Top Click Media Staff Blog

SEO School: Local Search – how to rank well in a competitive Marketplace

Andy Russell — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:43:58 +0000

The fight for local search rankings has just gotten a lot nastier, thanks to a decision from Google to cut the number of results displayed on the first page of Local Search from ten down to seven. The decision from Google is likely to turn up the heat on a battle that is already pretty vicious. Google does obviously display more than seven local search results if you click through to the second page or further, though it doesn’t take a marketing genius to realise that, the number of clicks for position eight is going to be vastly different top the number position seven gets.

Why has Google done this? Well, as always I can only guess, though I reckon it’s got something to do with the old capitalist tenet of improving overall service by making sure competition is as fierce and cutthroat as possible. Google evidently feels that by making competition for places 30% more lively, companies will be forced to add more information to their profiles, giving Google more on which to base their ranking decisions. It’s hard to see it not working to be honest.

So, how do you make sure that you are in the top 7.

Well the good news is that even though these changes have made optimisation for Local search substantially harder, it’s not altogether too late to sort out your local search. The fact is that many companies are, mystifyingly enough, not making this a priority currently, which can leave an open door for people willing to take it seriously though that door is likely to slam shut very soon as people start to take local search optimisation more seriously.

So how does one go about optimising for Local Search?

The main thing is to get your listing right, this means that you must…

• Include the keywords you want to rank for in your title, without being spammy! For instance if you’re an accountant, write J.P. Morley, Chartered Accountants and Tax Advisers, rather than just J.P. Morley
• Make sure the address(es) you provide match the addresses listed on your site and anywhere else on the internet, like yell.com etc., exactly! If they differ then change them to match. The more places that Google can verify your address the more trustworthy it will think you are
• List a local phone number with a local area code – Google views this as more proof that you are actually a local business
• If you have email addresses and websites then list them, though there’s no evidence they make a huge difference to your rank
• You get 200 characters with which to nail your business description. The importance of this cannot be overstated, though be careful. Of course you want to get the keywords in, though the second it starts to look spammy Google will penalise you so keep it readable. If it comes down to a choice between keywords in your description and keywords in your title, the title is much more important. Keep your description readable and useful.
• When the time comes to set your Google marker, the little pushpin thing in the map that denotes your location, be honest. Your location on the map MUST match the location you have given Google.

Once you’ve done all the above you’ll be ready to claim your listing. This will involve either Google calling you on the phone number you have listed or sending a postcard to the address you have listed, so make sure you’re about at those locations.

One other thing you can do is online reputation management. Local Search not only takes positive reviews you have received on the major review sites into account, it actually displays the number of positive reviews as part of the listing. Obviously a number of good reviews is not only goods for your ranking but also your conversion rate.

You don’t have to simply wait around for the good reviews though. Try putting out a call to some of your more satisfied customers and getting them to give reviews, if you tell them exactly where to post and within reason what to say they shouldn’t begrudge you a good review.

So that’s our advice when it comes to local search listings, if you run a local business, I really can’t overstate the importance of doing this and doing it soon! It may be hard now, but it’ll be even harder in a few months.

What would the Google Bot do?

Simon King — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:48:22 +0000

SEOs spend most of their working lives – and, let’s be honest, some of their private lives – trying to think like the Google Bot, in order to make their clients sites as welcoming and comfortable for it to visit and return to as possible. For the most part this is a pretty difficult thing to do, the Google Bot is, after all, a computer programme – not a living thing and, as such, is pretty hard to empathise with.

Until now, that is…

That’s right, the Google Labs section in webmaster tools has just played another blinder by introducing a tool that at last lets you see what the Bot actually sees when it crawls the internet, viewing and judging sites. This allows you to get an idea of how your optimisation is going without having to wait until your site is crawled again. Pretty useful, I think you’ll agree.

The experimental app is called ‘Fetch as Googlebot,’ and it works like so…

When you put your site through ‘Fetch’, it gives you a real-time representation of what the bot actually sees when crawling a site. It returns HTML code exactly as a Googlebot would encounter it.

The plan is to use this as a tool to allow webmasters to view their own sites after they have made major changes and it’s an invaluable resource as it allows you to get an invaluable insight into potential trouble spots, diagnose why you aren’t being indexed in the way you’d like to be etc. In fact, the list of things you could use this for is probably way too long to go into here, though I will let you in on what the Google blog itself has to say about the new tool…

“This feature will help users a great deal when they re-implement their site with a new technology stack, find out that some of their pages have been hacked, or want to understand why they’re not ranking for specific keywords.”

Well, there you have it that’s the latest Google Labs innovation for you, and it gets an a-star from me, literally the only limitation is that it only returns 100kb of data. Don’t worry, we think this is just how the app works, we have no reason to believe that the actual bot only views this much data. However, that said it is a good idea to keep the 100kb mark in mind when designing pages, purely because smaller pages load faster, and load times are always a factor in ranking.

Google Labs strikes again

Jay Smith — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:48:48 +0000

Google Labs has struck again with yet another useful tool entering beta testing on Webmaster Tools. It’s called Malware Details and it’s basically a godsend for anyone worried about hacking/illicitly installed Malware on their site. It works by crawling the site and flagging anything that it feels is malicious.

The really useful thing about this code is that it comes straight from Google, who basically decide what is or isn’t malicious code anyway, so it’s great peace of mind for a site to know that they won’t be penalised, as Google itself has given their site a clean bill of health… Or not.

This is a very timely release from Google – webmasters across the world are getting increasingly worried about the prospect of malware being installed on their sites. This is mainly due to a renewed focus from the major search engines on penalising sites that are suspected of having malware installed. It doesn’t matter who put it there, if you have any malware at all installed it is likely that any major search engine/browser will be informing users of this fact.

Whether it’s with a small note on your site’s search results, or a big red screen like Google Chrome helpfully provides it’s not something you want site users to be seeing.

Google are at pains to point out that Malware Details is not a cure in itself, rather a first step in ridding your site of malware. The programme works by giving you snippets of code it considers malicious, it is then up to you to find and remove the code.

If you suspect there maybe malware on your site – or even if you don’t – we highly recommend that you take advantage of this new tool. The main reason being that if Google are putting money into helping people identify and fix malware issues, they are probably also gearing up for a renewed push to punish those who have malware on their sites. The old Google carrot and stick approach.

SEO School: Long-Tail Keywords. Part 2

Matt Thomas — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:37:46 +0000

Know your aim and don’t get sidetracked

Keyword choice is the cornerstone of a good SEO campaign. As I’ve said before, SEO campaigns resemble super tankers, in that they are incredibly difficult to turn around if you make the mistake of setting off in the wrong direction. But how do you choose good keywords?

Well, the main thing to keep in mind is what you want out of the campaign. I know that sounds like a stupid question, increased profits obviously, but the trick is not to be sidetracked by unrelated concerns. A lot of people, for instance, get obsessed with the idea that they must rank for big keywords, if they sell printers they want to be number one for printers etc., just as a feather in their cap. But just because everyone else is fighting for that keyword, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

What if you could make more money by targeting keywords with a fraction of the competition? Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? But actually, in many cases it isn’t. Many industries have a whole raft of longer more specific keywords that will generates sales, often in excess of those you’d get with more generic keywords… Why? Stay tuned to find out.

SEO School: Long-Tail Keywords. Part 1

Matt Thomas — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:35:46 +0000

In this industry SEO professionals tend to live or die by their rankings. There’s nothing quite like being able to say that you took a nothing site to number one on Google for a really competitive keyword. It’s how we market ourselves and how others judge us. But is that right? Are rankings really the best metric, or are they just the easiest one to measure?

Surely a better way to judge the success of an SEO campaign is to look at the amount of money it’s brought in, even though it’s hard to quantify. After all, it’s no good being top for ‘printers’ if you’re not selling any, that’s why the cleverer SEOs, like us, are experimenting with new approaches that don’t always focus on the traditional generic-terms arms race to the top of Google.

We’re going to be talking about the benefits of one of those approaches this week – sorry for the overlong preamble – that approach is long-tail keywords, longer versions of the big hitting generics that allow you to bypass the generic race. But more of that tomorrow.

Caffeine Catching on

Matt Thomas — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:18:25 +0000

All week we’ve been talking about Caffeine and how it’s going to change the SEO game – or that’s the theory anyway. However, we have yet to discuss the probable response from Yahoo and Microsoft. One of the reasons for that is that it’s a little too soon to tell though we are starting to see the influence of these changes on the Microsoft front, particularly the new update’s social networking focus.

That’s right, Bing are apparently also trying to ape Twitter’s real time search function. However, they are going about it in a slightly different way to Google. Instead of trying to beat Twitter at their own game like Google, they appear to have decided to have taken a ‘can’t beat em, join em’ attitude towards real time search and signed a non-exclusive deal with Twitter to make tweets available immediately through the Bing search engine.

This could also be presented as aping another aspect of Caffeine, the increased importance of Social networking, an argument that is enhanced by the fact that Bing has also recently agreed a deal to show Facebook feeds as part of the Bing search results.

Caffeine Explained: How to check your new Ranking

Matt Thomas — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 08:00:26 +0000

Earlier in the week I told you all that caffeine probably wouldn’t change too much in the world of SEO, that if you were being ethical and above board with your optimisation then you wouldn’t lose ranking. Don’t worry, I’m not going back on that, you’re not going to tumble off the rankings overnight when Google finally flips the caffeine switch.
However, the Google search algorithm is an incredibly complex thing and if you’re doing complex SEO work then predicting positions can get very complicated, especially when you’re dealing with hypothetical scenarios like Caffeine.

This is why it pays to check what your caffeine rankings are going to be ahead of time. Luckily, Google has provided numerous tools to help us do just that…

1. Ranking Checker: This tool simply tells you your current Google ranking as opposed to your prospective Google Caffeine ranking

2. Google Caffeine Bookmarklet: A ‘bookmarklet’ that you can install straight into your browser to let you check your rankings with a click

3. Firefox Search bar Plug-In: As the name suggests, this is a plug in that allows you to view caffeine via a Firefox plug-in

4. Google vs Google Caffeine: A very cool toy that gives you a split screen view of Googleresults vs Google Caffeine results

5. Google.ie and Google.de vs Caffeine: Same as the above but for both Ireland and Germany

Caffeine Explained: The rise of Social Media

Matt Thomas — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:00:02 +0000

One of the main changes expected from the Caffeine update will be the importance given to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. in the rankings. This means that keyword-rich Facebook pages or social media blog posts will start to get decent ranking, as well as traditional web pages.

How good that ranking will be is unclear though this could well mean that social network optimisation for companies is going to become a new frontier in the marketing war. Up till now a corporate Facebook page has been viewed as, at best an interesting sidebar to your main campaign, at worst a massive waste of time that nobody’s ever going to look at. In the near future however, you might start to see companies using and indexing their facebook pages in ever more creative ways in order to grab another few ranking places and hopefully open up a new revenue/marketing stream.

We’re already starting to see the boundaries between social and business networking blurring. Marketing managers and web developers would do well to start thinking carefully about how exactly they can update their social media use to fit in.

Caffeine Explained: Universal Search Changes

Matt Thomas — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:00:17 +0000

Google’s universal search update has been an undoubted hit with searchers. Google users have responded incredibly well to the update that indexes video and image results either above the traditional paid and natural search results or in the middle of the search page. However, the position of the results has been hurting Google’s pocket by quite often distracting people from the adwords ads which, lest we forget, is the way Google makes almost all of its money.

As a result it’s very likely that we’ll see the position of this feature tweaked as part of the Caffeine update. It’s unlikely that Google will feel bullish enough to get rid of such a popular and useful application entirely, though I wouldn’t be even remotely surprised to see the section moved to the bottom of the results. This would be more of a relief for SEOs than an actual opportunity as it would basically mean that number one position would retain its cache, which has been slightly eroded by Google’s continual insistence on placing its own results, Google base etc., atop the search rankings.

Don’t get too excited though, Google are going to have to balance profitability with user experience here (as they usually do, to be fair to them) so where Universal Search actually ends up will be subject to change for a while.

Caffeine Explained: Real-Time Results

Matt Thomas — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:00:38 +0000

Google, as has been reported extensively in the past (not least by us), is a big fan of the real-time search results enjoyed by Twitter. The reason for this is that real-time content is one of the only ways in which Google can be beaten by anyone. As it stands, if you want to find out about something that literally just happened, or you want to gauge public reaction to something instantly, the best way is Twitter.

Google is hoping that Caffeine will put a stop to that. The search engine leader believes that it can index at a much faster speed than it currently is, even fast enough to, if not exactly beat Twitter at its own game, then certainly reflect web searchers’ hunger for real-time information and updates.

This is one of the great opportunities for savvy SEOs and marketeers I was talking about the other day. If everything goes to plan with Google’s new update and close-to-real-time indexing is possible, and that is a huge if, then it will make all kinds of exciting marketing and product placement opportunities possible.

Just off the top of my head, you could easily tie-in ecommerce deals with stories in the news to get them indexed further up the rankings, or write product placement style ‘news content’ to get your brand seen by more people. Definitely scope for some interesting stuff there.

Caffeine Explained: The Basics

Matt Thomas — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:15:14 +0000

Let’s begin our Caffeine master-class by talking about the point of all this, what Google actually hopes to achieve with its caffeinated update. Basically the update is supposed to result in more pages getting indexed and quicker as well as a more helpful and comprehensive results page. All of which sounds pretty good, I think you’ll agree. However, it is worth considering the impact of all this on the SEO game.

In practical terms the changes will mean that competition is going to go up for the generic keywords as more pages indexed clearly means more competition. There is also likely to be more fluctuation in positions for the big hitters as SEO changes are indexed quicker and improvements have more of an immediate effect. As I said yesterday, all this points to a renewed focus on use of SEO companies as ordinary webmasters are unlikely to be able to react in the best way, or quickly enough to keep up. Basically, sites that used to be able to muddle along without any real optimisation may not be able to do so any more.

Another thing to remember is that SEO strategy may begin to skew away from big aggressive campaigns targeting one or two generic terms, with competition hotting up for these big generic keywords, a good longtail keyword strategy is going to be more important than ever. It may be that instead of slugging it out for fifth position for that big hitting generic keyword, you’re better off focussing on being number one for several of its less glamorous cousins.

Caffeine Explained: First things first. Don’t Panic!

Matt Thomas — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:15:06 +0000

If you’re plugged into the world of SEO or online marketing then you’ve most likely heard about Google’s latest major search update, codenamed: caffeine. If you’ve heard of it, the chances are you’re thinking about what it means for your sites and online campaigns. That’s why we lovely people at Top Click have decided to explain the whole thing to you in step by step chunks over the course of this week. How nice of us.

The first thing is, don’t panic. Whilst Caffeine is a major update to the Google algorithm, it shouldn’t have too much of an immediate effect on your ranking, provided you’re behaving in an ethical manner, that is. The main thing to remember is that the stuff that has always worked best will most probably continue to work and use of SEO companies will continue to be a necessary part of your strategy. In fact, if anything, they will become more important than ever. The landscape is going to shift radically in terms of what Google can do and how fast it can do it, there will be plenty of loopholes for a capable SEO to exploit.

But more of that tomorrow. The main thing for the time being is, relax. There’s unlikely to be a horrific SEO downside to Caffeine though there may be some real pluses, for you. Again, we’ll go into some of this tomorrow. See you there.

SEO School: Lesser known Techniques #5

Alexei M — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:00:04 +0000

#5. Local Business Listings

If you’re not on Google Base, Google’s local business listing service, then for goodness sake sort that out immediately. Go on, do it now. It doesn’t even take that long to do. Local business listings generally come up in first position when relevant keywords are searched, so if you’re not on there then you’re effectively giving up position one on Google, a position that could cost thousands of hours and pounds to achieve naturally.

What makes it worse is that your competitors are probably on there, so however carefully you’ve honed your site to get up the rankings, clicks that could rightfully be yours will be being swallowed up by competitors, you have to be up there with them to try and claw some of that back.

Another reason to do this, as if one’s required, is that we’ve heard reports of people placing fraudulent listings, as in pretending to be people they aren’t. The last thing you want is someone masquerading as you at the top of Google.

Also bear in mind that Yahoo and MSN also have their own versions of base where it may be easier to rank well.

SEO School: Lesser known Techniques #4

Matt Thomas — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:00:21 +0000

#4. Prepare for Real-Time Search

Most SEOs agree that real time search is likely to be the future of web searching. Over the next few years freshly updated content is likely to become more and more important to determining ranking.

What this means in terms of on site content is that you need to find as many ways of keeping your content fresh as you possibly can. This not only means you need to up the amount of new content uploaded to your news page or blog, but also you need to investigate things like comments, forums, customer reviews etc., any way you can get regular content onto a site.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on the breaking news. In future, many experts predict that when keywords ‘go hot’, as in when there is a big breaking news story that involves your area of expertise, the search algorithm will probably shift so that articles on the subject are ordered by most recent ahead of other factors like title tags or keyword density.

The thinking is that when people search for news related keywords, there is a higher premium on having the latest information.