Geotargeting Your SEO Campaign With Google Places

admin    Google Optimization     Campaign, Geotargeting, Google, Places

Geotargeting Your SEO Campaign With Google Places

Building a web presence highly depends on a web site being SEO friendly. However, there are a lot of individuals who aren’t necessarily aware of the importance surrounding search engine optimization in predetermined regions. The truth is; this is one of the critical pieces to your SEO marketing campaign. The benefit is being able to target visitors from designated locations and bring them to your web site.

If you’re not familiar with SEO geotargeting; it revolves around content that offers search engine optimization and then delivers it to web site visitors who happen to be in that particular location. This could be a country, region, state, city, community, zip code, or several other similar traits. The end result is organic SEO for your business.

You’ve probably noticed that hard copy phone books are a thing of the past. People are searching for business services online more than ever, which is where SEO geotargeting comes into play. This approach allows business and service listings the opportunity to be discovered through Google.com or maps without any effort.

One tool you can use is Google Places. This will help with search engine optimization, which will eventually provide more success. It’s a free service that literally puts you in front of millions of visitors. The only thing needed from you is the creation of a professional business listing.

Most people believe that listing something with Google Places is going to take up too much time and effort. Actually it’s quite simple, and it can all be done without a professional website. We imagine your company is already on Google somewhere, but it’s important to validate your listing. This is done by making sure the content is up to date and all the details of the service are correct. Once this section is verified you will start to see improvements.

All it takes for you to push your SEO campaign to the next level is by signing up. Soon there will potential customers coming by your website non-stop. They will be looking for local companies where your business name will be front and center. Best of all this will provide credibility, because Google is providing more than just the name of your company. What it comes down to is that this is an easy way to build trust without any face-to-face interaction.

When your listing is added to Google Place it will be easy for potential prospects to access your information. The most important part is it’s very user-friendly. So when those prospects are looking for your specific location they will have easy to follow directions and all your contact information handy.

Utilizing this type of tool in your SEO campaign could be a major step in the right direction. Suggestions have been made that when you include an actual address to a listing it will boost the confidence of those looking at the information. Even though this isn’t considered an undeniable fact, there have been reports that have shown success. The point is; it makes your website look legitimate.

In the end, if you are serious about the SEO campaigns for your business, search engine optimization and Google can help provide you with all the tools needed to be successful. One of the first areas to start is Google Places and geotargeting.

Google Places: Why It’s Important to Small Business

admin    Google Optimization     business, Google, Important, It's, Places, Small

Google Places: Why It’s Important to Small Business

Map search is the new local Yellow Pages and it’s a place where small businesses can shine. Together, Google Places and Google Maps represent the most exciting opportunity for small businesses ever.

Your small business probably already has a Google Place page: If you own a small business, whether you like it or not, Google has probably already mapped it in Google Maps and created a Google Places web page about it. Most of these Google Place pages have been populated with information harvested from all over the internet – often small businesses don’t realize that their customers have been talking about them on the web.

The Yellow Pages is dead:

At the same time that Google Places has been improving in functionality and data richness, there has been a decline in the popularity of the Yellow Pages. Some businesses have responded to this by reviewing their web sites in the hope their customers will find them using a standard Google Search. However, unless a customer’s search term is highly focused, businesses are unlikely to rank highly in Google search results. Google estimates that three-in-four people click on one of the top three search results and then search no further. This means that unless your business ranks in the top three search results then its unlikely to be clicked on.

Map search is the new local Yellow Pages and it’s a place where small businesses can shine: The good news can be found in another Google statistic – the one that says that one in five Google searches have local intent. This statistic makes Google Places very important to small business because the search competition is much lower for a Google Map search than it is for a Google Web search. For example, although a standard Google search for “cafe” will deliver results that at best will relate to the whole of the city the searcher is in, a Google Maps search for “cafe” will return results only for the map that’s currently on-screen, or on the basis of a location specified by the searcher (eg. café in Edithvale).

This means that the likelihood of your small business being found by your customers is much greater in Google Places. So, if you’re a cafe, you no longer need to compete with cafés on the whole of your city, just other cafés in your local area. Hence the relevance of an old saying that goes “when a lion is chasing you, you don’t need to be the fastest runner in the world, just faster than the person running next to you”!

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How to Optimize a Google Places Local Business Listing

admin    Google Optimization     business, Google, Listing, Local, Optimize, Places

How to Optimize a Google Places Local Business Listing

 Introduced in March 2004, Google Local displays local business information at the top of many of Google’s organic search results accompanied by a map. As of June 2010, Google Places listings consist of 1, 3 or 7 businesses for most searches. Considering that most localized searches provide millions of organic search results, showing in the top 7 of Google Places can be invaluable to a business.

Breaking into the top 7 takes knowledge and time and staying there takes effort. It all starts with claiming and optimizing your Google Places local business listing.

Visit Google and search for Google Places. Register for an account. Follow the bouncing ball until you can click on the button that says “Add a Business”.

As a quick aside, it is assumed that anyone who would read this knows that Google Places only allows one listing per phone number. While you can in fact create multiple listings with the same number and reap the benefit for a short time, eventually you’ll find that all of your listings have disappeared into the void. Don’t play games with Google Places. It isn’t worth the time and effort it takes to undo the damage should you cross the dozens of arbitrary, invisible boundaries that Google has in place to try to make the entire process “fair” for every business.

The first page of the submission form is mostly fill in the blank, but there are 3 important opportunities to optimize the listing.

Company/Organization: Choose your business name wisely. No one audits the listings to verify that the company name matches your incorporation documents, but be careful. If you company’s legal name is “Paul’s Professional Services, Inc.”, you need to carefully tweak it for the purposes of Google Places optimization. Two common methods are to add a keyword descriptor or your primary city. For example: “Paul’s Professional Painting Services” or “Paul’s Painting Services of Dallas”. Monkey with your company name too much using obviously manipulative methods for cramming keywords into the field and you’ll eventually find that your Google Places listing has been relegated to a black hole by Google. Typically, this is the direct result of your competition reporting your listing to Google. Simply conduct a Google search for “locksmith google spammers” and you’ll find some insight on why you do not want to get on the bad side of Google Places.

Description: Carefully craft a 200 character description of your business focusing almost exclusively on your key products and services. Do not waste space here for marketing speak such as “Proudly serving the DFW area since 1974″. Do not waste space here by including geographic references. The geography is almost entirely controlled by the city you list for your address. Inclusion of additional cities does virtually nothing when it comes to optimizing your Google Places listing.

For our hypothetical painting company, Paul’s Professional Services, an optimized description would go something like:

Residential and commercial painter specializing in interior and exterior painting. Services include wall painting, ceiling painting, textures, faux finishes and color matching. Free estimates.

Note that the example include not only the company’s top services, but also includes multiple uses of the primary keyword in various forms – “painting” and “painter” are the top two keywords in searches according to Google’s Keyword Tool. In addition, “free” is a top search word for virtually any search phrase.

It is important to remember that the description is designed to reach a broader search audience – not win awards on Madison Avenue. Keep it simple and include your top keywords. 200 characters is not a lot of room, so make sure not to waste space.

Category: Google Places requires the use of at least one standard category. Begin by typing your top keywords and choose the most relevant category. Google Places provides the ability to include 5 categories. Use them. If your top keywords are not standard categories, then use one or two closely related standard categories and use the remaining three slots for specific keywords.

For our hypothetical company, the categories might look something like:
Painter (Standard)
Painting Contractor (Top keyword search / Custom Category)
House Painter (Top keyword search / Custom Category)
Commercial Painter (Top keyword search / Custom Category)
Handyman (Standard, but an extremely popular related search term)

NEXT. Page Two of submission form.

The Service Areas and Location Settings options are relatively new and are designed to allow a business to establish a service area if the company does not have a storefront of some sort. Initially, choosing a service area (“Yes, this business serves customers at their locations”) appeared to hinder the optimization process. While the jury is still out, Google continues to tweak this feature. If in doubt, complete the option accurately for your business.

Business hours and payment options are purely optional and serve little if any value to the optimization process. Potential customers certainly will find the information useful.

Google Places provides the ability to add up to 10 photos and 5 videos (from YouTube.com). Make sure you always use keywords to name your photos and take advantage of the “tag” functions provided by YouTube.com. The impact on Google Places traffic is limited, but any impact is good.

Additional details: Google’s examples are virtually useless and very misleading. To optimize your listing, create a table of your key products and services using as many keywords as possible. Each detail consists of two fields with a maximum space of 200 characters each. An example of an effective use of these fields for our hypothetical company would be:

Interior & Exterior Painting Contractor specializing in: Wall painting, Ceiling painting, Floor staining, Epoxy Floor coatings, Texture paint finishes, faux finishes, color matching, proper surface preparation

The colon is the separator between the two fields. Include as many additional details about your company, your products and your services as possible.

Feel free to include service areas as one of the Additional Details for informational purposes, but do not expect it to cause your Google Places listing to show in those cities.
SUBMIT.

The new Google Places local business listing will not be active until verified. Usually, verification can be completed by triggering a phone call from Google’s computers to the phone number of record for the listing. In some instances, Google requires verification via a postcard mailed to the address of record for the listing. Postcards can take up to 5 weeks to arrive. Once verified, the real work begins.

Paul Dumas has provided Internet marketing, website design and SEO services to local businesses for over 13 years. He is founder and owner of Optimized Local Search Services. Additional articles related to local SEO and Internet trends for local business are available on the blog: http://optimizedlocalsearch.com/localsearchblog

Related Google Search Articles

Google’s New SERPs – Will Local Businesses Finally Get Off Their Butts and Get Google Places in Gear

admin    Google Optimization     Businesses., Butts, Finally, Gear, Google, Googles, Local, Places, Serps, their

Google’s New SERPs – Will Local Businesses Finally Get Off Their Butts and Get Google Places in Gear

When most people today assume of the Internet, they consider when it comes to the World Wide Web and all the content on all the pages from websites all over the globe that search engines crawl, index, rank and serve up in response to search queries from the millions and millions of people who carry out billions searches across the globe every single month.

But Internet search isn’t just for the benefit of persons seeking content from any source anyplace in the world. Quite a few individuals who use search engines essentially use them since they are seeking data about places close to where they live or work or strategy to go to.

The Significance of Local Net Search

Local Internet search has been alive and properly – and growing – for years now. Actually, based on data published on Google’s blog, about 20% of all Google searches have a local intent to them (that quantity rises to about 33% for Google searches by way of the mobile Net).

A Kelsey Group study kind May well 2010 observed that 97% of all consumers use the internet to find local company facts – of whom, 90% use a search engine.

Seekers of Local Details Take Action

Individuals who use search engines to uncover local enterprise info don’t search just for the sake of looking. They search for the sake of discovering. And when they come across, they take action, as a Nielsen Net Ratings-WebVisible study discovered:

70% will call the phone number on a web-site
60% have referred a business enterprise they found on the net to a friend
52% constantly or usually research on line very first, then follow up with an offline purchase from a local organization
14% will send a small business they found on-line an email
11% will fill out an on-line form
How do those conversions compare to your Yellow Pages listings, radio and TV advertisements, and direct mail campaigns?

Google’s New SERPs Display Integrated Search Results for Local Businesses

It really should be no surprise that search engine giant Google – ever obsessed with delivering a greater good quality search encounter for its end users – has been operating challenging on improving its local business search facility and outcomes for fairly some time now.

And this week, Google rolled a new version of its search engine outcomes pages (SERPs) that represent a important change within the way universal search results are displayed whenever the search engine detects implicit or explicit local intent to a search query.

The new SERPs have eliminated the Local Company 3-7-10 packs in favour of an integrated search result. The new search outcomes for local businesses now combine details traditionally displayed within the Net search outcomes listings (page title, page description, and URL) with facts previously displayed only within the Google Places Page listings (pushpin corresponding to locations on the map, buyer ratings, critiques, and link to the business’ Places Page).

The map that employed to appear to left of the Local Enterprise 3-7-10 pack listings has now moved to the right – directly above the vertical paid search outcomes. It has also been produced “sticky,” so it remains in view as you scroll down the page.

Consolidated Web/Local Ranking Algorithms Could have Implications

Importantly, according to a post on Search Engine Land, Google claims that the ranking algorithm for local/place search has been improved and refined. Moreover, the previously distinct local and Web search algorithms have now been merged or consolidated.

This could have important implications for businesses which have held, within the past, top rankings in Google’s local organization search outcomes and Google Maps.

Local Businesses Have Been Lagging Behind

Local businesses have been – to their detriment – slow to embrace Google Places (witness the fact that about 90% of the 50 million+ Google Places Pages that Google had designed in September 2009 had been unclaimed, according to the most recent obtainable information). As a result, businesses have forfeited top rankings – and Net and physical traffic that top rankings can drive – to competitors that have only had to create a modicum level of effort at Search engine optimization for their Places Pages.

Using the new SERP display, local company outcomes take on new prominence on the very first page of Google. No longer will they appear as some aberration at the top (or within the middle) of the search outcomes. Now they are the search results.

The Time is Correct to obtain Your Local Search Marketing Effort in Gear

If your business has enjoyed top rankings within the non-local organic search results – but has completed little or nothing with its cost-free Google Places Page – you could be in for a big surprise.

If, on the other hand, your business enterprise has been shut out of the top search outcomes – local or otherwise – the time is suitable for you to make some moves.

How To Optimize Your Google Places Listing

admin    Google Optimization     Google, Listing, Optimize, Places

How To Optimize Your Google Places Listing

These firms typically have a website, but don’t rank effectively in the search results simply because their web site becomes lost inside the search engine “Sandbox”, with little hope of digging their way out. Smallbusinesses that are looking to drive a lot more site visitors to their website, have a tremendous opportunity to advance their listings and get first page results making use of the Yahoo and Google Maps Platform. Google Maps (also known as Google Places), supply small| business owners the ability to get their organization noticed on the web, by way of Geo-targeted Investigation.

In optimizing your small business| profile, Google Maps will bring your company initial page exposure by displaying native results to search users based on location. If your internet site is already getting sufficient listings on the search engine results pages, the local| business listing will build increased exposure for your organization. Your Google Places Listing| can offer driving directions, company info, operating hours and quite a few other distinctive features for your potential consumers.

Small companies can build their company listing in Google Maps by searching for Google| Places (formally Local Business Center) navigating to the site and creating a free account.

Make certain to fill out all of the offered categories in order to far better maximize your listings potential. The more accurate your details is, the more success you will see from your listing. Make positive to fill out all the info you can.

Your Google Places listing ought to have the same business name, address and telephone number as the information that appears on your business internet site. Attempt to prevent using 800 numbers, as they negatively impact the listing. 800 numbers might be added as an extra phone number, but attempt to provide a regular number as your primary point of contact.

Google only allows its Places users to create a single profile for their enterprise. If your company has multiple locations, you’ll be able to add this information using the “list of area’s served” section of the Google Places profile. Again, accuracy in this section will provide far better final results for your profile as it’s served on the Google Maps Platform.
These consist of images and video. You should also create coupons and add weekly specials to the profile as nicely. The far more data you supply Google, the better they can index you, thus driving much more traffic and far more qualified visitors to your website.

Filling out your Google Places business profile is just the start of your local internet marketing campaign. If your business is not very competitive, you may possibly be lucky enough to rank high in the search benefits for local business listings, just from filling out your profile information alone. But more competitive industries will need additional effort and optimization.

Encourage your consumers and clients to write testimonial style opinions for your company in the “review section” of your listing. Google will also populate your listing profile with reviews from evaluation websites such as Yelp and Kudzu as well. Employing these aforementioned tactics, integrated with a local SEO and Internet marketing campaign is one of the greates methods to improve targeted traffic to your web site and advance your small business’ Internet success.

To find out more about Google Places Optimization vistit the Searchtech website.

See the Value Google Places on Your Page

admin    Google     Google, Page, Places, Value

Do you want to do a Google rank check?  Google’s page rank is a patented algorithm.  Google considers more than half a billion variables when determining your rank on the search results.

No one person knows what all of these variables are – not even the person who oversees the code.  So, anyone claiming to be a Google rank check authority should be viewed with caution.

Still, there are some things we do know about how page rank works.

Google flat out says that pages they believe are important get a higher page rank than others.  Pages with higher rank tend to appear higher in the search results, though you will see page rank 5 pages occasionally ranking higher than page rank 7 pages for a specific search.

Google also sees the links on a page acting as a “vote” for other pages.  So, if a highly ranked page links to your site, you get more “juice” out of it than when a friend with no page rank links to your site.

Most experts agree that backlinks from .gov and .edu sites to have higher link juice than other top level domains because they are restricted to not for profit sites.

One way to get .edu links is to take out online ads on college newspaper sites.

But, any links from PR 2 or higher sites can help your page rank.  One way to get links is to post comments on with decent page rank.  But make sure that Google “follows” the links on the page first.  Some webmasters set their sites up so that you don’t get any link juice from your posts.  You can do this by downloading free software on the internet.

Other ideas for increasing page rank include:

· Join forums and post a link back to your website in your signature.  Every time you make a post, you’ll get link juice.

· Submit your site to directories.  Each directory which lists you will give you more of a chance of being listed higher in Google’s search results.

· Add an ezine to your site.  Not only will this allow you to keep up with the people who visit your site, but you can also post information about your ezine to ezine directories.

· Publish articles on the article sites.  You can drive traffic to your sites this way.  But, high PR article sites also give you link juice.

· Create a sitemap on your website.  This lets Google know how to index your page.

· Link to other pages within your web site.  Putting links to the internal pages within the web site allows you to increase your link juice.

· Continue building pages within your site.  Every page you create and link back to your home page increases the strength of your home page’s PR.
To do a Google rank check, you can install the Google toolbar to your Firefox browser.  The tool is at http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html -This will give you the page rank of every page you visit.

A Google rank check will allow you to know how your site is faring compared to similar sites.