Unfortunately, it would appear that Google may have gone one step further.

This morning I checked in on my allergy doctor’s website. He’d recently asked me for a few tips to increase his search rank. I was pleased to see his site in the #2 position on Google for the very broad term: allergy clinic. I was so pleased that I asked the good Hack to perform the search and bask in my pride and glory. His response?

i see some sketchy looking allergy doc at number 5

What the hell?

Undaunted, I ask my old friend Luke to give me a third set of eyes on the situation. He too saw the listing in the 5th position. So, what was going on?

Luke lives in Bend, Hack lives in the nether regions of my mind, neither of them live in Portland. Where does Google draw the “local dividing line?” Is it DMA restricted? If I lived 10 miles away, would it be the same? Was Google honestly giving an organic boost to a local listing based on my location? Yes. In fact, Luke’s company had been noticing this of late as well and even had a rather serious sounding meeting to discuss it. He’d pointed out that because of this, “running reports geographic locations in the U.S. is no longer accurate” and that it even applies “when using google.kr, google.fr, etc.”

Fantastic.

Google has just pushed down organic rankings for even more nationwide companies. It’s one thing to have the 10 Pack show up in the 4th position, but giving local companies organic precedence means that many nationwide companies will fall even further below the fold…perhaps even to the dreaded second page of results.

While this isn’t bad for the local business that wants local customers, it does pose an interesting problem for the semi-local business - the local business that wants outside customers. At the web development agency where I work, one of our clients is Legend Homes, they’re a Portland home builder that focuses on green-built homes. So, naturally we try to target Portland and Oregon keywords, but also “green” keywords. In addition, they are looking at selling homes to people who are moving to the area, not necessarily living in the area. With the vast amount of competition in the housing market (real estate, home builders, private sellers, etc), it’s already a challenge to establish solid footing with a lot of these keywords. Now, throw in the fact that listings will appear differently outside of any given location, and you’ll see the problem with Google’s new approach to local search.

Twitter “users” are beginning to annoy me. Bots are one thing, but the amount of real people that sign up and then fail to use Twitter is driving me nuts. Twitter is not a difficult product, and if you don’t feel like sharing, kindly leave.

If you are feeling like taking the plunge, here’s 5 tips to make it worth your and my time

1. Find tons of people
   The most daunting thing about Twitter when you first sign up is wrapping your mind around why all your friends have told you to sign up. When it’s just you and 2 of your friends that use Twitter it can be hard to have any other conclusion than all of your friends are mental. This is not the case (for the most part), in reality, we just have a lot of people that interact with us. More people mean more conversations, more opinions, more links, more thoughts and a more interesting tool. Go to Twitter Searchand find people that are talking about things you’re interested in.
2. Follow people that interest you even if you don’t know them
   What the hell? Really? Yes. This isn’t Facebook or myriad other high school reunion networks, this is a live conversation. Following people you don’t know can be the gateway to finding people that either you do know, or that are uncannily similar to you. All of a sudden you have more people to talk to on Twitter and more people that want to talk to you.
3. For God’s sake, stop following the Twitter prompt
   While it’s cool once in awhile, do not feel that you must be doing something. The most useless updates to Twitter are the “is brushing his teeth. Gonna get ‘em clean!” Oh? Well, good for you. I don’t give a shit. The problem when I don’t give a shit is that you’ve Tweeted yourself into a corner. If you do this sparingly, that’s fine. Doing it all the bloody time means you’re boring and are going to lose some followers - namely me. Give us something to work with, show us a cool site, tell us what you’re listening to, ask a question, say something witty, funny or depressing.
4. Do not use Twitter.com
   Twitter’s beauty and strength comes from the countless applications and plugins that allow you to post and read posts how you like. Get Twitterfox if you are on FireFox all day long, get TweetDeck if you want to be really organized, Twitterrific for a simple and functional app, there are hundreds of apps out there - find one and use it, you won’t be avoiding or forgetting about Twitter ever again.
5. Make use of the @
   You know what made Twitter take off for me? Replying to other users. All of a sudden the quirky thought bubble that Twitter had been turned into a constant conversation. I was no longer in my corner posting about how clean my teeth were going to be, but instead arguing back and forth with new acquaintences about topics that I’d not thought anyone else was interested in.

Oh and above all else, start using the damn thing and you’ll probably see people start following and interacting with you too. Which, in the end, is the point after all.

Local & HyperLocal Search Marketing

Let’s start by setting the stage a little bit. While most of my work involves being a snarky asshole on a blog and working on Nationwide PPC, Display and SEO, there was once a time when I was strictly a local marketer. It was ages ago back in 2004, before the IYP was a major player, when the world of local was dominated moreso by the “super-aggregators” like BellSouth, Verizon and SuperPages. Back then, the world was different. You could outrank a competitor by paying more than they did, and Overture (yeah, I know) would actually tell you how much to bid to jump ahead of your rivals. Bruce Springsteen called them glory days, RuPaul called them glory hole days, I called them the days when you could walk into work hungover and still please your clients.

So, although I don’t do a lot of Local Search today, it’s still fascinating to me.

SearchFest 09 - Local...with a guy in the way

First up, Greg Hartnett of Best of the Web.

Surprisingly, his advice is to start your online campaign with the web directories. While I can’t disagree, it does kindof feel like Google saying the best place to start is AdWords. However, to qualify this he encourages us to work only with the good ones.

• Yahoo Directory
• Best of the Web
• Business.com

He also stresses the importance of finding and utilizing local niche directories. This is really one of the best pieces of advice during his entire presentation. One of the things that can really hold back a local campaign is the failure to be seen in the right places.

What’s another great piece of advice? Properly using phone numbers and addresses. This is something that we used back in ‘04 to differentiate the 500 Atlanta Plumbers for which we used to have to write titles and descriptions. One thing that Greg pointed out is to use 1 phone number and address per page, as search engines will be confused as to which phone number/address to associate with the listing. Priceless. This has a two-fold effect. First, you’ve made the engine’s job easier, which is crucial because we all know that the search engines are too stupid to process 4 phone numbers, secondly, you’ve a reason for 3 more pages of content, phone numbers, et cetera to work for you on the engines.

Last thought - Greg seems like he could be a tough guy.

Now, Mary Bowling from seOverflow.com

I have 2 pages of notes on Mary’s presentation, that being said, you’re not getting all of them here. Sorry, but you don’t want to be reading my site for 10 minutes either.

Of the things that I do wish to share, the first head smacker was when Mary introduced an age-old local marketing idea to the crowd - create a geo-targeted tagline. How insanely simple. It’s so simple that you probably know about 30 places around your town (maybe 4 places for my potato farming readers and those stuck out in the middle of Canada ;)) that have geo-targeted taglines. Neighborhoods, cities, region, state, anything can be used; just take whatever you want, combined with your service (e.g. Boise’s Famous Pizzeria), and boom goes the dynamite.

The other, slightly less obvious, suggestion Mary had was to pusue citations in whatever form (not just links). Apparently, seeing a business name referenced throughout the web builds trust with Google and other engines. Obviously, it’s easier to pursue a reference or review or note than a link, and although it may not have the strongest end impact, trust is trust, and is best to be built than squandered.

Last thought - Mary needs a PowerPoint consultant

Next, my man, Matt McGee - Small Business SEM

First, Matt recaps what’s happening in the Blogging and SEO session “Blogging is good for search.” Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get on with the conference. Matt’s still got it.

The local blog, Matt and his wife run 4 of them. His wife being a real estate agent, obviously has great reasons for having a local blog. It conveys an inherent knowledge of their city, the schools, restaurants, stores, doings, et cetera. A level of expertise is communicated to the readers, while, most importantly, not plugging any real estate content along the way. This is a common mistake for the small, local blogger - the thought that their blog must actually serve a purpose to their business aside from content, traffic, readership, subscriptions, comments, links, advertising space, references…do I need to continue?

So many small business/local blogs fail on this very first step. I’m a plumber so I need to have a blog all about plumbing, or I’m a dentist so I could write about silly things that happen when I put patients under. Well, yes, I’d read about how you lost your licesnse to Dr., however, you could also just write about the new restaurants going in across the street and capitalize on the traffic that’s interested in those restaurants. The same people that are looking for those new restaurants probably have teeth, and they might live in your neighborhood. Put it together Hoss.

Again, I’ll hold back on Matt’s presentation as I want to save some info for myself; however, this was really the crux of his presentation.

Last thought - Only Matt could make Tri-Cities sound nice

Also, I have to get one plug in here for David Mihm & Patrick Sexton’s GetListed.org. It’s a great little tool for any company with a local office to leverage their local presence.

That’s all for now, Technical SEO will be up soon.

Bam! Welcome to 2009 reader! Your man Syzlak attended the SEMpdx PPC Hot Seat on Tuesday the 13th and blew it up.

On my first panel for SEMpdx, I was tasked with critiquing the PPC campaigns/offering PPC guidance. It was an interesting experience, unlike many of the other Hot Seat nights (that should totally be a viral infomercial for SEMpdx “Hot Seat Nites,” make it all 11pm 80s style, a little sex, a lot of dumb humor, like Viva Variety. Now, THAT was a good show. Remember Johnny Blue Jeans and all the stupid products? Baby is the Bagpipes? Baby Tastes Like Soup? Fishy Bar - the candy bar that tastes like fish??? Loved that show. Especially the episode where they played the game Plant or Animal. Contestants were given a 2 second sound bite and had to guess if the sound came from Robert Plant or a wild animal. It was unbelievably difficult, and made for a great game show.

Man, there really was nothing like the early days of Comedy Central. Shows like Exit 57, Stand-up Stand-up, Short Attention Span Theater, MST3K , Dr. Katz - all great. Then South Park came and ruined it. Now all we have (aside from Daily Show & Colbert) are MADtv reruns and Dane Cook specials. Seriously, when are people going to realize that not only is Dane Cook a theif, but he’s also about as funny as Andy Dick), this time the audience didn’t seem to be as familiar with the topic at hand. I think it’s fair to say that SEMpdx audience members are a bit more in tune with the ideas of usability and SEO, than they are with PPC; and for that, I am thankful that SEMpdx put on a PPC specific event.

Hopefully, the audience members got as much out of the sessions as the businesses on display did. I know that after the session the businesses were quite appreciative of all the help from Mr. Tom Hale, Mr. Todd Mintz and Ms. Leisa Hall and myself. I just hope that those in the audience didn’t feel like all the information was going over their heads.

All in all, a fantastic time and a great idea. I really hope SEMpdx makes a PPC Hot Seat a part of the regular rotation. If not, put a PPC specialist on the panel once in awhile to add some diversity, it’s about time we knocked some of those SEO big whigs down a notch
 

Oh, I almost forgot - I won a T-shirt!!! See what you can do if you set your mind to it?

Dear Reader,

So, we all made it to 2009. Congrats, we staved off death another year. I have nothing to say today, but I felt I needed to get back in the swing of things over here. It’s like shopping for a holiday, you have to buy the first gift regardless of whether you think you could get a better deal somewhere, or think that the item is utter garbage, that’s not the point - it’s crossing into the proper mindset.

Which brings us to our current predicament: my lack of posting. Never fear reader, I’m working on it. To get in the mindset I’ve put on Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash and I’m writing a fluff piece to get used to the onslaught of writing that will surely follow.

Yeah, that’s probably a bunch of bullshit; but hey, I’m trying.

Love you till Friday,

Syzlak

Holy shit right?

Wrong. After you’re done editing your video, you can register with the site and then they give you a badge to embed whereever you please.

Wait…Holy shit right?

Wrong. The badge simply takes you to here, where you can see Teen Beat style photos of the band and look at Japanese characters while wondering where things went wrong.

This is a massive blunder from two entities that rarely make massive blunders when concerning technology. Radiohead has been at the forefront of music distribution and Internet/Web savvy for a long time. Japan has given us the USB necktie. Clearly, these two should have pulled off something better than this.

While it irritates me that I cannot share my directorial debut, and it pains me that yet again someone drops the ball on using the Web to spread both culture, technology, ideas and joy; I must say, go make your own video, because it’s still really fun.
Just be sure to call everyone over to your desk when you’re done.

Wake up

Check email

Notification that Pownce is shutting down

Ask aloud “What the hell is Pownce?”

Yes, it seems that everyone’s favorite robust Twitter has gone the way of the bison. Why? Well, like the bison, Pownce was a bloated version of Twitter. It didn’t have the quick and easy updating options of Twitter’s multiple apps, mobile apps, etc. In fact, I knew more people that updated their Pownce via Ping.fm, thus catering their Pownces to their Tweets. Kinda how those of us in PPC advertising have always written ads catering to Google’s format.

Why does Plurk survive when Pownce dies? One reason is that Pownce was purchased, and thus didn’t really die so much as get absorbed by another company and deemed irrelevant (which it was). I’m sure if you were to (harkening back to Physics classes here) put them in a universe with the same condiditions, no competition but each other, et cetera that Pownce would win. Which may actually be the crux of their failure. Because they are better, they will fail. The cost of supporting users outweighs their investment.

Another reason is Karma. Many of us don’t give a shit about that little tally at the bottom of the Plurk profile, but enough teenagers (hypothesizing) do that they can remain popular, yet not too popular. Shit, they’re no Twitter.

And thus we see one of the endless amount of social media profile whore machines die today. Be sure to export all your Pownces so you can upload them over on Twi–oh yeah, you use Ping.fm, you’re fine.

This SEMpdx Hot Seat’s (btw - did you guys realize that SEMpdx is really annoying to pluralize or add possessiveness to? SEMpdxes? SEMpdx’s? Just really annoying.) featured guests were Eric Peterson and Ian Lurie. Enough with this semi-formal writing…

6:10pm - Mirror Pond

Eric Peterson is giving a high level introduction to the wonders of GA 3.0. Highlights include:

• Custom Reporting
• Advanced Segmentation
• API Access (will allow integration of analytics into proprietary reporting and data collection ZOMG this is so awesome!!!! OMG OMG ESPN BBQ IMHO - this will cut down reporting time by … some large percentage!!!!)

Eric’s slick, but he didn’t speak long. I think he’s going to be more interesting when we get to the Hot Seat.

6:20pm - Same Mirror Pond

Lurie time. Ian’s got a presentation on segmentation. Ian does a great job of introducing the topic and showing a real world example. He used the latest fad of charging a fee on airline luggage. I’m going to use a different, more Web relevant example. Audience Segmentation is essentially treating visitors as tags. On a blog, or bookmarking site, we use tags to identify where a post, link, etc. belongs.  We are able to divide and group at the same time. Take my delicious bookmarks. I have a bunch of music venues as I am a musician. So how do I organize them? For me, the most important facts about the sites were as follows:

• What is it? (A Venue)
• What type? (A Bar)
• Location? (Portland)
• Sounds they like? (Alternative)
• Have we played there before? (No )

Now that I have assigned one site all of these attributes (and more), I can easily index them by just looking up the city, or the sound, etc. Plus, I can find a coffee house in Corvallis that likes acoustic songwriters very quickly. Well, audience segmentation does a similar thing. Simply setup your own parameters for your web analytics:

• Visitors
• From Google
• On the week of the 14th
• That viewed 4 pages

Bam.

Lurie made a good point about the value of segmentation too. Often times, people see PPC as an easy way to trim budgets. They also see that SEO is working well for them, and accounting for most of their sales. So, right off, they start calling for PPC’s head. This is not always the case (thank you), sometimes site trends will be tied to PPC whereas SEO acts in a different manner and vice versa. Sometimes, SEO traffic will be converting for your top 5 keywords at a rate that is astronomically better than PPC. However, PPC is converting for your bottom 550 keywords at astronomical rates. Unfortunately, too many people focus on the former rather than the latter.

6:30pm - time for the bathroom. At the door, I hear the all too familiar battle cry of the wounded alcoholic - “ack..hag…whack.” That man is puking. In the Hotel deLuxe lobby. On a Tuesday. At 6:31pm. I love this country.

6:34pm - Mirror Pond

When I returned, Eric Peterson had said one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard someone who is not me say about the state of the market and advertising at this moment.

Don’t turn off any marketing if you don’t know what it is

Lurie followed up by saying that it’s ok to run tests on things that you’re thinking about shutting down…but don’t shut it down.

Fun Facts:

• Unique Visitors are inconsistently inaccurate. Just use Visits.
• 7% of users delete cookies every day (really?)
• Bounce Rates, historically are the #visits to a single page/the #visits to said page
• With the new GA, you can define your own Bounce Rates

Then there were Hot Seats…they were good, and there was a lot of Analytics integration into the discussion, which was refreshing. I like when the Hot Seat is slightly different and not just 4 SEOs saying “uhhh…robots.txt…well, I guess John already covered that…oh! You should make a sitemap.xml file.” Last night was a good format, 2 SEOs, 2 Analytics. That being said, where was the PPC love?

Click for a larger size.

Thankfully, it’s a headache of pure bliss; created by my own unwillingness to turn down my headphones. Earlier this week my pal and WordPress wunderkind, Nate, turned me on to Fucked Up’s latest opus, The Chemistry of Common Life.

Why am I writing about an album on a SEM blog?

Reader, I am many things. A search engine marketer, a musician, a sports-enthusiast, a political scientist and a humorist. I tried having 6 blogs take care of all of my interests, but frankly, I have to consolidate. In my personal life, I work for 9 hrs/day at my SEM job, then 1-2 hrs on music, then 1-2 hrs are alotted to personal time. When the hell was I going to update 5 other blogs??? It’s kindof like when you’re cleaning your closet, and you find your pleather. Sure, it was a good idea at the time, but now it’s a week later and you’ve realized you’re never going to wear those pants again.

So, let’s let this post, and all subsequent I Need a Little Escape posts, be time to unwind from SEM.

Earlier this week I was putting together my Top list of albums released this year, and to the best of my knowledge my favorite had been Paul Westerberg’s 49:00. An epic sprawl of songs crafted by one of America’s finest songwriters finding his voice again and creating the best music since his youth (see: The Replacements). Also in a short list: Blitzen Trapper’s Furr, Destroyer’s Trouble in Dreams and The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive.

So what catapulted The Chemistry of Common Life to the top of that list? To be honest, I think it was something about the guitar brilliance on display, the attention to detail in song craft, the lyrics confronting life and religion, the depth of instrumentation…or it was the raw energy of hardcore.

To hearken back to Reagan - I didn’t leave the hardcore and punk music. The music left me.

Yes, when I was in my first years of college, I’d found the brilliance that is hardcore and punk. You know, the old stuff: Black Flag, Bad Brains, Operation Ivy and the like. Sadly, as quickly as I found it, it left me. Soon, bands like Blink 182 and Less Than Jake were on the national stage, and I wanted to vomit. 2 years later I’m listening to Uncle Tupelo, the Old 97s and thinking that Steve Earle is a genius (which he is).

So you can imagine my excitement, when after more than a decade (Lord…) I’m told that I “might” like this new album from a band called Fucked Up because it’s got “good guitars” on it.

Apprehension sets in.

The first sound I hear on this supposed hardcore album is a flute. Let me repeat that. The first sound on the fucking album is a flute. Not a flute sample or keyboard mimic, but a real fucking flute (yes I’m trying to beat Hack’s record for F-bombs (yes I realize I just wasted an opportunity there)). The textural surprises don’t end there. There are 2 gorgeous instrumentals that separate the three sections of the album perfectly. It’s refreshing to hear a hardcore band pay attention to not only instrumentation (a fucking flute!), but also to album sequencing and purpose.

Fucked Up has crafted a damn fine album here, but more importantly, it’s a smart album. It’s a running discussion about birth, death, life and religion. Maybe I’m just getting old, but these themes seem to be very pressing to me right now; and, it’s great to hear a band like this, present the topic in this manner. It makes me feel young again, while being more receptive to the inevitability of growing old.

Well, there it is - the typical Syzlak self-reflection part of the post. Like the music at the end of an episode of Dr. Katz, the Wonder Years like self-reflection often signifies the end of a post for me. I’d had more things to say, but really if you can handle some beautifully orchestrated hard rockin’ music with a rather gruff sounding frontman, you should really just check out the album.

Our time is up.