in the first two steps and getting some great web references, throw a party. But wait, don’t forget to add this party to local event sites like meetup or Yahoo! Upcoming. Google also crawls these sites for local content about the businesses it knows of and, you guessed it, attributes these as web references:

upcomingweb

Try these tips — there’s a good chance your competitor is not, and they might give you and advantage they’re missing out on.

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Posted in Google Maps, Local Listings, Local SEO, Web References | No Comments »

Onebox vs. Natural Results

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

In October of 2008 I spoke at SMX East on a panel with Mike Blumenthal, and Eric Stein, Director of Google Local Markets. The panel went really well and had a really great audience, thanks to all of you who showed up. One question that got brought up that I didn’t have time to address that I liked was, the value of a #1 positions in a Onebox result vs. the #1 Organic position on that same page. The answer may or may not shock you.

At the moment I am Director of Innovation at a Local Search firm, and have access to tons and tons of data due to the tens of thousands of customers we have. Recently I started doing a lot of data mining and found some pretty interesting results.

I went through 50 different examples where we had a #1 spot in the Oneox and a #1 in the natural section on the same page. Guess what? The organic result actually got 1.6x more results than the Onebox did.

One interesting fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under. This makes sense because the lower the resolution of the screen the more real estate the Onebox listing gets “above the fold.

We took time to make sure that all the stats we measured that the queries produced both a Onebox result and Organic result with both in the #1 position.

A lot of you may wonder how I differentiated the clicks from the Onebox vs. Natural because Google does not add an extra parameter in the offering URL that allows you to tell the difference between click in the Onebox. We were able to gather this data because our Local Listing was pointing to a different URL than the #1 organic result we had.

Does this mean that the Onebox is not as good as a natural position? Maybe. You see we were unable to track calls so in the sense of click through rates natural is better, but actual customers calls has yet to be determined.

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Posted in Google Maps, Local Listings, Local SEO, Local Search | 9 Comments »

Get More Calls on Yahoo! Local

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

For those of you who attended the SMX Local conference in San Francisco in July 08, you may have noticed Mike Jensen talk about how 5 Star reviews probably attracted more visits to the listing rather than listings without 5 Star reviews. After thinking about ths for a while I decided to put this to a test. Here is how the test went. I took 30 listings that I had at lest two months previous call tracking info on that currently had no reviews and were not Enhanced Listings on Yahoo! Local (I will explain that one later). The results from the test were quite interesting. Here was one of the listings before we started the process:

Yahoo-Before-More_calls

When you upgrade to an Enhanced Listing in Yahoo! Local not only do they give you a couple extra attributes that you can fill up your listing with, including a description about your listing, but they add a “Merchant Verified” badge to your listing which draws attention. The strange thing is that when you write your description, and of course you are going to write nicely optimized content, is that Yahoo! indexes it and shows an excerpt of that description if any part of the users search query, just like we saw in the reviews. Here is what the listing looked like after we were done:

Yahoo-More-After

So what does this mean for small business? Well simply doing the following resulted in an average increase of 1.8x

more calls across all listings tested. I had two months prior call tracking data without these changes. So to sum this up, here is what you need to do to get the most out of your Yahoo! Local Listing:

  • Insert Keyword into Business Name
  • Upgrade to Enhanced
  • Write a well optimized description
  • Get plenty of 5 Star Reviews

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Posted in Local Listings, Yahoo! Local | 1 Comment »