ElementsDaily

Over this last weekend Google engineers rolled out a new “OneBox” search result format.  A OneBox appears any time a Google search includes enough information about a local business for Google to determine that one business in particular is the result that searcher is looking for.  Prior to this last weekend, the OneBox result was listed at the very top of the Google result screen with a map on the left and a link to the businesses’ website on the right.  See the image to the right:

A OneBox result is a prize listing that most SEO experts shoot for as it highlights one specific listing above all others.  This latest change to the OneBox makes that listing stand out even more as the business website listing for the OneBox now appears above the local map.

Now you might be wondering why merely changing the location of the resulting map and link to the businesses’ website would make any impact at all.  Well, there are a couple of reasons.  The first is that prior to the change only Google Places information appeared below the business link including the standard fare of the address, the phone number, hours of operation and links to the Google Places reviews should there be any.  Now inside of the OneBox just below the URL to the company’s website Google is displaying the description meta-tag for the company which is normally stuffed with calls to action to entice users to click through.

The other benefit for listings in the new OneBox format is that Google has now redefined the fold of the page.  When a surfer looks at any website, the top half of the screen is what will catch their eye and entice them into action.  Links above the fold will draw far more attention and clicks than anything below the fold where the surfer is required to scroll down to get to the content below.  It is reported that links above the fold receive 80% of the surfer’s clicks.  So by pushing the company’s website link & meta-description above the map, Google has helped push more links below the visible page and arguably created a new visual fold line at the bottom of the graphical map.  In doing so, Google is inferring that there is only one link on the result page that should matter.

Ok, but that’s only affecting the OneBox results which are very specific searches, correct?  Indeed, but over the July 4^th weekend Google rolled out a test of a re-designed 7-Pack (7 local listings to the left of a map in a general search result) in which the map was moved to the right margin and Google listed the website’s meta description below the URL.  What does this mean?  It means the 7-Pack visually becomes a 3-pack as lower results are forced off of the bottom of the page (image courtesy of: Linda Buquet http://www.catalystemarketing.com/ ).  No one outside of Google knows if this new 7-Pack will become a permanent feature in Google or when it will be put in place.  What we do know is that obtaining high placements in Google’s local search results is becoming more and more critical to a website’s success.

More often than not, people want to ‘buy local’ if they can find local. Customers might want to support their local stores just to keep money in their community, support businesses that help out the local community, get their hands on a product immediately and sometimes people just don’t want to pay for shipping. But in order for potential customers to ‘buy local’ they first need to know about your business and that’s where a strongly branded local website can work wonders.

Below you’ll find seven strategies that ELEMENTS has implemented to bring local traffic to local websites with great success. This list is a basic primer of best practices for local online strategies that both small and medium sized businesses can use to jump start their own local campaigns.

Build Your Website

Obviously you need a website. What’s not obvious to first time business owners is how to build a website that users will want to come back to once they have found your site the first time.

Simple is Ok. There’s no reason to create a mega-site with more pages than you have content. Start with just a handful of pages that include important information about your business like hours, location, types of services or products and be sure to include a bit of personality in your pages to give a potential customer a glimpse of your company’s culture. Get a good designer to make a website that is easy to navigate, has good typography and exhibits optimal image placement as all of these are vital to keeping web surfers on your site once they have found it.

Optimize for Your City

Search engines like Google are putting greater emphasis on local results. That means if a surfer types in the word “haircut” the search engine determines the surfer’s geographic location and then displays a result of businesses relatively close to where that surfer currently is that give haircuts. Those local results are your target so let’s make sure the search engines know where your site is located.

There are two ways to best optimize your website for local results. The first is something a lot of people do without even thinking of the benefits, which is including your physical location on each and every page of your website. Another very valuable way to achieve good local search engine results is to include the name of your city actually in the domain itself (i.e. denvercomfortinn.com).

Get Listed

Getting your physical address added to online directories is a step many local businesses tend to skip because they are worried about it being difficult. It’s not that bad. To get your site listed in Google Places just go to http://google.com/local/add/ and click the word “add”. See that wasn’t that bad. Now go do the same exact thing to Yahoo! Local & Yellowpages.com. Now, your phone number and address will appear on their maps and business listings.

Add a Google Map

One of the main goals behind your local online strategy is to get customers to your store. So why not make it easy for them to do so by adding a Google map with directions on how to get to your location right on your website. Your website designer should be able to integrate this into your existing website and as it’s really not that difficult it shouldn’t take them very long.

Interact With Your Customers

Social media is the latest buzz in online marketing, but there’s a reason for that, it works. Interactive tools like Facebook and company blogs allow you to interact directly with your customers to provide customer service, expose your company’s culture and offer up incentives to bring customers back in. Having a slow business day? Use Twitter to tweet out some immediate incentives to drive customers back to your door immediately. Keeping up with customers does take some effort, but your business will be better for it because people like to buy from businesses they trust.

Watch Your Stats

Even if you aren’t running a local campaign, watching your traffic statistics is critically important. From your stats you will get information on how visitors are finding your website and what they are doing once they get there which will allow you to make data driven decisions about your website. Is there a specific native dialect near your location and are you using it effectively? What keywords & phrases are working and which ones need to be pruned? These are questions that only your traffic statistics answer.

Go Offline

This is probably the best advice anyone can give you about your online local business strategy, get out there and be part of the community. Mingle with customers, join service organizations or support a local athletic team. These kinds of efforts don’t go unnoticed. You will gain contacts who can offer referrals to your website, turn contacts into followers of your social media campaigns and when you receive recognition for being a good citizen your website’s domain name can sit right there below your physical address.

These tips will drive more local customers to your website which is good because people want to ‘buy local’ if they can find local.

It’s funny, sometimes I crack open the old blog editor to write a post about a topic and end up writing about something completely different.  That’s what happened today.  While I was researching the use of using permanent redirects I stumbled upon a recent interview with Matt Cutts who happens to be Google’s mouthpiece to the SEO world.  In that interview Matt Cutts says something pretty poignant which pretty much verified what had long been suspected, which was that 301 permanent redirects do not transfer all of their PR(Page Rank) to the new designated page or website.

“That’s a good question, and I am not 100 percent sure about the answer. I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural Page Rank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).”

Sometimes there is a need to move content from one area of your website to another or you might even need to change your whole domain when you receive a cease & desist order from an attorney.  I myself have even used 301 redirects on my own sites when I went from shtml pages with ssi calls in them to php pages. 

So now that we know that there is at least some loss of PR when using a 301 redirect should we just leave the old page where it is and create new pages in the right place?  Well that’s a thought, but lets look at another point Matt Cutts makes about 301 redirects in that interview.

“Typically, duplicate content is not the largest factor on how many pages will be crawled, but it can be a factor. My overall advice is that it helps enormously if you can fix the site architecture upfront, because then you don’t have to worry as much about duplicate content issues and all the corresponding things that come along with it. You can often use 301 Redirects for duplicate URLs to merge those together into one single URL.”

See this is why mothers should not let their babies grow up to be SEO guys.  If we absolutely need to move content we either end up losing some of our existing PR on a 301 redirect to the new content or we leave the old content in place and risk a duplicate content penalty which Matt Cutts confirms could be a factor in how many pages on our site gets crawled.

What I take away from that interview is that we should not have duplicate content on our pages and we should really 301 redirect pages with content that needs to be moved to their respective new pages at the cost of some of our PR.  I guess that means that we should have bullet proof plans for our website layout prior to launching anything, but as anyone who has been in the traffic generation business can tell you adaptating to new strategies is paramount to maintaining success.

Ok, so I’m not actually a mad scientist bent on ruling the world, but the title of the article intrigued you enough to read this far, right? Well, that was the whole point of the title. If you follow the cool kids in the SEO game then you already know that one of the best ways to increase your rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) is by getting as many offsite links pointing to your website as possible. That increases your perceived popularity which is a major determining factor in your rankings. Those SEO cool kids use linkbait to draw in as many inbound links as possible, but very few of them will tell you exactly what linkbait is and why it is so important to their website’s success.  Most likely they don’t want anymore competition than they already have.

Quite simply, linkbait is content placed on a website that will offers something worth linking to. A few excellent examples of linkbaits are super-nifty flash games like Radioactive Teddy Bear Zombies, something controversial like KFC Sells “Cancer-Linked Food” to Fight Breast Cancer or something inane and humorous like Britney Spears’ Father Mandates Bra on Public Outings…and you thought my title was a bit overboard?  Ok, but each example linkbait web page was built to draw in those precious links, and look at that it worked because I linked to them in this article just now.

But how many of you actually read the full article or played the flash game on the websites in question?  Here’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter.  Those websites could get linked to by their titles alone.  Content may be king, but titles draw links, which lead to more traffic pointing to that indexed content; and as I pointed out, they don’t have to be great titles at all just titillating.

What I’m trying to get at here is that titles are an important form of linkbait because they can bring in links and thereby increase your website’s search engine rankings.  For more information on title creation check out Jeremy LaDuque’s 5 Tips for Effective Titles.

That space underneath your name in LinkIn is your “Professional Headline”. If you’re like most people who simply put their job title and company in that space, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to pitch yourself and the company you represent. Your “Professional Headline” is one of the most important pieces of information on your profile because it shows up whenever people search for you and after any discussion you participate in. Use this space to include a much abbreviated version of your elevator speech or to include your company’s tagline .