Aaron Bradley dropping some Local knowledge, along with a lot of other knowledge, in his fantastic post about the Semantic Web: “…search is no longer about words, but about the things to which the words on a web page describe and make reference…” “Why is this important? It’s important because when Google receives a user [...]
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I tend to get a lot of calls from start-ups trying to go the small business SEO agency reseller route to get their services in the hands of SMBs. Often they are looking for feedback on their service, introductions to potential resellers, or a SEO strategy to get in front of potential customers. I have [...]
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Since Google rolled out the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, numerous sites have been impacted or penalized. Often, companies that incur penalties or experience a drop in rankings don’t have a clue as to what they’ve done wrong — especially small, local businesses. This leads me to a novel proposal: perhaps for local businesses, the best link building is absolutely none at all.
I’ve been approached by many small-to-medium businesses seeking help with various degrees of penalization as a result of these updates over the past year, and some of the commonalities to me are striking — primarily, the degree of ignorance about online marketing behaviors that can result in Google penalizing your website.
The chief “sin” among these behaviors often involves link building. It’s not surprising that this has happened, given the overwhelming number of articles out there advising businesses on how to increase their inlinks in order to improve their rankings in Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search results.
If you’re a newbie, you might not realize that Google’s original PageRank algorithm ranked pages based largely on how many other sites and pages linked to them, taking into account the relative importance of those linking pages. Fast forward to 2013: Google rankings continue to be influenced by links, but there are many additional factors or “signals” by which Google determines the relative popularity — and, therefore, rankings — of webpages.
Over the years, I’ve written articles and provided advice about link building, though I’ve always tried to lean heavily toward the conservative side of this practice, recommending methods that should play well with Google’s rules.
Even so, it’s become very clear to me that it may be highly counterproductive to try to teach small businesses how to conduct link building. They don’t understand the best practices necessary to perform the development while simultaneously staying on Google’s and Bing’s good side. They take shortcuts. They make novice mistakes. They attempt to blatantly manipulate Google through building a linking scheme of interlinked microsites, purchasing numerous keyword domain names, spamming links onto sites or forums or blog comments, or by purchasing links.
And, more frequently than not, they get into real trouble — resulting in their websites being penalized and their listing getting suppressed or removed from Place Search or Maps.
Frankly, the key problem for SMBs in link building is that Google and Bing don’t want you to do it at all!
The search engines are looking to see sites’ backlink profiles expand primarily via natural growth. For instance, if someone’s writing a blog post and mentions your site/business, that’s when they want a link to appear — as a sort of heartfelt, real endorsement of your site.
Google has become so sophisticated with link analysis that there’s not much point in attempting to “trick” or manipulate them through link development practices (at least for relative novices).
So, this leads me to a simple premise: small-to-medium businesses would be better off simply in focusing on quality and working on good content over time, rather than involving themselves in the arcane practice of “link building.”
If you’re an SMB desiring to improve your search engine rankings and attract new customers, what should you be doing instead? I think you should really be ambitiously creating content and involving yourself in social media.
Some people have coined a trendy term for “creating content” — they’re calling it “content marketing,” and the name has been gaining steam over the last year or two. But, there’s nothing new about content marketing. Quite simply, ignore the potentially intimidating phrase and look toward areas where you can be frequently producing content in an ongoing basis, whether it be through writing, posting images, or posting videos.
Quite a few of us have pushed blogging for local businesses for years, as this results in unique and often shareable content that is search engine friendly. It also creates a great basis for Twitter postings and Facebook status updates, along with other social media sites. If your business lends itself to beautiful or interesting visuals, look towards posting stuff on image sharing sites like Flickr and Pinterest.
In terms of social media, simply posting your own stuff all the time really isn’t enough. You need to be working to increase your engagement and influence, since these sorts of nebulous factors are increasingly influential with the search engines as part of the overall ranking mix.
Local businesses still need to have first laid the groundwork for their online presence by getting their business listings to show up in all of the major online business directories (such as Internet Yellow Pages) and local search engines. That can easily be done by tapping a service like Universal Business Listing or Neustar LocalEze to distribute the information to many directories (or you can simply do it manually).
Either way, once the basic listing information has been distributed, the best source for local citations — i.e., “mentions” of your business online in places that search engines may notice — will be through social media work.
So, ditch the link building! Live stress-free! Work on developing interesting stuff and engaging with your customers and with the public. Do that, and the rest will follow… naturally.
WASHINGTON – Following revelations that the U.S. government’s PRISM program has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, President Obama admitted that Google’s policy of hiding keywords in Google Analytics was the deciding factor in moving [...]
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Since Penguin 2.0 hit a couple of weeks ago, a number of clients have received a large volume of requests to remove links from their sites that goes something like this: “I recently received notice from Google that my website has been assessed a penalty after they “detected unnatural links” pointing to my website http://www.spamdawber.com/. Can [...]
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Yesterday I talked about my initial thoughts on Google’s new Local Business Data Highlighter. Tyler Bell of Factual was quick to point out an important point: [View the story "Cheeky Google" on Storify] If you want to have the best chance of ranking for local queries in Google, you should definitely use the tools they [...]
The post Why You Should Be Open With Your Business’ Meta Data appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
Google’s new Data Highlighter for Local Businesses is definitely worth checking out for anyone trying to goose their local rankings. I have found it to be a bit buggy and it’s a new tool, so proceed with caution. Here are some basics on how to use it along with some tricks I have figured out [...]
The post How To Use Google’s Local Business Data Highlighter…So Far appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
Last week, I was lucky to join a number of great speakers at the iLive conference in Riga, Latvia. As with all conferences, I learned a lot. (I simply can’t relate to those who go to a conference and say they’ve heard it all before.) I learned at least as much from the people I met and chatted with — as well as from the people of Riga and Latvia — as I did from the conference itself.
Latvia is a very small country with a population of just over 2 million people — around the size of a smallish Chinese or American city. The country has a very checkered history with a Nazi occupation, being absorbed into the Soviet Union for over 47 years and then finally achieving full independence in 1991 — just 22 years ago.
Somewhere around 25% of the population speaks Russian as their native tongue, but they are still “Latvian.” What this means, in practical terms, is that many Latvians are bilingual, and some speak three or more languages. When you jump into a taxi in the capital, Riga, one driver will be listening to the radio in Russian (I just managed my directions in Russian), while another will be listening in Latvian (directions to him were in English).
International SEO & Personas Are Increasingly Linked. Source:Webcertain
When you land at Riga, you can just about see Estonia in the distance; when you take off, you are rapidly over Lithuania long before the plane has finished climbing. Latvia shares borders with the Russian Federation, Belarus, Estonia and Lithuania, and is just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden.
What, exactly, does this have to do with local/global search marketing? It’s very simple. What most people mean when they say “think local” is that you should work with someone who is “local.” But, if your country is so small that going to dinner sometimes means crossing a national boundary and speaking a different language, then who really represents that “local” person?
In this crazy, mixed-up, increasingly complex world we live in, thinking global and acting local is no longer a useful idea — though the principles behind it were valid (and in many cases, still are).
The main problem with “acting local” is that it you run the risk of putting vastly different customers with vastly different needs into the same “box” based solely on geographic location. And, as Latvia shows us, geography isn’t everything. A more useful way to target such a diverse customer base is by developing personas that represent each different group of customers within your target market. Today, the Web is all about personas — even if you don’t work with them, they still matter.
Keywords and personas are linked. Yes, it would be great to have much more data about keywords and the people who use them available easily online, but if you’re clever and you structure your website around clearly defined “personas,” then you probably have more data than you actually realize. (And, by the way, Facebook is a very useful tool to help build a better picture of your personas, even if you are not advertising.)
Personas are closely aligned with SEO needs. If the information presented in a SERP is appropriate to the targeted persona, the click-through rate will be higher, ultimately improving the traffic and ranking potential of that particular result.
Different personas will respond differently to the same content. For optimal success, you must consider how to differentiate your approach for each of your target groups.
Going back to Riga, we could define our customers and potential customers in the following ways. Note how the personas become more precise and more closely defined as you work your way down the list:
The above list is only to give you the idea in very simple terms. If you have different “description” pages which describe the same product in different ways, then you are already personalizing your Web content to some extent — but is your SEO also personalized? And, do you think about your content and SEO in terms of personas?
I should add that, in my example above, I split the languages to demonstrate my point — but there are cases where it may not make economic sense to target every language. It all depends on your organization.
However, my key argument is that personas take your SEO efforts to the next level. Moving your messaging from “global” to “local” is naturally followed by “personal” — and that that’s where the edgy, fast-moving businesses are going as fast as their coders can take them!
One final note: the word “international” itself means different things to different people. In conversations with those I met in Riga, people did not generally use the term “international” to refer to working between Baltic states. On several occasions people said to me, “there are not many international firms in Latvia,” which was odd to me, looking at a country which bordered with so many others speaking so many different languages. I think it would be fair to say that they often saw “international” as outside their region rather than outside their nation.
And in other breaking CitySearch news, Darren Waddell of RadiusIntel just sent me this awesome Google Alert he received this morning: It links to this article from 2007. For all of you marketers recommending that your clients use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, be sure to include that it works better if [...]
The post Google Alerts Tip – Works Better If You Have a Time Machine appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
Today Greg Sterling asked What’s Going On At CityGrid?: “Here’s my paraphrase of some of the things I was told: CityGrid and Citysearch are struggling (to retain and deliver value to advertisers) Citysearch was characterized to me as having lost so much momentum that it was effectively “dead” CityGrid and associated properties (InsiderPages, Citysearch, Urbanspoon) [...]
The post What Happened To CitySearch’s Business? appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
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