SEO Question: I have primarily a local based business. How should I do SEO / SEM for my site?

Answer:

Organic Local Search Engine Optimization:

These tips will help you rank well for local search results in the global search databases, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

With local SEO you do all the same stuff you would do with global SEO, like:

• do keyword research

• ensure your site is crawlable
• ensure each page has useful unique content
• submit to a few decent general directories
• build other related links

Listing in local directories and advertising on local portals can be a cheap marketing spend that provides a solid ROI. It will take a bit of research to analyze the value, but if pages are ranking well in relevant search results on Google then they are great places to be listed.

You can think of relevant web communities in terms of location or topic. If a site is relevant for broader queries about your field or broader queries about your location it may be a great link buy.

If you local chamber of commerce has a site that provides listings don't forget to submit there. You may also want to consider submitting your business to sites like your local Better Business Bureau.

Why Getting At Least a Few Links is Important:

It is important to build at least a small amount of editorial linkage data pointing at your site (through directory listings and other related link building activities), because if you chose to list in business directories like Verizon Superpages some business directories charge you by the click.

If your site does not outrank them then it is worthless being forced to pay a recurring click cost anytime someone is already searching for your brand name.

Yahoo! also offers a paid inclusion program which charges you by the click to be listed in their regular search results. I generally do not recommend paying for inclusion as getting a few links is typically far cheaper than paying for every time someone searches for your name. Plus if nobody links at your site it is hard for search engines to gauge how much they should trust your website.

As compared to Yahoo!'s paid inclusion Google offers a program called Google Sitemaps, which is a free program that makes it easy to see what traffic you are getting from Google. It will also show top search terms that you ranked for and if Google had any crawl issues with your site.

Leveraging Well Trusted Local Hubs:

In some cases if you are in a competitive field and are starting a new site from scratch it may be worth creating a temporary site in conjunction with your main site. Sometimes Google can take a while to trust new sites in competitive fields, and creating a mini site on an already well trusted and well established site can have you seeing positive ROI quicker.

For example, Maui.net costs $20 a month to establish a business account on their server which leverage their Maui.net domain trust. This one is a bit out there, but in some small markets the hosted content pages cost next to nothing. For example, in Kaitaia (the northernmost town in New Zealand) you can get a lifetime hosted page on kaitaia.com for $10.

Local Domain Registration and Hosting:

If you primarily cater to a specific market foreign to the US it may be worth it to buy a local domain (.co.uk for the UK for example) and / or host it on a server in that country. Building links from other sites that are deemed to be local to a specific region in nature should help get your site included in those search results.

If you are trying to build a strong global brand or are in a hyper competitive field it is probably worth the extra $8 per year to register the global .com version of your domain to prevent someone else from cybersquatting you.

If you are targeting multiple local markets in different languages it probably makes sense to use subdomains by language or different domains for the secondary markets.

What's Your Address?

You should post your business address on at least the home page and one other page of your site, perhaps sitewide. You should format it like 1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA, 98052. MSN has a search near me feature which may give you a boost in their results if you are deemed to be close to a searcher.

One Page Per Location:

If you are targeting multiple towns it is likely best to focus your homepage on either the most competitive town or the entire region. Use interior pages to target the other towns. It is possible to target many towns on a single page, but the problem is that when people find your content it may seem less relevant if you try to target 5 towns on one page than if you target 1 town per page. The smaller towns may also be easy to rank for by using good page title tags and internal linkage. The more relevant your page seems to a searcher the easier it is to convert them into a buyer.

Local Search Engine Advertising:

Many search queries are local in nature, but the outlay for a professional SEO provider could cost well into thousands of dollars, and even then results take time and are typically not guaranteed.

If you want to test market demand using Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter allow you to quickly and cheaply buy relevant traffic on a pay per click basis.

I could write a 30 page post on PPC right here, but it would be beyond the scope of this post, so I will recommend my free ebook on pay per click marketing [PDF]. As an overview of a few things to consider with local pay per click:

• Are you bidding on ads relevant to your area?
  • Are you bidding on ads for each relevant town (with relevant ad copy and sending them to the most relevant page)?

  • For large cities are you bidding on relevant neighborhood related or zip code related terms? (these will likely be low traffic and have little competition than the core related terms, but because of those two factors they are often underpriced, and they are ultra targeted leads)
  • Think of alternative ways to describe where you are (ie: Raleigh-Durham is also called something like Research Triangle park).
• Are you bidding on core terms and alternate ways to define your products?
  • For a qualified real estate agent terms like [my town realtor] makes sense.

  • Most realtors will also bid on [my town houses] and [my town homes].
  • The smarter realtors will also bid on more descriptive lower searched phrases like [my town town homes], [my town condos], [my town condominiums]. You can use our free keyword list generator to generate these sorts of lists.
  • In some cases it may make sense to bid on terms related to moving or things like [my town home buying guide].
  • If you do not sell commercial property make sure that you use commercial (or other words that would indicate a demand for commercial property) as a negative word.
• Is your ad copy for each keyword group relevant?
  • As you expand out your campaign you want to keep it organized in neat groups where possible.

  • Make sure your ad copy is as relevant as possible for your core terms.
  • While some dislike using it, Google's dynamic keyword insertion may make your ad seem more relevant than competing ads because it puts relevant copy into your ad.

Google AdWords (and some of the ad systems) allow you to set up ads in multiple ways.

• As described above, you can use modifiers to target your local ads.

• Google also looks at the IP address of web surfers, and can allow you to set up additional regional ad groups targeting the same terms, but instead of using the local modifying terms (such as my town keyword), you can filter the town or regional aspect of the targeting via Google understanding where a web user is located from their IP address.

Google is also getting into partnering with companies to offer free WiFi (which will increase Google's usage AND make it easier for them to target local ads) and Google is also testing using pay per call listing in the search results. Expect the local search marketplace to have significant innovation in the near future.

Google's Vertical Local Search Engine Marketing:

Google seems to go back and forth with their names on the product that integrates local search and Google Maps. I think the key point to consider is that they do want to make people think that local and maps are one and the same.

In the same way that they are trying to integrate the idea of maps and local they may also point more of their global search queries at different verticals. Google is testing a new interface that suggests different vertical databases (like news search, image search, shopping search, Google Groups) on some global searches. Google also sometimes places what they call a OneBox result at the top of the search results. These results are also pulled from vertical search databases.

The Google Local Business Center allows you to list your business on Google local / Google maps for free. Google Local also pulls results from Verizon Superpages and other trusted sources. Google is also testing AdWords ads that allow you to buy local ads on Google Maps.

Google also offers a product called Google Base. It allows you to upload listings of free information or items for sale.

Yahoo! Local:

Yahoo! Local offers free basic listings and monthly flat rate advertising based on your category and local market size. They also integrate some relevant Yahoo! Search Marketing ads into their local product. You need to have a physical address to list your site in Yahoo! local, but you do not need a website. They offer a free 5 page website with your listing.

If you are paying a flat rate fee or are looking to maximize how much traffic you receive it may make sense to keyword stuff your title or description if they let you get away with it. From my experience paid ads seem to be able to get a bit more leeway than free listings.

Pay Per Call:

Earlier in this post I mentioned Google was testing pay per call ads. In some verticals calls are much more valuable than ad clicks. Verizon also intends to auction off some of their offline print catalog ads using phone numbers that are auctioned off in a pay per call manner.

Ingenio is a technology market leader in the pay per call space, offering ad distribution on AOL and a few other major directory sites.

Other Local Search Sites & Local Directories:

A number of well known directories get significant direct traffic from global search, searches on other local databases, and direct traffic. A few of the top players are:

• Verizon SuperPages

• CitySearch
• TrueLocal

Many directories and local search products are powered from Acxiom, infoUSA, GeoSign, or Amacai. Stunty pointed me at a couple resources showing the relationships.

• Post by ewhisper showing what major engines Acxiom and InfoUSA power

• PDF Chart by Bruce Clay visually representing the data and mapping relationships at major search sites

If you do not want to need to submit your data at many locations RegisterLocal allows you to submit a profile and have it syndicated to many local search sites.

Local SEM Help:

As far as I am aware Local Launch and Reach Local are the two most well known companies targeting the local SEM market.

I have not hired either, but I know Local Launch has some of the brightest minds in SEM working for them. ReachLocal offers this video explaining how they work.

Verizon SuperPages also signed up with Google to become a Google AdWords reseller.

Disclaimers:

I have not done a ton of local marketing, but I get asked this question often. Feel free to tell me if I am hosed up on anything. Also this post is a bit biased in that I only speak fluent English and have only lived in the US. In some foreign markets where search is dominated by other companies (ie: Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia) you may have to take a look at what other local directories and search services are important.

Some people, like the Kelsey Group, track local search much more in depth than I do, so they may be able to give you information about your local market.

Dan Gillmor recently posted a speech he gave at Columbia University:

I'd propose replacing the ideal of objectivity with some principles that may be easier to achieve.

The principles that collectively go beyond objectivity are thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence and transparency. Of course, they tend to bleed into each other, and in a several cases can even conflict or at least be somewhat orthogonal. I put this problem into the category of "Life is messy."

Microsoft recently was said to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a company that puts ads in video games. The military, disturbingly enough, is also creating advergames targeted at children:

Even the U.S. Defense Department has adopted the model, creating a combat games called "America's Army" to be used as a recruiting tool.

Objectivity is highly flawed due to its parroting effect.

In a world where

• traditional publishing business models are dying (due to new information streams and the decay of inefficient monopolies)
• in most markets it is more profitable to create highly biased or low quality content (due to increased conversion rates or search algorithm inefficiencies)
• the cost of creating content drops daily
• nearly anyone can create content
• companies make hypocritical clams to misdirect the media
• those claims spread quickly
• information systems are as easy to manipulate as the media is
• the price of attention increases daily (more people are fighting for it)
• most content creators become marketers fighting for attention
• people create fake controversies for attention
• ads become content
• everything is an ad

TRUST is going to be worth far more than objectivity.

Some of my most profitable ideas have not been the most valuable...a true disconenct often exists, in fact. I
have made thousands of dollars by accidentally misspelling a word, and uncovering a market others mised.

You can accidentally stumble into profits, but generally the value you can extract from a market is often directly proportional to what knowledge you have about that market which most others lack (o, if you are selling information, how well you can convince others this is the case).

That is part of the reason why it is hard to have useful and hopefully somewhat original content for TW and seo book. As I start to get more business savvy and learn how to exploit more and more algorithmic holes it doesn't make economic sense to post all of them. Most people are not going to be interested in some advanced creative marketing techniques, some might sue me for them misapplying them, and if I am too sharing some people who share great tips with me may want to cut me off.

If you share all of your best tricks and many people follow them then the algorithms change to accomidate that. In a competitive marketplace it is no good to make yourself the squeezepoint unless you are building some scalable network that can leverage a large volume of transactions.

It is easy to recommend some resources so long as the provider selling them has little incremental cost to each additional unit or client, but if you share your best workers you increase their rates AND make them less available to yourself. The same thing is true for some techniques. Why would a person lose $100,000 testing a business model and then finally share the profitable techniques they figured out after they tested them? Especially if others have more resources and would quickly saturate the market inefficiency?

Most of the market willing to spend money is either at the high end of the market or people new to the market. People who write for beginners will end up making far more cash typically than those writing for mid market (or even the later end of the market), especially if they are good at conveying complex ideas in simple straightforward naratives. Seth is good at doing just that.

From my experiences it seems that the high end of the market tends to follow the sources which have largely built their brand by focusing on the beginer end of the market. For instance, by largely writing for the beginning end of the market on this site I frustrated some of the readers who used to be interested in me digging up the research type stuff. At the same time sales went up at least 50% (most likely more if you also consider citations and recommendations future sales waiting to happen). And the same beginner content has caused people from the high end of the market to be interested in hiring me. I have got leads for companies at the high end of the market, some of which I never would have thought would contact me. Some of which are companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

The tip here (as Andy Hagans reminded me - cool cat he is) is to write for your customer. Not write for your reader. Threadwatch is an amazing community site, but it is not a largely profitable one because it writes for the mid market reader, not to customers. This blog has become far more customer centric, because it is stupid for me to help less people and throw half of my income in the trash can by focusing on things that only advanced SEOs would want to read.

It is also easy to be seen as patronizing if you focus too much on the early end of the market. In the goal of reaching the beginning part of the market and exploiting that opportunity for profit many people do not consider the effect of dating information or who all will read what they say. Initially I was writing for people new to the web, who were like me, and trying to get by doing their own thing. But from day to day I have no idea who may read my blog. I have got calls from venture capitalists, media, board advisors of search engines, search employees, etc.

What is hard about selling internet marketing information is that most people generally want quick fixes. Income increases as:

• you make stuff sound simple

• you hook people on your subscription based service or system
• they believe you are the competitive advantage or end to end answer to all their problems

Rarely though is any single idea, tool, or piece of information the edge needed to succeed across the wide array of human desires that search and the WWW represent.

Some people who read my book will fail. Others would read it and were hyper successful may have done great even if they never read it. As you increase your userbase you get more people at both edges. Bought and happy. Bought and pissed off. You can't make a person see the true end value of anything until they reach their final goals.

In selling stuff we are forced to use proxies for success. Ie:

• Some will tell you how important Alexa is. As you track yourself going through your own site you see how great you are doing in Alexa, but in no other statistic.

• "The more websites you can get to link to your website, the higher you will rank in the search engines, guaranteed!" - Last week I chatted with someone who uses that sales line on their sales letter. They know it is outdated advice and factually incorrect, but they still use it because it sounds authoritative and sells their link exchange service.
• Some people will buy testimonials, leveraging value offers in misleading emails titled "free gift" where they only give the product after a glowing testimonial is posted.
• I push that I rank #1 for SEO Book, which short of a penalty should be a joke for me to do so given my market position and domain name, but to many people new to the market saying I am #1 for that sounds more credible than saying I am #5 for SEO.

I don't think there is any problem with using proxies as an indication of value, and it is not surprising that sales letters focus on the value end of stuff.

However inside many tools and information products there are often many upsells. These should make you question the validity of the product, business model, motives, and quality. If the advice people give you is mechanical in nature, and does not teach you about the larger picture or the social aspects of the WWW, the advice giver is probably hurting more people than they help. That is the biggest reason why I think most for sale SEO tools are garbage.

This post rambled a bit again...I am getting bad at that. But the point is:

• You need to pick your audience.

• The better your content target customer align the more you will make.
• If someone tries to boil most every issue down to a black and white situation you should be sceptical of the quality of their advice.
• Almost no advice is universally true.

I have been doing way too little book reading, but was recently able to finish Andrew Goodman's print book on Google AdWords. It only costs about $16 on Amazon. Well worth splashing out if you are interested in PPC and don't want to spend the $50 to $100 most PPC ebooks cost.

On to the review... Google AdWords changes rapidly, so some of the features since publication have already significantly changed. For example, instead of disabling ads with a low clickthrough rate now Google increases the price if the relevancy of an ad is considered to be low (and apparently Andrew has already updated this in his ebook). Even today Google announced that they are trying to kill off even more of the bottom feeding market by showing less ads on search results that are not deemed to be exceptionally commercial. Andrew has long insisted that Google believes advertising to be a type of information, and in his book he predicted they would continue to innovate to focus on relevancy. Instead of focusing on tricks that work right now his advice is grounded in techniques that should yield long term success.

He also pointed to the fact that Google's organic search results tend to have an informational bias to them, which typically is true. Beyond the aging factor associated with print books the only other downside I would say there is to Andrew's print book would be the heavy bias toward PPC marketing over organic search. But I suspect that makes sense since that is Andrew's bread and butter. I probably am equally biased (or maybe more biased) toward organic search (because that is where I have done well thusfar).

At around 350 pages his print book is pretty beefy. It takes a while to work through, but Andrew worked hard to not just write the hows of the ads but also explain why he felt certain things work well and certain things would prove ineffective long term. His book also touches on many important online issues, such as brand credibility and conversion. He points heavily at viewing the process as an ongoing process that you continue to work at from end to end.

I think I learned much more from his ebook than this book, but that most likely consists as a sum of the following:

• I read his ebook when I was totally new to the market

• I read every post on his blog and his occasional newsletters
• I read his Google Groups posts
• I had already read his ebook before reading the print book

I just looked at the sales letter for his $69 ebook and saw that he gives you a free copy of this print book with it. My recommendation is to buy his ebook, read it first, and then if you want a bit more of the background and history information give the print book a read.

Anoother nice compliment I would like to dish Andrew's way is that many books or ebooks try to hook you on hiring the author, buying junk through affiliate links, or subscribing to an "informational" newsletter that hits you up with junk product offers weekly.

When you buy off Andrew you get good information, and you pay for honest advice without the upsell upsell upsell mentality that is all too common with most internet marketing informational products.

A few people asked me how to customize MovableType to add advertising posts on the individual archives, category pages, and main pages in MovableType powered blogs.

MovableType is fairly easy to customize, but you have to customize the different templates differently. I have been a bit slow to getting around to doing this, so sorry on that.

Opening Tips:

• The day I changed the format of my blog to include the advertising post inline my income tripled. That is a huge deal if you participate in keyword markets where you pay per click. It may make many keywords that were once prohibitively expensive become affordable.

• If you are unsure how to do something ask at the MovableType forums.
• If you are changing a template make a file called something like templatename-old and save a copy of the old template before making any changes.
• Each template that you want to change will require customizations.
• My template is a bit hacked up from a normal install, so the code to change your layout 1 for 1, but this post aims to show the general idea of how to change your templates.
• I do not sell MT customization services. I can offer general ideas, but I am not a template or code expert on any level.

Customizing the main page:

The MovableType templating system has a couple important features that make this easy to do. The three big things you need to know are:

• lastn - how many posts you want to feature in that segment

• including your post - easy enough, eh
• offset - how many of the most recent posts to skip before you start posting the next set of posts

So you start your blog and you have your container and whatnot. The first thing you need to decide is how many posts you want to show above your advert. Currently I show 1.

So you start your content area, and after the div id=content you enter
<MTEntries lastn="1">

So my home page content container area starts with

<div id="container">

<div id="content">

<MTEntries lastn="1">

<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>



<div class="post">

<a name="<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>"></a>

<h2><$MTEntryTitle$></h2>

<MTDateHeader><div class="date"><$MTEntryDate format="%b"$><br /><$MTEntryDate format="%e"$></div></MTDateHeader>



<div class="entry">

<$MTEntryBody$>



<MTEntryIfExtended>

<p><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#more">Continue reading "<$MTEntryTitle$>"</a></p>

</MTEntryIfExtended>

</div>



<div class="post_meta_left">

<p class="categories">Posted in: <MTEntryCategories glue=" "><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a></MTEntryCategories></p>

<p class="post_author">by <a href="http://www.seobook.com/about.shtml">Aaron Wall</a></p>

</div>

<div class="post_meta_right">

<MTEntryIfAllowComments>

<p class="thoughts"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#start_comments">Your Thoughts?</a> [ <$MTEntryCommentCount$> ]</p>

</MTEntryIfAllowComments>

<p class="perma"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></a></p>

</div>

</div>



</MTEntries>

If you wanted 2 posts above the advert post the above would be lastn=2.

Advertisement or Offer Post:

After you create your first post you can include the advert post. I recommend creating a mini post instead of placing a huge advertisement. I probably would do better if I had an autoresponder series in a small advert post rather than my current ebook one.

To input your advertisement post you can create a backdated post and then just include that in the templating system. My post 142 is my advert post. So for me the code looks like this

<MTEntry id="142">

<div class="post">

<h2><$MTEntryTitle$></h2>

<div class="entry">

<$MTEntryBody$>

</div>

</div>

</MTEntry>

Remainder of Home Page:

After the advertisement it is time to publish the rest of the page content. So now you need to use lastn again, but this time you have to offset it. So you use code that looks something like

<MTEntries lastn="10" offset="1">

<$MTEntryTrackbackData$>



<div class="post">

<a name="<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>"></a>

<h2><$MTEntryTitle$></h2>

<MTDateHeader><div class="date"><$MTEntryDate format="%b"$><br /><$MTEntryDate format="%e"$></div></MTDateHeader>



<div class="entry">

<$MTEntryBody$>



<MTEntryIfExtended>

<p><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#more">Continue reading "<$MTEntryTitle$>"</a></p>

</MTEntryIfExtended>

</div>



<div class="post_meta_left">

<p class="categories">Posted in: <MTEntryCategories glue=" "><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a></MTEntryCategories></p>

<p class="post_author">by <a href="http://www.seobook.com/about.shtml">Aaron Wall</a></p>

</div>

<div class="post_meta_right">

<MTEntryIfAllowComments>

<p class="thoughts"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#start_comments">Your Thoughts?</a> [ <$MTEntryCommentCount$> ]</p>

</MTEntryIfAllowComments>

<p class="perma"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></a></p>

</div>

</div>



</MTEntries>

</div>

Individual Entry Pages:

I simply hard coded the ad text into the template on individual entry pages. After the post and comments section were closed I added this:

<div class="post">

<h2><!--#config timefmt="%B %d, %Y" --> <!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" --></h2>



<div class="entry">



<p>Ad entry text</p>

</div>

</div>

Server Side Includes:

Notice how that date of my advert uses what looks like a comment. That is actually a server side include that is used to parse the date from the local machine as being the current date. Useful to do to make your content look fresh if you are using freshness as a sales point for your software, information product, or other offer.

If you are having your site created dynamically I think you could insert that information using a php date command.

Also note that I stress the date instead of an offer. For most people the date is probably not so important, and they could probably put their post title or whatever in the H2 tag or whatever type of post heading they were using for other posts.

If you are outputting to static html files by default your server will not process server side include directives. You can set your file extensions to .shtml inside the MovableType settings, but doing that would cause you to lose whatever link equity you have built up from pages located at the old locations.

Instead, you can configure your .htaccess file so that your site processes .html or .htm files as though they were .shtml. Your .htaccess file is simply named .htaccess and exists in the root of your site. Please note that some FTP programs do not show .htaccess files, so you may want to ask your host if you have one if you can't find it.

Please note that I do not recommend screwing with your .htaccess file on an important site without supervision, as a poorly configured one can cause a site to not load at all. I have temporarily screwed up a number of my sites playing with them...but you have to learn somehow. Also, make a copy of your htaccess file before screwing with it.

Also be aware that you may already have a .htaccess file that you do not want to write over. Instead download it to your local machine. After you download the file change it from .htaccess to htaccess.txt. After whatever code is already in it you can add

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .htm
AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

Save that file. Then change it from htaccess.txt to .htaccess and upload it to the server in the root of your site.

Date or Category Archives:

Here I just inserted the post after the opening container and content area

<MTEntry id="142">

<div class="post">

<h2><!--#config timefmt="%B %d, %Y" --> <!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" --></h2>

<div class="entry">

<h2><$MTEntryTitle$></h2>

<$MTEntryBody$>

</div>

</div>

</MTEntry>

If you have further questions I probably can't answer them, but I hope that helps a few people.