Through working with a lot of small business clients recently, I’ve realized that getting ranked “near the map” on Google is a pretty big request most of the time. And in most cases, it’s something that I do recommend pursuing for the majority of my small business client’s as it’s generally not too competitive and also a “free” source of traffic (i.e. you don’t pay Google anything).

In future posts, I’ll go into local seo strategy in depth, but here’s a few quick tips to make your website SEO friendly for local rankings.

1. Don’t Spam Your Listing

This should go without saying, but many people are still doing this…even other “seo companies” that I’ve cleaned up messes for (i.e. clients had past companies that didn’t get good results…partly because of spamming).

In short, your Google Business Listing (and others) enable you to have a “custom categories” area of your listing. This is generally used for information such as “is parking available (yes/no)”, “free consultations (yes/no)”, etc. It’s not meant to be used to add your keyword to the Google local listing in a million different ways thinking Google will like this.

For example, if you were running a airplane charter service, you would not want categories like “private planes: personal air charters”, “chartered flights: california charter service”, “cheap charter flights: corporate charter service”, etc. This is just pumping your custom categories full of keywords, which Google notices and will penalize.

Instead, you might put something line “charter planes available: Cesna, Learjet, etc.”. This way you’re getting your keywords in there but not coming across as overtly spammy.

2. Be Present on Major Listing Sites

Another large factor that is a relatively easy tactic to pursue is to make sure that you have listings for your business on other non-Google business listing websites (citysearch.com, superpages.com, etc.). Having optimized listings on these sites makes Google take notice of your business and can further increase the rankings of your actual Google Local Listing.

3. Address and Phone Information On Your Website

In general, you want to be sure to list your business address and phone numbers on the website. Most business owners do this on their contact page, but you’d be surprised how many don’t.

One step further might be to include the address and phone number in the footer text of your website (the small text at the very bottom of each page), as this further establishes your website address and phone contact info with Google.

In the near future, I’ll put together a laundry list guide of what small business owners can do to pursue a local seo strategy to get ranked “near the map” on Google search results, but I hope these quick tips have helped you if you haven’t considered local business listings in the past.

I recently saw a presentation by David Heinemeier, one of the creators of the hugely successful BaseCamp Project Management software.

David had some very great points in his presentation about the realities of business and his call to “unlearn your MBA”, but one of the simplest concepts stood out to me.

Constraints Force You To Innovate

In starting BaseCamp, David talked about his time constraints in creating the software and geographic constraints working with a team of programmers dispersed around the globe.

The product of these constraints was BaseCamp, with “4+ million users” and “millions in revenue”, although David won’t disclose exact revenue numbers.

Large Competitors Don’t Have These Constraints

I think it’s important to elaborate on how these constraints actually helped the team build a great product and bring it to market quickly. In a paraphrase of David’s words, “Microsoft couldn’t do what we did because Microsoft would assign a 30 person team with millions in budget working full time for 2 years…we just didn’t have that luxury and it made us figure shit out faster”.

Constraint’s That Helped BaseCamp Innovate

• Because David had only 10 hours of time per week to code the software, he was forced to keep things simple and not add useless features with his spare time. This led to a dead simple project management platform that users praise completed in about 6 months.
• Because the team worked together across multiple timezones (Chicago to Europe) via web conference / email, their communication was in results instead of just back and forth talking. Put bluntly, they communicated by showing progress on the actual product instead of simply talking to each other about what would be good to add.

An Experiment in Constraint

A good friend of mine brought up an interesting point recently. If you work full time and develop a startup product / software in your “spare time”, you’re forced to only do what matters. Having the luxury of an 8-10 hour work day to focus on your startup enables you to mess around with somewhat unimportant things for 8-10+ hours of the day.

Give Yourself Constraints

If you had just 2 hours per day to work on your business, you would likely spend those 2 hours doing what’s important and set aside the things that might be “cool”, but are not crucial.

When you start your day, spend the first 2-3 hours doing these crucial tasks and then stop for 30 minutes. If those 2-3 hours were the only time you had available for your business, would you be happy with what you’ve accomplished? If not, refine your focus on what you’re spending time on.

Is It Crucial…or Just Cool?

What are the crucial things that you’ve completed today or crucial things that you know you need to get done tomorrow? What are some of the “cool” things that you’ve spent time on while not focusing on getting the crucial things done?

I work with Intuit Merchant Processing to handle the credit card processing for my various businesses. I’ve usually been very happy with their service, but was concerned today re: how they dealt with a rather simple customer service call.

Before going into this, let me be clear that I’m not concerned regarding a mere $25. Instead, I’m concerned with how Intuit Merchant Processing dealt with this customer service issue. At some point in the near future, I may take my $25 (and $1,000’s in merchant processing) somewhere else since they seem to be focused on $25 fees instead of long term customer relationships.

—-update—

UPDATE 3/15/2010

As you can see in the comments section (click here to see directly), an Intuit Merchant Processing rep reached out to resolve this issue after this blog spread. I spoke with this rep via email and was contacted by the manager of their customer service call center on 3/15 via phone.

Long story short, I was refunded the fee I was charged and was told that the initial representative didn’t know the background of the situation which is why I was handled the way I was. It’s commendable that the manager reached out to me to resolve the issue, but I felt as though the rep’s manager (who was consulted by the rep during our initial call) should have handled this issue on the initial call as I did explain the entire background of the situation.

It shouldn’t take a blog post and a few tweets to get the manager to react, although I do commend her increased efforts these last few days after the fact. I appreciate their monitoring of social media and prompt followup to resolve the issue.

—end of update—

Intuit Might Do This To You Too

Without boring you with the detailed timeline of what led up to this, I’ll summarize by saying that I had to close all my bank accounts / credit cards late January and re-open all of them the same day due to a security breach at my bank.

Because I had new bank accounts with new account numbers, I had to make changes with Intuit Merchant Services to ensure that they had the updated checking account.

I Dealt With This Quickly

Long story short, I was notified by my bank on a Thursday night, spent all day Friday at the bank closing / opening accounts (on my birthday lol), and called Intuit on the Monday morning to confirm the change in accounts.

I was told the process to make this change and implemented it right away…a bit of a hassle but reasonable.

I Notified Them In Advance About Potential Fee

I specifically told the reps at Intuit Merchant Processing on that Monday that the old account was closed and that it couldn’t be used anymore. They said they’d note this in their system and make the account changes quickly to avoid any “account charge rejection fee“.

The Account Seemed to Change Successfully

It took about 10 business days of back and forth to finally make the change. It was tedious and a bit of a hassle, but it finally got changed and all was well.

Then They Fee’d Me

On my next statement I had a fee because they attempted to charge my old account after my initial conversation with them regarding my accounts being changed. This occurred after I said (and they confirmed) that the old account wasn’t usable and shouldn’t be charged.

I Was Confident They’d Solve This

In seeing this fee, I assumed it was just a glitch in their system and that they would reverse the fee since there was documentation that I had done everything in my power to work with them in advance of the account being charged and getting a fee.

Very Unhelpful Service at Intuit

Their response when I discussed this on the phone was that it was my responsiblity to notify them that I was changing my accounts 10 business days in advance of changing accounts. That would be understandable, except for the fact that we spoke prior to the account being charged a “rejection fee” and they confirmed that they would ensure this didn”t happen. Secondly, I didn’t choose to make the account changes. I was forced to make the changes Friday at my bank and notified Intuit immediately to get the gears in motion on their end.

How Much is a Customer Worth To Intuit?

The $25 fee is not my concern. The time I spent on the phone with them was worth much more than this $25.

The way in which this situation was handled by Intuit is what truly concerns me, especially in this type of customer-centric social media world.

Intuit’s accusation that “it’s your responsibility” and “we can’t make this change since it was your fault” shows me that they aren’t thinking in terms of long term customers. They’re thinking in terms of collecting their $25 fees and hoping customers don’t cancel.

Avoid Intuit If Possible

I’m not saying that I’ll cancel right away, as this would just take more of my time to get done. However, I’ll be sure to steer associates of mine away from Intuit Merchant Processing based on the way they deal with customers over a meager $25 fee.

Don’t Make This PR Mistake With Your Company

A little bit of customer service goes a long way. If they had at least aknowledged that I tried to get this handled on my end and worked with me a bit, instead of literally saying “it’s your fault“, then I would’ve forgot about the $25 and moved on as a happy Intuit customer.

But the way Intuit Merchant Processing valued me at $25 incredibly pissed me off. At some point in the future, I may take my $25 (and $1,000’s in merchant processing) to someone else.

What is Good Customer Service?

Leave a comment re: a good vs bad customer service example you have had in dealing with various companies. Intuit may be able to use some of these examples in their improvement for the future…

Dear New York Times,

As a web marketer, I work with many businesses at all levels of technical know-how.

But for a company as massive as The New York Times to be making some of the most basic of Internet Search Engine Optimization mistakes makes me worried.

When I saw this today, I’ll admit I chuckled for a second, but it honestly got me worried to see how can a company your size can be overlooking the most basic aspects of online marketing.

Fix These Mistakes and Exponentially Grow Web Visitors

Although your article ranks on the search engines for a few keywords related to the article topic, there are still some serious changes needed on the site.

Considering you know print is dying and that your newspaper needs to be online and focused on getting website traffic (thus ad revenue), I would hope the great minds at NYTimes.com already have this on the radar.

But just in case, I thought I’d put in my 2 cents…

Fix Your Amateur Addresses For Articles

Think of your actual website address (technically called the webpage file name) as a street sign that tells search engines “this specific article is about X, Y, and Z“.

The article file names on your site are hurting your web traffic. For example, the article about Pandora.com possibly going public after a very challenging startup journey has the file name of “08pandora.html” (circled in picture below).

This tells search engines “my article is about ‘o8pandora’”…

Needless to say, your current webpage address makes no sense.

Make This Change

You should have named it “pandora-going-public.html“, “pandora-ipo.html“, etc.

While I know there is more to the article topic then just the IPO, this serves as a simple example.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if you told search engines “this article is about Pandora’s IPO” or “this article is about Pandora going public” instead of “my article is about ‘08pandora’”…

This is a simple change to make, but something that could have huge results for your web traffic.

Secondly, Your Meta Keywords Are Horrible

I’ll spare my readers the technical mumbo jumbo of what meta keywords are, but you can simply think of them as yet another way to tell search engines “this article is about keywords such as keyword 1, keyword 2, and keyword 3. If someone searches online for those words, then you should show my article”.

Again, the article at NYTimes.com is about Pandora, a web based company, possibly going public this year. Therefore, you would expect that the meta keywords would be something along the lines of “pandora going public, pandora ipo, etc. etc.”.

Here’s what your staff at NYTimes.com decided to put.

Computers and the Internet
Radio
Music
Start-ups
Westergren Tim
Pandora.com

Honestly, This is Pathetic

You need to get specific when you’re telling search engines what your article is about.

Yes, your article is somehow related to “computers and internet“, but that doesn’t mean that you should put that in your meta keywords. Put keywords directly related to your article topic such as “Pandora going public“, etc.

Action Plan For NY Times Web Department

If NYTimes.com wants to remain relevant and respected as a modern website that is the source of important information online, you can’t be making amateur mistakes that are costing you website visitors…seriously, if you change just some basic things on your site, I’m confident your web search traffic will increase exponentially!

These Simple Changes Will Exponentially Grow Your Web Search Traffic

• change your page file names to include keywords / the actual topics your article is about.
  • in making these changes, do not forget to “301 redirect” your old amateur webpage file names  so that if someone visits 08pandora.html they’re taken to the new pandora-going-public.html webpage.
• optimize your meta keywords to include keywords specifically related to the article. It’s a good idea to stay relatively focused when doing this, so I wouldn’t recommend putting “computers” or “internet” as your keywords even if the article is about a internet based company that just so happens to run on a computer somewhere going public in the next year…Nearly every article in the “technology” section is about “computers and internet”…don’t put these as keywords for articles.

I have a million other suggestions for the site in terms of easy ways to increase your website visitors, but these first two make for a simple but effective list of changes you need to make.

Looking forward to your response,

Jon Tucker

To Readers: Seeing Big Companies Make Newbie Mistakes?

This is not the first time I’ve seen a big company make an amateur mistake. I think it’d be interesting to discuss ideas of where you see that some of these untouchable companies could improve.

Looking forward to your thoughts…

Yellow Pages Advertising Stats

This is what $1,000’s in YellowPages online advertising in 2009 gets you.

• $1,000’s in Advertising Costs
• 21 Website Visitors
• and ZERO new customers

Lesson? Don’t Advertise in YellowPages

Everyone knows the YellowPages aren’t what they used to be, but I don’t think everyone realizes how truly bad it is.

The data above, provided by Google Analytics Website Tracking, is from a client of mine who has been running YellowPages online ads for quite a few years. He doesn’t do much YellowPage print anymore, but he kept the YellowPages online because he thought

“they might send over a few customers here and there,
so I haven’t decided to cancel them.”

Plus, the YellowPages sales reps send him insanely high data about how many 1,000’s of people see his online YellowPages ad on YellowPages.com, but the data above proves that those 1,000’s of people aren’t clicking through to his website.

Lesson? Track Your Marketing

By spending about 15 minutes of my time, I was able to realize that not only was YellowPages online ads not producing him much web traffic, but it was producing him absolutely zero customers! Not one person that visited his site from YellowPages.com actually contacted him through the sites contact page.

note: he also gauged how many calls he got directly from the ad (i.e. non-website visitors), which was also disappointing at best.

Needless to say, he won’t be renewing his YellowPages ads this year.

Hint: Your Answer Should Be YES

• Are you tracking your website traffic with Google Analytics?
• Do you truly know how much revenue each marketing campaign you run brings in, whether it’s a print ad, Google marketing, email marketing, etc?
• Do you know how to fully analyze your website tracking data to make sure you’re not throwing money away on useless advertising? I’m not talking about reading website traffic reports…I’m talking about understanding them.

UPDATE: If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, you should consider attending my no-cost online webinar where I’ll teach you how to avoid this mistake, and many others like it. More details on my other website.

Share Your Thoughts

• If you’re a business owner, are you advertising in YellowPages or have you in the past?
• As a consumer (which everyone is), when was the last time you used the YellowPages?
• If you are a YellowPage sales rep, enlighten us on how you possibly sell your ad space ; )

So many non-techie people don’t seem to understand how marketing a website on Google works.

Through my marketing consulting gig, I get asked multiple times per week by clients and could-be clients, “how do you get a website onto Google”.

Everyone Loves Funny Explanations

I hope the below cartoonish explanation will help you better understand the big picture of how a website gets on Google’s first page.

Step 1: Google Meets Your Website

Google “meets” your website when it finds your website on the internet. Think of Google as a person that spends her entire day going through every website on the internet. It’s a boring job to be Google, but I hear it pays well.

Step 2: Google Understands What Your Website Is About

Google “understands” your website topic(s) by basically reading through the entire website. Google reads through the content on your website, the coding, and all of your website files.

But Google Doesn’t Care About You

Google now understands your website is about blue widgets, but Google doesn’t really care that much. There are numerous websites about blue widgets and Google has seen them all.

The question Google wonders is:

“Why are you more important than the
1000’s of other websites about blue widgets?”

“Why should I show you on Google’s first page
if someone looks for ‘blue widgets’ on Google.com?”

Step 3: Other Websites Say “He’s Awesome”

The way Google realizes that you’re important is when lots of other websites around the internet tell Google “yes, that website is about blue widgets“.

The way other websites “tell” Google that your website is about ‘blue widgets’ is to link to your website with the words ‘blue widget’. There are lots of ways this happens, but that’s a blog post for another day.

An Example of A Website Link

For example, if I want Google to think that my webpage is about Jon Tucker being awesome, then I would make a link that says Jon Tucker is Awesome. Google see’s that link and understands it as me saying that the page I’m linking to is about ‘Jon Tucker is Awesome’.

This is a simplified and a bit odd example, but you get the idea.

Finally: Your Website Is On Top of Google

Because many other websites on the internet are “telling” Google that you’re about “blue widgets”, Google will start to realize that you are an important website when it comes to blue widgets.

If someone types “blue widgets” onto Google.com, Google will show your website.

This “Dumbs Down” Internet Marketing…

I get around quite a bit in the internet marketing industry, so I’m sure that I’ll get a bit of flack for this blog post. This sort of dumbs down the whole Google marketing and the “SEO” process…

But That is The Point = )

This post is not meant to teach internet marketers how SEO and Google marketing is done. Instead, this post is meant to explain to non-techie business owners how getting a website to the top of Google conceptually works.

Ask Me or Slap Me

Leave a comment below with your questions or criticisms.

• Have you ever been confused by a marketer trying to explain “Google marketing” and “search engine optimization” to you?
• Have you marketed your business online? What are the results and lessons you’re learning along the way?

note: much thanks to SP Studio out of Germany for developing such a great cartoon character tool, which was used extensively in creating the cartoon characters shown in this post.

I’ve been planning to launch a personal hub of everything that I do online for quite sometime. In fact, it’s probably been on my radar for the past year.

Although I’ve launched various versions of personal websites for myself, I’ve never really taken the time to make one that I’m really happy with that has the powerful features I needed to do the things I want to do.

…until now!

I’ve created this Wordpress site to be the hub of everything I do online. Most of the people that know me are aware that I have a range of businesses I operate, but I wanted to have a single place online where I can share information about lessons I’m learning, plans I have, and also to interact with other entrepreneurs online.

I plan on doing a range of things with this site, including blog posts (obviously), video blog posts, webinars, online office hours (details soon), and much more. Using the WordPress platform will enable me quite a bit of flexibility which I’m happy with. I’ve been using WordPress on client sites for quite awhile and it’s going to be nice to have this type of flexibility on my own sites also. Things have just been so hectic that I hadn’t had time to setup my own WordPress site. Until now = )

Stay tuned for updates to the site and new features being launched.

Lots of new things to come soon…