Entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing directors, and SEO enthusiasts:

Join Pure Visibility’s visionary, Linda Girard as she moderates her annual SPARK Marketing Roundtable event – Search, Social, Mobile Marketing Trends. Linda and her panel will discuss industry trends and how they will impact your business and budgets. Here’s your opportunity to engage with experts who will share stories that directly influence your 2012 marketing planning.

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I Heart Job Offers Resume T-shirt by BlackBirdTees

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An Age-Old Problem, with Heightened Visibility

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Five Steps to Optimizing Local Search Marketing to Secure and Promote Your Brand

Yesterday we covered the first two steps of what a single location business can do to make their business stand out against a franchise operation with multiple outlets.

3. On Site Optimization

So now you have claimed all your local search listings, and optimized them to take full advantage of how their fields influence the local search results pages in search engines. Great! It’s time to do some high-level optimization to your own web page to appear clear and concise in the organic search results.

Write the homepage <title> and <meta> description so they both appear as complete thoughts instead of being cut off in mid-sentence. If the user is searching with the intent of going to your website, they will skip the local listings completely. In the search results page, your website needs to clear, concise, and grab the attention of the user. Most search engines allow a maximum of 60 characters for the title, and 160 characters for the description.

4. Paid Search and Competitor Terms

Other companies are allowed to bid on your brand name, however, they are not allowed to falsely represent themselves as your company.

Advertisers often use DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in the titles of their ads as a way to increase the perceived relevance of an ad to the search query. This gets tricky when the search query is a branded term that fits in the ad title parameters.

In the ProFlowers.com AdWords account, a search for “University Flower Shop” would trigger a broad match hit of the keyphrase “Flower Shower”. Using DKI though, University Flower shop would appear as the ad title (because it fits in the 25 character parameter), meaning that people could click the ad wrongly thinking it would direct them to University Flower Shop.

DKI Ad Example: {KeyWord: Flower Shop}

When it comes to branded terms, competitors are not allowed to use your brand name in their ad title. Because of this, using DKI on competitor terms often gets advertisers into trouble. If you own a business and someone is using your business name in the title of their ad, you can contact the advertiser directly or send a trademark grievance to Google.

But there is more! If your brand name is too vague (as the business name “University Flower Shop” is above), it is okay for a competitor to use your brand name in an ad title. Because there are dozens of stores across the US named University Flower Shop, ProFlowers is not overstepping their bounds.

5. Bonus! Free Listing of Local “Offers” and “Deals” to Stand Out

Especially if your business is in a very competitive market, and everyone has optimized their local pages, it can be difficult to stand out. A new feature in both Google Places and Yelp is the ability to promote offers for (i.e. “Three free balloons with purchase of bouquet!”).

These are free to post, and give your listing more precious real estate on the search results page. And in Google Places & Google Maps, it puts a green star next to your listing which immediately attracts the searcher’s attention and makes you stand out from the others. An example of what the green star looks like next to Paid and Places ads can be seen in the image below.

This makes you more noticeable, attracts attention, and increases your chance of a click (since people love saving money). A definite Win-Win situation.

Five Steps to Optimizing Local Search Marketing to Secure and Promote Your Brand

Running a small business is tough stuff, and complicated even more when large national brands begin throwing their weight around and engage in questionable practices. Small business owners are left wondering what is and is not legal when it comes to aspects of online marketing. If you’re a small business owner, here’s what you can do to protect and promote your brand, and to help you recognize when another business has overstepped their bounds online.

Here’s the kind of thing that could happen. Last week I spoke with University Flower Shop of Ann Arbor, who were vexed that a national competitor of theirs, ProFlowers.com, had done some very questionable and shady marketing tactics to attain new business, at their expense.

ProFlowers.com claimed the Google Places page of UFSAA, and changed the phone number to their own. Because of this, anyone who tried to call UFSAA ended up talking to the customer service department at ProFlowers. This was shady indeed.

ProFlowers was also showing up in the AdWords listings for University Flower Shop terms. Again, UFSAA worried that they were losing business because of unfair advertising methods.

So as a small business, what can you do to protect and promote your brand, and what is unauthorized when it comes to aggressively competing on the search results page?

1. Secure Your Local Listings (Before Others Do)

The easiest way to prevent others from wrongly claiming your local listings is to beat them to it. Google Places makes it difficult to claim a listing that is not yours, however there are loopholes that shady-savvy marketers have discovered, as UFSAA found out.

Below I’ve segmented the local search sites into three levels of decreasing importance. When claiming your local listings, I suggest fully optimizing each tier (see Tip 2, below) before moving on to the next level, as they will have the greatest impact in creating better visibility for your brand on the search results page.

Tier 1: Google Places & Yelp.

Tier 2: Facebook, Yahoo Local, Bing Local

Tier 3: Yellow Pages, Localeze, Superpages, CitySearch, Yellowbook, and MapQuest.

2. Optimize Your Local Listings to Bolster Local SEO

Each interface has different fields to populate. As an example, I am focusing here on the options Google Places provides, and the significance of each.

Very simply, the more complete your Places page is, the more prominently it appears on the search results page, and the more likely the user is to find the information they were seeking. Including all this additional information and claiming your local listings bolsters your local SEO strategy, allowing you to dominate the organic search listings for highly relevant traffic.

Company, Address, Phone: These fields are the essence of local; alerting the search algorithm that you are indeed relevant and within the local radius of the search.
Note: Phone number is especially important in this instance, because local searches are much more likely to be done from a mobile device, and these users have a high propensity to call you.

Email & Website: Not essential, but including these fields allows the user to learn more information about your brand, and gives them an alternate means of contacting you.

Description: 200 characters are given to sum up your business. Depending on how well known your brand is, you may wish to write your slogan, give important details of your company (locally owned since 1985!), or attract users with short marketing copy (Lowest prices on flowers, guaranteed).

Categories: Five categories are given, and I recommend using them all. This helps both the search algorithm and the user understand your expertise better.

Photos & Videos: Boom! One of the biggest things you can do to increase your real estate on the search results page, and attract a users attention is to add photos (up to 10) and videos (up to 5) to the local listings page. Often times businesses do not include any good multimedia with their listings, making those that do stand out amongst the pack.

Hours of Operations: One of the main reasons people use local search is to find out if/when businesses are open. This is an optional field, but a very important one.

Payment Options: Letting the user know ahead of time what is accepted as payment is a good business practice. You’re a restaurant that doesn’t accept American Express? Please let me know so I’m not out of luck after ordering dinner.

Additional Details: This section is reserved for other details customers should know about your business. Do you validate parking? Include that. You have student discounts every Thursday? Include that. Accept competitors’ coupons or interesting trades? Include it!

Stay tuned for the other three tips… coming tomorrow!

At the end of the day, the goal of SEO is to establish your website as an authoritative “subject matter expert” on the topics and keyphrases you want to target; at least in the eyes of the search engines.  To this end, I wanted to share an excellent analogy I heard to help crystalize this notion.

In the early days of the Internet, webpages were conceived of much like academic publications (such as dissertations or journal articles), with descriptive titles and abstracts, deeply informative body content, and references to other authoritative work on the subject.  Translated to a webpage, these correspond quite nicely to the <title>, meta description, <body>, and links to related content.  At a very fundamental level, sites and pages continue to be thought of in this fashion by search engines.

Using this analogy is helpful to understand how a website might be viewed by a search engine as an “expert” on the topic(s) it covers (and thus be rewarded with higher rankings).  Expressed in academic terms, subject matter “expertness” is derived from two basic elements: the size of the body of work on the topic (i.e. the number of pages your website contains dedicated to that topic), and the degree to which that body of work is cited by other relevant, authoritative sources (i.e. links from other high-quality webpages on the subject – both internal and external).

Pretty cool, huh?  Now get out there and act like an expert!  Start fueling your SEO campaign with some high-quality, link-worthy content!

A few weeks back Scott and I had the pleasure of attending SMX East 2011. And now that the dust has settled we figured we’d share with you the most interesting things we learned. Drum roll…

Top 3 Take-Aways from SMX East 2011

3. Panda is here to stay

Not only were there several sessions dedicated entirely to Panda, but it felt like it was discussed in just about all of them. Panda was everywhere! With Panda affecting so many sites and shaking the foundation of so many online businesses, it’s no wonder it was such a hot topic (here is a good Panda Update Video that discusses how it changed SEO forever). There was a lot of interesting discussion and predictions focused around Panda, but what it came down to was that Panda is here to stay. In fact, almost everyone (to a certain degree) agreed that similar adjustments to the algorithm would continue to occur as Google tries to identify ways of filtering out “poor quality” websites. To help protect yourself from being affected by the next big quality update the experts recommended doing the following:

• Write content for your users, not the search engines
• Make sure your site is user friendly – include graphs, charts and images, while excluding excessive amounts of ads
• Remove error pages from your site

2. Schema.org – Don’t get left behind!

Schema.org was launched in June of 2011 and is an effort supported by all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to establish a uniform set of schema, such as html title tags. The idea is to establish one “standard” set of schema for webmasters to use in order to markup their webpages. Although at this point in time, the search engines do not rely heavily on the schema, the experts on the panel all agreed that it is the “way of the future” and several indicated that you will be left behind if you don’t begin to think about using the markup on your pages. This doesn’t mean you should do it now, especially if there isn’t an obvious ROI for your business. It may not make sense to redesign your entire site or CMS to include schema, but when you do overhaul your site or think about updating your CMS, you should definitely consider building in the ability to markup your pages with the new schema.

1. Don’t Ignore Social – It’s part of SEO!

As would be expected, there was also a lot of talk around social and its impact on SEO. One of our favorite sessions was called “Facebook, Twitter, and SEO.” A huge amount of tips and fun facts came out of this session – below are some of our favorites:

• Social media visibility = # of social media events (likes, shares, etc.) linking to a web page, accumulated over a defined time period
• Most popular social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.) depend heavily upon audience and the type of site. Searchengineland.com’s most popular channels are as follows (in order) -  tweets, stumbleupon, shares, and +1′s
• Add Social Buttons to Your Site!
  • Twitter drove 7x more “engagement” and is on only 42.5% of sites
  • Facebook drove 3x more “engagement” and is only on 50.3% of sites
• Social media CAN be a huge time suck. Use technology/tools such as HooteSuite to help you be efficient and get the most out of your social media in as little of time as possible.

Across the board the experts agreed that while specific social signals, such as Facebook likes/shares, may or may not have a direct impact on the algorithm right now, it will be used to some degree in the near future. In addition, social media has a lot of other great benefits, such has helping build brand awareness.

Recap

In total we attended over 20 sessions and had a blast in New York. We hope to see you all there next year!

Just last week, in addition to Google Analytics Premium, Google also launched their new beta of Google Analytics Real Time to a limited audience and will expand that audience over the next few weeks. This is a real-time analytics tool that shows what is happening on any site that is already using Google Analytics for tracking, without any additional setup required. Add one point in the “plus” column.

When… and Where… is Real Time?

For those of you who haven’t checked out Real Time yet, head into your Google Analytics account and click on your Dashboards tab (in the main orange nav bar). Real-Time (beta) will be the first item in your left nav now, with further options of aggregation once you open the Real-Time menu item. This is kind of hidden for to more novice users.

What Happens in Real Time?

Your first impression will be the spinning dial, labeled “Right now,” as it winds up. Once running, this number constantly changes along with your Pageviews charts to the right.

It may not be clear to you immediately without a bit of actual testing, but this is very fast. Demos and tests I have seen show 1-2 seconds of response time. Apply this across the segments available in the nav and, on the surface, this seems to be a powerful tool.

So, the real question is, how will you be using Real Time? Google demonstrates its usefulness in social media, but what other uses are there? Go live or site launches? What about smaller sites where a user may be the only user on the site at a time? That’s almost like real-time, real-user, anonymous, and remote usability testing all in one…

How valuable is real-time data? Is there something more useful here beyond its pure immediacy? Let us know what you think.