A lot of the clients that BuzzStarter works with always like to think big. They always aim for top ranking on keywords that best defines their market (and business), that drives the highest search volume possible. The challenge with that is, that will never be true all the time especially for keywords that are extremely long tail. With the advent of local search engine results, it may be difficult to plan these keyword campaigns in advance especially if some of these locations are extremely valuable for your business. Now I do/did some work for a number of companies where local SEO matters and I would like to share some interesting tips that I’ve learned that maybe able to help you in your optimization campaign.
Why Local SEO Matters
First, a few reasons why optimizing for local SEO is important:
Google (and other search engines) factor in location data when displaying search results. With the advent of increased mobile use as well as the ever increasing penetration of the Android OS across different markets (see the smartphone Android versus iOS versus Windows Phone top platform data below) plus integration of all Google accounts that can be used universally across all their services, results are becoming more and more accurate and leaning towards serving relevant results where it originated from, if location can be determined. From a recent report by comScore.
| United States – Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Month Avg. Ending Jun. 2013 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Mar. 2013 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Age 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens |
|||
| Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers | |||
| Mar-13 | Jun-13 | Point Change | |
| Total Smartphone Subscribers | 100.0% | 100.0% | N/A |
| Android | 52.0% | 52.0% | 0.0 |
| Apple | 39.0% | 39.9% | 0.9 |
| BlackBerry | 5.2% | 4.4% | -0.8 |
| Microsoft | 3.0% | 3.1% | 0.1 |
| Symbian | 0.5% | 0.3% | -0.2 |
People tend to include cities/states/regions when searching for businesses on the web. The pattern of search queries are changing and evolving, especially with mobile having
a greater penetration of internet consumption compared to desktops. Knowing this, especially in 2014, most companies with an Internet presence of aware of how important effectively integrating search engine optimization techniques into their business plan is. However, not only do businesses need to concern themselves with SEO, but they also must be aware of searches happening at a local level. At this basic level, this type of SEO helps to drive in more local businesses and get that local audience that will be engaged longer, since this type of audience may have a better interest on what you offer as a business. It is always great get any type of audience but depending on what you sell, it is much easier to convert local customers over non-local ones.
Consumers are starting to trust smaller, local businesses over larger, well-known brands. Have you heard of community currencies? Those unique local currencies accepted within a particular community, the more popular one that’s effectively used is the BerkShares of BerkShire County, Massachusetts. 
Everywhere in the United States as well as countries all over the world, the “buy local” movement has been successful in the past 8 years, driving customers back to buying and investing in their local businesses. Now more than ever, it is important as a business owner to start getting their businesses in front of customers, especially online. The challenge always is, how do you compete and stand out from other business both local and national so that you become a important local player in your own right? What do you need to do to stand out, especially for customers that are searching you out online?
To be continued next week at Buzz Starter! Need immediate help? Contact us and let us know how we can make you successful in your next SEO campaign.
One of the things I’ve been trying to do is change the whole way people think about SEO, digital & search marketing as well as analytics by participating a little bit more on Quora. I also go on that site to spread the word on BuzzStarter and what we do. So this will be the first article entry in a series of entries where I try to educate people using my own experiences being in this field. A couple of days ago, this questions was asked:
How do I use Amazon Mechanical Turk for SEO to increase my page ranks?
My answer as originally posted on Quora.
I’ll give you the best advice here coming from experience and try not step on anyone’s ego. I noticed that most of the long answers given here are a bit inexperienced and the short ones are from experienced people who are a bit sarcastic. I’ll give you a use case on how you should use Mechanical Turk because in a nutshell, what it really is is cheap crowdsourcing work.
MT is good for things like, creating lists. For example, you want to create a comprehensive list of all mom bloggers out on the web for a PR campaign you’re doing, then you use that service.
Or if you want to do an a/b test in a controlled environment, then you use MT. Load balancing test that mimics normal human activity? Yes.
It’s also good for collecting data that you have a hard time doing yourself by writing code, especially if you’re not good at writing code.
That’s how you would use MT.
Now let’s turn to your question because what you’re really asking is how can you use crowdsourcing to increase your PageRank. To increase PageRank, I’m assuming you’re thinking about backlinking because that’s the algorithm if this was still 2010. Since this is 2014, I’m going to give you a friendly advice, be that brick wall and tell you not to use MT in anyway to generate backlinks or generate content to push up your PageRank because it won’t work. The reasons being:
- There’s this algorithm called Penguin. Look it up and you would understand why this won’t work, especially combined with Panda (and Payday Loan 2.0).
- It will look unnatural. You may even get a penalty for doing what you’re about to do.
- Stop being in the mindset of, “if I use MT to create content or links in bulk, I will start ranking” because that too will not work.
My advice for you if you are serious about SEO in 2014 is, think about what you should do to create important popularity signals back to your content, that is not contrived, artificial or machine generated where you’re not chasing people for links all the time.
Also forget growth hacking, which is not good for SEO. Those guys are hacks in my opinion because the audience they build is stimulated only on the short term. Google values user experience that engages visitors, makes them stay and come back to your site over time.
Make sense?
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So one of the biggest questions most of our prospective clients ask us here at BuzzStarter always is this, “How fast can you get us to position number 1 on Google?”
Personally, when I get that question I try not to cringe or run for the hills because it gives me already an idea on how the project would be. It displays how the client is misinformed on how or what search engine optimization really is and the process it takes to make it work. The expectation is already high before we even do any discovery and it is not only is my job to make the clients’ organic campaign work, I also have to educate them along the way of the work SEO entails. In a perfect world, it is always great to have both consultant and client aligned on day one, both being aware what kind of work would be needed and knowledgeable enough of the process. However the reality is, this doesn’t happen quite often and you will be asked the same question above, “How fast can you get us to position number 1 on Google?”
To set expectations and make sure that the client understand the reality of such request, I always start first in trying to understand the their main taxonomy. From that point on I take the most competitive words, which is mostly the keywords the clients would really want to rank for most of the time, and I help educate them on certain gotcha’s and avoid pitfalls before the project even starts. The last thing anybody wants is optimize and spend a lot of time, effort and work on keywords that are extremely competitive from day one. To figure this, one doesn’t need a lot of complicated tools or algorithms, I do a very simple spot check. Let me share with you what this process is.
- Avoid keywords that attribute double listings to a competitor.
When doing keyword research and looking at how these keywords apply to the competition, it is always great to just see what shows up on search engines before making a decision. Take a look at the example below:
The above is a good example of double/stacked listings. Now we are about competition and as much as we are confident in the results we provide, we are also about efficiency and being realistic on results. It would be impossible to compete for keywords in the same scenario .
- Avoid short term keywords that Wikipedia will always rank #1 for.
Let’s say you are about to start an online retail store and one of the items you are about to sell are things related to chicken. Using our simple process, let’s see what shows up on Google when you type in that keyword:
I know the above example maybe unlikely, given the difficulty of simply ranking for the word “chicken” even if Wikipedia isn’t around. However, I just want to stress out the fact that Wikipedia is such a strong site when it comes to SEO. Doing this simple exercise will help you avoid wasting time and energy optimizing for keywords that your site will never rank for.
Let us know how Buzz Starter can help! Here are the ways you can follow, learn and grow with us:
- Subscribe to our newsletter.
- Subscribe to BuzzStarter Insider.
- Like us on Facebook!
- Join our LinkedIn Group.
- FOLLOW the BuzzStarter experience on Twitter @BuzzStarterBiz.
- Contact us and learn on how we can help you find answers to your real world problems.
- Schedule a call with us and get a straight answer. Be it digital analytics, search optimization or any online acquisition question, we will give you the insights you need to get to the next step.
- Not on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? See those social site icons on the right side of our pages? We are on Quora, Google+, MySpace, MerchantCircle and 4 other social channels, you are bound to find us no matter what!
- Want to guest write for our site? Contact us and we will like to work with you in getting your article across.
At Buzzstarter, I try to keep up not only with the latest in search but also in digital analytics and I try to provide 
colleagues, past and current clients information that will be critical to their operation. Lately I have been noticing a more proactive stance by the big search engines on a move towards secured search and the one thing that is changing up how web analytics data is being collected is that most of them are moving search onto a secure server (HTTPS). With Google, we are not so surprised since they have been trying to move everyone to this protocol since October 2011. Back then, searches done while logged into any Google service will not be recorded and passed onto any analytics platform, including Google Analytics. By September 2013, Google made the final announcement that all searches will be secured by default. What this meant was search professionals know people are coming from a Google search but they wouldn’t know what the search term was that brought the visitor in.
One way to see some of this data was to force everyone to adopt and integrate search keyword data from Google Webmaster Tools onto Google Analytics which only gives you impressions but not really traffic volume by keyword. It was a half-baked yet decent solution. I actually created a Google Analytics filter that can still identify and bucket release some information coming from secure Google searches (a solution I provide) but for the most part it will only release keywords if users aren’t signed in, something that is quite a challenge now with mobile visitors using android, where they are almost perpetually logged in.
Now let’s move onto Yahoo. With their recent push to secured search in the past two months, how is this going to affect your web analytics data? As much as web analytics platform agnostic as I can be with this answer, do not expect some interesting spikes in your Direct traffic. Would you get an “keyword unavailable” or “not provided” spike on your organic search engine by source reports? Yes, so far with what we have observed with most of the more popular web analytics platforms (GA, Adobe Omniture, Webtrends, ClickTale, Piwik) and most of them still translate the traffic coming from Yahoo Search (http://r.search.yahoo.com/) as organic traffic, although it will be a lot more complicated to define this if the only platform you use is Google Analytics. That is another topic I will write soon on how to create effective filters on how to do this.
As of currently, Yahoo does not want to reveal anything to you, from a data standpoint.
Some of you guys reading this may ask, “Would Yahoo implement something similar to Google Webmaster Tools data?” My answer would be the jury is still out on that since this secure search rollout seems to still be incomplete as I still see some Yahoo keyword data on some of the production analytics sites I work on at the moment. However, I have noticed a downward trend of organic keyword traffic coming from Yahoo’s organic search in the past two months at 5% month-over-month.
This brings us up to Bing and what the future is for that search engine. As far as I can tell from the grapevine and from real life experience, they also launched secured searches towards the end of January 2014 but it’s not on by default. However if you do have it on by default, expect the same behavior as implemented by Google or Yahoo. That means no keyword data as well as possibly losing referring site data.
Now on a web analytics platform perspective, what does this mean to your organization as well? I have been working with medium to large scale companies that utilize Google Analytics as their main platform. Others I work with use GA as a validation tool and rely on a paid solution such as Webtrends or Omniture (Adobe Marketing Analytics) as their data source for digital analytics. For GA, Google has yet to announce if they will try to provide a solution to their free product that will try to translate such organic traffic coming from a secure Yahoo or Bing search.
At Buzz Starter I try to come up with creative filter solutions either on a profile or report level and still try to translate secured search data regardless of what platform you use.
Let us know how we can help! Here are the ways you can follow, learn and grow with us:
- Subscribe to our newsletter.
- Subscribe to BuzzStarter Insider.
- Like us on Facebook!
- Join our LinkedIn Group.
- FOLLOW the BuzzStarter experience on Twitter @BuzzStarterBiz.
- Contact us and learn on how we can help you find answers to your real world problems.
- Schedule a call with us and get a straight answer. Be it digital analytics, search optimization or any online acquisition question, we will give you the insights you need to get to the next step.
- Not on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? See those social site icons on the right side of our pages? We are on Quora, Google+, MySpace, MerchantCircle and 4 other social channels, you are bound to find us no matter what!
- Want to guest write for our site? Contact us and we will like to work with you in getting your article across.
Last week, we discussed part 1 of how BuzzStarter’s best practices on 404s come to play. For the conclusion of this series, we will layout key bullet point action items on how we address 404s in general. For new people who are just getting into SEO, seeing 404 error messages in Google Webmaster tools can be nerve wracking. As we mentioned previously, handling your 404 page in the right way is an integral, but shouldn’t be a worrying exercise, part in improving your website’s user experience for your visitors and search engines.
Why do we get 404 messages?
Not a comprehensive list but generally, search engine bots will get a 404 because:
- A bookmark from Social sites (G+, Facebook, etc.) does not exist.
- Black hat competitors, or spammers generate non-existing links to your site that gets crawled by search bots.
- A page that was linked from an external source got moved or deleted.
- Code from your page (javascript, etc.) isn’t handling page loads properly giving the appearance of a 404.
You have 404s, now what?
Now that you understand how a 404 happens, what do you do next? In part one of our article we gave you guys an idea on how we handle 404s in general. Now for a summary and actual list of action items, this is what we recommend.
- Now that you see 404s happening, make sure that existing pages in your site do not link to these 404 pages
- It is not necessary to redirect all 404s to someplace in your site. In fact, if you are having just a regular amount of 404s, it may not be necessary to redirect at all.
- If you do get an unusual amount, make sure you redirect properly to the right page on your site. Take a look at your sitemap file and make sure to audit, then remove any links on the map that points to non-existing pages.
- If a link from an external source is pointing on a non existing link on the site, reach out to the owner of that site to let him know of the issue. If that doesn’t resolve that, try to handle the 404 on your own by doing your own redirect to an actual relevant page on your site.
- 404s happen. Our suggestion is create some links that are important to navigating your site on your 404 page, ideally to some rich content portal on your site.
You can relax now, Buzz Starter is always here to help. For more updated best practices please always refer to the search engines themselves.
For Bing 404 best practices, click here.
For Google 404 best practices, click here.
We are always here to help, contact us and let us know how we can help you in maximing your SEO dollars.
