Search Marketing Insights by Dev Basu

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Ziya Genceren Gives it Up

Eric Enge’s recent interview with Microsoft’s Ziya Genceren provides some pretty unique insights into Microsoft’s involvement in local search, thorough Live Search Maps.

MSN Live Search Maps actually has an edge over Google Maps in my opinion, both in usability and innovation with features such as the birds eye arial view, and live traffic updates. From a local search perspective, the listings actually change based on the area you’re hovering around on a particular map.

No one has paid much attention to live search maps, but it is a contender in local search for those who brace internet explorer. And with IE still capturing close to 70% of what I know, that makes positioning on Live Search pretty lucrative to businesses that don’t have a particularly tech savvy audience.

Ziya’s Top Factors for Live Search Rankings

There are 300+ factors that determine local seo listings for live search, although these are the most important as indicated by Ziya Genceren in the interview with Eric Enge:

1. Keywords in the business name Eg: Joe’s Pizza Shop, Toronto, Ontario.
2. Category membership based on meta data. Eg: ABC Optometrist, Category: Optometrists, Eye Doctors, Eye Clinics.
3. 3rd Party Vendor Data based - Hours of operation, Payment accepted.
4. Distance from query location (local centroid).
5. Business reviews are currently not taken into account.
6. Yelp, Zagat, UGC content will be considered in the near future.
7. 3rd party vendor information from Info USA, Yellow Pages, and Axciom is trusted more than UGC.

Read the entire interview to get more scoop on Live Search Maps ranking over at the STC blog.

photo credit: chegs

Why a Local Landing Page for Each Location

Every local businesses I’ve worked with wish to rank for multiple city + service oriented terms for each of their locations, but only 20% realize that each location deserves its very own landing page.

In a way, it’s like asking to get business to from all over your business service area, without actually having brick and mortar locations to service local customers. In this case, Google is your customer, and it needs to see a separate ‘landing page’ for each of your locations to be a satisfied ‘customer’.

Local Landing Pages for Each Location = Good Local Search Engine Rankings

In fact, having a local landing page for each business location or area served will not only enhance your your organic rankings, it’ll most likely be a cited website picked up by Google Maps as well. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

Landing Page Best Practices

What’s useful for people to find your location faster, is useful for the search engines as well. Here’s my top 10 factors to include in a local landing pag, starting from the top to the bottom of the page.

1. Optimized Title Tags -’Business Name + Service Type, City, Province/State’ | Keyword 1 & Keyword 2′. Eg: ‘Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, ON | The Best Wedding Cakes and Twinkies in Toronto’.
2. H1 & H2 Tags - Use header tags that reflect your full business name and service type. Eg: ‘ Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, Ontario’,
3. Full Business Address - Include this in a easy to use hCard microformat. hCard may help the search engines separate address information such as business name, street address, locality, and postal/zip codes. Interested on how to create an address in hcard? Try the handy hCard generator.
4. Regional/Local Phone Number - Local phone numbers build trust - both from customers, and from search engines. Often, businesses such as plumbers only have one service location but multiple local phone numbers to gain trust from small town customers, which they then forward to a singular call centre. ALWAYS use a local phone number on each landing page in the format (123) 345-6789.
5. Services Offered & Business Hours - Services often differ from location to location based as do business hours. Save your customers time and add to your body content by adding this valuable information.
6. Embed Google Maps on your Landing Page - This is imperative to include on your landing page. Not only will it provide an interactive way for a customer to map their way to your location, it will also count towards a better ranking in the Google local ten-pack listings.
7. Include Driving Directions Anyways - Unless your customers are relatively savvy with the concept of using Google Maps to get driving directions to your location, you’re best off by providing a brief paragraph of directions from the NSEW (North, South, East, West) end of your city.
8. Single Line Business Address in Footer - Having your address in the format ‘Business Name + Service, Street Address, City, Province/State, Country’ can provide an easy format for search engines to pick up on your address.
   
9. Meta Tag Descriptions with Local Address + Phone Number - This one’s self-explanatory. If you’ve got an additional phone tracking number handy, you can include the spare phone number in your meta tags to see if customers would rather call you via seeing the search results, or prefer to click on the results and view your landing page. This tactic is also specially useful for folks that use Skype (which makes phone numbers clickable) and on the iPhone.
   
10. URL Naming Structure - Last but not least, it’s important to include keywords in your url. Separate keywords by using hyphen’s and only include your most important keywords minus your business name, unless you have a highly recognized brand: Eg: domain.com/toronto-rexdale-ontario-bakery.html

I can promise you that if you’re diligent in your landing page design and follow the tips above, you’ll score some neat rankings in non-competitive markets. Subscribe to my RSS feed today to keep updated on a future post on how to capture local rankings for competitive search terms.

photo credit: kittyz202

About the Local SEO City Centroid Factor

In layman’s terms, a ‘centroid’ when referred to in the context of local search is simply a local search engine’s geo-location of a city or town’s geographic core, a.k.a ‘down town’ to the rest of us. This means that if you’re business serves a greater city area, but happens to be physically located on the city outskirts on or in a suburb, you’re already losing points toward ranking well in the local search algorithm. You can read more about the importance of the centroid on David Mihm’s local search ranking factors, which is a fantastic resource by the way.

Finding Your Business’s Core Service Area as Per Google

Let’s say you’re located in Richmond Hill, Ontario and you’re business serves the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) covering the boroughs such as North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, Mid Town Toronto, and Toronto City Proper. If you happened to be a florist for example, and were trying to rank for ‘Florist in Toronto’ or ‘Florist Toronto’, there would be quite a bit of work needed to rank you in the Google ten pack for that term.

That being said, Google is getting smarter about the hyper-local nature of communities, and is paying attention to search volumes for local specific keywords such as ‘Florist Richmond Hill’ instead of ‘Toronto Florist. 

The second factor at play is understanding where your customers are located. Most savvy (including non-technical) business owners know this information like the back of their hand, so this is one of the questions I’m bound to ask in my initial meeting with a client. In this case, if you’re a Richmond hill florist, but most of your business happens to be coming from the neighbouring community of Thornhill, Ontario, then there’s probably a way you can capitalize on that market as well through Google Local.

Looking at the difference in ten-pack competition between florist richmond hill, and florist thornhill its pretty apparent that thornhill is a low competition market. Setting up a Google Local keyword rich listing will do the trick in this case, such as ‘Richmond Hill and Thornhill Florist’ along with an appropriate description of service areas, and inbound anchor text from local business directories to boot. 

But What if I Don’t Know Where My Customers Are Located?

Eh? You don’t know where your customers are located? Not a problem - I can help you figure out how to get a centroid location for that too. Let’s assume you run an ecommerce store serving the Greater Toronto Area, selling the aforementioned flowers - You receive orders from all over the city, and you’re trying to figure out where most of those online orders are generated from. Using a tool such a Map a List it’s easy to figure out shipping and billing addresses, and home-in on your customer location centroid. 

Map a List Google Maps Visualizer

   credit: lifehacker

Here is how it works:

• (1) Upload the spreadsheet with the list of addresses to your Google Docs account. Or create a new one online.
• (2) Sign-up with MapaList and grant it access to your Google Docs account.
• (3) Point MapaList to the the spreadsheet with the list of addresses you want to map.
• (4) Follow step-by-step guide to map the address list.

Features:

• Map the address lists on top of Google maps.
• Map as many address lists as you like.
• Customize maps further by adding markers for each address, hiding certain points etc.
• Make maps public and share them with friends.
• Change addresses in your spreadsheet files and have them automatically synced with MapaList.
• Download marked maps as KML and view them in Google Earth.
• Send map to your mobile phone.
• See a sample MapaList map here.

photo credit: tilaneseven

Turning Counter-Intuitive Advice into a Strategic Advantage

Search Marketers are a great bunch. Among all the marketers I’ve worked (some of whom have 20+ years of experience), I’ve found search marketers to be the brightest of all marketing folk in being able to relate, transpose, create, and execute on complex marketing campaigns.

While we’re great at tying in the code level aspects of website promotion, in additon to blogging, PR, social media, email marketing (the list goes on), we cannot ever forget that we’re servicing a client’s customers at the end of the day. Thinking like customer would can save time, effort, and yield better results than what the marketer in you think’s he or she ought to do.

So How Do I Think Like the Customer?

Eh, that’s pretty simple really. Your brain is too attuned to dissecting marketing messages, so ask someone more like the customer than emulating what the customer would think. Here’s some ideas:

• Ask your Mom - Your mom probably is 10X less search savvy than you are. My respect goes out to all mothers who are teaching their grown up kids a thing or two about using Google.
• Ask your kids - They are definitely as savvy as you are if not more, but they might not think about a marketing campaign the same way a marketer does.
• Ask a the Real Customer - Surveys are a great way to get information direct from the source. Why not run one via Facebook, or other survey services? If you’re promoting Tim Horton’s coffee’s newest iced cappaccino flavour, why not strike up a conversation with a customer just like yourself about an exclusive preview if they’re willing to offer up their thoughts on the product?

There are many ways to get into ‘customer-vision’ mode and leave the marketer in your behind for a while. Once you’ve got your insights ready, jump right back in and plan that campaign to glory.

photo credit: digitalhead!

Recently, I was in a plush downtown office pitching to a client in the competitive travel and vacation’s industry. While most clients I meet are taky baby steps towards online marketing as as important component of their integrated promotional strategy, this one was on the ball, complete with an in-house paid and organic search team. Having worked in an in-house SEO capacity before, I was impressed on how tight they ran their ship.

Curious as I was, we talked the usual SEO, SEM operations, and then the focus shifted to Social Media. The client in question runs a lot of promotions during our frigid winter months, targeting university students, young single executives, and families for vacations in the Caribbean, Domincan Republic and Cuba.

That got me thinking, and I asked him how he measured the performance of his campaign. As I’d expected, most of the promotion was through the Adwords Search Network, so I had two important suggestions for him.

• Use the Content Network to your advantage by strategically targeting Canadian travel sites.
• Use Social network ad placements to figure out what target market best converts for you.

I won’t go into how to make the content network work for you, but I will talk about how to use Facebook to test ad copy, conversion rates, and demographic targeting for seasonal, and inherently, social marketing campaigns.

But Aren’t Facebook Ads Absolute Crap at Converting?

My answer : It depends on the type of offer you’re promoting. Folks like Slighty Shady and Nicky Cakes have made a killing promoting affiliate offers on Facebook because they have a knack for understanding what offers ‘fly’ and what doesn’t.

Three reasons Facebook ads are a good testing bed for your social campaign:

• Facebook ads are dirt cheap. The CPC on desirable keywords is FAR less than that on Google Adwords.
• Facebook ads have better targeting than Google adwords for specfic demographics. You can target by Age, Location, Company, Interests and more.
  • Do you know of a company that encourages its employees to take lots of vacations? Perhaps you’re running a campaign that is targeted to young execs from that ‘fresh and oh so web 2.0′ company everyone keeps buzzing about - Target them by company.
• Facebook Insights (Analytics) provides some interesting demographic data that cannot be found in Google Adwords.

Bottom line, I got the client interested in approaching their vacation promotional campaigns for this year in a different light. George, if you’re reading this, you know who to call ;).

To summarize how to use Facebook ads to test social marketing campaigns:

photo credit: damozeljane ☼

Citation Sources Canadians Can Use

Local Search in Canada isn’t nearly as developed as in the US, but we’re getting there at a fast pace. Due to economies scale, carrying out a good local seo campaign in Canada isn’t particulary challenging, but isn’t necessarily easy either. There’s a couple of good reasons for this, one being a complete and utter lack of Canadian specific local citation sources.

The Local Ranking Algorithm is generally centered around the regular on-page and off-page factors attributed to traditional or organic seo, in addition to an all important factor around local business citations. David Mihm provides a great explanation about why Citation is the New Link in Local SEO, and also provides a great resource in his BCS of Local Search Engine Optimization for our friends south of the border.

As local search becomes increasingly more social, user reviews and local business citations are becoming very important in securing top local ten-pack listings. Let’s look at some of the hand-picked citation sources I’ve researched that influence Canadian Local SEO on Google Maps.

photo credit: nickel.media

Local Citation Sources for Canadian Hotels

TripAdvisor -  TripAdvisor provides unbiased hotel reviews, photos and travel advice for hotels and vacations. It’s not only a great resource for travellers, but also a significant source of all of the reviews cited by Google Maps results for local search times such as ‘Toronto Hotels‘.

Virtual Tourist - Similar to TripAdvisor, Virtual Tourist hotel reviews pop up frequently on Google Canada Map results. Sign up, and leave an honest review of businesses you’ve dealt with.

Igougo - Igougo has vacation and travel reviews, and features third in line after TripAdvisor and Virtual Tourist on Google Map reviews for Hotels.

General Citation Sources

WCities - WCities has a North American base covering businesses of all kinds from restaurants, to night life establishments, and more. You can review businesses by navigating to your respective city and clicking on the appropriate business profile.

Toronto Life -Toronto Life isn’t a UCG site, but does count as a citation source in Google Local. The best way to get featured is for your establishment to offer something sensational, whether that be a unique dining experience, or world-class service.

Where.Ca -Like Toronto Life, Where.ca is not a user generated content network, but does figure prominently as a citation source.

Frommers.com -The perennial paper-back favourite Frommer’s guide is equally popular online, and covers everything a traveller needs to know about their destination, including hotels, attractions, restaurants and more. Leaving a review for an establishment is a matter of navigating to the appropriate business and adding to the mass of exisiting reviews.

Zip Local - Zip Local was recently featured on a popular Canadian TV network, Cable Pulse 24, and is ideal for hyperlocal UCG content. Want to find reviews for a trendy bar in the posh Yorkville neighbourhood of Toronto? Not a problem. From a small business standpoint, this is an ideal way to get cited as the neighbourhood go-to business for what you offer.

Yelp - Yelp was the original hybrid between Yellow Pages listings and UCG from what I can recall. While Yelp does have listings in the organic search results, they are a definite contender to be considered as a local citation source  as well. Leaving reviews on Yelp is easy, and doesn’t even require a user login. That said, if you’re a small business owner, you can claim and modify your existing listings to include more information about your products or services.

Restaurant.ca - If you have a restaurant of any nature, you should have citations present on this site. Restaurant.ca covers all major Canadian cities and allows citations in the form of comments on each individual business listing.

Nota Bene: Don’t spam these listings or write nasty things about your competitors. While certain Local Search listings are taking positive or negative reviews into account, most star listings are present based on the basis of the number of reviews present for the business listings.

photo credit: NieckQ-

Time can do wonderful things in the search marketing world. We’re almost in a time machine on fast forward compared to innovation and advancement in other industries, and that’s one of the things I love about search marketing in general. It’s also the reason I’m back to blogging - there’s too much on my mind that I can’t write about over Twitter, because 160 characters just doesn’t cut it.

The second thing I love about SEM in general is how close knit our little community of experts are. For those you who might not know me, my name is Dev, and I’m a passionate online marketer. You can find out more at my about me page, but for now I can tell you that I’ve got some insights in SEM that you’ll want to read up on. I aim for this blog to educational, informational, with a focus on quality vs. quantity.

Along the way, I’m going to entertain a lot of user input into what you want me to write about. I can conceivably think about a weekly “Ask Dev” post, which will address some of the tougher SEM questions you can’t find answers to elsewhere. I’m looking forward to having a bit of fun with this blog in recording my thoughts and tips, and I’m sure you’ll benefit from them too.