Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog

SMXLOMO - SEO Best Practices for Local Search

Gib Olander, Business Development Director, Localeze
Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster
Vanessa Fox, Product Team Lead, Zillow
Chuck Aikens, SEO Director, The Booyah Agency
Moderator: Chris Sherman

This session will focus on hands on activities to optimize for local search.

Chuck Aikens
Assumptions: You understand SEO basics, you get location page value, you will do local registration.
-70% of internet users performed local search queries, 68% would use the phone number to contact business (Neilsen), also a high percentage would bookmark only 11% would fill in online form. (this is good info)
-49% of search users put in geo-modifier, 23% use a specific business name
-Top Search Categories Travel, Services, Entertainment, Places, Brands (from mapquest)
-put business locations on right hand side and in footer.
-gotta use local link coverage with on-page SEO: Local Links from IYPs, Zvents, Local Media Sites, Local Bloggers, Regional PR

Gib Olander
-Local search is not just a vertical.

The Why Of Local Search
-close loop on buying cycle
-creates engagement at store level
-local is where the buying power is
-supports all other forms of advertising and marketing

What Are the Two Types of Local searches.
-Recovery for business name, phone number, address
-Discovery Search - search for specialty service, particular brand or product

What are the Components of Local Search
-orangic web crawled index
-business listing database index (google local)
-advertising generated index (PPC)

4 Tactics for Organic Listings
-Microsites
-Profile Pages
-Dealer Locator Page
-Directory inclusion

-Create cloud of content for each individual business location, must answer discovery and recovery searches.

Vanessa Fox
How can you generate local content?
-you can autogenerate content —– NOT!
-you can use user generated content - SOMETIMES FAILS MISERABLY see tips below

Ideas that could work
-partner with other sites ( be careful of dupe content)
-hire content writers
-hire internal expert
-a hybrid of the above
-create an invite only or exlusive test with industry insiders (find on blogs, flickr, social networks etc)
-5-10% of users contribute 50% of user generated content
-provide incentives
-use reputation ( people care what they look like)
-oversee quality
-your community features have to add value

Matt Van Wagner
Did I really do that?? Paid search mistakes by Matt!

case study on local MBA program with classroom only courses
-2 campaigns one inside polygon with generic terms
-one with geo-modified keywords
-received emails from india (was bug in Google)
-don’t bother making kw with zipcodes
-include city names in ultra targeted ppc campaigns

case study eldercare placements
-national provider, no brick and mortar
-lots of keywords
-create state level campaigns ,no national campaign
-traffic and conversions disappeared, reactived national campaigns

-state spelled out outperforms abbreviation
-other good keywords near, in, area
-directional terms, south west north,etc
-consider county names

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