As it’s now summer in Chicago, there’s plenty of opportunities to dine al fresco and I’ve been looking for new and fun places to eat. The one thing I don’t find is actual restaurants ranking well in search engines for common phrases: wrigleyville al fresco dining, restaurants with outdoor seating in chicago, or outdoor dining in the loop. The majority of sites which are ranking well are listing websites (Yelp, Metromix, CenterStage, etc.). Herein lies a real opportunity for a local restaurant to take advantage of this situation with some simple changes. Below are five tips any local restaurant could use to improve their rankings:

Page title, party of 65. Your table is ready.
Although brand recognition is something to strive for, especially in a competitive market like Chicago, you can’t rely on that alone. Unless you are Starbucks or Alinea, people are probably just looking for a lakeview mexican restaurant. You have to give your users, as well as search engines some context as to what your restaurant is, who you are, and who you serve. And you only have 65 characters to do it in. I know, that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more than you think. Here’s some examples below of what I’m talking about:

Instead of “Mom’s Diner“, say “Mom’s Diner - Quality Food in Northcenter Since 1935“. That’s only 52 characters, you still have about 13 or so left.

Here’s another one. Instead of “The Road House Bar“, say “The Road House Bar - Roudiest Bar in the South Loop and West Loop“. That’s 65 characters. This can be as much a part of your branding as the design of your website itself. Remember, Google is only as smart as the information you provide it.

I’ll take a website sandwich, hold the flash.
Many local businesses are victims of this, but bars and restaurants are especially bad. I’ve heard it before and I’m sure I’ll continue to hear it.

Client: “I want a website with music and strobe lights and lots of flashing images.”
Web Developer: “So you’re telling me you want lots of Flash?”
Client: “Sure, whatever gets me that stuff.”
Web Developer: “You know this will make it difficult for search engines to find you, right?”
Client: “Yeah, but it will look cool!”
Web Developer: “Ok…[sighs]”

Although there are ways to effectively build a flash website to rank well in search engines, my advice is to use flash as sparingly as possible. One benefit of this is that your website will rank higher in search engines for having indexable content. Another benefit is that users on mobile devices will be able to access your site. Mobile devices are just now starting to support flash, and that’s only the very high end phones. Most mobile users who access an all flash site will not be able to see any of the content.

The directions say it’s right here. Let me check my hCard.
In case you’re unfamiliar with it, hCard is a format that many search engines are now using to identify physical addresses outside of other data they may find. The reason this is beneficial to your business is that search engines can instantly identify your address [street, city, state, country], phone numbers, and even your logo. Google and Yahoo maps are already incorporating this data into their results to ensure accurate maps and business data, but more applications will use it in the future as it becomes more readily accepted. The one big thing going for hCard is that it’s extremely easy to implement. You can get the full syntax breakdown here and there’s even an hCard creator here.

What does this menu say? I don’t speak PDF.
This is an issue I see time and time again on websites. Restaurant owners will take their physical menu, scan it, and put it on their website. Although this is a quick and easy way to do this, it often frustrates users when they realize Adobe Acrobat is loading. It often slows their machine down and they are not able to do other tasks while it’s loading. Another issue is often the scans are poor or low quality, which makes reading them online even more difficult. The best option would be to have an HTML version of your menu. This would also benefit mobile users who are visiting your site from a mobile device, as many mobile devices are not PDF enabled.

That place was great! I’m glad I read the hReviews.
Along the same lines as hCard’s, another microformat you can implement on your site is called hReviews. Much the same as how hCard provides context to search engines as to where your restaurant is, hReviews allow them to aggregate reviews of your restaurant, assuming you have them on your site already. Often, search engine cannot determine a positive review from a negative review or whether a restaurant is rated out of 5 stars or on a scale of 1 to 10. hReviews allow for a consistent sharing of information across data platforms and more importantly, it provides a voice for your exisitng customers to speak to new customers.

Well hope those help. After all this, I’m hungry. Let me know if there’s anything I forgot in the comments or check out some of my previous articles on local business SEO below:

• 9 tips for local online business marketing - all of them are FREE!
• Local Search ~ The Backdoor to Top SEO Rankings

Picture courtesy of your truly - olive burger.

ZYGOTE is a lightweight inflated ball, illuminated from within, that responds to pressure applied to its surface. Interacting with the ball is simple: punch it, bounce it, squeeze it, or tap it and the ball’s internal LEDs react instantaneously.

NUday-ZYGOTE from todo.to.it.

No matter how often you talk with a client or how in the loop your agency is, there will always be things that slip through the cracks in terms of information coming from the client. Whether it’s “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Joe’s been transferred to Omaha” or “Man, you guys should have talked with us last week. We had a bunch of fires to put out.” Each one of these is a lost opportunity to assist the client and improve your existing relationship, but it’s also lost revenue for your agency. Well, there are many ways to stay more in the loop as a result of information constantly being posted online, specifically your clients.

The following are three ideas of how you can stay more in the loop, better service your clients, and improve your bottom line at the same time.

Job alerts
You’re probably thinking, what am I going to learn from job alerts from my client? Well, the first thing you’ll learn is whether they are going to be a client much longer or not. As marketing is often the first place cuts are made, when your client stops hiring, it often means their bottom line is flattening or starting to decline and hence your relationship may come into jeopardy. Second, it will clue you into things that are going on within the organization that you are often not privileged to as a third party. Are they hiring in sales or marketing? Product development or HR? Are there trends or is this an ongoing thing? For example, if you are constantly seeing the same position come up within the marketing department, does it mean the department is growing or do they just have a lot of turnover? Do you need to make other inroads and obtain other client champions in case your client contact is transferred, laid off, fired, etc.?

Ok, you get the point, so how do you do this now? Well, the first place I would start is:

Indeed: Indeed provides job alerts you can set up for free to be delivered to your inbox, or via RSS feed.

SimplyHired and Careerbuilder also allow for the same functionality. By having these job alerts coming in, you can get a feeling for where they are growing the most, what sectors of their business are growing the fastest and also clue you in to things happening internally, which you may never find out otherwise.

Search Monitoring
Search monitoring is also something you can setup quite easily, but many of the free tools are a little difficult to aggregate together, so I’ll also recommend some paid search tools. In terms of search monitoring, I’m talking about a noticeable rankings increase, decrease, new competitors in the space, or other changes, which the client will most likely not communicate to you, or which they themselves may not be aware of. This is of course, assuming they are not already running a search campaigns, paid or organic, which they are actively involved in. And even if they are, and you are not running it, it’s always a good idea to show your client that you are acting as a third party validator for their current search provider.

So how do we set this up? Here’s four tools you can use:

• Google Webmaster Tools: If you have direct access to your clients web hosting, you can set this up and get an idea of their web rankings for the queries driving most of the traffic to their site.
• SEO Book Rank Checker: This is a free add-on for Firefox, which allows you to run ranking reports against multiple domains, multiple engines and multiple keywords. All of which can be exported as an excel ready spreadsheet. The problem with this is that you have to manually assemble any kind of report for multiple competitors.
• Zoom Rank: I actually don’t have experience using these guys, but it appears that they have everything needed for this kind of reporting as well, but for $7.95/month, which isn’t too bad considering they automate this entire process for you as well as archive rankings for historical reporting.
• AdGooroo: As I’m sure you’ve seen me mention them before, our friends at AdGooroo are back. They provide a highly comprehensive solution for both paid and organic search listings, but they are definitely more pricey than these other products.

So with this knowledge in hand, you will be able to better optimize press releases, web content, link building efforts, and much more as opposed to flying blind and just making up a headline, which may ultimately have no real influence on their bottom line. These days, it’s all about demonstrating an integrated approach, even if you don’t manage everything inside and out.

Social media alerts
And last, but certainly not least, where would I be without mentioning social media alerts? What happens if your client releases a new product line and the blogosphere/twittersphere tears it apart? Or some press release comes out and your competitor starts picking apart the research laid out in it? Even if you are not the PR agency or in charge of social media efforts, the client will ultimately be grateful if you are the first to point it out, and even happier if you have a solution in hand. The first thing I’d recommend is to have a social media emergency plan in place. Once you have a plan, you’ll need to actually implement it. There are a ton of free products out there to do this:

• Twilerts
• Tweetbeep
• Filtrbox
• Google Alerts
• Twe2

And if you have some a budget associated with your efforts:

• Radian6
• TNS Cymfony
• Nielsen Buzzmetrics

And here’s some previous posts where I outline many of them in more detail:

• 5 Online Reputation/PR Management Tools ~ Watch your brand in real time
• Real Time Firefighting - Justification for Social Media Monitoring

Really, all of these come down to servicing the client better, even if you are not the agency of record. Once you have these tools in hand, it then becomes a matter of aggregating, automating, and accelerating. This is how the nimble agencies will succeed and the stagnant will disappear.

Image courtesy of Asim Bijarani

Following up on my last post concerning Social Media Emergency Plans, I decided to provide a little more detail into the legal section I outlined. As I said in my last post, I would make sure to contact your legal counsel to ensure you know what to do in scenarios where social media (or any other media) gets out of hand. It’s probably a good idea to do some sort of risk assessment prior to starting any of these campaigns. Part of that process though is to know who to contact once you decide legal action is required. Below is a list of the “who’s who” on the web and each of their copyright and/or DMCA pages.

• Twitter’s Copyright Page
• Youtube’s Copyright Page
• Vimeo’s Copyright Page
• Facebook’s Copyright Page
• Myspace’s Copyright Page
• LinkedIn’s Copyright Page

And in case it gets indexed before you can remove it:

• Google’s Copyright Page
• Yahoo’s Copyright Page
• MSN’s Copyright Page

As I couldn’t find any document to really show how to do a social media risk assessment, part 3 of this series will be an outline for a document on how to do just such an assessment. Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see and I’ll make sure to include it.

And for any law firms or lawyers reading this, here’s a trio of twitter tips for you. Enjoy.

Over the last several months, there have been several examples of how social media is still a space where many are still trying to learn and mistakes can happen, and often do. Whether it’s Motrin Mom’s, where being off message with certain audiences can lead to online outrage, or the recent Dominoes YouTube issue where a few bad apples threw an entire brand under the bus. In either case, there are several things that can be learned prior to starting a social media campaign. But just in case everything goes south, it’s still a good idea to have a contingency plan in place, just in case.

So you’ve kicked off some social media effort and all of a sudden you see 20 people, 60 people, 500 people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs calling your efforts lame, repulsive, inappropriate, and so on. Or even worse, a proprietary document that was never supposed to see the light of day is now floating around in the social media universe. What do you do?

Breathe deeply and think
The first lesson is not to fly off half cocked. Stop and pause for a minute and think.

• First define, who are “they”? Where are “they”? Twitter, Facebook, blogs, traditional media? Are they competitors? What does it say about “them” because of the spaces they frequent?
• How vocal are “they”? Put them somewhere on a scale with relevance. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is “harmless razzing” and 10 is “foaming at the mouth”, where do they fall? Anything registering on this scale, is both important for marketing efforts going forward and anything over a 2 or a 3 probably needs further investigation.
• How much influence do “they” have? This is extremely difficult to define. With Google, Yahoo, Buzzmetrics, Radian6, and everyone else scraping the internet for content - if it’s online, it has influence. Anyone with “influence” can always find a no-name bit of information and report it as their own.
• Why are “they” so vocal? What is the context they are making these comments? Only by understanding their frustrations can you make an articulate response.
• Did “they” see the original version of the video, ad, comment, press release, internal document, etc.? Or did they see some subverted or doctored version meant to cause this kind of response?

Go to legal (only if absolutely necessary)
Although in the social media space, things move with lightning fast speed and legal teams are often known as slowing the process down, this is still probably a necessary evil. The more autonomy a brand manager or marketer can have in making these decisions, the better and faster a response can be put in place for the vocal “they”.

• What are “they” commenting on? Is it an internal document? Is it proprietary, restricted, copyrighted, etc.?
• If you are a publicly traded company, will it effect stock value? Will shareholders care?
• Do competitors stand to gain from action or inaction?
• Before issuing any legal notices, please use all other available vehicles. As most people in the social media space are individuals who are neither legally trained nor huge corporations, any legal action comes across as a David vs. Goliath scenario and this may only worsen the situation.

Prepare a statement
This needs to come across as sincere, honest, and actually acknowledges the problem.

• What was the real issue at hand?
• Why was each audience so vocal?
• Acknowledge “their” comments, sincerely. In the case of the recent AmazonFail uproar, Amazon first blamed the issue on a “glitch” and when it was later found out it was for another reason, they had to make another statement and in the end up released another statement that said the entire incident was “ham fisted“.
• What can you do to prevent this from occurring in the future?
• What can you do to win back those audiences?
• Does this effect any other marketing efforts? Do your agencies need to know?

Use the tools they use
When you respond, make sure to use the tools that “they” were using. In the case of the Dominoe’s issue, the President of Dominoes U.S.A responded via YouTube, much as the original issue arose as a result of YouTube. Likewise, much as you should be doing at the onset of such a campaign, engage with your audience where they are. By using the tools that “they” use, you can engage in a one-on-one or one-to-many setting, which will help to rebuild trust and credibility. It also acknowledges the fact that you are listening (in both the real sense, as well as the social media listening sense) to these audiences and care about their feedback. In the Motrin Mom’s case, they released the videos on Friday and by Monday, without a response, the issue has exploded across social networks.

Mea Culpa Debriefing
And lastly, once you have the firestorm somewhat under control, do a little soul searching.

• What can you learn from this?
• Did you gain new audience insights?
• Did you find new brand advocates or critics?
• Who came to the rescue and who kicked your brand while you were down?
• Do you have any brand loyalty based on your response? Was your response sufficient enough?
• Do you see long lasting negative effects as a result or have you saved the day entirely and turned a negative into a positive?

Have any other tips or things you’ve come across, which would benefit brand managers or marketers looking for the escape hatch? Let me know in the comments.

image courtesy of Marvin Kuo

So I recently had some difficulty describing two types of paid search techniques. The first was in regards to a set of keyword terms which include a geographic location such as “Chicago dentist” or “New York plumber”. The second set of keywords I was trying to describe was a paid search campaign which used generic keywords “plumber” or “dentist”, but only showed those ads within a specific geographic area, such as Chicago or New York. Well, after some discussion with our head of media, he let me on two terms to describe both.

Geo-targeted: Which I was able to describe prior to this discussion. This is my latter example where a user enters a generic term and you show only the paid advertising for the geographic region they live in. For example, I’m searching in Chicago and I search for “pizza” or “dentist” and the mere fact that I reside within the targeted geographic area means the ad will display for me.

Geo-modified: Which I understood the technique, but just didn’t have the vocabulary to describe. This is the former technique whereby a user is explicit and says “Chicago dentist” or “New York plumber” and it doesn’t matter whether I am in Chicago or Denver. If I search for “Chicago dentist”, the geo-modified keyword phrase will cause that ad to be displayed.

And in case you missed it, Google decided to liven up the whole mix over the last few days by releasing geo-targeted results for natural search queries. So when a user queries things like “pizza” or “dentist”, Google returns the natural results, but also includes “relevant” local results. This is still to be determined as to how accurate these results are, but at least it’s a start. I’ve included a screen shot of what this looks like below:

I’m kind of against this technique as it trains users away from using longer queries to get more detailed information. I understand the logic that many of the queries they are using are localized queries: pizza, dry cleaning, chinese food, etc. however, I’m not 100% sure users will understand that when they need local information, they can just type in a one or two word query with no modifier. I think this might confuse Google’s experience a bit for any cases where Google either provides too much or too little information. If a user enters “Chinese restaurants“, they receive information about those restaurants, along with localized listings. If they use the phrase “traditional Chinese restaurants“, they do not receive any local listings. I know I’m giving Google a hard time about semantics and they will get better over time, but it’s the behavior they are reinforcing that I have an issue with. It should be “local modifier + term” yields local results - every time. If no local modifer is specified, it should yield non-local results - every time. By creating this muddy situation, they are diluting from the user experience, ever so slightly.

Any other cool targeting terms of features I should know about? Let me know if the comments.

Photo courtesy of timsnell.

I think we’ve either just about crossed over the peak or we’re about to shortly and are now heading towards disillusionment. As soon as American Idol starts using Twitter as a voting platform, we’re done.

Now typically, we tell our clients that it will take some time to see results and depending on the competitive set and the keywords they want to rank “well” for, it can be anywhere from two weeks to two months to two years, in extreme cases. In this case, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just see what I could do.

So one morning I read a story which threw out a bunch of buzzwords like microblogging, crowdsourcing, web 2.0, etc. and I said, this is getting out of hand. So I did a quick URL search to see what domains were available, purchased one I liked, set up a hosting plan, and posted some files I threw together quickly. All within the span of a few hours.
That’s step 1.

Step 2 is that I set up Google analytics and Google webmaster tools to ensure that Google would both crawl the site that day, as well as give me statistics on what traffic I could generate over the course of that day.

Step 3 is that I blogged about it via my own blog, posted it on Twitter where it was RT’ed a few times, and posted it to Sphinn, Digg, Del.icio.us and a few other social bookmarking sites. And by the end of the day, VOILA! You can see the results below.

So if you are in crisis mode or you really drop the ball on some marketing effort, there is still some hope that you can make up for it by creating, optimizing, and launching a site all in one day*.

*DISCLAIMER - subject to competitive set, age of your website, amount of traffic on your website, your websites authority in your space, content to support your optimization, your knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. etc. etc. Do not try this at home - results will vary

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me anytime.