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January 5, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

3 Steps to Better Local Search Visibility

On January 5, 2013 / Bing, Google, local search, Yahoo / Leave a Comment

Local search use is way up

Nearly half (46%) of Google searches are for a local business and users are gravitating toward the local listings over the organic listings. So if your business serves local customers on a face-to-face basis you need to respond to that.

Here are three steps to take advantage of local search to build traffic to your website and in turn build new customers for your business.

Big Three local search engine listings
Citations
Reviews

3 Steps to Better Local Search Visibility

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The Big Three

To start with, you need your own page at Google Business Profile, Yahoo Local, and Bing Places for BusinessLocal to even be considered for a local listing. You need to flesh it out as much as possible, with your logo, other images, information about your service area, hours of operations, payment methods accepted, and more. Then the more challenging part begins: getting citations and reviews.

Citations

There are lots of local directories that people use to search, and it’s very helpful to ensure you’re listed on the most popular/powerful ones. Not only will it help your local SEO and your organic link authority, but these citations also provide another way for customers (or clients or patients) to find you.

Here’s a list of the biggest general ones that you need to be listed in:

Amazon Alexa
Brownbook
City Search
CitySearch
DexKnows
Dun & Bradstreet
EZLocal
HotFrog
Insider Pages
MapQuest
Merchant Circle
Nextdoor
Superpages
Yellow Pages
Yelp

Reviews

Reviews from customers, clients, or patients can be very helpful. For one thing, they add legitimacy to your citations. So the more positive ones you have the more likely you are to be listed prominently in local search results. There’s also another thing. If you have a lot of stars and many excellent reviews, people reading your review will be more likely to click over to your website or call you.

I recommend asking a few delighted customers to go to one of the listings that accept reviews and write a few words about how they feel about you. Caution: don’t put words in their mouths and don’t try to phony up reviews yourself. Search engines are very conscious of the natural temptation to do that and are quite diligent about sniffing those out.

When asking a customer to write a review, it helps to provide them with a direct link to your listing page where there’s a clear “Write a Review” button.

Find this process a bit daunting? Rank Magic can help.

October 8, 2012 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Google’s Crackdown on Low Quality “Exact Match Domains”

On October 8, 2012 / domains/URLs, Google / 1 Comment

EMDs

We’ve blogged in the past about comments from Google that they recognize websites with an exact match to a popular query get ranked higher than they really deserve and that Google planned to address that.

Well, Google’s EMD algorithm update hit a couple of weeks ago.

EMD stands for “Exact Match Domains”. If you search for brown widgets, BrownWidget.com is likely to show up very highly, even if it’s a crappy website with no link popularity. (At this writing there’s no such website, but you get the idea.)

In recognition of the fact that low quality websites shouldn’t rank highly just because of their domain name, Google’s published the EMD algorithm update.

Google’s Crackdown on Exact Match Domains

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It’s no longer necessary to pay a domain squatter lots of money for a domain just because a lot of people search for the domain’s phrase. Recently a company asked us about an offer to sell them the domain njit consulting.com, citing the large number of searches for NJ IT consulting. We suggested they decline. The domain would start out with no link authority and would not be likely to be ranked nearly as highly as it once would have simply due to the domain name. They would have to work as hard on the SEO for this domain as they did for their current domain.

How big a deal is this?

This is a new algorithm change, and it will take awhile to gauge just how severe it is, but Google anticipates it will significantly impact at least 0.6% of US queries. If you have an exact match domain and see a significant dropoff in Google rankings and traffic, the antidote is effective SEO.

We can help with that.

June 8, 2012 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Penguin Penalty for Keyword Stuffing

On June 8, 2012 / copywriting, Google, page content / 1 Comment

Penguin Penalizes Keyword Stuffing

Google’s latest significant algorithm change, Penguin, was released in late April of this year. It’s designed to reward high quality websites and penalize what Google calls webspam. One of the kinds of webspam Penguin is focusing on is on-page keyword stuffing.

In the past SEOs believed that a certain number of iterations of a verbatim keyword phrase was needed in order to score highly enough in relevance and achieve a high ranking in the search engines. Search engines have since gotten much better at understanding matching pages for a query without requiring such verbatim keyword density measures.

But many web pages have nevertheless gotten better rankings than they might otherwise deserve due to overly aggressive on-page keyword placement.

Penguin is designed to put those web pages in their place.

Google penalizes keyword stuffing.

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According to Google:

In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

Have you inadvertently done some keyword stuffing?

Assuming you haven’t engaged in link spam, it would serve you well to examine your on-page optimization. Now a certain presence of important keywords is essential for a page to rank well, so how do you know if you’ve gone overboard? Respected SEO guru Dan Thies has studied a large number of websites and come up with a test you can do yourself with a printout of your web pages. He calls it The Red Pen test and it should give you a good idea of whether you’ve stepped over the line and are in danger of a Penguin slap-down.

We recommend his keyword stuffing test to you — you’ll find it here.

April 25, 2012 by Bill Treloar 3 Comments

Keyword Density According to Google

On April 25, 2012 / copywriting, Google, keywords, page content, SEO practices, user experience / 3 Comments

Google’s Matt Cutts recently addressed a question about what the ideal keyword density is. He refers to the diminishing return of repeated keyword usage and the danger of keyword stuffing which can earn you an over-optimization penalty.

Matt says it best, so take a look at the video.

Increasingly employing variations on a keyword phrase rather than strict repetitions of a verbatim phrase seem to work best.

May 20, 2011 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

Recovery From Google’s Panda Update

On May 20, 2011 / Google, links, SEO practices, user experience / 2 Comments

Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all.

Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
Proper use of 301 redirects
Paying close attention to their page speed
Constantly building backlinks.
One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.

Recovering from a Google Algorithm Change

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CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant:

Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought.
And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

3 Steps to Better Local Search Visibility