local seo

5 Local SEO Blog Posts Worth Reading This Week

July 5, 2013 by Carmen Rane Hudson

If you didn’t catch these great local SEO blog posts last week you might want to dig into them this week. Each of these posts has a wealth of excellent information for a small business owner who wants to be more visible online.

The first was Google Authorship for Your Plumbing or HVAC Business by Plumber SEO. While this wasn’t about local search per se it was a post that gave the Authorship program a distinctly local spin for contractors or other local business owners.

Authorship may well be feeding into Local SEO results as it is. That became abundantly clear when I read Linda Buquet’s post “Google+ Business Images in the Local SERPs – New and Hot for Local!” The jury’s still out on just where these images are coming from, but as I mentioned in yesterday’s post it’s time and past time for business owners to really get on top of their photo presence on the web.

Those who are interested in Local Carousel will want to pay attention to two posts. The first is A Heat Map Click Study for Google’s Local Carousel Results. Carousel took 48% of the clicks, so you can tell that this new development isn’t going away any time soon.

If you really want to get “deep in the weeds” on Google Carousel then you can take a look at Mike Blumenthal’s own round-up post, “Local Carousel Reporting from Around the Local Web.” There were a lot of neat posts on his list that were quite educational.

Finally, there’s “Small Business Can Still Have Big SEO Success.” Again, article from Search Engine Journal isn’t direct Google+ Local search advice. However, it is good SEO advice aimed squarely at small business owners who need to draw traffic from their immediate physical location, especially those in large city markets who may be competing with national businesses that have big deep pockets.

By the way, I’ve decided to do some sort of round-up once a week. It’s occurred to me that there are tons of people out there who are putting out some really smart work, and I’d like for my readers to be able to benefit from that work too. 🙂

Warning: Pictures are Now Even More Important to Small Business Web Marketing

July 4, 2013 by Carmen Rane Hudson

In a previous post I talked about how Google Carousel is making it vitally important to add really good pictures to your Google Local listing and your website. A recent post by Linda Buquet has given me another reason to make it clear that photographs are vital to small business marketing.

Now it’s gone beyond adding great content to your blog and social media sites. And its gone beyond prepping for Carousel.

Even those businesses which are not currently involved in Carousel will need to take note of Google Local’s latest change, which places Google+ Local Business images on the Local Search Engine Results Page.

As with Google Authorship, these results make your business far more clickable. Observe how the photo makes the result “pop” right off the page. This is the same example and screen shot that Linda used in her post.

There are a couple of speculations about how and why this is happening.

At least one of my tests showed me what appeared to be a clear case of a Google Authorship photo appearing on the local search results. Yet the photos Linda found appeared to have populated from the businesses’ Google+ Business page. It could also be that these companies are using Google Publisher, which is similar to Google Authorship and which I’ll take the time to cover next week.

But the takeaway here is that you need to have Google Authorship set up, you need to have good photos on your business profile, and you need to maximize any and all chances for these photographs to pop up wherever people might see them. It’s clear to me that Google is trying very hard to create a web that is far less anonymous and far more visual, and as a business owner you need to be on top of that trend.

5 of the Best Local SEO Blogs on the Internet

June 28, 2013 by Carmen Rane Hudson

Here on the TVS Internet Marketing Blog we do our best to provide you with a lot of great information about helping local small businesses get more visibility and sales online. However, there are six other really great local SEO blogs that I wanted to take a moment to share with you–a nice round-up to wrap up the month of June.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Phil Rozek’s Local Visibility System. If you’re looking for tons of in-depth information about local search this blog is a must-read. His posts are simply a lot of fun, and they’re chock full of great information.

Mike Blumenthal’s Understanding Google Places and Local Search. This is no-nonsense local SEO information that’s laser-focused Google Places. This is a great place for the latest information and updates.

Catalyst Local e-Marketing pulls some of the best search topics from Linda Buquet’s Local Search Forum. This forum covers new developments in local SEO, local SEO troubleshooting, best practices, and more. If you’re a small business owner who wants to understand local SEO like a SEO consultant then you’ll find everything you need right here.

Nyagoslav Zhekov’s NGS Marketing Blog offers local search information that’s very clear and easy for any business owner to understand. His blog is unique because it offers an international perspective on local SEO.

Mike Ramsey’s Nifty Marketing Blog is another great choice. His blog is a lot of fun to read for the cool Comicgraphics, but there are also several really cool “field test” style posts that makes for some very insightful content.

Do you know of a must-follow local search blog that I missed? Drop a comment to share your link!

Yelp Business Listings Just Got More Useful for Small Business Owners

June 27, 2013 by Carmen Rane Hudson

If you’ve spent much time following this blog at all you’ll already know I’m not a fan of paid directory listings. However, Yelp Business Listings has rolled out a recent new feature that actually may be worthwhile.

It’s called the Yelp “Call to Action” feature. Here’s what the Yelp blog has to say about it.

“Consumers come to Yelp ready to make a spending decision and they rely on Yelp’s wealth of valuable content to find a local business to fit their needs. Today we’re introducing a new feature for business owners, designed to further close the loop between discovering a business on Yelp and making a purchase at that business. Yelp’s new Call to Action feature allows business owners to promote a desired transaction of their choosing directly on their Yelp business listing.”

So you can get people to click through to your website with the idea that they’re going to schedule an appointment, make a reservation, or schedule a reservation right then and there. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

However, you’ll need to do a lot more than become a Yelp advertiser to take advantage of this feature. Since the click goes right back to your website you need to keep a few things in mind.

Your website will need to be capable of completing the transaction in the first place.
You may want to create a specific landing page so users don’t get lost before they find their way to the action you want them to take.
Your overall website look and feel will need to be both professional and appealing to avoid losing customers once they get to you.
Your Yelp listing will need to be claimed and optimized so people can find it in the first place.
You’ll need a strategy for gathering positive reviews so that people trust your listing enough to take the desired action.

In other words, using Yelp’s Call to Action feature needs to be part of an overall internet marketing and local SEO strategy. It’s not something that’s going to stand on its own.

New Developments in Google Local Marketing: Google Carousel

June 25, 2013 by Carmen Rane Hudson

If there’s any truism about Google Local marketing, it’s this: sooner or later, Google’s going to decide to change something. Staying on top of those changes and figuring out what to do about them is one of the biggest hurdles for small business owners who are trying to stay visible online.

The latest development is a feature called Google Local Carousel, which rolled out on June 21st. This feature presents users with a visual list of local options that appears right at the very top of the search engine results page.

What does this mean for local search marketing, and how should you, as a business owner, respond to this change? Here are a few thoughts.

Photos are More Important Than Ever

If you don’t have a photo of your business an unimpressive picture of a Google map shows up instead. That’s not a position you want to be in.

Instead, you want something that’s welcoming and visually appealing, because in my opinion the photo is what’s going to get you the click. The horizontal view means that there is nothing “on top,” which means being in the “A” position at the left doesn’t give you the same psychological advantage (on top = best) that you would have gotten in the old view.

Try to choose a photo that gives potential customers some idea of what they’ll experience when they use your business. Don’t go for a shot of your business from the street or a shot of your sign.

Restaurants should go for plates of food that look tasty. Hotels should go for an interior shot of their comfortable bedroom, where customers will spend most of their time.

In the service business? Choose a photo of your best work if your work is visually appealing. If you’re something like a doctor or a dentist, choose your own smiling face, or a picture of your entire smiling staff, since that is who your customers will be dealing with.

Keep Working to Stay Optimized

The leftmost positions are the most prominent. Mike Blumenthal did an audit of those positions which pointed out that the most visible results still adhere to the old A-G rankings.

So while you can get seen if you’re not still in the top 7, you’re still in a bad position because you can expect fewer users to scroll all the way to the end of the results on the right, even though it’s theoretically easier and more fun for them to do so.

Bottom line? It’s best to keep right on optimizing your Google+ Local listings.

Other Insights

There have been a lot of great reactions to Carousel across the blogosphere since it rolled out on Friday. I wanted to share a two of the best so that you could benefit from them as well.

First, there’s Mike Ramsey’s Post over at Nifty Marketing: 10 Random People’s Response to Google Local Carousel.

Then, Mike Blumenthal offered another post about Carousel that I really liked: “How Many Results Are Required for the New Local Carousel to Display? At Least 5.”

Right now the Carousel is only working for restaurants, colleges, and hotels. But that doesn’t mean that other businesses shouldn’t plan ahead.

Is Angie’s List Worth It?

June 18, 2013 by Carmen Rane Hudson

If you’re a contractor, sooner or later you’re going to get a call or an e-mail from Angie’s List asking you if you’d like to pay for front page placement on their site. Is this a good idea? Is Angie’s list worth it?

First of all, you should consider whether or not you want to pay for directory listings at all when there are better options out there. All of the caveats that apply to any directory also apply to Angie’s list.

However, there are other problems.

Angie’s list isn’t even the best place to steer customers if you want them to give an online review. It turns out that Angie’s list reviews only “count” if the customer is already a member of Angie’s list.

Oh, they show up on your Angie’s List profile, but nobody is ever going to see them there. People spend most of their time paying attention to the Angie’s List search results instead.

Personally I wouldn’t want to waste time and energy directing customers to any site they’d have to pay for in order to leave a review that actually matters. I’d want to get more benefit off of that review, and I’d want to respect my customers more than that.

Angie’s List reviews aren’t helping your Google and Google+ Local visibility either. Meanwhile, you’re still having to go through all of the hard work of getting reviews. It seems to me like you’d be better served feeding your reviews into Google+ Local or Yelp so that Google will recognize them.

Darren Slaughter has some interesting things to say about Angie’s List too. Check out his video:

Angie’s List has been under a lot of fire for saying that contractors don’t pay to get listed on Angie’s List when contractors do, in fact, pay hundreds of dollars a month to pick up the bulk of the visibility on Angie’s List. They’ve maintained this status quo through a lot of double-speak that’s been well-covered on other sites.

If you do decide to proceed with Angie’s List, proceed with caution. There’s a 35%-of-contract cancellation fee if you find out you’re not getting any leads, which is a big price to pay for something that is so problematic.

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