Local Search Strategy Tips - #seopodcast 191

Hi, welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I am Charles Lewis, of Internet Marketing Specialist. Welcome to the most entertaining podcast with SEO content on the known planets. Yeah, something like that. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers, and our mantra is... Don't be a deuce. As always, it is not a good look. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast. Our previous podcast was number 190. The tip is take advantage of authorship and plus one buttons when performing spring cleaning on your website. Yeah, if this is that time of the year where you're maybe giving your website a facelift or you're updating the content and you're making some changes, take advantage of the new tools and applications that are out there that Google has provided to help increase your rank, like authorship. Set up that authorship. So, your avatar can display your search results. Add those plus one buttons to your site so people can vote your site up, which would improve the likelihood of you getting ranked higher. So, take advantage of G Plus when you're updating your website. Excellent. If you can, if you know how, if you have the technology at your fingertips right now, go ahead and pull up that device and tweet now. And what you should tweet is... Hashtag SEO Podcast. This is number 191. Be sure to tag us in it at eWebStyle. That way, we can link up and social network with you and all of that good stuff. Also, remember, there's two things that you can do for us, and one of those things requires three steps, and that is go to iTunes, make an account, and write a review. Write a review if you've gotten good information from our podcast, if you're entertained by our podcast, if you just appreciate the fact that the audio in our podcast has improved, please write that review. Also, what you could optionally do is send us an email, podcast at... E-WebStyle.com

And we'll give you a PTOF, which stands for... A punch in the face. It's a good thing, by the way. The other thing that you could do is you could go to our G Plus local page and write a review. You know how valuable G Plus local reviews are, so we would really appreciate that. And you also know how long the URL for G Plus local pages is. It's like plus.google.com slash post slash 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, dot post. And so, you know, we don't need all of that instead. What you can do is you can go to E-WebStyle.com slash... G Plus. Or slash... G Plus. Or slash... Google Plus. Or slash... Google Plus. All of those will immediately forward you to our Google Plus local page where you can write a review. We will really, really... How many reallies? Appreciate that. Two. We'll go with two reallies this time. Yeah, two reallies. Next time, maybe it'll be three. We'll feel more generous with our reallies. Remember, we have a referral program. If you're in the web design business, you're listening to our podcast to improve your own website, and you have clients asking about SEO services for their websites that you're making for them, and you already know how hard it is because you're doing it on your site, send them to us, and you can get paid. And we'll take care of it. We do have our segment, The Algorithm Cataclysm. That looked really good over there. That was good. And I'll tell you, that is the best, most cheapest special effect I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah, so I'll go cataclysm. So how many of you guys remember, this isn't like a new algorithm change Google has made, but it's more of a search engine result page change. So back in April, back in April of 2010, they released the instant previews. And if you remember that, that was when you could hover. You could hover over a little arrow next to the search listing,

and then you would get a screenshot of how that website looked. They said that it was going to be great, that it would increase user activity, people would feel more confident clicking. Problem was, nobody used it, right? And so Google has made two changes on that search result page. One, they removed instant previews. So that's not there anymore. Two, they've also removed the option to plus one this link. Remember, you could do that at one point. Click plus one, and then to plus one a particular search result without clicking on it. Can't do that either anymore now. Instead, what they've added, and check it out when you get, because you probably haven't noticed it, there's a new green arrow on the search result. And when you click that green arrow, you'll get a drop down, and it'll show you, it'll give you an option to share it with G+. It'll give you an option to view the cache version of that site, and it'll give you the option to see that instant preview. So that's your cataclysm. No more instant previews, no more plus ones from the SERP. You have to use the green arrow to get access to that kind of stuff. I actually, I'm kind of, like I'm ambivalent. I don't care that it's gone, because I never used it. I used it occasionally. Every now and then, it was like, hmm, I'll hover. That's pretty cool. I think that's the site. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, kind of site confirmation before you actually commit to a click. Definitely. Because our clicks are valuable here. Yeah. Just want you guys to know that. The only piece of news that I've got, a bunch of comments that I found on podomatic.com, so we'll go through some of those. One really cool tidbit about getting Google to index your domain name from actually breaking apart the words. So the example was conjugateverb.com. I'll be reading that. The only piece of news I have is Facebook either releases or re-releases trusted friends. So say you forget your

password, you don't remember your first pet, you don't know your mom's last name, and you forgot your birthday, you can ask three. So you create a list of trusted friends, and then you can ask them, and Facebook will send one password to each of them. Your friends will get that back to you, and then you can actually log back into your account. I think it's a great idea. Yeah, as long as you trust them. Yeah, well, so really you should choose two friends who really don't like each other. Yeah. Right, because as long as they don't ever conspire to get into your Facebook account, you're okay. And so if you have one oddball, or maybe nobody knows who the one last trusted friend is, you know, so you maybe do your mom. Yeah, it'd be like my wife, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Two best friends. And a wife. Yeah. I'm not worried about my wife having my password. Exactly. Just not an issue. So I thought that was pretty cool, because there are some accounts out there that when you lose the password, and in some cases it makes sense. For instance, we have a password program that we use here, and if you were to lose your passphrase, you just lose access. It's just gone. That's it. Bye-bye. Adios. So I thought that was pretty cool, and that is the only news. Okay. Here's a comment. This is, I think we've read, he's commented on all sorts of places, so he really deserves the patoof that he's going to get now. This is from Daniel Street, Soulmates Photography. He actually posted on our Podomatic page, hands down the best SEO podcast on the Internet, tons of useful advice, and after listening over the past year, I have used approximately 20% of their advice, and I'm on page one of seven different keywords on Google. Can't wait to use more of their excellent advice. I can honestly say that this will be a banner year for me. Profits are way up, and that

says a lot about eWebStyle. Hey, guys, next beer's on me. Nick, could you figure out where he's located and schedule that trip? Yeah, we're going over there. Well, Daniel, appreciate it, man. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for your support. I'm glad it's working for you. I'm going to be honest. I would like some more information. What's worked for you? What have you tried? What site did you implement it on? And I would like to, you know, see how that worked for you, and that way we can see how that works. I have no clue. Just keep going. Keep doing the podcast. Has anyone said cut? No, they didn't. But, yeah, I'm interested to see what sort of things did you try? Did you kind of benchmark what you did prior to using some of the advice we give? Just be cool. But it's always good to hear people trying what we say and it's working for them. And succeeding, yeah. Yeah. Imagine what we do with our clients if just our 30-minute advice once a week is getting one of, he's on page one for seven different keywords on Google. That's awesome. Okay, so we had David Hinckley actually submitted a comment on Podomatic. And it says, Charles, you can break up the word hardyplank in HTML, and this is referring to a podcast a while back, with hardyplank to force Google to see words in a compound phrase. The word hardy will now be part of your search terms. I have proved this with his article. So he wrote this article, and the article is, Oh, I remember what podcast he's referring to, too. Right? Mm-hmm. And what he said is, how to rank individual terms of a compound domain name with Google using HTML span. And basically, he went and he did an href, a link, and for the actual content that was linked, he did span, so the domain is conjugateverb.com. He did open span, that's S-P-A-N as in Nancy, conjugate, closed span, openspanverb, closedspan.com. And what

that does is make sure that Google really, really knows that it's conjugateverb. And not conjugateverb. Yeah, exactly. And so, and then, but the user sees conjugateverb. Conjugateverb. Yeah. And he says he's actually placing well for verb.com in that situation. So, That's pretty good, and I get that, and I'm aware of some other ways you can get Google to do that as well. In that particular case, the issue wasn't necessarily ranking for both terms because the client, you know, James Hardy, frankly, doesn't want its trusted vendors to market under the incorrect spelling. So it wasn't that we couldn't show for that. It was that Google was recognizing the incorrect spelling. I see that. So his point was put in span hardy. Yeah. And then put the E in span. So when they see it, they'll see the regular version. But, and you're right. That's a great idea. Frankly, we'll probably implement that. But my thing is that why does Google automatically make the incorrect spelling their correct version? Yep. That was my issue. It wasn't, I mean, I know, More a knock on Google than, Exactly. Yeah. We have tons of HTML and different coding and tricks we can do to get the right word there. But it's more of a principle deal. Google, this is the incorrect spelling. Well, it's kind of a, it's a algorithmic inertial issue. Yeah. Right. So the inertia is everyone's using hardy without the IE, just finishing with the I. And so now you have this inertia. And so your suggest search keeps leading them to DI. I mean, frankly, hardy may actually have to petition Google to make a manual change in order to have that done. And I'm sure that, frankly, that's probably the only way to make it done because all the searches now are being performed as hardy DI. So very interesting. Well, appreciate that info, man. I would have, I had a different way to do that. I didn't think of using span tags for that,

to be honest. I usually use span tags for styling. And in a sense, this is a form of style. So it makes perfect sense. So appreciate that. Good stuff, Mr. Hinckley. Hopefully you haven't shot any presidents lately. And then finally we have this, oh, I didn't even get his name in this. Okay, let's skip that one. We'll do this one. We'll do Rich. Rich says, great podcast. Just found it last week. And that was posted 444 days ago. Oh, that was in, like, wow, 2011 sometime? Yeah. 2012? A while back, as we say. Remember, you are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all you all. We really do appreciate you. If you've listened to our podcast before, you know that approximately now is the time that the potatoes ends and the meat begins. Yeah, so I brought an article today. I got this from Search Engine Journal. 11 ways to get your local search strategy to the next level. And so I usually, I like pulling articles with numbers and different tips and things like that. One, because everyone has a checklist, and I'm always curious to see what that checklist is. And as I was going through this one, it was kind of vague. Some things that we were going to more depth on. Some others I kind of disagreed with. And so we'll look at these and take it from there. Remember, this is focusing on your local search strategy. So number one, he says, broaden your horizons. Right? And I like the concept of that. Basically, what he's saying is think outside the box. Right? You can't, it's a local search strategy. And so with that, you can't stick to the same things you're always doing. A standard local strategy would be, you know, set up a Google Places Local Plus account and then put all my information on there. Right? And then I'll even take it a step further and maybe set up some Angie's List or City Search and things

like that. But what he's saying here is to broaden your horizons. When you start thinking outside the box, think about other things you can do locally, since this is a local strategy, maybe even offline, that will help with your online deals. So, for example, you may want to have some business events. Maybe a meet and greet with the owners or something like that. And it's an event that you can schedule, that you can publish in some local calendar through the local paper. Right? That's another link. But more importantly, engage your local community in what you're offering. And so that way they can familiarize themselves with your brand, with your location, and things like that. Because all of that sorts of things affect your online local strategy. Which kind of goes into number two, which was organize and participate in events. So, for example, let's say you are a local plumbing person. Right? You're a local plumber and you service a certain zip code, a certain area. Why not, if you have a physical location, why not run seminars that show people how to install the new faucet or how to maintain the correct water pressure or whatever it is. And invite people over so that people can come, so they can learn, so they can take notes. More importantly, they can share the information that they learned on different social sites and online, which all helps your brand, helps people recognize where you are locally. So, you know, participate in different local events. Number three, advertise offline. Anytime you're doing a local search or a local campaign, I'm a firm believer that offline advertisement and offline efforts strategically help with what you're doing online. For example, if you're a local business and using the same example, you're a plumber, it's worth it for you to run offline advertisement. Traditional stuff, radio, TV, because the one benefit to offline advertisements is that you can somewhat target it to a certain area. And so you may not, you know, want to broadcast the entire city of Houston.

You may want to run it during a certain time, during a certain region, right, for your service. And so offline advertisement gives you the ability to do that. But more importantly, you can tie it into your local stuff. All offline advertisements should have a link to your site, maybe a link to, well, not necessarily a link, but the address listed to where they can post those reviews and see citations and things like that. Maybe a QR code? Definitely a QR code, which is what I was going to go to. What he didn't mention on here until later was the use of a mobile. Anytime you're talking local, you should really be talking mobile in that same sentence because local searches, most local searches tend to happen on a mobile device. And so keep mobile in mind when you're working on your local strategy. Number four, measure everything. When I say everything, everything. Measure traffic to the site, measure how many people came in and where they came from, measure bounce rate, measure everything. How many forms you got from that, how many phone calls you received from that, how many people actually converted. Measure everything, sit back, look at analytics. That way you can figure out what worked and what didn't work. I'm going to take measure everything, and you should make that across the board. Not just with your local strategy, but with your SEO strategy, with your paid strategy, with your social strategy. Measure, measure, measure. You must quantify in order to determine what's working and what's not. Number five, he put, it's not just about consistency. And so I think with that, people were, you know, we're still talking local. The consistent thing to do is, okay, consistently get reviews. Consistently update my images. Consistently update my videos. Consistently keep my Google Local Plus business page updated. And I'm not too sure about that. I think that's kind of a norm, right? You have to be consistent or you will lose your placement. But I think it's about, I think it's about

the content. I think you have to be consistent with how you post, with how you publish. If you're doing those events that I talked about earlier, then be consistent with those. Do them quarterly, right? If you're having these meet and greets, do them consistently. Do them monthly. If you're doing a podcast. Do it consistently, do it weekly, right? And so, you know, be consistent with what you're publishing and give people, what consistency does, it allows people to get a better feel for who you are, what your business is about, and what they can expect from you. And so when you're consistent, then people tend to be more comfortable spending money with you. Number six, reputation management is important. It's extremely important. So you have to do things like monitor the web, right? I'm a firm advocate for Google Alerts. Set those up so you can see who's saying your name and what they're saying about it and link to it. And you can monitor what's being said, what's being done, what's good, what's bad. If you're not monitoring these sort of things, monitoring your reputation, then you just won't know. And then that's a problem because on the web, what you don't know can hurt you. So monitor what's going on. And then not only monitor, but fix it. If indeed you're getting, you know, people complaining because they're not receiving something from your site or whatever, fix that problem. Yeah. You know, if you are getting bad reviews because of a certain, you know, employee, then fix that problem. Get him off the phone. Get him or her off the phone. Do whatever you got to do. But you have to address those issues. And not only that, in situations where things are going okay, take that extra step to make that client feel appreciative. Send that card. Send those flowers. Send that gift card. You know, give that handwritten personal note or that late evening phone call to thank them. Those are the sorts of things that generate reviews, that generate referrals, and

they, at the end of the day, they help with your local strategy. Because if you do that to that mom, who, let's say, that mom is a soccer mom, and she's going to practice, and there's nothing but soccer moms around her, and they all need whatever she got from your store, she's going to share it. And she's going to share the wonderful experience, and she's going to show them the card that you sent her, and she's going to put up drinking in the Starbucks that you sent her. And so, you have to do those things to help with your overall local strategy. Number seven, you put Embrace PPC. You need to, like, customize the Starbucks cups. You know how they have the Starbucks cups? I got my Starbucks cup from E-Web Style. Nah, that'd be kind of cool. Right, because if she shows up in a Starbucks, she just assumes she went and got it. But, oh, really? Yeah, y'all didn't hear that. We may just keep that one. Yeah, patent that somehow. Somehow. Number seven, Embrace PPC. I wrote down Embrace Mobile PPC because we're talking a local strategy. And so, you know, with 60% of local searches happening. Wait, wait, wait. We're talking local strategy. The title is Embrace PPC, not Embrace Mobile PPC? Yeah, his was Embrace PPC. And so, I changed it to Embrace Mobile PPC. That's the SEO keyword in me. Right? Wow. But just to think that, you know, 60% of local searches happen on a mobile device is enough to tell me that if I'm doing PPC and I have the budget for it, then I need to be doing this on a mobile device. Because that is the quickest way to get somebody to get your phone ringing. After all, when people search for a mobile device, nine times out of ten, they're looking to take action. Whether it's a phone call. Whether it's click the call, great. Or, you know, nav so I can find this place. So I can get there. And so, definitely, if

you have a mobile, if you have a local strategy in place and you're doing PPC, spend money doing PPC targeting mobile devices. And then, of course, change your ads to reflect that. You don't want to run the same ad you're doing on a desktop that you're running on mobile. That mobile ad should be really hard sell focused on the close, which is the call. Number eight, localize your content. I think this is key. You can't have a local strategy in place and all of your content is generic, right? Or talking about, I'll use our city, talking about Houston. But let's say you only do work in Missouri City or Sugar Land or wherever your local suburb of wherever your town is. Then your content should be reflective of that. Talk about the local things in that immediate area. Maybe the main highway that passes through there or some school event that happened that was pretty popular or something like that. That way, the people in your area can immediately familiarize themselves with your content. More importantly, they may have some sort of connection to the event or whatever you're referencing that kind of then gives them an emotional kind of reason to read along and eventually take the action that you're calling them to do. And so when possible, localize your content. Number nine, which is going back to mobile. Perfect your mobile game. This is an easy one, right? First, have a mobile version. Two, make sure that the things you have on your mobile version follow or are in line with your strategy. If your main call to action is to have people call, then calling should be the primary deal on that mobile device. If your main call is to have people fill out a form and contact you, then that may not be what you want to do on a mobile device because filling out a form on a phone is extremely difficult. And so, you know, you may want to change that strategy strictly for mobile or give them a

different way to do it, right? Click here and text us or something like that. Take advantage of the technology. Maybe incorporate some social if you need that sort of back and forth because it would be easier to do that on a mobile device. Yeah. So number 10, we're almost done. He put Go Industrial, and I read about that, and he was really talking about, you know, using other tools and things like that. And so that's what I tagged it as. Use the available tools, right? Take advantage of Google Places. Set up your Angie's List. They have plenty of tools that you can use that will import all of your local data across the board to several different directories all at once rather than having to do each one of them manually. So, excuse me, use the tools available and take advantage of them. Lastly, remain educated. This is number 11. Get educated. Stay on top of what's going on in your industry locally, right? If there are events going on that's related to your industry, you should be a part of it, if not organizing it or if not sponsoring it or somehow or another, you should be there. Your logo should be present. Your presence should be there. The people, the clients should be aware that you are there, and you're part of the reason why that's happening. And when you do that, what people don't realize is when you do that, that gives you the permission. Credibility. The credibility. There you go. And the power to come and ask somebody for a referral or to pitch them or give them a sales pitch because they know you helped sponsor this entire event. Right. So, definitely remain educated on what's going on in your industry, in your local area, for what you offer. And that's really, you know, living strategies on how you can use offline deals and all sorts of other things to help with your online local strategy. Local strategy. All right. Do we have, that is the meet. Do we have

any blank stare? Kind of. I got blank stare. Yeah, this is a personal blank stare. Go Rockets. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Go Rockets. Beat the Thunder. I love hockey. Oh. That's my favorite side. I really enjoy high-end sports. I should have watched the game last night. I love highlights. I've played soccer for 25 years. I just don't watch that much sports. So, my running joke when somebody brings up any team is like, man, I just, I don't watch hockey. And the jaws drop. It's awesome. It was like, I was talking about baseball. Yeah, I know. I mean, I at least know the teams that play which sport. I was just kind of, yeah. You didn't get it. Yeah. I once had to tell a girl, I got the first joke. I'm on the second joke now. Catch up. Guess what? She didn't get it. Of course not. Neither the joke nor the insult. All right. You have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all you all. Thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure, go ahead and, you know what, why don't you stalk us? If you're getting some good information from us, go to facebook.com slash ewebstile. Or twitter.com slash ewebstile. Or youtube.com slash ewebstile. Or you can send us an email, podcast at e-webstile.com. Until the next podcast, my name is Christopher Riss. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Slap out, brow, high. Free. Free.