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.

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).

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

The article says that it can be done for $10 and while I agree that a small business can do a lot on the web without spending a ton of money, trying to do it for only $10 will probably give you subpar results.

To save money on hosting, they recommend going with a free provider:

Fortunately, in the past year, a number of companies have begun providing hosting services free of charge. They often make money by charging for premium services or running ads on your Web pages.

Please, don’t let a hosting company run ads on your site, even if it means free hosting. This is unprofessional and a nuisance to your visitors. Besides, the ads will probably be targeted to the content on your site, meaning that you could be running ads for your competitors on your own web site!

Designing a site is more challenging and using a template provided by the hosting company is not an idea I’m in love with, but it’s much better than having no website at all.

Having your own domain name is something I really stressed during the last web marketing class that I taught. It’s so critical because it starts the aging clock on your domain (good for trust in search engines) and no matter how ugly or deficient your first website is, you can always get it upgraded and redesigned later.

This goes for blogs too–much better to take a little time to figure out how to use WordPress on your own domain rather than relying on a hosted WordPress blog or a Blogspot blog. That way, any links to your blog will boost the authority of your domain, rather than the wordpress.com or blogger.com domains.

Ads and Payment on Small Business Sites

The article goes on to talk about accepting payment via paypal on your site, which is a good idea and easy to set up. Then they recommend putting ads on your site; which is a bad idea for a small or local business.

A small business website’s purpose should be to generate sales and leads for the business, not to earn $10 a month in AdSense revenue while taking users to other sites.

SEO Talk

I’m very happy to see the article mention search engine optimization and I think that they bring up some good points, especially the recommendation to add your site to Google’s Local Business Center (the starting point for every local SEO campaign).

Ranking locally will take more than that, but it’s a good start.

On the other hand, the article doesn’t mention anything about link building. Even a perfectly optimized web site will fare poorly if nobody else is linking to it. For local sites, the magic number of links varies but it can be as low as 25. For more competitive markets it could be in the thousands.

Overall, it’s a decent article and I’m glad to see that SEO is getting mainstream treatment. Whether you hire someone or take the time to learn on your own, SEO holds great potential for small businesses.

If you own a business in Baltimore, then make sure your info is updated and correct on the site–having congruent business information for your business is very important for local SEO.

Guess what? Your physical location is now just as important in the online world. As more and more potential customers turn to local search engines like Google, your physical location plays a greater role in your business potential.

Google’s local search algorithm gives very strong preference to sites that are located near the city center. You can usually find this point by searching Google maps for “Cityname, State” and seeing where it places the pointer. While Google’s algorithm is still developing (and will surely change in the future), the distance between your business and the city center plays a major role in where your business will appear in Google Local search rankings.

To witness this effect, search for something like “restaurant cityname, state” and you will typically see a listing of ten restaurants within a city, in a circular pattern around the city center. As you go through the results page, you will see that the business listings tend to fall further and further from the city center.

While other factors like customer reviews and online mentions of your business do play a role and can help you leapfrog other businesses in the local rankings, having a physical location near the city center gives you a big head start over the competition.

What does this mean? It means that SEO and local search engines are factors that you will not be able to ignore for long. As more users turn to search engines, your offline business will need a savvy online presence to survive.

Well I know that somebody out there is searching for tanning in Baltimore, they’re just not doing it in the right Meta engine or through the right ISP.

This presents a big problem for local businesses that have to choose between targeting different regional keywords on their site.

How Do I Decide Which Location Keywords to Target?

If you’re an acupuncturist in Rockville, MD, how do you choose between targeting “acupuncture washington dc” and “acupuncture maryland”? Should you go after “acupuncture rockville md” or would it make more sense to target “acupuncture bethesda”?

Or maybe people are searching at the county level and “montgomery county acupuncture” would make the most sense.

Let’s try an example in Keyword Discovery. This first search is for “rockville md acupuncture”:

These results don’t tell us much. This is supposed to represent all traffic in Keyword Discovery’s database for the last 12 months. Does that mean that nobody searched for “rockville md acupuncture” in the last year? Color me skeptical.

Let’s try Bethesda, a suburb of Washington, DC:

More results, but this data is still useless. We need something more accurate.

Using Google AdWords to Measure Keyword Traffic

If you want real, accurate search data, try using Google AdWords. This is a technique that I learned from the SEOmoz’s Keyword Research Guide (premium membership required) and it works perfectly for local keyword research.

Here it is, in 10 easy steps:

1. Select your topical keywords. Let’s take the example of acupuncture and add another related term that people might search for–acupressure.

2. Make a list of all the regional keywords that might be used by someone in your area looking for a local acupuncturist. So if you’re based in Rockville, MD, you might choose:

• Rockville
• Bethesda
• Washington DC
• Maryland
• Southern Maryland
• Southern MD

Depending on your budget, you can expand that list to more local areas. Are people searching more for “acupuncture in bethesda” or “acupuncture in bethesda md”? Keep it relavant; the further afield you go, the more difficult it will be to rank and to actually convince a customer to make the trip.

On the other hand, if you have a hunch that customers are searching within a particular area, this is the time to test it out. Money spent on AdWords now could save you hours of time ranking number 1 for a search query that nobody ever uses.

3. Combine the topical keywords with the location keywords. Use a tool like Keyword Lizard to make a list of the various keyword combinations.

4. Set up an AdWords campaign for your research. You can put all the keywords in one AdGroup or you can group them by location. It’s not a big deal because at this point we’re more concerned about the impressions than the actual click-through rate.

5. Enter all the keyword combinations from Step 3 as exact matches (they should go in brackets).

6. Set the cost-per-click (CPC) high enough that your ads will show. This will depend on how competitive your niche is. You want to set it high enough that your ads will be showing on ALL of the searches during the testing period–this will give you the most accurate data.

7. Set the daily budget high enough that your ad budget will not be met. If the campaign reaches its spending limit early in the day, then you won’t get accurate data.

Note: This keyword research technique may require a significant investment up front, depending on how long you let the ad campaign run. How much you’re willing to spend depends on the expected ROI of a top ranking. My opinion is that the insights you gain will be worth the money invested up front.

If you’re going to spend dozens of hours or thousands of dollars optimizing your site for your target keywords, you want to make sure that there’s a payoff. Ranking for a keyword location will be a waste of time and money if nobody searches on that keyword combination!

8. Make sure you uncheck the Content Network box in the Settings page of your AdWords campaign.

9. Wait a day and tweak if necessary. If you’re spending too much then you may have to cut your research short. On a positive note, the money you’re spending will be bringing in traffic to your site, so make sure the ad is sending visitors to a decent landing page with some information about your business and a way to contact you.

10. Collect the data and analyze. Ideally you would run this test for at least a month to get a meaningful sample size. The actual search volume for a given keyword will be the number of impressions listed in the AdWords interface.

Once you have your data, you can see which locations perform the best and target your website accordingly, taking into account traffic volume, competition, and relevancy.

I like it from a link-building standpoint because they let you link out to sites you own with the anchor text of your choosing–good for promoting other sites that are linked to your name, like your LinkedIn profile or your business.

From a reputation management perspective, it’s helpful because you control the content and you can push it up in the rankings with some concentrated link building. We’ll have to wait and see how it does in search results, but this is the kind of site you look for when you’re trying to push friendly sites to the top of the rankings for your name.

It’s a free site but they offer premium services for $4.95 a month, which includes paid search placement for keywords related to your name, the ability to edit your META description, and a few other nice options.

Unfortunately, learning about blogging never led me to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), because if I had, I probably would’ve been a much more successful real estate agent! As this article from Search Engine Land points out, many real estate agents are shifting their advertising efforts from traditional media to online media.

As more and more real estate agents and brokers begin to compete for paid search terms using pay-per-click (PPC) engines like Google AdWords and Yahoo’s Overture, popular keywords will be bid way up–especially in the most competitive markets.

So what’s an agent to do?

One option is to join a larger brokerage that can afford the big advertising dollars and hope that the traffic to your broker’s website trickles down into clients for yourself. I emphasize the word trickle–you’re not going to make a lot this way if you’re competing with 150 other agents in your brokerage.

Another possibility is to create your own website and drive traffic through AdWords. Like I said before, this is going to be increasingly expensive.

The third online strategy is to build your own website and get it ranked organically. I definitely wouldn’t say that it’s going to be easy to get on the first page of the Google results for keyword phrases like “my city real estate agent,” but the potential payoff is tremendous.

If I were still a real estate agent, my first priority in marketing would be organic search engine optimization. Why? My gut tells me that most agents and brokers will begin their online marketing efforts with PPC and online classified advertising. Most will not be looking at organic SEO as an option until their other online efforts fail or the idea of SEO becomes more mainstream.

The agents who move now and get established early in the search engine results will have a huge advantage. Google loves websites that have had good, trusted links for a long time.

The agents that start building quality incoming links and creating quality content related to their markets will have a big head start on agents who are entering three, six, or twelve months from now. Age is a big part of search engine authority, so the older your site and the older your backlinks, the better foundation you will have when every other real estate agent learns about SEO.

A strong SEO/link-building strategy combined with blogging to create fresh content and establish expertise will pay big dividends for real estate agents who are in it for the long haul.

Hey, that strategy will pay big dividends for just about any freelancer or small business owner!