Archive for the ‘Local Search’ Category
Blogging as a Content Strategy for Local SEO? – You’re Doing it Wrong!
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011I just read a great post by Yousaf Sekander, a local SEO colleague based in the UK. He was speaking about the conundrum faced by many small businesses who’s expertise is in running their business, not in being a blogger and spewing out content to satisfy the search engines and that silly internet mantra of “content is king”.
Think about it, what is the prerequisite of being a good locksmith or a mechanic or a painter decorator? Is the prerequisite being “good content” creators? I don’t think so.
I know this is an issue many small local business owners struggle with. I’ve had this conversation over and over with clients. They don’t know where to start with blogging, nor are they sure they have the time. Not to mention the fact that they get inundated with bad advice on the topic of how to blog for their business.
Now, I originally was going to write this as a comment on Yousaf’s post but it got long winded and I felt it deserved to be a full blog post instead. It’ll also illustrate my point better as a stand alone post. Read on.
Hello – You’re Blogging to the Wrong People
Where most local businesses fail on content generation (additional blog content – not the home page, services, about us, and contact pages) is targeting the wrong audience.
Take the locksmith example. Typical blog posts you’ll often see might be things like;
- 5 things to ask before hiring a locksmith
- How to recognize a reputable locksmith
- The Chicago locksmiths people trust most is AAA Locksmiths, LLC
- just another self promotional fluffy fluff blog post, powered by wordpress
What these locksmiths, or their hired gun seo’s, don’t realize is NOBODY CARES. Really they don’t. You see the same crappy stuff over and over from plumbers, lawyers, or just about any local business trying to go down the content creation route. Boring topics. Crappy writing. Keyword stuffing. They’re just doing it wrong.
Don’t blog to customers, they don’t care. Is your average Joe local customer gonna come back and read a locksmith’s, or plumber’s blog again and again? Will they subscribe to the RSS feed for that? Pfft! Fat chance of that.
Who Then is Your Blog Audience?
I tell most my clients, those that are thinking about going down the blogging road, the blog should be a separate portion of the site and is primarily NOT a marketing channel. Instead it is an authority building tool that should be directed to their peers, not their customers.
Blog about the industry you are in. Trends, changes, challenges in marketing, hiring, taxation, regulations, education, etc… It is the professional development arm of your website. Engage primarily with others in your industry (maybe not those in your immediate competitive local, but that rule is not set in stone).
This kind of approach will make that locksmith a better locksmith and a better business person through information exchange with others in the same industry. It’ll foster link building far better than the crappy self promotional blogging that nobody wants to link to, at least not naturally link to. Others in your industry who are blogging, serious industry blogging not crappy self promo blogging, can be engaged, linked too, and they may link back as well. Industry level controversies may get covered by the press. If you’re at the forefront of blogging about those issues you may get a mention, and possibly a link from a local, regional, state or even national newspaper, or a prominent industry website, or even government website.
I stumbled across a rather stellar example of this recently. The people at Energy Vanguard, an HVAC training, consulting and design firm in Decatur, GA are doing a top notch job of blogging about technical issues and standards for high performance and energy efficient home cooling and heating. Their home page is a common Page Rank 3 yet their blog page is a PR5 – that’s link authority for you!
Look at a few of their posts and check out whose commenting – other HVAC professionals from around North America. Look at the content of the posts. Often quite technical stuff – not quite what the average homeowner in need of a new HVAC system needs, or even wants, to actually know. And it’s working for them. Check out what they wrote about blogging over the past year and half, what they learned and how it’s been great for business.
Freshness is a Stale SEO Tactic
I hear fresh content mentioned as an SEO factor far too often. I don’t believe it! Well, not entirely.
A new blog post can get some extra ranking love for its freshness, but freshness wears off – rather quickly. And that blog post is not ranking for the primary search terms customers are using to find a local business. In the case of a locksmith, or any other kind of local business (landscaper, painter, lawyer, dentist, plumber, restaurant, etc…..) it is usually the home page of the website that is ranking for these primary terms. Separate internal service pages may target other offshoot phrase variants and related business services. These static pages can rank and continue to rank for years and years without ever so much as a single edit, providing they are worthy of ranking in the first place (good on-page SEO, keyworded anchor text linking to them, domain age, etc…). A fresh blog post just won’t be outranking those pages for those kinds of terms.
It’s in the long tail you may see a blog post get great rankings the day of posting it only to see it slowly slip away, to where it actually deserves to rank in the grander scheme of things, over the next days and weeks.
So if you’re thinking you need a blog on your local business website solely for satisfying the “freshness requirement of SEO” and that it’s somehow going to help you rank better for your primary search terms just because it’s fresh, well, you’re probably wasting your time.
Oh, I See What you Did There
Dear reader, let me guess, you are probably a fellow SEO practitioner, most likely in the local search marketing space. I’d bet money on it. I’d probably win that bet far greater than 50% of the time, making it a profitable bet. Why? Because my audience here on my blog is mostly other SEO’s. Look at all the other prominent SEO blogs out there. Who is reading them? Who is commenting? Who is sharing links to those posts on twitter? Who is taking the discussion further on their own blogs, and linking back to their sources of inspiration for the topic? It’s other SEO’s!
My blog builds my authority in the industry. It’s mostly other SEO’s that interact with my posts here. I gain a few links here and there that way too. These are internal links to the specific blog posts, but that link juice flows through the site and in turn helps my service pages rank for terms my potential customers can find me with. Some customers, small business owners looking to hire an SEO, mention that they checked out the site and even looked at some blog posts. They didn’t actually read them so much as just scanned through them. The content of the blog posts is often over their head but those that mention it say it seems like I know what I’m talking about. And that’s authority, real authority that goes beyond what Google interprets as authority based on link profiles.
See, this is why I ended up writing this as a post instead of a comment. Yousaf got himself a couple links out of it. I might too. There’ll be a few comments from some of my local seo colleagues, and it’ll make the rounds on Twitter for a bit. There’s a good chance the majority of potential customers that find my website will never read this post, and that’s just fine. I’m not really blogging to them anyways.
Do Google Places Listings Really Matter?
Friday, April 1st, 2011I’ve noticed, for many cases, if you have great organic rankings for your local terms having the additional visuals of a map marker, logo image, and address/phone info, plus maybe star ratings, review snippets and review counts, from a Google Places listing, does not matter at all.
I have a certain LONG term client (5 years) and have seen all the various iterations of Google Maps and Places mixed into the search results. From 10-packs to 7-packs and today’s blended local organic listings. This client has enjoyed #1 organic rankings for their primary local terms through most of that time (maybe the odd short term dip to #2). But here’s the kicker – they are located just outside the city limits. This tends to restrict a number of things as far as Google Places listings and rankings go.
Here are the various changes to Google results they’ve witnessed over the past 5 years;
- Before Google started showing map listings in the SERPS, they were #1 organic.
- When the 10-pack local listings rolled out they were #1 organic but below the 10-pack and map.
- For a while (most of 2009 and early part of 2010) we were able to trick Google into thinking they were in the city and they showed #A in the 7-pack and again #1 organic below the map.
- Later Google caught on to our trick and they got kicked out of 7-pack but still showed at #1 organic below the map.
- New blended local organic results now has them at #1 above any of the local listings that get the bonus map markers and such.
What do you think we saw for changes in traffic to the website and changes in lead volumes (we track email leads as goal conversions in Analytics) through each of those significant changes?
Answer = none.
By none I mean nothing that could by any means be attributed to places listings vs. no places listings. What we did see was year over year growth in traffic and leads (look at the peaks in the image below – this is a very seasonal business). We attribute that to the growth of the internet and search in general as a source to find local businesses.
Traffic (filtered for local city name) and Email Lead Conversions - 2007 to 2011. Yellow bars are main season for this business. Click to view full size.
You would think that there should have been a noticeable difference between being in the 7 pack noticeably above the organic results and being only in the organic listings below the map. But it simply is not the case.
Now the peak for 2010 was not much different than 2009. Could that peak have been higher if the business was located in the city limits, or we managed to still convince Google it was, and we continued to show up in the local 7-pack? To check against that I checked their primary local term in Google Insights for historical traffic trends. You’ll see 2009 and 2010 at about the same levels there as well.
Total available traffic for primary local search term as shown by Google Insights
One Small Difference
Primary Service Term with No Location Qualifier
If you search certain broad terms like dentist, pizza, plumber, etc.., Google recognizes it as the type of query that may have local intent and will mix in map results with the broad organic results. Without a true local presence in the city we now miss out on that traffic. But it is small, puny even.
For the year + we had the spoofed (sort of) local presence and high map rankings, the volume of traffic from the singular terms was about 1/10th of those that included that word plus the city name before or after. Plus there is the other iterations that use city names with state or province abbreviations as well as those that use ‘in’ city-name, ‘near’ city name, etc… Combine all the other search terms for their various related services, with a city name in the phrase, and the singular broad terms amount to close to 1/100th of their local traffic.
Another thing about the insignificance of the single word terms, conversion rates (email leads) were a mere fraction as well. Terms that included the city name convert at 8% to 15%. Single word searches on their 2 primary service type variations, converted at 0.39% and 0.64% respectively.
Goodbye single phrase terms with pseudo-local intent – we don’t really miss you.
Hold On, Not So Fast!
I have other clients ranking well organically for areas they don’t get local map listings – they pretty much see the same thing. But for some industries the pull of the map is a little bit more noticeable.
People have slightly different intents when searching certain local businesses. Those industries where need tends to be urgent – “I need it now and I don’t care who it is, just get it done, NOW” – see a slightly different trend.
I’ve worked with a number of plumbers in various cities and they all tell me the same thing. Searchers are looking for phone numbers and simply start “dialing for dollars”. They have a leaky pipe that’s about to ruin their flooring and they want a fix now. First plumber to answer the phone gets the business, not the guy who can’t answer his cell while elbow deep into a toilet. They can’t even be bothered to leave a message on voice mail. Instead they hang up and call the next plumber on the list.
Google Maps/Places listings show phone numbers quite prominently, so in those urgent cases the Places listing in the search results matters more. But that can be overcome with good organic rankings too. Simply include a phone number in your title tags, and/or meta description tags.
Reviews Can Matter, Sometimes
Blended local search results are sometimes displaying snippets of reviews right there on page one. They can have an impact, in extreme cases. By extreme I mean a glaringly negative review showing as the review snippet. Right there, page 1.
From the perspective of what a user see’s in the search results, things like positive review snippets, review counts, rating stars, etc.. have little impact on click through’s to the website and phone calls. It primarily comes down to rankings. But one bad review, for all to see, can have a dramatic impact – but not on traffic to the site. It impacts lead volumes – both phone calls and emails.
A client in New York City had that dilemma with a false negative review being pulled from Yelp. The bad review showed on page one of Google search for close to two months and during that period lead volume dropped by 75% (phone calls saw a bigger impact than email) but no discernible change in total traffic to the website.
The impact from one bad review showing in Google Search results
Seems that rankings still pulled the clicks as they usually do but people chose not to contact them. Obviously because of the review they saw in the search results. Based on the content of that review we could tell it was either an intentional fake from a competitor or a mistake on the reviewers part mixing them up with some other business.
We posted a business owner response to that review, similar to what this dentist did, and a couple weeks later Yelp ended up placing the bad one as a filtered review and Google then scrapped a different one to show as a snippet. Lead volumes are shooting back up to normal levels. Needless to say, my client is breathing a sigh of relief.
In general terms, organic rankings trumps all and the extra fluff of review snippets, star ratings, review counts are just that -fluff (unless it’s glaringly negative). I wonder then, at the mass user level, what they actually think of those extras.
- Is it merely a little side bonus that might, for some users in some cases, maybe, maybe, maybe influence a decision?
- Is there a lack of trust for user reviews that are easy to fake and have little to no quality control?
- Do they ultimately put more trust in the ranking algorithm, regardless of stars and reviews?
