Local SEO for Local Niche and Small Business.

I know this Local SEO guides have been written many times by others, so I’ll try to cover it well enough so readers don’t feel the need to read more Local SEO tips and waste more time.

Local Search Keywords

The first thing you need to do is nail down the local keywords you want to target. Lets go back to the Red Trolley Ice Cream Shop in Denver as an example.  The Red Trolley would probably come up with a list of Local keywords phrases including;

1. Ice Cream Denver
2. ice cream denver co
3. ice cream in denver
4. Ice Cream Highland (the neighbourhood it is in) Denver
5. Ice Cream 80211 (zip code)
6. Ice Cream 32nd (the street it is on) Denver
7. Organic Ice Cream Denver
8. Local Ice Cream Denver
9. Address
10. Phone number.

That is the basic list we’ll work with.  You will see all the places we get to put this in, in a moment.

Meta Tags

There are 3 places "behind the scenes" of the page , where only search engines read, where keywords need to be placed.  They are

1. Title Tag. This is the big one.  Right now it has "Red Trolley".  This is fantastic if they sold Red Trolleys, but I think we’re about a 110 years too late for that in Denver.  A Title tag is what shows up at the top left of your browser.  Here, an improvement would be "Ice Cream in 80211, Denver Highlands | Red Trolley".
2. Keywords .  Although not as "key" as in past years, keywords are still important and I have "observed" that Google is again using them in their super secret algorithm a bit more now (Just a hunch).  The keywords here are the 10 listed above.  Yahoo! & MSN still look at them a bit more.
3. Description . This is the text that shows up as the result listing description in search results.  This needs to be written to entice people to click on the local, organic result to the site.  Red Trolley’s description might look something like this; "Local Denver Homemade Organic Ice Cream and Fair Trade Coffee  in Highlands".  The description needs to be kept to 160 characters for Google

Local SEO Copy Writings

Now that we know our keywords, and have added them to the behind the scenes content, its time to add them to the content of the site where people can actually read them.

To start, here are some places you should have your local keywords.

1. In the website footer. This allows your local information to appear on every page.  This might look like "The Red Trolley Ice Cream Shop, 282 32nd Street, Highlands Denver Co.  80211.
2. On every Page .  I don’t mean to get all Amy Africa about this, but YOU HAVE TO HAVE YOUR ADDRESS ON EVERY PAGE, and it should somewhere it can be easily seen.  At the top right is a good place to consider.
3. In your Site’s Copy . Your keywords need to be in your text, in a clear and relevant way.  Lets go back to The Red Trolley and grab some text to optimize, just to sh0w how simple it can be.  Here is some homepage copy;

"Our flavors constantly change because as the seasons change, we change. Everthing your tastebuds experience  in our shop is made with passion and integrity, on the premesis."

This could be

"Our ice cream and food flavors constantly change because as Denver’s seasons change, we change. Everthing your tastebuds experience  in our ice cream shop is made with passion and integrity, on the premesis in Denver Highlands ."

That wasn’t very hard was it?  Now, what they should really do is create a Flavours (or without the "u" since it is in Denver and I’m the only Canadian in the Neighbourhood, opps, there I go again) page, and link the "ice cream" references above to a page filled with ice cream content.

By the way, I just want to mention, although Hours of Operation are not normally high of on SEO radar, they at least have to be right.  The Red Trolley’s are not, by about 20 hours a week, ouch!

Incoming Links

A big part of Local SEO is number and importance of the sites that link to you .  Think of it like high school.  You are only as popular as your friends.  You could have known the entire band, AV & Glee Clubs but you likley would not have been as popular as if you knew just one jock and one cheerleader.

One way to get incoming links, although not "cheerleader" links, is Local Search Directories .  Check out the list of local Search engines, directories and provider s I have assembled on this site.  That should get you started.  I can see I’ll eventually need to write a post on how to get people linking to you site.

Bonus Local SEO

When your site does ger linked to, here are some things to help your Local SEO when that happens.

1. Keywords in Links – Get any links to your site to have as many keywords as it can.   This – Red Trolley – is not as important to search engines as -  Red Trolley Ice Cream Shop in Denver Highlands .  Especially when the site linking to yours is relevant (which eMarketing and Ice Cream in this case are not.  Sorry Red Trolley).
   
2. Press Release – If you every do a press release, you have control over #1.
   
3. Landmarks – Optimize for landmarks and surrounding neighbourhoods as well if applicable.

Summary

If you cover the basics of Local Search Engine Marketing mentioned above, you should  find your site will get local search traffic. This traffic will be low cost (free minus the resources to make the Local SEO changes). Once completed, you will need to make sure you handle that traffic properly!

To learn more about Local SEO and Local Search Marketing.  Head over to the best blog on the subject at www.GrowMap.com.

Are Premium Services with the Yellow Pages Worth It?

In Denver there is a guy on radio and TV called Tom Martino, The Troubleshooter .  He exposes scams that prey on honest people and small business.  On the radio today he was interviewing small business owners who claim to have been sold $650/month marketing packages by theYellow Pages (that alone got my attention, I’m still not sure I heard that right), and guaranteed leads from their listings in www.YellowPages.com .  They cited Yellow Pages sales people who said their business would be at the top of the local search results for their respective business etc, etc

I’d be interested to know more about this subject, so I invite people to post comments here and let us know about any experience you might have with getting leads from paid ads or services with the Yellow Pages

Are your advertising dollars worth it with the Yellow Pages? Leave a comment with your experience!

Purpose of a Website Homepage.

If more than 12% of the visitors to your homepage leave right away, you may need to read a bit more. We’ll show you how to make your new homepage, or change your homepage, depending what stage you are at.  This is not technical, this is what your need to do as a business, then hand off to who every is “technically” taking care of your site, if not you.

A homepage isn’t what it used to be.  It used to be the single entry point for a website, a place where you dazzled all visitors with what your business and mission was.  Well, that was the 90′s if ever at all.

A good homepage is a popular entry point, and likely the place most visitors arrive.  In fact, it may be just the way you imagine it, or it could be far more people enter from sources like search engines and other sites to the places on your site where they actually want to go.  It could be that they have bookmarked another page on your site, or even published that bookmark on social sharing servies like Digg.com , StumbleUpon.com or Del.ico.us.

Regardless of how people enter into your site, your homepage is the convention for visitors to orient themselves to your business, and navigate to where they want to go.  This means that your site is one part sitemap, and one part branding message.

Site Transparency

A homepage needs to offer transparency to a site.  A site visitor, regardless of how they enter a site, should be able to arrive at the homepage an know 3 things.

1. Who are you.
2. What do you do.
3. What does it mean for them.

Site Transparency also means visitors should know what is on the inside of a site, by looking at its homepage.  Is your website transparent from the homepage?  Let’s talk about how to get it there.

Other Must Have’s

1. Hours of Operation
2. How to Contact the Business
3. Steams into site (See below).

“Streaming” Visitors

Not all visitors are the same.  Your site likely serves more than one audience.  Your homepage design needs to handle each audience in a clear concise fashion.  Each audience needs to know where to go, and what areas of your site are useful and intended for them.

Consider the Best First

Every page needs a primary audience.  If you are a new business, when you create the homepage, design it for your ideal customer.  If your business is established, the homepage should be designed for your best customer.  Other audiences your serve will have their place, ut you don’t want to risk the experience of the audience that brings in 60% of your business revenue for the audience that brings in 15% either.

Local Businesses

If your business’ clientele is locally based, than your website homepage needs to have certain information on it.  You should have the following on your homepage;

1. The area your serve
2. Address (include street, city, postal code & neighbourhood if applicable).
3. Location Map (cross roads version will suffice)
4. Phone #
5. eMail

For a local business, this information should be available on on EVERY page, not just the homepage. This is why I suggest placing it in the top right of the header. It is easily placed on every page, but is also quite visible do to the way people scan a page (top to the right 1st). There might be a bit of “banner blindness” to this position, but when someone is looking for something on a site, they most ofter return to the top right of the page.

Here is a local business I love . They make organic ice cream, serve fair trade coffee and have a great environment. But the one issue I have with their website is that when I went there to get their phone # so I could book a meeting in their back room, I could not find it. To make it worse, my meeting was with people who have never been and they might need a map on the site to get to this popular meeting place. In the case of the Red Trolley, they are on 32nd street, but not the more popular part of it. In fact, 32nd street is broken up buy a couple of streets and park area, meaning it is hard to get from the more know part of 32nd street to the now “emerging” part of 32nd street they are at.

This business obviously needs a map, and it needs to be prominent with their phone number.

If I were to “tweak” the site, I would use the area in yellow to provide a map with the crossroads defined well, along with the phone # and physical address. I would also try to get “Open Hours” in there too. I might even through up a link to map it with Google Maps and “pop-up” a layer with the map. The other page elements this would displace could easily go to other areas once the top navigation was tweaked with “About Us” and “Faces of the Red Trolley” being combined”, “Giving” could move into “About Us” as well. This would free up the best navigation spots for “Parties & Meetings” which could move to the left with About Us and a “Menu” area, standard in this industry.

Might Have’s

1. Special Promotions – If so, make it clear which of audiences it is for to avoid confusing the others.
2. Newsletter/eMail sign up – See the Quadrant below to see where to put this. hint:You want them to do this.
3. Most common tasks or popular pages.
4. Search – 9 out of 10 people will try to navigate from the homepage.  If you have heavy search usage than you likely have a poor homepage.
5. News – If you really have to, remember this is most likely you wanting visitors to know your news, not vice versa.  Consider of a link to news instead.
6. Trust or Policy Info – Letting them know you ship UPS or have Verisign Security on purchases is great, but not pressing information.

User Experience – Give ‘em What They Want.

Your website, especially your homepage will be more successful the more you organize information from the perspective of your site visitors.  Basically, you give people what they want before you try to present them with what you want them to know or do.  We call this user centric design, and it is important to remember who the site is really for.

Homepage Quadrant Guide – Put it in its Place

Here is a guide to use when you are organizing the content mentioned above and anything else you might have. Each quatrant (area) of the page is representative of a web page.  i.e. If user often go to an online tool, then place that in the top right quadrant.

Using this Quadrant as a tool to organize your Homepage, will ensure you are presenting your business from your customer’s perspective, not yours.  It is also great for any page, but works great with home, product and service page.

Quadrant Breakdown

Top Left – This is the information your site visitors want the most. This is what they want to KNOW. This is not the place to place specials unless you 1st “satisfy” your visitors questions about what you do and what it means to them.

Top Right – This is where to place the things your site visitors want to do. This is not an area to sell. It might be a good area for search, but only if that is what your customer WANTS to do. Offering quick links to the most popular areas of your site would work well here. If you take orders by phone, put it here.

Bottom Left – Here is where you should tell them what you want them to know. Additional services your offer, your specials, charities you support etc.

Bottom Right – This is where you offer thing you want them to do, like sign up for that workshop you offer, or sign up for your newsletter (unless your site is so great that is what they want to do, which is rare).

Summary

What you read is more than a philosophy of page design. It is based on best practices, common sense, experience and long term strategy. If you organize your homepage as suggested, covering the key points mentioned here, your homepage will be what is supposed to be, and what your customers need. I suggest finding out your current “bounce rate”, the % of people immediately leaving your homepage, and compare it after you reorganize your page. If is not cut in half, I would be surprised.

If you have a homepage you would like to have feedback on, please leave a comment and I will take a look it and give my two sense, as will (I hope) other readers.

Cause People Under 40 Don’t Use the Yellow Pages Book Anymore.

With most local business searches happening online through local search engines and local search directories, local search marketing and local search advertising are more important than ever. A huge part of local search optimization is the local search directory. There are now dozens of places online to find local businesses, so knowing the best local directories for local search and how to submit to and get listed with all of these local search engines and directories is extremely important to today’s local business.

The Local Search Engines, Directories & Data Sources below are listed in order of importance to a local business, and it is critical to be in as many of them as possible , especially those ranked near the top. That’s why the list below was compiled.

Losing Business? Perfect Example

I was doing some research on Twitter.com , a place where people give short updates of what they are doing etc, and I came across this perfect example of a local business losing business because they were not listed well locally.

In this case, a local franchise of Kona Grill lost business because this person could not find its location via MapQuest.com or her GPS unit. From reading this article, you’ll learn how this incident could have been avoided.

Where to Start Listing Locally

Submitting to all these directories will take about 13 hours, which is a lot of time! Even worse, its tedious.

So start with Universal Business Listing (UBL).   I don’t mean this to be a review of Universal Business Listing, but they are the "big one". They feed listings to almost everyone else online, as you can see in the Notes area of the table below. Plus they also get you in 411 and GPS directories. The cost is nominal at $30, and included in that is the cost of listing with other paid directories like the Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Dex. You also don’t have to wait 4-6 months to get into InfoUSA which is all important online and off. Do the math and you’ll realize that its well worth it, plus , it gives you one place to make updates with in the future, not 26.

After submitting to UBL, hit at least the top 5 local search directories not covered by UBL. Do the rest too, but you’ll be leaving a lot "on the table" if you don’t hit at least those top 5).

Get Listed With These Local Search Engines, Directories and Providers

The above list was compiled by using a formula based on the popularity of the Local Search Engine/Directory, its recent increase or decrease of popularity, the significance of the sites it "feeds" and where it get "fed" its information from.

The Importance of Online Local Listings

Besides the fact that over 75% of searches for information on local businesses &services occur online, there are other compelling reasons to get listed on as many Local Search Directories as possible:

User experience – People tend to start with a general search online, then go from there. Eventually they locate the information they need, and if they have a good experience, will seek out that information resource (site) again. What this means for local business searches online is someone who searches for "Ice Cream" with a Zip Code, will end up a map of results from the search engine (why you need to be in Google, Yahoo and others) as well as results from local search directory sites like Merchant Circle, City Search and others (see the list above). If a user knows where they want to go already, they will use the map feature, if they are looking for reviews and opinions from others,they will go local search directory instead.

This is the current user experience today. It is not flipping through the Yellow Pages. Yes, the fingers are still doing the walking, only now its more like a tap dance on the keyboard, so you need to be part of it.

Reach – From the above ice cream example, you can see the reach you get from being listed. But data collected and managed online now goes a lot further. Not only is mobile local search picking up steam with the iPhone and similiar devices, but I often find places with my GPS while driving as well. (Gas, Food, Florists, Coffee Houses). Being online as well as on everyone’s GPS is pricless. Its being right where people are already looking.

Ranking – The better your search ranking with search engines like Google, the more often your site will be found, bottom line. When you are listed oline, you have a web reference to your site. The more references that are relevant the better. The more popular the site referencing you, the better. Listing with Local Search Directories provides you a way get popular and relevant sites linking to yours. Things are never really this simple, but you get the point, these links have value to your site ranking, and therefore to your business.

Writing for Local Search Engines & Directories

Steven Brier over at Local Internet USA brought up a good point to me recently, in that the focus on submitting to Local Search Engines and Directories is not so much about the time it takes to submit to them all, but rather the work it takes identify your keywords and create some compelling and attractive copy that will draw your target audience in from these local search engines and directories.  This obviously comes from a professional who see the results of well thought out copy.

Before submitting to search directories, your website should be optimized with your keywords.  You’ll want to make sure these make it into your listing copy where appropriate.  Here is more information on Local SEO for your website .

Note: This list does not cover local niches. If you are a restaurant for example, you will want to list with local directory sites like UrbanSpoon for instance. If there are niche directories with local listings, get in them as well! I’d put such a directory near the top of my list.

Now that we’ve discussed how to do SEO properly and how to get listed locally everywhere online, I’ll put some time into local online advertising (and not the useless opportunities you’ve been approached with by some sales guy).