Blue Wave Concept's Blog

Local search queries— those including a specific geographic location — are becoming immensely important in website marketing.

Not only are local listings gaining valuable real estate on the search results pages, locally focused websites are appearing with more frequency for nonspecific search phrases as well, thanks in part to Google Instant and the real-time nature of today’s Web. So what can you do to leverage this growth?

Hopefully you have already 1) claimed your business listing and/or submitted your website to online services like Google Places and Yelp.com, among the many others (listed here — http://wsm.co/9EgJ6p), 2) promoted your website and brand on social destinations like Facebook and Twitter, and 3) become involved with location-aware applications like Foursquare and Gowalla.

All of these channels present excellent ways of getting local search traffic to your website. But often overlooked are the factors that influence how profile pages from these Web services are returned to users. Actively optimizing local search profiles improves search engine rankings and the chances that your website will appear in the first few positions on local query results.

About Profile Optimization
While not technically a page on your website, claiming and validating local listings on Google, Bing and Yahoo! can drive high-quality, targeted traffic and help your site rank higher within local search results. While unclaimed local listings can sometimes outrank claimed local listings, it is still vital to claim your profiles as it gives you complete control of what is displayed to users and prevents someone else from claiming your listings (and reputation).

Here are the major ranking factors to consider when building your local search engine pages:

Location (Address): Does your business address need to be in the actual city of the search query to rank? For the most part, yes, particularly if you are located in a large city. There are some exceptions for smaller towns — if there are not enough matches then the search engine may take results from neighboring towns. But your business’ physical location is a major ranking factor when it comes to local search. Make sure to include as much information as possible, including longitudinal and latitudinal data.

Business Category: Make sure your business is categorized correctly — if secondary category choices are available, select a few over time to see which ones positively influence your position and traffic.

Business Name: Consider your business name the

Citations: Citations are when your business is mentioned (but not necessarily linked to) elsewhere on the Web. Citations are like links, in that the more you have the better. Citations build trust with the search engines and give you a boost when it comes to ranking, especially with Google Maps. You can see your citations on your Google Places page under “What people are saying about”. Check out the competition and make sure you make an attempt to get citations from the same or related sources.

Reviews and Ratings: Not only will good reviews and ratings have a positive effect on your local listing ranking, it will also help the click-through rate of your listing. Encourage existing clientele to submit reviews and ratings and reward them when they do.

Complete Profiles: Take time to fill out your local business profile pages completely. Add business hours, payment options and craft a well-written description of your business. Even add pictures and videos if you have them. Also, be sure that the information on your local listing pages is consistent across all directories.

Remember to claim and submit your website to the primary local providers (http://wsm.co/9EgJ6p) and test different profile information combinations to see what influences return list position and website traffic. While often tedious to complete and validate (and for some, to create unique landing pages for each business location), these efforts will more than pay for themselves in the form of quality local traffic.

Imagine if someone were rifling through your Rolodex, calling all of your contacts. That would be illegal, of course, because your information is private.

However, because the Internet is open, you can now see every keyword that your competitors are using for both pay-per-click (PPC) and SEO. With this information, you can know exactly what is working for them, allowing you to simply copy and paste only their most successful keywords into your own campaigns.

I had a hard time believing it myself … but it’s true. And it works.

Let’s start with the basics. Keyword research is the process of discovering the actual search terms people type into search engines when browsing online. People are generally doing one of two things on the Internet: looking for information about something, or seeking to buy something. As Internet marketers, it is those who are looking to buy goods or services that we want to connect with most.

Keywords that indicate a high level of interest in buying are called keywords with high commercial intent. To discover these keywords and phrases, a free tool is available from Microsoft.

For example, type in the phrase “Dodge Caravan”, and the tool will tell you that there is a 95-percent chance that the user is looking to buy something. On the other hand, type in “blue clouds” and the result comes back with a 71-percent chance that the user is not looking to make a purchase.

Next is the long-tail keyword. This refers to a phrase made from very specific words. For example, “how to eliminate student loan debt,” is a long-tail keyword. Because there are more words, there is less search traffic for these keywords and thus fewer bids — making them cheaper to buy for PPC advertising

Individually, long-tail keywords make up a small portion of Internet searches. But when taken as a whole, they can provide significant traffic to your site that is highly targeted. They also make you a subject-matter expert for the search engines, since the long-tail terms strengthen the theme created by broader phrases.

Conducting long-tail keyword research is important because these users are usually further along in the buying cycle, resulting in higher conversions.

Geographic Targeting
Depending on what you sell, it is important to include geographic locations in your keyword research. For example, “homes for rent Miami”, “Chicago glass repair” and “Richmond Italian restaurants” all provide important qualifiers for local products and services.

Another important consideration is the ratio of keyword supply to keyword demand. Keyword demand is the number of times a keyword is searched by people in the most recent month. Keyword supply is the number of Web pages that contain that specific keyword or phrase.

“What you want to do is find keywords for your niche that have a high number of searches and a low number of pages with those search terms on them,” says Gina Gaudio-Graves, president of Directions University and 30DayIMChallenge.com, an Internet marketing university for entrepreneurs. “For example, I recently found out that the term ‘hypnosis CD’ has over 40,000 searches a month, but only 20 organic website competitors there to meet the demand. This means that there’s a huge opportunity in both pay-per-click and SEO for this term.”

The keyword research tools currently available allow you to see your competitors’ PPC ads as well as how long they have been running. Most offer a limited free trial. In addition, you will get access to your competitors’ SEO data. If you see that a competitor has been running the phrase, “DUI attorney Tucson” for the last six months, that can be a good indication that the keyword is converting profitably for that business. You can also discover and copy your top competitors’ ad structure and keyword-ad and landing page-copy combinations.

Keyword research is broken down into three basic stages:

Stage 1: Creating Your List
Stage 2: Finalizing Your List
Stage 3: Taking Action

Creating Your List
A common misconception about keywords is that you already know what terms a customer will use to find your site or PPC ad. By putting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you will quickly discover how many users are conducting searches for that term on a daily basis, and how many of those searches are converting to sales. You will also discover synonyms of which you were not previously aware but could prove very valuable.
Knowing your competitors’ data tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term organically, or how much money you will need to spend to be successful in PPC.

There are two questions to ask when making these decisions:

1) How many other sites are competing for the same keyword?
2) How strong are those sites’ rankings? Or, How many other sites link to those sites? and How many pages do they have indexed?

This information can be found for free by plugging your competitors’ websites into the Yahoo! Site Explorer tool. Knowing the answers to these questions will offer a good indication of the competitive nature of your selected keywords and phrases.

Finalizing Your List
Create a spreadsheet that allows you to easily see each word’s conversion rate, search volume and competition rate, as provided by the keyword research tool you use. These three figures allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your SEO and/or PPC campaigns.

The first step in narrowing your list is to highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your website or advertisement. These are the terms that you want to keep. Delete all words that are not relevant to your site or that you do not have sufficient content to support. You can not optimize for words with no supporting content. Create a mix of both long-tail and targeted keywords — you will need both to rank well for SEO and convert with PPC.

Taking Action
After compiling a final list of 20 to 30 highly focused keywords, it’s time to prepare them for launch.

If you did your keyword research correctly, some of the words on your list should already appear in your site’s content. Begin thinking about how many pages you will need to create to support new keywords, and how and where these keyword phrases will be used.

Current best practices for SEO recommend optimizing for three or four related keywords per page. Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you will rank for nothing. Simply work the keywords into your pages naturally and avoid over-repetition, which can be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never sound forced.

Your on-page content isn’t the only place where you can insert keywords, however. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site, such as title tags, meta description tags, headings, alt text, and anchor text/ navigational links.

Keyword research can be a fun project as you discover all of your competitors’ top converting keywords and plug them directly into your own PPC or SEO campaigns. If you take your time and go through the tutorials that the keyword research sites offer, you may end up like my friend Sarkin who has the number one Google spot for 90,000 keywords. Of course, this success did not come without significant effort — he’s been at it for 20 years.

About the Author: Mike Evans is Director of U.S. Sales and Marketing for KeywordSpy. com, a PPC and SEO research firm that tracks more thank 127,000,000 keywords.

This week, we’re making two new feature enhancements to our view-through conversion reporting to help you more effectively measure the ROI of your display campaigns on the Google Content Network. View-through conversion reporting, which we launched last year, helps you measure the conversions that result from users who have seen but not clicked on your display ads. The enhancements we’re making will allow you to customize this reporting to better fit your needs.

Customizable view-through conversion window. You’ll be able to set a custom range for the window of time for which you’d like view-through conversions reported. Previously, this window was set to 30 days, meaning we reported on the number of view-through conversions that occurred up to 30 days after a user saw your ad. Now, you’ll be able to customize this time-frame, based on what makes sense for your product or service. For example, if you’re a local pizza shop looking for users to download a coupon and order a pizza, users will generally respond to your ad within a day or two after seeing it. In this case, you might set a reporting window that’s much shorter than if you were an auto dealership, for example, as it may take several weeks before a user schedules a test-drive, given the a longer sales cycle for automobiles.

De-duplication of search conversion reporting. In addition, you’ll also have the option to exclude reporting for view-through conversions that are duplicated across both the Search and Content Networks. If you enable this feature, we will exclude from your view-through conversion reports conversions that come from users who have also clicked your search ads. These conversions will only be attributed to your search ads.

If you decide to apply these settings for your campaigns, please note that they will affect data moving forward in your account.

We believe these improvements will make view-through conversion reporting more accurate and actionable for you. If you’re using view-through conversion tracking today, we recommend you evaluate these two new options and implement them based on your needs. However, try to avoiding flipping back and forth between enabling and disabling these settings as this can muddy the usefulness of your campaign metrics.

If you’re advertising using display ads on the Google Content Network, but are new to view-through conversion tracking, we encourage you to implement it to more effectively track the ROI of your display campaigns. Remember, display ads often drive performance beyond immediate clicks and conversions, like from users who may visit your site and make a purchase after seeing your display ad, even if they haven’t clicked. Learn more in our Help Center.

Over the past few months there has been a major rush of advertisers heading to Facebook and throwing their marketing budget against the wall to see if they stick. (See Sponsored Crops in Famville) With Facebook becoming the most visited site, beating out Google, it seems only natural that advertisers would begin to flock. So where do you get more bang for your buck? Search engines or social media sites?

Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of advertising on Facebook:

Advantages:

Ability to display advertising to your target market based on demographics (age, sex, marital status) location, information in profile etc…
Ability to set up Fan Pages for your company at no cost
Provides companies with an outlet to communicate directly with current and potential customers
News feed feature can help spread information on your business virally
Disadvantages:

Users are not solely looking for a product or service when visiting site
Focus of users attention is not on ads, focused on pictures, comments, games etc…
Users are at multiple stages of the purchasing cycle and you cannot target your ads accordingly
There is no doubt Facebook can be an effective marketing tool, companies like Kenshoo and Marin would have not just announced plans to have their software manage Facebook advertising if it wasn’t. But when comparing it to search engine marketing it does not stack up.

Why?

When you head to a search engine like Google, why do you go there? You are searching for an answer, a product or service or at very least researching a product or service. You have the ability to cover multiple sections of the purchasing cycle. You ads can be displayed when a potential customer is just researching a product and you can also be visible when a potential customer is ready to make a purchase.

Let’s look as some of the advantages and disadvantages of advertising on Google:

Advantages:

Searchers are looking for a product/service or answer
Ads can be tailored to show at certain times of the purchasing cycle
Easy to use interface and extensive reporting available
Able to understand ROI and track performance easily
Disadvantages:

Besides ad or info under organic link – limited ability to communicate with client
Both SEO and SEM can be complicated and the average marketer does not understand
If outsourced, SEO and SEM can become very expensive
There are many unethical SEO and SEM agencies – finding a quality one is tough

While visitors to search engines are looking for products/services or answers users on Facebook are quite different. People head to Facebook to look at pictures or their friends, stalk X-girlfriends and waste time playing Farmville and other games. People do not head to Facebook to make purchases.  With Facebook’s targeting capabilities you can show your advertisements to your exact target market. But if that user is more concerned about writing a funny wall post then they are your advertisements, is it really affective?

A combination of SEO and SEM also does quite well at driving qualified leads – think about it. A potential customer heads to a search engine and searches something related to your businesses. They then select your ad or organic listing because it was most relevant to what they were looking for.

It will be interesting to watch both search engines and social media sites evolve over the next few years. Both industries will direct compete with each other as the mainstays of internet marketing.

Justin Freid is a Paid Search and SEO Consultant based out of Philadelpia. Justin currently works as the SEM Manager at ClickEquations, a Paid Search Software company. You can follow Justin on Twitter at @Justin_Freid or ask him questions on his internet marketing forum.

Google™ recently updated its search engine index—the way it collects and stores data for retrieval—in a big way. Though Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm (i.e., a set of rules about how to deliver results), its newest update, “Caffeine,” is worth the interest of the small business website owner. Search engine experts have noticed that Caffeine results have been gradually showing up over the last month, and you may have already noticed a change in site traffic as a result.

Caffeine got its name because it finds and delivers results faster, as if it just had a few shots of espresso. Considering that Google is also showing more page results and discovering more relevant sites on the Internet, this is quite a feat. This update is also designed to retrieve more relevant search results for the end user and to find newsworthy (or “temporal”) results. Once Google finds these temporal results, it places them in its index faster.

How does the Caffeine algorithm update affect you? The results can be seen as both positive and negative, but overall it’s good news for people who take the time to make their websites search engine friendly. The algorithm values relevance and does a better job of associating keywords, so if you have descriptive content on your site, you may find that your rankings have improved.

The downside of the Caffeine update is that Google may be doing a better job finding pages on your competitors’ sites, and many of those pages may be considered to be more relevant than they were in the past. When you stop to consider that results on Google Caffeine test servers showed millions of extra search results for some queries, this means that you may have to work harder to stand out in the crowd. Additionally, an update that values “fresh” content may require a more active level of maintenance on behalf of the site owner. So making changes—or frequently contributing to an on-site blog—may be recommended.

What can you do to make your site more visible in light of Google’s Caffeine architecture changes? For starters, you can:

• Update the content on your site to include common synonyms of what you sell or what services you provide.
• If you serve a local area, make sure that your top cities, towns, suburbs, and communities are referenced on your most important site pages.
• You may also want to invest in local or national search optimization initiatives that send more links to your site from other sources or that reference your site from phone directories and local resources.
• Since Google still relies on links to determine the relative value of websites, make sure your site content is adequately referenced by other sources. Web.com even sells a website promotion package that will get you started.

Overall, the reaction to the rollout of the Caffeine update has been positive. Because the update prefers relevant results, small business owners are benefitting, and Google is getting better at showing local results for local searches. Therefore, websites that only service a limited area may have the advantage in their own neighborhoods. For sites that may have moved down a few spots over the past few weeks, this is the perfect time to spruce up site content with fresh and newsworthy information. Over time, you may not only reclaim your old results, but also jump ahead in the search engine rankings list.

Dentists—and doctors of all types—should drill down on these tips for writing healthy ad copy

Ah, the dentist. We put it off, we brush furiously to avoid it, but sooner or later we all wind up seeking out the man—or woman—in white.

When it comes to finding dental help, the Internet has made the thing easier, bringing local dentist info out of the yellow pages and onto our computer screens. But like anything else you search for online, there are a lot of possibilities out there. Dentists have to compete for attention online by creating strong search results that stand out and catch the eyes of users.

Given that, here are some tips that can help our dental advertisers put a polish on their search campaigns:

Get to the point
Ads for dentist offices (and all ads, really) should be direct and to the point, avoiding slogans, jargons and claims to fame. Lines like “We provide miles of smiles” may sound cute, but they don’t really explain what services you offer, and worse, they take up valuable real estate in your ad copy. Likewise, stuff like “As seen on WKTV local news” doesn’t have as strong an impact as titles and descriptions that clearly and precisely explain who you are and what you offer.

Additionally, we’ve noticed that specific dentist names don’t matter much to users. Rather than use up space by listing doctor names or degrees, dental advertisers should consider using that space to explain the services they offer, as well the location they service.

Please, think of the children
If you offer dental services to kids and your keywords are child-specific (i.e., “child dentist”) then your titles and descriptions should focus on children, even if you also serve adults. Make sure your “child” info comes early in your ad copy, because anyone searching on child dental keywords will absolutely be looking for it.

Also, make sure your ads for children keywords make sense for children. Ads for “children’s dentist” may flounder if they’re full of references to tooth whitening, dental implants or other services that children generally don’t need. Lastly, make sure that your ad copy doesn’t clash with the keyword. People may be deterred if they search on “kid dentist” and get back a result that offers things like “sexy smiles.”

Pinpoint your location
Since the majority of dental advertisers offer local services, it’s a good idea to mention your service area in your titles and descriptions, even if your ads are already geo-targeted to that area. However, make sure that your service area is clear to users: If you live in a highly recognizable city, that’s easy enough, but if the city you work out of is lesser known, simply listing that city name may deter users who aren’t familiar with it. Adding a state name or the name of a more recognizable city that’s close by may help users place your location.

And, as always…
All types of advertisers should use keyword insertion to make sure that users’ keywords appear in your ad copy, as well as alt text to make sure that they appear just the way you want them. Write ads in sentence form and avoid “shopping list” copy that simply lists the services you offer. Avoid redundant or repeated words that make ads read poorly. Don’t use abbreviations that aren’t typically well known; abbreviating words just to save space may confuse and deter users. Simply put, make your titles and descriptions concise, to the point, and clearly indicative of who you are and what you’re offering.

In the end, your ads are a lot like your teeth: A little maintenance and care will help keep them in great shape. So when you have a chance, give your ads the check-up they deserve.

Yahoo! media event spotlights search innovation

Because we’re constantly working to make the search experience more relevant, we also want the world to understand what we’re up to in the search business. That’s why today we hosted a media event, SearchSpeak 2010, to help the media know what’s going on.

The event, at our Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters, featured our new senior VP of search products, Shashi Seth, David Pann, VP of search advertising, and a slew of other executives. Shashi told the audience about consumer search innovations, and talked about the importance of search to Yahoo!, even in light of our potential partnership with Microsoft. “Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in the future,” Shashi said. “We’ll continue to drive innovation. It’s our stake in the ground.”

David talked about our latest innovations in paid search, including our network distribution feature and the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop. “We’re focused on three key areas for advertising,” David said: “Better value, transparency and control, and innovation.”

Here’s an example of what the press is saying about Yahoo! search after today’s event:

All Things Digital: “[They debuted] a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-a-Sketch type drawing technology–using fingers and not keywords–to help users find stuff.”

USA Today: “Yahoo executives are spending most of this morning outlining the company’s ambitious search plans.”

Dow Jones Newswires: “A senior Yahoo Inc. executive said Wednesday that the Web giant hasn’t exited the Internet search market, despite the company’s decision to strike a search pact last year with Microsoft Corp.”

TechCrunch: “Yahoo has been in search, is in search, and will continue to be in the future.”

Mashable: “The point seems to be: ‘We’re a pretty damn good search engine, you can’t ignore us!’ And in many respects, they’re right.”