WebTiger Local SEO Blog » Local SEO Blog

The Search Engine Marketing Job Market

Robert Carter — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:00:52 +0000

If you live in the U.S. then you’ve probably heard the news — we’re in a recession. Or a depression. Or the great recession. Whatever. Unless you live in DC then you probably know at least a few people that are struggling for work. I would hate to be graduating with a liberal arts degree right now. It was hard enough back in 2003.

Anyway, if there’s one area that hasn’t been hit by the recession, it’s search marketing:

“The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) recently announced that the North American SEM industry will grow 14% this year to $16.6 billion! This contrasts with contraction in most other sectors!”

The hyped up language is thanks to press release over-enthusiasm, but I can attest to the strength of the market, at least here in Chicago. I get at least one call or email per week from recruiters and staffing agencies looking to hire people with SEO, PPC, web analytics skills (especially Omniture), and web copywriters. So if you just graduated or you’re looking for a career change, being in the online marketing business is a great place to be. Lots of firms hire interns so you can get your foot in the door and people with just 1-2 years of experience are getting good salaries.

If you’re in the Chicago area, hit me up and I’ll send you in the right direction. There’s at least six staffing agencies here dedicated to placing people with web or creative skills.

Replacing the Old Google Keyword Research Tool

Robert Carter — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 07:00:38 +0000

Google’s new keyword tool is now out of beta and for a while they were letting you use the previous version that many of us had grown accustomed to. The new version has a lot of improvements, especially if you’re putting together a PPC campaign (it’s much better at finding related keywords), but it’s not great for doing the kind of research that involved plugging in 300 keywords and having the traffic numbers spit out nicely into a spreadsheet.

Or so I thought until I found the “Traffic Estimator” button at the top left of the screen. It’s basically the same as the old keyword tool, except now you can pull data on up to 2,500 (!!) keywords instead of just 300.

Business Changes and Site Changes

Robert Carter — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 04:47:06 +0000

I updated some of the pages on the site today. The Local SEO page is now a resources page — it’s a bit bare at the moment, so if you have any suggestions of sites that would be helpful, let me know in the comments. I’m not taking any more local clients although I’m still willing to work with larger sites, especially eCommerce sites, as long as it’s a good fit for me and the client.

For the most part I’m moving towards an affiliate business model, building my own web properties that generate income.

I started a mailing list as well and I added a free WordPress sales page theme that I’ve been selling through another site (it’s free now!). And there may even be some more blogging coming, if I can find the time.

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.