Small Business Search Marketing

One Less Reputation Management Tool

Matt McGee — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:46:38 +0000

With Technorati in the midst of a major re-launch, it looks like we’ve lost one small-but-important reputation management tools: the ability to subscribe to keyword-based RSS feeds from Technorati’s blog database.

For ages, I’ve had Technorati RSS feeds setup for searches on my name and on “small business sem,” which is how many people refer to this blog. While checking RSS last night, I saw this alert from Technorati:

The message says that existing feeds have been “retired” and hints that new feeds are on the way. I went to Technorati last night and did those vanity searches, and sure enough … no RSS feeds available (yet).

It’d be nice to get this tool back.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

One Less Reputation Management Tool

Report: SMBs Need to Spend Money to Make Money

Matt McGee — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:34:23 +0000

Emarketer recapped an interesting report about the relationship between money spent on marketing and expected revenues.

From the eMarketer article:

According to the “Small Business Marketing Health Check” report from Hurwitz & Associates, there is a correlation between small businesses that are doing well and greater marketing spending.

Almost two-thirds of small businesses that expected increased revenues had raised or planned to raise marketing spending, compared with just 32% to 36% of businesses with flat or declining revenues.

The article goes on to say that social media, email marketing, and search are the top three marketing tools on small businesses list in 2009.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Report: SMBs Need to Spend Money to Make Money

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SBS Mailbag: Is it too late for holiday SEO?

Matt McGee — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:50:10 +0000

It’s been forever since I’ve done a mailbag post, but Christine sent in a great email that’s very timely with the holidays ~~approaching~~ already upon us. She’s asking about doing SEO and the timing of trying to optimize for holiday-related terms. Christine sent this email within the last week, and the clock is ticking. I haven’t seen her web site, but let’s take a shot at helping her out.

I was just put in charge of optimizing our web site mainly because I seem to know the most about SEO. We sell personalized gifts that are targeted mostly toward senior citizens, and would like to increase our sales over Christmas. I know that SEO results aren’t immediate, but is it too late now to do anything for this year? Are there things I should focus on for the fastest results? Thanks for any ideas you can give me.

My Reply

I’m almost tempted to say “yes, it’s too late” because the best time to start thinking about holiday SEO is in the spring or summer, and I don’t want to give the impression that it’s okay to wait until November to get started. But I’m obviously not going to end this blog post here, so let’s go against the grain with this answer.

Christine, this is far from an ideal situation, but let’s try to make the best of it. Yes, there are some things you can and should do now in the name of holiday SEO, but there’s no guarantee you’ll see the kind of results you want. Since time is short, let’s keep this simple and focus on the easy stuff.

Low-hanging SEO Fruit

1. Optimize your page titles. (aka Title tags) This is the strongest on-page factor, so do this first. Make sure your page titles make good use of the most appropriate keywords. (I’m assuming you guys have already done keyword research and know the terms you want to target.) Since we’re doing holiday SEO, consider adding “gift” and “holiday” and other themed words to your primary keywords. Many people shop by price during the holidays (”I’m looking for a gift under $30,” for example) so if you can, consider putting the price of each item in the page title; likewise, if you offer free shipping, consider putting that in the page title, too. These might help your listing stand out on a search results page.

2. Optimize your internal links. If it’s not too much work, make sure your site navigation uses keywords instead of saying “Products” or whatever it might say. Even if that’s too much to update this late in the game, you can still go through the page copy and optimize links there. If you have links that say “click here” or “learn more” or “buy now”, or anything generic like that, optimize the anchor text to include keywords. And don’t just stop at optimizing existing links in your page copy; look for opportunities to create and optimize new links to the deep content and product pages on your site. If you have some text on the home page about personalized stopwatches (or some such thing), make sure “personalized stopwatches” links to the product page. Optimizing internal links is a highly underrated SEO tactic.

3. Optimize your page copy/content. Along those same lines, look for opportunities to improve the copy on your current pages. Can you add some more text about the products or categories you offer? If so, be sure to include keywords — but keep it readable for humans, too. You might also have time to create some new content, like a “5 Things to Look For When Ordering Personalized Gifts” article. Done right, something like that might capture some attention online. It might get some new inbound links, or maybe get spread around a bit on Twitter or Facebook. Improve your existing copy and content, and create new content, too, if you have time.

How much will this help?

Like I said earlier, there’s no guarantee any of this will make things better between now and Christmas. Let’s look at some of the factors that will determine how much this helps in such a short timeframe.

1. Competition. Holiday/Shopping/Retail is generally pretty darn competitive, especially at this time of year. But I don’t know specifically how competitive your niche is, and I don’t know how competitive the landscape is for the specific items you offer. The less competition, the more likely you could see results sooner rather than later.

2. Crawl/Index Frequency. This refers to how often Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. visit your site to crawl it and update their indices. Companies with static, brochure-like web sites probably don’t get visited too often, so the search engines would be slower to pick up changes. As a retail site, you may get crawled more often — if so, that’s a good thing. The sooner the spiders crawl and index your new, optimized pages, the better.

3. Trust. I put trust is at the top of the SEO Success Pyramid for a reason: Sites that are trusted can generally get away more often with being late and even making some other SEO mistakes. If the search engines trust your site, there’s a better chance your updates will have some impact sooner. If you don’t have a trusted site, none of the above may help – at least not as soon as you want it to.

These are just a few of the factors that will determine your chances of success. Good luck with it!

Your turn: How would you have answered Christine’s question? Did I give bad advice? Did I forget something important? Comments are open, please share your thoughts!

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SBS Mailbag: Is it too late for holiday SEO?

Thank You, Sponsors

Matt McGee — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:39:26 +0000

Every once in a while I like to give a shout out to the sponsors who are supporting me and this blog. These are companies that value you, my readers, enough to want to have their names in front of your eyes. I hope you’ll read their messages below and, if interested, click through to learn more about what they provide.

Romow.com

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LotusJump

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WordStream Free Keyword Tool

WordStream is a keyword discovery and organization software service that provides small business owners with a cost-efficient means of managing their paid and natural search campaigns. The software makes it possible to identify highly specific, profit-driving keywords and then group and act on those discoveries to drive more targeted traffic to your site.

WordStream also offers a service-heavy jump start program that will help small businesses get their pay-per click (PPC) account set up for $1,000 dollars, and train them to maintain the account using the WordStream software for a flat monthly fee (no hidden costs, and the fee doesn’t go up as you start to increase your AdWords spend).

If you’re looking to reach small business owners and webmasters, learn more about advertising on Small Business Search Marketing.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Thank You, Sponsors

Google Pulls Local Phone Numbers from Search Display

Matt McGee — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:14:03 +0000

Update, 11:45 am: After emailing Google to ask why the phone numbers have been removed, a Google spokesperson replied back saying it was a bug:

“For a few hours this morning phone numbers were not displayed as part of local universal search results on Google. This was a small bug, and we quickly fixed it.”

—————–@—————-

It looks like Google is making more small changes to how its displays local search results — but these are small changes that might have a big impact on both local businesses and the users searching for them.

Missing Phone Numbers in 7-Pack

On a number of searches I’ve done, it appears that Google has pulled phone numbers from the 7-pack display. Here’s a screenshot of an old search from Bradford PA restaurants that I’m borrowing from Mike Blumenthal for the sake of comparison:

And here’s a screenshot of that same search conducted just now. Notice that the phone number of each restaurant is gone.

It’s certainly a cleaner look for the 7-pack, but it adds another step in the process of search-find-contact. Phone calls are the lifeblood of most local businesses, and it’s now harder to find local phone numbers on Google.com searches. That’s bad both for the businesses and the customers who want to contact them.

Google asks “Is this accurate?”

The other change I’m seeing is to individual local OneBox listings. (What are we calling these? Authoritative OneBox?) Not only is the business phone number also gone from this display, but it’s been replaced with a question from Google: Is this accurate?

If you click on the question, Google asks you to confirm that something’s wrong — either the address, phone, map, or business info. is wrong. (I have no idea what happens when “Confirm” is clicked.)

This is similar to how Yahoo has allowed users to indicate bad data in local business listings since early 2007. But in Google’s case, you can only hope that they have several layers of safeguards in place to prevent the obvious spam/sabotage opportunity that this presents.

Your thoughts on these changes? Comments are open.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Google Pulls Local Phone Numbers from Search Display

New Google Local Listing Guidelines

Matt McGee — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:23:15 +0000

Google has published a new set of guidelines for local businesses using the Local Business Center — guidelines that continue to get more specific to counter the very specific ways ~~small businesses~~ spammers try to bend or completely get around the rules.

In a nutshell, there are three completely new guidelines that deal with spam/attempts to take advantage of the LBC system:

The business name on Google Maps must be your full legal business name.
PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.

I went into more detail on the changes in this Search Engine Land post. There’s also some great discussion in the comments on Mike Blumenthal’s post about the new guidelines.

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This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

New Google Local Listing Guidelines