Google Maps Optimization - Critical Local Business Strategy

Here is a 7 minute video released by Be Found Marketing about Google marketing for local businesses. What is the best possible strategy for local marketing on Google? This video speaks volumes:

Maps and organic positions help businesses get leverage that allows them the margins to participate in the high cost PPC arena.

Local SEO vs. Local PPC Marketing - which is better?

PPC (Sponsored Links, Pay Per Click) vs. SEO and Google Maps Marketing

The story of the three little pigs provides the perfect analogy...

Comparing SEO and PPC marketing relates to the story of the three little pigs.

I use the 2 pigs on opposite extremes commonly in my answer to this question:

1. The little pig that built a straw house

This pig will very likley have the highest cost of maintenance over time. When a storm comes or the wind blows, this will be damaged if not destroyed and the rebuilding process will begin again. The good news is that it required very little heavy lifting, expertise, or time to build.

2. The little pig that built the brick house camped out for a while, worked hard, planned a permanent structure, and laid down bricks, one by one, until the structure was complete.

After completion, the brick house would require some maintenance, but it remained solid and strong - able to provide the smart little pig a better return on his investment of time over the longer term than the short-sighted pig.

The first pig compares well with a dependence on Pay Per Click as a means of obtaining competitive Google positions. It's relatively simple to set up an Adwords campaign in an hour or 2 at best. To take a local Adwords campaign to the next level (optimize quality scores) requires a few blog reads and a willingness to learn. The learning curve is short and so is the barrier to entry. The low barrier to entry means that just about anyone can do it. Your competitors can jump in the fray and outbid your positions in a matter of ours. As a result of the low barrier to entry, Pay Per Click advertising based on the bidding system, continues to go up in price as more competitors bid on sponsored links. Ultimately, the cost per customer is highest in most cases using Pay Per Click/Sponsored links as an online marketing strategy. Thus, PPC dependence can be compared to the pig who built the straw house.

In contrast, the smart little pig built a brick house designed for a long term, low maintenance benefit. Building it required time, expertise, and sacrifice. It's simple - those companies occupying top Google maps and organic positions invested, remained patient, and had the right expertise or expert help to help them obtain positions that remain stable 24 hours a day without the high cost of Pay Per Click (sponsored links). Those web assets were developed with engaging, quality content that was well thought out. Without a doubt, those companies are in the best position to have online marketing success for the long term.

Smart little pigs will grow in a down economy. Smart little pigs will have the best chance at growth when Google is now the most important factor in small local business advertising.

SEO is far more advantageous as the analogy used above suggests.

Google Maps Marketing - How do you find a Legit Maps/Local SEO company?

Google, Yahoo, and Bing feature maps now for more local oriented keyword searches than ever before. Google maps marketing is a new discipline that includes nuances that are unique and complex. For local search terms like: "Los Angeles Insurance" or "Chicago Plumber", the maps are placed above all other organic links, supplanting the traditional organic links as the most valued part of Google's first page.

As map listings become more prominent in local search, the effect on overall marketing strategy has shifted fundamentally. For local business marketing, map optimization now reigns as the most critical aspect of local SEO Marketing.

Not surprisingly, the organic results (starting with the Map Listings), receive over 75% of all the click traffic. 96% of users who never leave the first page when they search. One thing is for certain, the local map section resides in a very critical area of the page as most users begin scanning their search results starting at the top left section of the search page..

Local map listings are practical for searchers. Searchers may prefer local results that include immediate access to practical information (maps and phone numbers) to paid and traditional natural listings. In addition, important business details can be evaluated. Customer reviews are obtainable with one click – so a searcher can evaluate and contact a company all in one easy step with map listings. In addition, users can reward or penalize a business with a negative or positive review. These features are not available in the sponsored and traditional organic results.

Google map listings are organic – meaning, you can’t pay to be there. Many users prefer what they consider to be Google’s “genuine” or “natural” results to paid listings. Being that map listingsare often the first set of organic listings, we have found that among regional searches, local maps listings have garnered the largest portion of clicks. That being said, local map listing optimization is the most critical element of local online marketing.

A variety of factors effect Google Map rankings and many firms claim to adhere to Google's Quality Guidelines for map listings. Unfortunately, many assembly line map optimization companies that are jumping into this new discipline don't follow the guidelines. As a result, many businesses who hire firms without extensive knowledge and experience with map listing optimization wind up with a severe ranking penalty. So, how do you know if you are speaking with a reputable map optimization firm? Here are three common questions you can use to test their knowledge:

1. Where did Google recently release their new Paid Map listing product?

Answer: San Diego and San Francisco

2. If I want to put a listing multiple cities with one web site, will I be able to do so with map listings even though have only one real location?

Answer: Yes, however, you risk a penalty each time you reach into another city in which you do not have a location and you are better off risking a penalty against an additional URL that holds less value than your main URL.

3. How Long should the title tag be in my local listing?

Answer: According to Google's guidelines, your title tag should match your company name exactly, however, minimal keyword loading (no more than 2 keywords) in the title tag has been used effectively to obtain good positions without a penalty.

These are 3 questions of many more that can differentiate a professional map optimization firm and a telemarketing driven assembly line map listing endangerment firm. Considering that Google has now replaced the Yellow Pages as the most common place someone looks for a local vendor, Google Maps Advertising is arguably the most critical piece to a local business' growth strategy. In this economy, it may make the difference between prosperity and extinction.

The original Post can be seen here:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Google-Maps-Marketing-The-most-critical-advertising-element-for-local-businesses

For Expert Help and a free consultation, contact the Google Maps SEO Experts

SEO Marketing - The Red Herring Strategy

Recently one of our clients was approached by an SEO firm who was soliciting their services, and as usual, a familiar SEO sales pitch was presented - it's what I call the "Red Herring" SEO pitch.

The Red Herring SEO sales strategy is commonly used among some large and small SEO firms. In this instance the SEO rep (see company in graphic), scanned the site for any error they could find to alert the site owner that they have very serious SEO problems due to the negligence of their current SEO firm (us). Well, they didn't find any Meta tag errors, density issues, or linking problems, but they did find 12 W3C (CSS) compliance problems in the site content!

Alarmed, the client contacted us immediately to discuss this problem that must be addressed before he loses his existing high ranking SERPs. We explained that W3C compliance issues are definitely something that we look at and fix on an ongoing basis, however, it was not at all likely that SERPs were being negatively effected by this issue. To illustrate our point further, we went ahead and did a compliance scan of (I'll let them be anonymous but if you look hard you can see them) - the company using the Red Herring sales approach and here's what we found:

We found 13 W3C compliance errors. Now, that doesn't mean that this company is inept or doesn't have a handle on SEO. Many, very well managed sites (even many SEO sites) will have W3C compliance errors arise from time to time and it requires some ongoing maintenance. When we showed our client that the company that had him up on arms about the 12 W3C errors that existed on his web site actually had more of the same errors on their own site, well... he got the picture.

Unfortunately, this tactic is common and it is far less than honest - in this case hypocritical. Many SEO sales persons are trained to use basic scanning bots to nit pick the compliance of a site in an attempt to discredit other SEO professionals rather than focus on the positive elements of their service. When we speak with a prospective client for example, we immediately acknowledge our observation that a site has or has not had a professional SEO work on it. In cases where we acknowledge that it has been worked on by a professional or someone with SEO knowledge (usually made obvious by titles), we focus on the reason why the client contacted us in the first place by discussing their goals rather than looking for ways to fool them into believing that the work that was done is somehow inferior.

This is fair warning to the users of the Red Herring approach. From this point forward, we will expose companies who use it when we encounter them. Next time, I'll put the company name in this blog. It's dishonest and unprofessional to use the Red Herring strategy and may be indicative of the integrity of their service.

LSI is here - Bring on the new tools! Or is it the latest Snake Oil?

I've been hearing about Google's implementation of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for some time now. In a nutshell, the buzz is that LSI will change the On Page SEO game completely. The On Page SEO process currently consists of some the following evaluations among others:

Keyword Density
H1 tags
Meta/Title Tags
Tags matching anchor text
Interlinking/Navigation
Well Written Targeted Content

Do we now scrap the keyword density checkers you've been using and start reading articles about IR, Heuristics, and matrices as they are being used to calculate the overall "theme" of a web site based on the probable relationships between keywords as opposed to density?

Here is an excerpt of the patent filing by Google:
"The system is further adapted to identify phrases that are related to each other, based on a phrase's ability to predict the presence of other phrases in a document. More specifically, a prediction measure is used that relates to the co-occurrence rate of two phrases to an expected co-occurrence rate of the two phrases. Info gain, as the ratio of actual co-occurrence rate to expected co-occurrence rate, is one such prediction measure.

Two phrases are then related where the prediction measure exceeds a predetermined threshold. In that case, the second phrase has significant information gain with respect to the first phrase. Semantically, related phrases will be those that are commonly used to discuss or describe a given topic or concept, such as "President of the United States" and "White House." For a given phrase, the related phrases can be ordered according to their relevance or significance based on their respective prediction measures."

So basically, anything that help determine the topics, contexts and themes of a given page, like industry terms, synonyms, buzz words, acronyms, etc, will be more than ever, very useful and impact the way your page gets ranked. The relevancy of theme based words will be playing a key role this year and beyond. New factors such as LSI and theme based relevancy have been touted in recent years as the next frontier of ranking pages and combating keyword spam.

If LSI were ever implemented in the non-homogenous environment, on-page optimization will become as critical as the off-page, which will have to be properly implemented so they complement each other in a new way that satisfies both your visitors and the search engines. Every person interested in achieving top ten rankings under the new LSI-driven environment should understand the basics of this methodoogy, and how to comply to its requirements. Is it being implemented? Maybe to a degree.

There's an important twist. LSI is actually a real technology, however, some experts say that using LSI in the non homogeneous world wide web is not practical at all and LSI is simply the latest snake oil that that some SEO's put in their pitch.

Here is a great link on this topic from which I will borrow a quote:

http://www.seo-blog.com/latent-semantic-index-lsi-myth.php

I believe this article clearly explains why the use of LSI on a massive scale is impractical and is currently not being used as some SEO purveyors claim. So, if you've seen or heard a pitch from an SEO or a software designer who can apply LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) or LSI to your site to increase your rankings, in my opinion, they are full of shit.

This author cites a defining quote about LSI and it's application in evaluating sites on a large scale:

"Professor Michael Berry head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee wrote me as follows 'Just for the record, LSI has been used to index on the order of 10 million documents using out-of-core SVD based techniques so you could apply it to subdomains of the Web but the entire Web would be problematic as you point out'”

blog promoters that are hot

High PR blog promotion sites that provide segmentation of blog content into another, highly organized format.

www.zimbio.com

www.alltop.com

www.feedagg.com

Much like social bookmarking sites attempt to reorganize human reviewed pages, blog aggregators provide an interesting search alternative. I've submitted a couple of my blogs to these sites and I'll try to measure the impact on traffic and Page Rank. Stay tuned.

Social Bookmarking - the Impact on Page Rank and Traffic

I read a good piece that very clearly and simply defines the purpose of social bookmarking and how this relates to we increasing traffic and page rank.

"When you do a search in a search engine, you get all the sites that have something to do with the keywords you typed into the search box. It is easy to get a bunch of garbage sites that are loaded up with keywords but have poor content on the actual site.

The great thing about social bookmarking sites is the only sites you will find there are sites that other people have looked at and decided were worth saving for future reference. Real people have decided to save (bookmark) the sites, not robots. Real people also monitor the sites so if trash does get added, it is soon deleted.

The more people who bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes. As an example, lets say you are selling widgets for a really great price. You bookmark your home page on many public bookmarking sites. When someone is looking for a widget, they do a search at the bookmarking site and your bookmark comes up. They go look at your site and decide your prices are so good, they might want to come back later when they need another widget. So they add your site to their bookmarks for future reference. "

Here is the part about implementation of social bookmarking as it relates to SEO Strategy:

"Start with one bookmarking site and one page from your site. (Start with your squeeze page and build your newsletter list) Set up your account with the bookmarking site and add your page to the bookmarks. Make sure you use the best tags and description you can. (Check the popularity list on the site) Doing this in itself will help you get more traffic. Now you can go one step further and work both sides of the system.

Add a link to your site that will lead back to the bookmarking site that has your page bookmarked. Ask your visitors to bookmark your site on the social bookmarking site.

My example is below
Bookmark my site at Blinklist.com and access it from any computer, anytime. Create a link to the bookmarking site so your visitors only have to click.

You want to make sure the page opens in a new window so when your visitors are done setting up their account, they will still have your page handy to bookmark.

Next Page

Now move on to the next page. You will want to offer a different bookmarking site on each page. Why? So you can get as many bookmarks on as many sites as possible. Use the same information in the example above but change the social bookmarking site you are promoting."

This information was furnished courtesy of the following post:

http://backlinksbreakthrough.com/can-social-bookmarking-help-me/

Thank you for the very clear explanation Mr. Carpenter.