WebTiger Local SEO Blog » Local SEO Blog

Yelp Adds New Business Categories

Robert Carter — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:28:04 +0000

I got an email from Yelp this morning saying that they added new business categories for the more “long-tail” listings. Check out the list and make sure you update your listing if there’s a new category that fits you. Here’s instructions for updating your category:

Applying a category to your business is a pretty simple process. For example, say you’re an HVAC repair service provider. Just under your business name on your Yelp listing, there’s a link that says either “[Edit]” or “[Add]” next to the “Category/Categories” line. Simply click this link, find the category that’s most relevant to you (no more than 3 categories per business), and add the category. Our user support team will verify the update within a few weeks.

Archery anyone?

Blogging to Generate Leads for Real Estate Agents

Robert Carter — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:48:29 +0000

My first blog was set up in 2006 when I was embarking on my short real estate career (the markets made sure I wasn’t there very long!). I focused mostly on the challenges and issues that I was facing at the time, while throwing in a few funny anecdotes that come with the real estate gig in Baltimore City (e.g. bums and crackheads taking residence in unoccupied homes).

If I had known better at the time, I would’ve focused a lot less on ME and a lot more on my CUSTOMERS. I would’ve written about what they wanted to know about local neighborhoods, housing trends, good deals, how to get loans (ok so that wasn’t very hard at the time–back then a pulse was the only real requirement for a real estate loan), neighborhood information, etc.

I also spent a lot of time worrying about how much traffic my blog was receiving and not much time thinking about the quality of the traffic and how to reach the people who might actually convert into leads for me.

Well there I go again, talking about me, and not about you. I’m telling you about my experience so that you can avoid it. If you want your blog to generate leads for you, then you have to blog about what your customers want.

Real estate people caught onto marketing way before most local niches (probably because real estate agents spend 80% of their time on marketing), but most local niches are full of small business owners that are just catching on to local marketing. That means that you can start a blog on your domain now, start blogging about your expertise, and start generating leads. The sooner you start, the harder it will be for your competition to catch up.

Just make sure that you start your blog on your own domain, and not Blogspot!

The bottom line:

Put yourself in the shoes of your customers
Establish your expertise
Blog at least once a week

And don’t expect instanteous results–a blog is about cultivating relationships with your readers (and with search engines).

Moving a Blog from Blogger to Wordpress

Robert Carter — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:18:37 +0000

I left a comment on Lead-Gen SEO yesterday about moving a blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress and I thought the information should be shared here on my blog.

I’ve moved several blogs with this method and it works pretty well, although there’s no way that I know of that will preserve all of the backlinks to your blog.

The bottom line: avoid having to move by setting up your blog on your own domain and don’t bother with a blog at Blogger or Wordpress.com. It’s a little more work to get started but it’ll save you a lot of headaches and linkjuice down the road.

This is the basic process I use:

1. Buy your domain name, get it set up with a hosting company, and upload the WordPress files to the domain. When you go through the initial blog setup, turn off indexing so your blog won’t get spidered by Google and other search engines.

2. Import the Blogger blog to the new WP blog (there’s an option within the WP control panel under “Tools”, you don’t even need to download anything.

3. Clean up the formatting of the new WP posts. This can be a real pain for blogs with a ton of posts because WP unfortunately picks up a lot of funky Blogger style tags. You can do this by going into each post and looking at the HTML/code view of the post.

You also have to make sure that the images transferred properly and that they’re being linked to their new locations on your domain, and not still pointing to where they were hosted on Blogger. Ditto for video embeds; sometimes Blogger uses its own player to embed video so you have to make sure they’re pointing to Youtube or wherever, instead of back to the old blog.

4. Write a post on the Blogger blog that the site is moving and people should update their bookmarks/RSS feeds.

4. Once the new blog is set up, you can do a 302 redirect from Blogger to the new domain (using JavaScript – http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress).

5. Turn indexing back on in WP. Use the Sitemap generator plugin to create a sitemap for the new domain and submit it to Google and Bing webmaster tools.

6. Transfer the RSS feed.. this is easier if you’re using FeedBurner. If you’re not using FeedBurner, then you can ask your current subscribers to switch over to the new RSS feed. You’ll probably lose some subscribers in the process.

6. I leave the 302 up and running for a few weeks while the new blog gets indexed. During this time you should be reminding people to subscribe to the new feed and update their bookmarks. I also email any bloggers or sites with inbound links to the Blogger domain and ask them to update their links to the new domain.

7. After your new domain is indexed and working properly, shut off the 302 redirect, write a post on Blogger that the domain has moved, and add a “NoIndex” META to the template header in blogger so you can avoid duplicate content issues. Another option is to delete all of the data on the Blogger blog, except for a “This Blog has Moved” post that includes a link to your new blog.

It’s not a perfect solution and you’ll still get people showing up at the old blog but it’s probably better in the long-run to be on your own domain. Maybe someday Blogger will allow for 301 redirects but until then…

Updating Your Business Information in Local Search and Yellow Pages Sites

Robert Carter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:36:18 +0000

One of the keys to improving your Google Maps listing is getting your business information listed in local search and Yellow Pages sites. While the quantity and quality of incoming links is the major factor in your organic search ranking, the number of times your business is mentioned across the web is a major factor in your Google Map listing, so it’s important that you’re listed in all the major local sites.

Some of the most important places to have your business liste:

Google Local Business Center
Bing Local
InfoUSA (provides many yellow pages sites with their business data)
Yellowpages.com
Yelp.com

Make sure your business information is the same across all the local search sites and the same as it appears on your actual website. GetListed.org is a nifty tool to monitor your local business listing in Google, Yahoo!, Best of the Web, and Live Search.

When I first started adding clients to local search sites, I would manually submit them to dozens of sites. That can be quite tedious and time-consuming but now I use a nifty tool called UniversalBusinessListing.org. For $30 a year, it submits your business information to all of the major local search sites and dozens of smaller sites.

Adding Your Business to Directories in Your Vertical

Robert Carter — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:08:41 +0000

I created a new website for finding practitioners of alternative medicine, called ZenLocate.com. Finding websites like these is a great way to build links to your site, especially for local sites. Because the search algorithm for Google Maps measures the number of times your business name is mentioned across the web, it’s important to get your business listed in as many local directories as possible.

If those directories give you a link to your site, then that’s an added bonus. You’ll get some extra link juice flowing to your site and you might even get some referral traffic. Just search for something like: “house cleaning directory” and see what comes up (you can do this for pretty much any type of business). Not all of the sites that come up will be relevant but it’s a good starting point. If the directory charges a fee to register your site, make sure it’s not a “spammy” site and has a decent page rank (3 or higher).

Optimizing a Business by Neighborhood Location

Robert Carter — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:33:30 +0000

Chicago is a huge city and most people search for local services and businesses by neighborhood. Google recognizes some Chicago neighborhoods as ‘belonging’ to the city and assumes that if you search for “wicker park restaurants”, you mean the Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago.

Some neightborhoods require a more refined search to produce a 10-pack. For instance “bucktown restaurants” gives you results for Bucktown, IL, not the Bucktown neighborhood in Chicago. A search for “lakeview restaurants” produces similarly noisy results. But, when you refine the search to “lakeview, chicago restaurants” you get much more relevant results.

If you’re running a neighborhood business, then your physical location will be very important for your Google maps result. If you’re trying to decide where to set up your business, take a look at Google Maps and search for “neighborhood, city” to find the centroid for your neighborhood.

For example, when you search for “wrigleyville, chicago”, Google locates the center of Wrigleyville just above Wrigley field. That seems obvious, but if you look at Yelp’s Wrigleyville results, you’ll see that the center according to Yelp would actually be a few blocks north of where Google places the center.

If you’re trying to target customers throughout Chicago and don’t want to be constrained by neighborhoods, then you should be looking for a location near the center of Chicago.

More than Physical Location

Of course moving your business is not an option for most of you. In that case, you should also look for natural ways to add neighborhood keywords to the copy on your site, make sure your business information is correct across the many local search sites, and get your customers to give you positive reviews on Yelp, Google, and other local sites.

WebTiger Search Marketing Has Moved to Chicago

Robert Carter — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:52:40 +0000

Well it’s official! We’ve moved to Chicago.

I wanted to be absolutely sure that we were staying here before I announced it. I’ve traveled a lot this year, including a three month stint in Argentina and I’ve been living in Chicago for the summer. I originally planned to stay in Chicago just for the summer but now I’ve decided to stay here permanently.

What does this mean for clients? Nothing is going to change. We’ll still be providing the same level of service and communication for the clients in the Baltimore, MD area.

In addition, we’re looking to add SEO clients in the Chicago area.

The Goal of SEO is to Inform People

Robert Carter — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:03:01 +0000

SEO helps businesses connect to consumers via search engines. For consumers, that means it’s easier to find what they’re looking for online. I think it’s easier to illustrate with a story:
I recently landed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city I haven’t visited since 2001, long before my thoughts ever turned to things like Facebook, Twitter, or SEO.

Search engines like Google existed back in 2001 but we didn’t rely on them as heavily, especially for things like local search, i.e. finding local businesses via Google Maps. When I first visited Buenos Aires, I navigated the city with paper maps, word-of-mouth, and the original ’stumble upon,’ which involved actually stumbling upon new stores and places.

Fast forward 8 years to 2009–living in Baltimore I had become accustomed to finding almost any business in Google Maps or any one of the other local search sites like Yelp, Cityguides, Topix, or local sites like 600block.com or CityPaper.com. Those sites are effective in large part because of SEO.

When you search for “greek restaurants in baltimore”, you get a listing of 10 Greek restaurants in the Google onebox, plus a number of other sites in the organic listings that either take you directly to a Greek restuarant’s site or to another search site like YellowPages.com where you can find more listings of Greek restuarants.

So what’s the big deal?

Monday morning I woke up in need of a local cell phone. I loaded up Google Argentina and began searching for a place where I could buy a cell phone. I tried a number of keyword combos, including “telefonos moviles”, “moviles”, “telefonos celulares”, all modified with location keywords like “buenos aires”, “capital federal”, and even “argentina.”

No luck! I spent about an hour trying to search for one web result that would tell me where I could buy a cell phone in Buenos Aires. I tried Google Maps. I tried Live Maps. I did manage to discover the names of a few mobile carriers here but much to my chagrin, they didn’t have a Store Locator feature on their site.

Eventually I just left my apartment and started walking down one of the main avenues, until I happened upon a store that sells cell phones. Yes, that’s how we did it in the old days.

I couldn’t help but think that if the cell phone providers in Argentina were on top of their SEO game, I never would’ve had this problem. If you’re selling something, you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer to find you online. There’s nothing dishonest about this–to the contrary, it directly benefits the consumer!

SEO, like other forms of marketing, is a process for communicating useful information from businesses to consumers. When your SEO fails (or doesn’t exist), then you’re failing to communicate via one of the biggest and fastest growing sales media–the search engine.

SEO in the Economic Downturn

Robert Carter — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:12:08 +0000

A lot of people have been asking me recently about how my business has weathered the economic downturn. I haven’t noticed any changes in the number of calls I get and I have two explanations for this:

1) Most of the damage so far has been to publicly traded companies, major corporations, and real-estate related businesses. None of my clients are the Fortune 500 type of client as I deal mostly with small to medium-sized businesses. None of my clients are directly related to real estate either.

2) The economic downturn makes SEO even more important. When things get tight, companies will start looking at where there marketing budgets are going and they’ll start to question the ROI of their offline marketing efforts. How much are these newspaper ads really making us? Are we tracking the ROI on these?

One of the benefits of SEO, Pay-per-click advertising, and online marketing in general is that it’s much easier to track leads, sales, traffic, and ROI. Web stats programs are very accurate, and it’s easy to tell if you’re getting more traffic. Tracking incoming phone calls is still difficult because there’s no way to know what triggered the call (was it a Google AdWords click, an organic click, or a referral from a firend?) but there are ways to track phone calls.

You can put a different number on a website to track calls from online traffic or you can ask your customers when they call how they found your business. If you’re running an AdWords campaign, try doubling your daily spend for 2 weeks and see if your calls go up (as opposed to just your traffic).

What about Yellow Pages?

Online, the major Yellow Pages sites are free, although sites like Google Maps take some work to rank well locally.

Print Advertising?

Running an ad in a newspaper or magazine is basically “interruption marketing” and you can’t hope to target your audience well. Even if you advertise in a niche trade journal, you can’t be sure that everyone who sees the ad actually wants to buy at the moment. With pay-per-click advertising, you get customers on your site only when they are looking for what’s on your site (assuming you write honest, informative ad copy).

New Maryland Web Directory and Blog Directory

Robert Carter — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:32:28 +0000

Jon Payne of Ephricon Web Marketing has started a new local directory for Maryland websites and blogs and the submission fee is only $25. When I teach my SEO class at Howard County Community College, most of the students have businesses that are local to Maryland in nature, so I tell them to find directories and sites directed specifically related to Maryland or their local city.

Having links from regional sites helps Google place your site “on the map” so to speak, and will improve your local search rankings.