Google Local Factors Part 1 - Internet Marketing Podcast - Number 92

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Internet Marketing Unknown Secrets. Yes. Yes. Bro. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome to another fun-filled edition, having some technical challenges, I guess, or just... Yeah. So if you tuned in a little bit early, you heard a little of the background process of us trying to figure out what the hell is going on with Ustream.tv. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-WebStyle. And I'm Paul Hanson, sales manager at E-WebStyle. We have a great podcast for you guys today. It came up at the last minute. We found this great article. We're going to be covering it. We were kind of batting ideas around, and we suggested that we actually should be talking about Google Local Search and some of the aspects of Google Local Search. Before we jump into that, though, we certainly want to talk briefly about what we spoke on our last podcast. That's, in fact, our tip from our last podcast. Don't neglect mobile search. It represents 10% of your search traffic, potentially. So don't neglect it. And now, should you change your strategy to focus on it? Probably not yet. But it is... Don't give it all away. Yeah. There you go. Go back and listen to that podcast. The other thing that we want to cover, we've got lots of really good news. We've got some good Facebook stuff going on. We actually have an SEO joke. Is that with Eugene? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not even going to attempt to go with his last name. So Pan Rutkiewicz. Pan Rutkiewicz. Rutkiewicz. Yeah. Pan Rutkiewicz. So here's the joke. I don't... I think on paper, it's really clear, the intent. So we'll see if this works on audio. So here's the joke. So this SEO... That's a really bad intro to a joke. Yeah. So the joke is now beginning. So this SEO expert walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor, mixed drinks, shots, tequila, vodka, cantina. I mean, since we're international. You know, I thought it was pretty

cool. I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. But if I told that to any of my friends, they'd be like, no. They just don't get... They're like, where's the joke? Yeah. They just don't get the technical... I'm like, come on, man. It's funny. You know, it's a play on the old school joke. Yeah. Keep words. Keep words, you know. And there was a like on there by Christina Hawkins. By the way, this could be the first interaction on Facebook this year. By a non-male. Oh, that's what's up. No, no. We had somebody that dogged our logo. Okay. Well, that was last year. Oh, yeah. So you're right. This is the first one this year. Christina Hawkins is an interesting kind of small world story. When I was a freshman in high school, my dad was in the Air Force, so I moved every two years. I was actually in Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama, going to a private school, St. James Private School. My brother was there, too. And his good friend and Christina went to prom together. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so my brother sent me... Don't tell me she found you from the podcast. No. My brother found us and put us in contact on Facebook. Oh, okay. And then we haven't gotten together. She's down in Sugar Land, which is real close here in Houston, so we're going to get together. Small world. Yeah. Pretty small world. Very small world. Shout out to her. Her company is Global Specs Web and Graphic Design, so guys, go check that out. She does some good stuff out there. I've actually checked some of it out. I am trying to get caught up on the audio, and I was talking to Chuck earlier, and what I mean by that is we broadcast and create our podcast on Fridays, 9.15 Central Standard Time-ish, depending on technical issues, and you can always watch us live, and please do. It's actually good. We're getting more and more people. You can actually interact with us during the podcast, so that's kind

of cool, and get questions answered on the podcast. So then that podcast, we strip out the audio, and eventually I get it up onto iTunes and Podomatic, and I've been trying to get caught up because we're about a month behind, but I just keep getting stymied by technical issues there, too. But you can always watch it on the Ustream page. We record everything, right? Yep. And as we do these shows, we record them and post them directly to the Ustream. Here's a little bit. So we got 73 Facebook likes right now. For real? Yeah, we're up to 73. Wow. There's at least 73 people who like our podcast. That's what's up. That's cool. We may get 300 downloads a day, but at least 73 like us. That's what's up. So, by the way, if you're downloading our podcast and you haven't liked us yet, just stop listening. Yeah. And so that means about 13 people have liked us since last year, and I remember we were right at 60, so if you like us, remember, hit us on our Facebook page. Let us know who you are, what you do, what company you're with, and we will definitely give you a shout out on that. Or give us a call, 713-592-6724. And since we're already talking about it, there's other ways. You can actually send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. You can also follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash e-webstyle, no dash in that, facebook.com slash e-webstyle, youtube.com slash e-webstyle, dot com slash e-webstyle. And if you requested a website analysis, we, you know, I don't know what's going on with this thing, and you haven't gotten it, send it again, because someone, Chuck, who was that that hit us yesterday? Gareth Copeland. Gareth Copeland hit us up, said, hey, I submitted a request, I hadn't gotten one back, and I haven't gotten a reply, so he emailed us directly and said, okay, don't worry, we're going to jump on that, so if you ran into that, submit it again, or shoot us an

email. By the way, that's why we recommend for all of our clients that forms get submitted into a database first and then emailed, because we're not getting the emails, but if we were submitting it into a database, no, if we were. Oh, I was like, wow, so we can just go back and look. We can just go, yeah, that would, that's what we do for our clients, so yeah, we need to implement that for us as well. So, and usually you don't think about doing it for simple forms, but we're getting a lot of responses from that, so, and we don't want to miss them. So do as we say, don't do as we do. Exactly. Yeah. In the news, IBM Jeopardy supercomputer beats human. That's not even exciting. I was like, yeah, it's what it must have been. It's about time. Canadian students get online textbooks. You know, and when I was reading this, I was kind of thinking, well, you know, like, I think Hyundai is now giving away an iPad as the user's owner's manual for the Hyundai. So instead of giving them an owner's manual, they get an iPad, and inside the iPad is the owner's manual. And I was thinking, because I never thought through this process. When I went to college, like, no one had laptops. Oh, yeah. And, like, everyone has them now. Is theft up on campuses? Plus, like, before you could walk away with a bag and you'd have some books that you probably didn't want. They were probably worth 20 bucks a book. Most people never carried more than two books. Yeah. So you maybe got 40 bucks. Now you're walking away with a laptop. Oh, yeah. Cell phone, laptop, iPad. Oh, yeah. All kinds of stuff. So I wonder if theft is up on campuses. I don't know. Maybe it should be. And then I read this one article. I actually didn't read the article. I saw the headline. I thought it was appropriate for what we've experienced this week. Why people power is

cool again. And this is talking about people-powered directories, kind of like, I don't know, Yahoo directory. And I thought it was interesting because last week we submitted some of our clients to Yahoo directory. On Monday, Paul sends me an email with the link to, Yahoo, canceling paid inclusion. And I immediately start justifying, well, this is fine because we'll at least have a year. And then Charles comes in and chimes in and he's like, you know, dudes, this was like 2009. Yeah. I don't know. So apparently paid inclusions made it through their removal of paid inclusions. Of paid inclusions, yeah. We don't know if they never took it down or they took it down and they added it back up. But apparently this article, and this was on CNN technology, apparently people power is cool again. Now, this is not to be mistaken with the Yahoo web search. You can still be in Yahoo's web directory and not in their local direct, excuse me, not in their directory. You can still be in their web database but not in their directory. There is a difference. By the way, their web database is Bing. Yeah, basically. So if they actually canceled their paid people search subscription, you just wouldn't be on Yahoo technically anymore. Yeah, you wouldn't be in their web, their directory directory. And funny, my first thought when I saw that is, you know, we've been kind of riding Yahoo down as they sell off everything. We're like, how are they going to make any money? There's no paid, so apparently maybe that's the only way they're making money anymore. All right, so we were talking, we were batting ideas around local search. And here's, here's how, maybe you guys have noticed this already, maybe you haven't noticed this. Here's how complicated local search is now. Now, let's say I do a search for, we'll do plumber, right? And I, Google knows I'm in Houston based on my IP address. Sometimes it knows even in a more narrow focus exactly where I am. Like when

I was up in New Jersey, it knew I was in the town of Franklin Lakes. And by the way, in New Jersey, there's a town, well, I think the logic is there's a town every one day horse ride away, right? So that's how the town's kind of cropped up in New Jersey, which means about a five minute car ride away. It knew I was in Franklin Lakes at the time. So it's, it's pretty detailed. It can get pretty detailed. We know that in Houston, Houston and a lot of kind of little municipalities get to, tend to get thrown in there. But it's got a pretty good, Google knows where you're at typically. So if you do a search for a plumber, you get one set of results. If you do a search for Houston plumber, you get another set of results. If you do a search for plumber and on the left of Google, there is a place where you can change your location. If you change that location, you'll get different results. So it's three searches for the same technical, I'm looking for the same thing and doing a test. And then three different sets of results. So where does this sit? I mean, what is the importance? And then this all really does tie into Google Local Places or the six pack. Remember our tip from podcast number 90 was, was the rap Google Places is the place to be. That's Google Places A to G. Is it G? I don't know. A, B, C, D, E, F. Yes, it's G. Um, because that's the seventh letter of the alphabet. Um, I like those awkward sounds. If this was a radio, we'd have got fired. But, you know, I think local search is... We pulled our license. Yeah. Local search is important enough. You know, we talked about it a lot last year, I think. Uh, and I'll say this, even though I said it last podcast. This, 2011 is the year of local search. Even though last podcast, 2011 was the year

of mobile search. Mobile search. Next podcast, it'll be something else. It's, uh... Well, I don't know. We got a lot of information here to go on local search. This may be the beginning of the longest podcast, SEO podcast. Yeah, for real, this is going to go until March. In history. Uh, so basically, local search is extremely important. And we've, you've heard this. Yeah, I've kicked this dead horse several times. You know, the, the local pack, or the seven, six, seven pack, it's going to be the place to be. Uh, because everything is local. Every, you know, Google recognized the value of it, so they started putting things into place end of 2009, beginning of 2010. So we want to, you know, cover this again. Local search. Mobile search. Here we go. 2011 is the year of local slash mobile search. Which, I guess, which could kind of, well, I won't say it's kind of the same thing, but they are definitely, uh, they're merging. Well, certainly Google knows where your phone is, too, right? Um, I, I think there's probably some way you can turn that off or turn it on. Uh, but, you know, when you go into Google Maps, it knows where you're at. So when you're searching other Google places, it probably knows where you're at. And, and that's kind of the whole, whole goal of, I think, of, of Google, you know, having Android and having, uh, their operating system on phones is that, you know, when you start doing searches, it can actually sell ads that are immediately around you. So if you're hungry, um, you know, there's three restaurants around that are paying to have their ad put in front of you, uh, because you're right there. And, uh, you know, it's actually, uh, it's a, it's a, of high value to us. If I am looking for a restaurant, I want to know three restaurants right around me. I don't want to know the three restaurants that's, that are paying Google that may or may not be within

the next 30 miles. Yes, I, I, and I completely agree with that. Uh, here's a great, uh, line I'm going to pull from this. It's, and here's kind of why we're going over local search. And then I'm going to read, I'm going to quote this, uh, directly from the article. It says, it's getting harder and harder, even for local SEO experts, pull for this survey, survey to keep up with all the developments in our industry. I think this basic blah, blah, blah, blah, basically. So things are changing so fast. You know, you've got Facebook going local. Yup. Going local. Google places is local. Uh, excuse me. What else? Being local Yahoo, local algorithm. I mean, they all have separate algorithms for local search. So I thought this was awesome. So what this guy did is he pulled a bunch of local SEO experts about different things that are important to your local search. And we've done this before. I think about a year ago we did, uh, we did a podcast that was a survey of different, uh, SEO experts on what factors are important to SEO. And then they rated them. Okay. Which, you know, 75% think this is important, 25% don't. So, okay. What, what, what is important in local? Well, let's make sure we give credit on this article, right? Okay. Um, it's from David Ming or Mim, uh, M I H M. So you guys can find this. Uh, we're just going to kind of briefly look at these numbers. There's a lot of details in here. Um, they asked a whole lot of people, their opinions of this, and then their specific text responses, uh, of their opinions to this is included. We're just going to kind of go over the highlights. Um, I highly recommend that you go pull this article, uh, and, and read through it, uh, in detail because, uh, you know, just like I described, if, if plumber, if plumber in Houston, if plumber and you happen to be in Houston is something that you're going

after or whatever that key term is, uh, you really need to be on top of local search and this will, this will help you understand at least what the experts out there feel. Of course, we don't know the Google algorithm and, and we probably never will. Yeah. I, my standing offer, I will give anyone who gives me the Google algorithm, I will give them $10. I'll give you 20 bucks. 30. I'm not, I'm not going. That's just not, I'm, I don't want it that bad. 31. You're like the price is right. If you, uh, overbid, you lose. So I'll take 29. All right. So, uh, kind of the first thing that's listed here is general importance of claiming places, page, and local listings, uh, of your local listing. And, uh, I think that's kind of self, I thought that was kind of self-explanatory. Yes, you, you do need to claim your listing. Why? You probably have 50 of them out there. We had like a ton of listings out there. Get, find one that looks good. Claim it. Bang. Very important. Everyone said that was an importance of like 4.4 out of five. So everybody, you know, just about everybody poll said that was very important. With very high agreement. Now I don't really understand their, uh, high agreement or disagreement. So a 1.3 is moderate agreement. This is a 0.9, which means high agreement. So I'm guessing the lower the number, the more the agreement, the, the less the, it's probably, uh, if I remember my statistics class, it's probably the, uh, deviation. So the deviation is 0.9, which is, is low, which means that everyone is in a tight framework and everyone agrees with that. Enough of the science. And I'm lost, so I'm like, wow, standard deviation was a long time ago. So basically get your listing, find it, you know, search as many different ways for your business as you can. You're going to find multiple listings. Find one that's most completed, complete it, and then claim it. And we'll give

you some advice about listings. Don't get yours banned. Yes. Yes. Definitely don't do it. And don't try to cheat the system. Yeah. Definitely don't try. Not that we did, but you know, kind of, nevermind. No, okay. I know where you're going and this is, this is not wrong. It's not right. The reality is, is I was trying to mirror for one of our clients what I saw at other physicians facilities and those other physicians facilities, it's working that way and ours it's not. And we're getting banned and I'm like, okay, well, I'm doing exactly what they're doing. So get your proverbial together. Anyway. All right. So the next one was that your business address is in the city of the search. Now, this was considered a 4.16 out of five. So of high importance and there was high agreement. I thought this was really cool because we got, I got a call last week from a guy in Oklahoma. I cannot remember his name for the life of me, but it's in my email and he says, Hey, listen, I'm in a small city just outside of Tulsa. And I know a lot of people out there have the same concern. I want to market to Tulsa. Yes. I want my listing here in my city, but Tulsa is where the meat of my business is going to come from. So what do you do to do that? You know, uh, okay. No, do you, you don't want to just, well, you want, you, you got to have it in your main city. If you live in a suburb, you got to have that listing there, but there's a lot of different things you can do. If you want to do if you want to market there, you can go get, I've told people, you know, you can go get a PO box, you know, you can borrow someone's address that, you know, you can find a, uh, a fault here. Now, now this, this is just flat out lying and I'm not going to

endorse it, but you can just go make up an address and do that. But there are complications with doing that. Potential complications. So you can do it and you can probably get away with it. And it also depends on your business. Uh, and it wasn't Chris either. It depends on, on the type of business that you're in. So if you're a storefront and you're in the suburbs, you certainly don't want your, your store showing up as being in downtown Houston when you're out in one of the suburbs. Uh, so you've got to be mindful of that. If it's a service that you provide again, back to plumbing, um, you know, it may help people find you and really you go to them. So it doesn't matter if you're located in downtown Houston or, or in any of the suburbs, as long as wherever the client's located is something that you're going to service. So, um, so, so be mindful of that. It's not just, Hey, I got to get on the first page, uh, for this term. It, it, it, you know, the type of business makes a significant difference too. And also, you know, like a tutor may not want to drive that. So why would you want to be in downtown Houston? Uh, and, and people are kind of mindful of that also where, uh, I'm looking for a tutor. I want a tutor who's pretty close to me. I don't need a tutor driving all the way across town. Uh, and I typically, I like to do business in between where I live and where I work. I would prefer not to go out of that if I, if I don't have to, to make it easy and convenient for me. All right. So we've got, uh, the next one. You want to take the next one? Associating your places page with your proper categories. I mean, I can't stress this enough. And this would be one of probably like one of the very first things you do. You're setting up your

Google places listing. Make sure that you have, you have, uh, utilize as many categories as you pot, as they will possibly allow you to. This will help make sure that your listing is 100% complete. Now there's a couple of ways you can do these listings. You can select categories. Google has predefined categories. I would tell you that my first thought would be to, to go with what, use their categories as much as possible. Yes. You can create your own categories, but, um, I can give you an example. Yes. Google, Google boost, right? Uh, I don't know if it's been released across the country. It certainly is available here in Houston. And it's a kind of a paid listing with Google local places and Google boost in order to determine which keywords show up. Remember a couple of our podcasts, we were complaining, uh, that we were showing up for things like marketing, not internet marketing, but marketing is general. Marketing. Um, and, uh, and so we sent an email to, to Google and they, they seem to have gotten it straightened out. That's very good. But the, the made up categories, if you will, uh, are not being, they don't take those categories into consideration when figuring out keywords for which to show our ad. Okay. So they're only, they're only basing it off of, you know, internet marketing. I don't remember what the, I think internet marketing is one of the categories. Um, not SEO, um, Houston or something, whatever. I have one category that actually has SEO in it. They don't have an SEO category and, uh, at least not that I recall. And, and so we're not showing up for SEO keywords in Google boost, but we are for internet marketing and marketing in general. So, um, that's, uh, that's the reason that you want to make sure that your categories are right. And now if you're going to, uh, add your own, if you're going to add your own separate categories, here's what I'd recommend. Make sure that you have, if

you want a keyword that is not a Google category, let's say, uh, blue, blue alarm widgets, right. And that's not a category. Make sure that that text is in your places listing somewhere in the text. Um, you know, if you decide to create your own description, it's, it's, and the other places you might want to put it in your, you know, the title or, I mean, there's a million places you can put it, but just make sure that that keyword is listed throughout your, your local listing text so that people can find it because the text is keyword searchable as, I mean, everything, just about everything, Google's keyword searchable. Yep. Um, the next one is product service keyword in place page business title. Um, and this is an interesting one. Okay. This one had a little bit of disagreement to it. Um, would it help? Yes. I, I, and, uh, from what I understand this is to be as, you know, and our business title should be e-web style, web design, internet mark, search engine optimization company. Uh, yeah, yeah, but no, if that makes any sense. Don't do it. Um, and I'm kind of glancing at some of the comments here. One of them is saying, yes, sad to say, but I see a plethora of businesses that are ranking well in that, in that seven pack, uh, as having the name in the business. Now, what this really means is you should probably have keywords in your business name. Okay. But you, you, Google will ding you if you're changing your business name to manipulate their system. Oh, so it's kind of like back in the day and, uh, you know, people in older generation will definitely recognize this when, you know, on the yellow pages, people would say, my name is triple A bail bonds. Everybody, you know, I'm sure there's a triple A bail bonds and every, uh, see, I know there's the, nevermind. Uh, I'm going to open quadruple A. Yeah, yeah, and that's what people do to get to

the front of the, to get to the front of the yellow pages heading. Uh, they would put AAA and that's kind of how people are doing, oh, let me put, uh, web design in front of, you know, Joe Schmo marketing, whatever. Where yellow pages used to allow that. And actually that may have been their name. Um, and if that was their name, great. Uh, but if you want to, maybe you want to get a DBA and, and, and, you know, open that DBA listing so that it actually has those keywords in, um, because, uh, yes, I believe it does have importance and two, don't manipulate it. Don't change your business name. Um, if you haven't legitimately changed your business name, cause you can have some, some problems. And that's kind of how I'm like, yeah, but no. So yeah, it would help. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't make any significant changes to do it. Uh, this next one I love, I don't know, a lot of people are having, or they want to hear about this and it's called the proximity. It basically, it's judging the importance of the proximity of your business address to the city centroid. Are you sure you're qualified to answer this question? Uh, no, I'm obviously, I'm definitely not. I'm definitely not. I appreciate it. I was going to speak authoritatively on it. With great conviction and passion. But I'm certainly not qualified. But let's get somebody who's qualified out here to actually answer this question. Let's bring out the one and only Charles Lewis Moe Sirius, the SEO rapper, to, uh, to help us answer this question about the city centroid. What is the city centroid? I think, um, centroid is actually a, uh, is a geometric, uh, term that refers to the center of the mass of a city. Yes. Um, so, don't. Here he is. What's up? Centroid. Centroid. So what is your thinking on the proximity? What, what do we have? We have this as high importance and moderate agreement between the experts that were, uh,

queried in this survey. Um, well, from my understanding, it's the centroid is typically, uh, geographically the center of that city. So, uh, Houston, for example, downtown. Right? Just like street signs. Right. If you're in Houston, you'll see a sign that'll say, you know, if you're in a suburb, Missouri City or whatever, you'll see a sign that says 16 miles to Houston. Right. But you're in Houston, right? Right. So it's still calculating from where you are to downtown Houston. And so I think in regards to that, the proximity, it's the same thing. Right. If I give you a, a Katie address. Okay. Then technically you're really not in Houston. Right. According to the centroid. Right. You're, you know, 30, 40 miles up. Yeah. So I think, you know. So how important in terms of local places, not just local, well, I think this is mostly about local places, but we're also talking about kind of localized search. How important is being at the center of the town? So I searched Plumber Houston. Um, yeah, your address should be, you know, the center of Houston. I mean, it should be in one of those zip codes that they consider in Houston. You know, if it's 004, I told you that would have to say. If it's 004 or, um. Okay, okay. Okay. 004 or, you know, any one of these other zip codes that's in the city of Houston, um, considered downtown or whatnot, then your best bet for coming up ranking for that. Would be close to the, you want to be close to the center of Houston. Now, a lot of people have called and asked me, how do I get in that, that pack? How is it that everybody that's listed in that local search is listed, like, right around the center of the city of Houston, you know? But, you know, I think everyone has seen this, where there'll be five listings right around the center of Houston, and then there'll be one guy 10 miles outside of Houston. How does he get

in that listing? Okay, and the 100% correct answer is, I have no idea. Only Google knows that. But, I can, this is basically a canned response I'll tell everyone. Make sure that you have a listing, you've claimed it, you have the right keywords in it, you're in the right categories. Your listing is 100% complete, uh, which is probably one of the most important factors. And, um, you know, hope and pray. People like that benefit from having, uh, remote locations. Okay. Corporate office may be in Sugar Lake, right? But, I have a remote office on West Timer, right? I got another remote office, you know, somewhere else downtown. And so, while they're not the corporate office, he does have a, a legit, physical, satellite office. Yeah, satellite office that's in Houston. And so, the little dot is showing the corporate office, but he, he has work in, locally. They are in Houston. So, you know, I don't, um, I'm not going to recommend that you go get office space downtown if you don't have to, or toward the city of Centroid. Um, would it help? Probably. Yeah. But, there's other ways around it. And, is there better ways to spend your money? Yeah. There's definitely better ways to spend your money. That's a better way to spend your money instead of moving downtown. Yeah, there you go. So, uh, that's a big issue. I know a lot of people wondered about that. So, just get your listing up and make sure it's complete and looks good. Um, and then you should be able to get around that city-centroid issue. All right. The next one we've got is product service keywords in place page description. So, this is not the title. We covered the title already. It's actually in the description. And how important is that? Uh, we've got a 2.49, which that says high importance. We've seen higher, obviously. Uh, and, uh, and an agreement of 1.15. Remember, lower is better. Uh, also considered high agreement. So, um, content. What do you guys think? Yeah. I

mean, this is like. This is what you do. If you have some e-commerce website and on your product page, you list a product description. Um, since this is Google Places and it's a place page, it's not considered duplicate content. It's a copy of that same description and placed it on your Places page. Right. You know, um, now you don't want to describe one product on your Places page. You probably want to describe, you know, your company or the different products you guys offer. But, um, yeah. Definitely make it keyword rich. Um, and, and. Don't spam. Yeah. Don't keyword spam. You know, people are. Because people actually read this, right? Yeah. Because it's not a, it's not a, uh, oh, if I, if I do a great job on this, I'm going to get great placement. Well, I feel, I don't know if people actually read it or not. Oh, yeah. This is my opinion. Yeah. Because I feel like when you get that, that, that top seven listing, A through G. Boom. The link goes to your site. Yeah. You have to actually click the Places page link to the right to actually even get there. To get to the Places page, yeah. You are right. And so, I'm not sure how many people read it or not. If they do, great. Write a review. You know, but if you don't, um, I'm fine with you clicking directly to my site. Yeah. I actually prefer you click directly to the site. That's, that's true because it's got, I've got, you know, the flash of our site, the look and feel of the site. Yeah, you've got CTA, it's, it's ready for you. Mm-hmm. Um, I, I, I almost see this, I'm surprised that, I would have thought there'd be more, uh, importance and more agreement because for me it's like, have a listing and make sure your keywords are in the description. Yes. Like, I, I, I don't even know how that's, uh, uh, it's, it's, they're, they're together, right? I mean, in fact, you

would almost put this first except you have to have a listing in order to actually have a description. That's the only reason a listing is more important. Um, so I don't, I, I'm a little surprised at, uh, at, at, at the fact that the agreements. It's kind of like off, off, uh, off-site SEO work, right? Right. We do all this stuff on our places page just so we can get people to our website. Yeah, yeah. You see what I'm saying? So, and then we do all this work on our website just so that we can have them turn off the website and give us a call, send us an email, write us a letter. I just had to throw that. All right, uh, next one talks about associating photos with your place page. I thought this was kind of, um, duh, like, and yeah, this was self-explanatory. You have to have photos. What I get a lot of is how many photos? As many as they'll allow. I think it's five, yeah. Five photos, five videos. Well, and we've, we've talked, uh, a lot about your listing needs to be 100% complete. Yeah. Uh, I think you have to have at least two pictures for 100. I don't think you have to have all five for 100% complete. But go ahead and put all five, um, uh, we also started putting our pictures on Picasa, which is a Google product. So, you can put tags and you can have extra information about that image and then have that tied back to, uh, your Google Places listing. Um, yeah, this really goes back to, uh, the fact that we know Google gives precedent to people who have 100% complete Google Places listing. Make sure it's 100% complete. I mean, that's. You have a, uh, you know, a popular person in your industry. You know, or in your company, put their picture. Another great picture would be your logo. Another great picture would be your company storefront. Another good picture would be your most popular product. You

know, I would put a series of different pictures along with, uh, associated videos. Yeah, make sure your, make sure your videos are there. I'm sure we're gonna, it's gotta hit videos at some point. What, uh, what do we got next? We're on number 20 already. Associating a local area phone, uh, a local area. Associating local area code as primary place page phone number. You know, this is one that I have never actually, um, even thought about. Yeah. Me either. It was just, you know, every time we set up a local. It's a great question. Great question. Every time we set up a local, uh, a local listing for a client, they always have a local phone number for that particular area. So it's never really been a question. Now, some of them may have 800 numbers and yeah, we'll put that in, but that local number goes first. Why? Because it's a local listing. Yeah. They're tracking area codes. Yes. Um, just like they know. And from a user perspective, um, I live in the suburbs where majority of our area codes are two, eight, one. And so if I see a listing and a seven, one, three, that lets me know that it's probably not close to me. Okay. Right. So I don't, I'm going to go for the two, eight, ones. I'm wondering if even, I mean, we've kind of have these concrete thoughts, uh, but I, I'm more and more, I'm getting, uh, area codes of, of business contacts that I'm have to do business with who work in Houston, who live in Houston, who have, you know, an area code from California or, you know, if you had brought yours from Michigan, there's no reason you don't have to change it. You're not, you don't pay extra fees to make local calls here in Houston from your, uh, from your Michigan cell phone or, or whatever. So I think, uh, I, and then Google, Google phone, right? The whole concept is I never changed my phone number. So if I moved

to California, yeah, maybe I have a home phone, but I just forward my Google phone to that home phone number. That's why I'm not so sure if mobile phones work best for Google places. I think the better, uh, the better direction to go would be a landline. Yeah. You know, a landline with a, with the area code that determines where you are geographically located. So I think there's a better fit. I think we're seeing what we saw here, which was, uh, uh, it says high importance, which I, I would say medium importance, uh, but low agreement. Yeah. So, so you're all over the map. Does it, you know, cause a business could legitimately do business in Houston with a California area code and it doesn't matter. Yeah. I do all of them. You got four numbers post all four. Yeah. Yep. Well, I think we've, we've made it through 20 of these. We have any blank stare news or we got any? That's some blank stare news. Everybody knows. Oh, blank stare. That's blank. That was good. That was very blank. Okay. So everybody knows, you know, uh, Verizon, right? Right. Brought the iPhone. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so made a huge hoopla, but I got two pieces of blank stare news related to that. Number one, uh, Verizon, I don't understand this. Answer this for me, even though I'm, I'm Android for life. So I won't ever go, but just got a question. Um, iPhone four, Verizon offers 4G speed, but the iPhone four that they brought over only works on 3G, what was the point of that? That was just to make this phone right here, the Evo, that much better. I didn't get that. Oh, and then after Verizon took it, one of the AT&T custom service reps tweeted, um, this some bull. Now they have a choice. That really sucks for me. You know, like, come on, Rachel. Her name is Rachel. Come on, Rachel. Like, for real, you know, your job is on the line. Yeah, for real. Oh no,

Rachel got fired. Trust. If you found that, then our boss probably did too. Sorry, Rachel. Yeah, I think that was a bad move. I don't know if it was a Verizon move or an AT, uh, or a Apple move, but I'd be pissed. I do think one thing that is going to come out of this, you know, a lot of people have blamed the AT&T network for the iPhone's failings as a phone, right? And, and I've read in other places that, uh, other phones on the AT&T network are fine. Okay. Right? So you don't, you know, whatever the Samsung, you know, freebie phone that when you sign up at AT&T, it, it works fine. It doesn't drop calls. So I think we're going to see as we switch, as they switch networks, it's going to have the same quality. What I mean is low quality of service. And people will begin to realize that it's a great, uh, it's a great iPod. It's a great mini iPad. Yeah. And it's a marginal phone. Yes. And, uh, and the, this is better. Yeah. The Evo. The Evo. Android. Another Google product. Yeah. They need to start sending us a check. For real. Maybe Matt can help us out with that. Yeah. Mr. Cuts. All right. This has been another great podcast. This was podcast number 92. Uh, we appreciate you guys listening. Uh, you have made us the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is entirely because of you. I am a little depressed because we have not received a review in a little while. You can get a review, uh, make a review of us on our Facebook page, facebook.com slash ewebstyle, or just get onto iTunes, create a simple account. I think it's a two minute process or something, create an account and write a review about us. Uh, it's been over a month, um, not, not even counting the break that we haven't had a review. And, uh, we know that there's a few, well, we know there's, uh, what, 72 likes.

So, uh, I don't think we have 72 reviews. So, go out there. You're listening. You're enjoying the, the information. You're enjoying the humor, the humor, uh, or maybe not. Um, go, go write a review. Uh, until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Paul Hanson, Charles Lewis, bye-bye for now.