I’m Going to Get So Busted for This One!

In this Intro to Local Search I’m going to give away everything I know about getting higher ranking in the local maps and business directories. You’re going to be very pissed off if you’ve been paying a vendor to do this for you (especially when you realize that they haven’t done you any justice and may actually posses the power to take your business DOWN).

I have to protect this content for Standard and Premium Members only, it’s the best of the best as it pertains to what I’ve learned about optimizing for higher ranking in the maps sections of Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Maps. Of course I’ll give you a teaser (you can hate me all you want).

Principles of Local SEO

Below are what I believe to be the principles of Local SEO for 2011. They are without a doubt completely different from organic SEO and Sponsored search engine optimization, and like anything else in business need to be a part of the ongoing online marketing strategy.

1. You must be authentic
2. You must optimize your website with (Local) SEO best practices
3. You must do business in the area for which you are marketing
4. You must select the right categories for your business
5. You must get your customers say good things about you
6. You must share as much information, media, and offers as possible
7. You must know where to be listed and be active where you are listed
8. You must NEVER spam

Okay, that’s my teaser. Ready to learn what the heck all that means? Read on, my friends.

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Do It Yourself and Save

With the strategies listed above (and linked to from above), you have the opportunity to do some basic research, make some simple website modifications, analyze competitor categories and citations, get tons of positive business reviews, and (bottomline) get incredible results from search engine maps and directories.

Don’t Make Me Beg for Feedback

Share, argue, spill it – let me know what you think of all this “Local SEO” stuff in your comments below. Don’t hold back.

We’re putting this guide together at the moment. For now, please use the link below to learn WordPress:

http://wordpresstraining.com/training-index/

Let’s talk about Facebook for a minute. Three years ago, we were customizing MySpace layouts and working with the Fox Network on CPA and CPC programs for MySpace and other social websites. Unless you’re in the music or sexy t-shirt industry, MySpace may not be the best social network to be advertising on. At the Facebook Ads Summit I attended on October 15th, there was a segment focused specifically on monetizing Facebook Pages, a supplement to the new ad platform that I must say has been performing very well for us thus far:

With 300 million users and over 70 different languages, it’s no wonder so many people (including my entire family) have migrated to Facebook. With an advertising platform that currently offers over 250k keywords, ad abstraction, contextual targeting (on the way), and demographic targeting, there’s plenty of opportunity to reach millions of eyes. Not to mention the new Rosetta campaign importer that’s coming out soon, which will enable you to simply import your AdWords or YSM campaigns (wow!).

But what about Pages? What the heck are pages and how are they different from profiles? And do you set one up? Better yet, how do you optimize a Facebook Page so that it shows up in Google or adds another “vote” to your local business listing to improve local search engine trust?

Let’s start at the beginning with Facebook’s definition of a “Page” according to their most recent product guide:

A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables brands, businesses, or public personalities
to connect and share with Facebook users.

Pages provide a “voice” for communicating with Fans in real-time as you post interesting
and relevant stories. When your Fans interact with your Facebook Page and the content
you share, viral stories can appear in their friends’ home pages .

So in terms of marketing, having a Page is having a beacon within Facebook that allows fans, patrons, and prospects to interact freely without the barriers of old-school communication. It’s like Twitter with 10x’s the content and no text limitations.

Optimizing Within Facebook

Let me know if you think I have this backwards (trust me, I don’t): The primary goal of having a Facebook Page is to get fans (or subscribers) and invoke interaction. The secondary goal is drive them to an offer page or get them to your target website.

How do you do get more fans and visibility within Facebook? By pushing content out tactfully. The Wall within a Page is the same as a Wall within a Profile. Therefore Page Admins can publish stories, news, and offers to their Fan’s home page streams. As it was told by a publisher during the Ads Summit, updates don’t always happen right away and she also noted that something goes on at Facebook on Tuesday’s with regards to updates, which means Tuesday mornings may be the best time to push content (hint hint).

The other internal way to communicate with Fans is by direct messages to their inboxes, which is reportedly being used less and less. Who uses email these days anyway right, right? (sorry Corey Feldman fan here).

Going back to the Pages themselves, here are some ways you can optimize your Facebook Pages according to product guide and people I spoke with at the Facebook Ads Summit:

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Optimizing Outside of Facebook

If you don’t already have a Facebook link on your website, please grab the one below and get it on there ASAP:

A week ago I received an SMS from Mandalay Bay with “Become a Fan of Mandalay Bay on Facebook http://bit.ly/4DekHh or Follow us on Twitter http://bit.ly/2lfWwQ.” Then a few days later the emailed followed with a similar message and not at all bundled into a typical newsletter. The messages were clear: Follow Us.

Giveaways and contests won’t produce the ideal target market when it comes to Fans on Facebook Pages, but it can draw a lot of numbers very quickly.

And then it all comes down to links. You definitely do not want your Facebook Page to show up above your target website, but getting a few new targeted links to the Page every month could position the listing as a close 2nd, and maybe your Squidoo page as close 3rd, and your LA Times or OC Register listing as 4th (you see where I’m going).

The list goes on. It’s not rocket science to use your Facebook Page to get better visibility within the world’s most-trafficked social network and to potentially get more trust from the search engines when you get links and business data shared across 3rd party websites.

How Do You Optimize Your Facebook Page?

I want your feedback. Please let us know your techniques if you’re getting great results or know someone who has. Thanks for visiting!

Five years ago, when Search Engine Optimization was still young and Bruce Clay’s famous Tech Tips page was still little known, the idea of hiring an in-house Search Engine Optimizer was far and none. With more Internet adoption year after year, thousands of companies either have someone learning in-house or they are outsourcing to reputable SEO companies. By the end of the decade, I expect most companies will have addressed SEO in one capacity or another.

Enter Link Building Specialist

The happy, organic marriage of great content and powerful links, combined with a stellar CTR and low bounce-back-to-Google rate creates a perfect SEO scenario. However, because it is so difficult for many companies to measure ROI on SEO link building activities, most will not likely hire a resource responsible for ONLY managing link building efforts. So I’m not going to try and sell you on the idea of having an SEM Manager in charge of an On-Page SEO Expert, Off-Page Link Building Specialist, and a dedicated PPC Specialist. I’ll do that next December.

Instead, I’m going to try to sell you on a new role that your Marketing Department can’t possibly say no to.

Enter SEO Brand Marketing Specialist

The other day I received an email from the good folks over at WordStream (well Byron who may work for an outsourcing agency) who read my post entitled Linkscape Vs. Wordtracker and asked me to check out their product. Now, I find it highly unlikely that WordStream follows our blog regularly. So how then did WordStream stumble upon the post? What I’m about to show you will uncover a technique that may help you get dozens of free leads while at the same time enable you to get your brand mentioned all over the web. If you’re smart, you’ll figure out how to include keyword-rich links when possible, taking this technique to the next level.

Three main reason you will want to hire an SEO Brand Marketing Specialist:

1. SEO Link Juice
2. Having your brand appear whenever your products or services do
3. Online reputation management

Below are the steps to follow if you’re going to handle your own SEO Brand Marketing tasks:

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Track Everything

At the bare minimum, use a spreadsheet and track everywhere you post. If you can create or find a tracking software (such as Buzzstream.com), you’ll have a live system for tracking contact information, follow-ups and so forth; like a mini-Salesforce.com.

If you’re not ready to hire a dedicated Link Builder in-house, at least consider hiring an SEO Brand Marketing Specialist to help get authentic/organic links, get brand visibility wherever your ideal keywords exist, and to create awareness whenever your brand name (or personal name) is mentioned online. I can almost guarantee that Bruce Clay, SEO Expert Robert Wright, Aaron Wall and other SEO giants have someone in-house managing brand marketing.

Please share this article with your friends, family, peers and associates, if for no other reason then to get alerts when their names are used.

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In this tutorial, I’m going to cover the core fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization. You’ll learn how to optimize your website to be search engine-friendly, with content that ranks high for popular keywords and phrases, and stay at the top with a few simple title-writing best practices.

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It’s a known fact that your business reputation can take down your company or can be the real key to business success. This fact applies both online and offline. As reputation pertains to the Internet, reviews play a major role in how a business listing is displayed, not just within search engine results and maps, but also within key local business directories such as Yelp, MerchantCircle, and other important local business destinations.

The best way to get business reviews is to simply ask for them from your customers. You can ask via a flyer, postcard or thank you letter. You can ask by stapling a note to every receipt. However you ask, the best way to insure participation is to offer to an incentive, such a discount on the customer’s next visit.

Rotating the destinations on whichever medium you decide to distribute will be key for authenticity. Likewise, the more instruction you can provide to help your customer who may be new to providing business reviews, the more likely you’ll be to gain more participation.

There are services and vendors available who can not only help get reviews from existing customers, but also syndicate business reviews throughout a list of popular review websites, such as Yelp, RateItAll, etc. But be warned, these agencies tend to leave a footprint in the syndication to give themselves attribution. If you can pay more to NOT have the attribution, I’d ask for it.

Start with Email

Collect email addresses of as many customers as you can. Offer a survey or contest, start a “of the Month Club”, do whatever it takes to capture their email addresses.

Then, as part of your email campaign, send out a special offer to customers who bring in a positive or neutral review of your business. Below is an email template you can use in your campaign:

Dear Valued Customer,

Sincerely,
Your Company Name Here

Business Rating and Review Sites

Below is a list of popular online business rating websites. I recommend rotating these into each campaign you use to get business reviews with as to get as much saturation as possible:

• bbb.org
• bing.com/local
• brownbook.com
• businessdirectory.bizjournals.com
• citycliq.com
• cityguide.com
• citysearch.com
• cityslick.net
• citysquares.com
• dexknows.com
• insiderpages.com
• judysbook.com
• kudzu.com
• local.botw.org
• local.com
• local.yahoo.com
• localadlink.com
• localdatabase.com
• maps.google.com
• matchpoint.com
• merchantcircle.com
• openlist.com
• pennysaverusa.com (NEW!)
• planetbuzz.com
• rateitall.com
• ratepoint.com
• sitejabber.com
• superpages.com
• switchboard.com
• yellowbook.com
• yellowpages.aol.com
• yellowpages.com
• yelp.com
• zagat.com

The Incredible Business Review Postcard

Below is a link to a business review postcard we put together to help you get reviews from every customer who walks out the door. We recommend stapling this to your receipts and rotating the rating/review website every few weeks to give you more saturation and diversity in reviewers.

Comments? Feedback? More Ideas? Please share below:

Learn how to write content that ranks well in the search engines and provides enough information and trust to convert visitors to sales. In this guide, I’ll be walking through a few important principles and best practices. Start by watching the video below.

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Download the Content Writing Guide

For those of you haven’t already downloaded my guide to writing content, please click the button below to get the PDF. For a step-by-step walk through of writing content, please read the article below the download link.

Now for Some Step-By-Step Instruction

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My Preferred Vendors

I have two preferred Copywriters / Content Writers I trust: Karanai Ravenscroft and Bulldog Creative Copywriting.

1. Contact Karanai Ravenscroft
2. Bulldog Creative Copywriting

Got any recommendations? Please post your ideas below.

Here’s your Link Building 101 course on the basics of building internal links that will help you rank higher in the search results.

That being said, here’s your video on basic internal link building:

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Basic Link Building Tutorial

There’s content and then there’s links. Both play an important role in how search engines catalog your website. In this Basic Internal Link Building Tutorial (also called intra-linking), you’ll learn how to optimize your navigation, get more “juice” to top content, and use a site map to help distribute PageRank™.

But very quickly, I’m going to discuss two types of link building: Internal and External. Internal link building will help Google understand your content well enough to categorize it and catalog it, creating “sitelinks” and “breadcrumbs” to help users access popular content. External Link Building is building links that come from third party websites and could be compared to votes. Good votes giveth, bad votes taketh away.

So let’s get started on intra-linking…

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Selecting the right categories in the local maps is a bit of an art. I’ve got spreadsheets and case studies I can’t share on this website that identify patterns of category-based local maps optimization. Think back to your high school days and class registration. You thought about which courses you wanted to take based on your own criteria (friends, teacher, difficulty, etc). Later you find out that you might have done better had you been told which courses would give you the best results or had you known what last year’s valedictorian had signed up for.

Welcome back to high school registration and to your official guide on choosing the right course. Put yourself 365 days from now. You have the chance to completely change the number of leads and/or sales you’ll receive and it can be as significant as 1,000+ from selecting the selecting the right categories.

The Category-Finding Technique

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Your Feedback is Needed – Got Any?

I bow to those who have a tool to make the above easier and spreadsheet-free. The process works but as you can see, is very time consuming. Let me know your thoughts, ideas, feedback and insights below.

A friend of ours on Twitter recently asked about a Tweet we posted regarding not wanting to have the job of Social Community Manager (SCM), so we thought it prudent to write a post on the topic of Social Networking and hiring a part-time or dedicated SCM.

Why Hire a Social Community Manager?

If you use an productivity application such as ManicTime or RescueTime, you may be shocked to see the amount of time you are spending trying to build and maintain your presence on social networking websites. What you might not notice is the limited amount of leads and sales you’ve been driving from Social in your Google Analytics (or other web analytic program). Don’t bother logging in to check, because the number will be less than 4%.

So when all is said and done, you have to account for those hours and your market rate for whatever it is you do at your job. For a lawyer who makes $400 per hour to spend 20 hours per month (5 hours per week) on Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook, that’s a cost of $8,000 per month. For Joe Marketing Coordinator, his hourly rate is around $31 per hour. If he spent 20 hours per month on social networking, the cost would be $620 per month, in addition to the production/operations work that isn’t being handled during those 20 hours.

Neither the lawyer or the marketer in the example above have any training on how to monetize social efforts, so for the most part it’s just time wasting. Therefore, hiring a Social Community Manager trained in the art of growing, nurturing and executing viral marketing campaigns across various social platforms would be a much more efficient use of marketing budget (versus sacrificing internal resource time to the Gods of Time Wasting).

What Does a SCM Do Exactly?

Aside from spending 25% of their day getting better at what they do, a SCM is responsible for Brand Awareness and improving Online Market Reach by getting as many eyes to see the company they provide services to through various mediums, such as video, Flash media, bulletins/posts, widgets, direct communications and more. An effective campaign will not only encourage the community members to visit the target website (and make a purchase or inquiry), but will also spawn a viral marketing epidemic that’s too good not to share with others; such as the Elf Yourself campaign by OfficeMax in 2007.

At the end of the month and/or campaign, the Social Community Manager is accountable to providing detailed analytical data on the following deliverables:

SCM Deliverables:

1. Reach / Impressions and Growth Rate
2. Member Count and Growth Rate
3. Traffic Generated From Social Networks
4. Leads / Sales Generated from Social Networks (Web Analytics)
5. Overall Campaign Performance & Recommendations

Think with the End in Mind (Covey)

Having a goal isn’t just telling your SCM that you want more leads and/or sales. It’s more complicated then ROI because the ROI from a brand awareness campaign is very difficult to measure. Here’s our recommendation: There is no end, there is just growth. Don’t tell your SCM that you expect a tree 20 feet tall that produces 50 apples per month. Instead, tell your community manager that you want a solid foundation, a rotation of out-of-the-box campaigns/offers, and continuous growth in visibility at a rate of 15% or higher per month.

Your reports will tell all and should look something like the below:

Social Marketing Report Sample:

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Still Want to “Do the Social Thing” Yourself?

We recommend hiring a Social Community Manager if you’re really interested in using a social networking strategy as an advertising platform. Otherwise, limit your time and who you follow to just those people in your industry who will help you to grow at an individual level. As SEO Experts, here are a few of the people we follow, some on our mobile devices:

• @graywolf
• @affiliatesummit
• @mikefilsaime
• @seomoz
• @SpyFu
• @garyvee
• @bradcallen
• @randfish
• @dannysullivan
• @TerryCox
• @mckennasmark
• @ericward
• @aaronwall
• @mattcutts
• @seochick
• @dennisyu
• @sengineland
• @DeniseWakeman
• @BradFallon
• @BenGerstein
• @drodecker

Of course you may want to follow us as well (@seosteve and @adamwayne) to keep up with industry trends and see discussions on search engine optimization, social marketing optimization, and other Internet marketing facets.

Where to Go to Find a Social Community Manager

We recommend the following, based on our experience working with each vendor:

1. Social Networking Girls
2. McKenna’s Marketing
3. CrowdSurf
4. Pearse Street Consulting

We hope we provided enough information and resources above to plan and deploy an effective Social Marketing Optimization (SMO) strategy. Happy socializing!