Google has been very, very busy lately. Right on the heals of rolling out Google Instant (click for my recent post on that change), Google has now rolled out a concept they’ve been testing in Europe for the last couple of months.

Google’s Integrated Local Search Results

What has changed?

Before:

Google used to display a small-ish Google maps 7-pak at the top of the page, featuring local Google Places (aka maps) listings, followed by 10 organic search results further down on the page.  The maps/places listings were one-liners, and the organic listings had fuller listings with the title line and up to two lines of description.

This is what it used to look like for the term wedding photographer Boulder: CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

wedding photographers boulder-old search results

After:

The Google maps/places listings are no longer bunched at the top of the top of the page, nor are they simple one-liners.  The search results page is now one big page (versus two sections) with the Google places listings integrated into the rest of the results.

Here is what is looks like now: CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE IT

wedding photographer boulder - New Integrated Local Google Search

How does this affect you?

The Good News

• If you were in the Google Places 7-pak, previously, then you will most likely still show on page 1 and also be more visible than the general search results (although it seems that a very strong organic listing can still pull a great local listing down).
• If you had strong organic rank (even if your Place listing didn’t show in page 1 for a specific term), you may well now show near the top of the page — this is the case for several of our clients, including the wedding photographer in the example.
• For your specific city terms, you may show better than you did before, because there is less outside competition, now.
• General directories, that used to have a lot more muscle, are now pushed down in the search results.
• There are fewer results shown on page 1, now, making your appearance even more powerful (if you made it!)

The Bad News

• If you previously had two appearances on page 1 (a Google places listing and an organic showing), you will now only have one
• If you don’t have a website but you used to show in Google Places with the http://maps.google.com URL, you most likely will no longer show.
• If you used to have organic rankings for a city near you due to organic SEO work, you may now be bumped by the local listings for that city (remember, there are now fewer spots on page 1).  In fact sites that didn’t have a Places listing but ranked well organically for geo-specific terms (mainly due to location and/or SEO), are taking a big hit.

Example of “Too Local”

This impact is most disturbing to us:  For those businesses that serve OTHER nearby communities, it will be more challenging to get them rank for searches from the nearby city.

This video illustrates this situation:

In the series of videos, below, I’ll walk through a case study that shows you REAL WORLD results of how your sales can be affected by moving up on Page 1 of Google.  It is a generally accepted fact that higher page positions on Google are better, but this shows how much better.

Note: Most of my SEO clients are in services businesses, such as counseling and therapy, law, home building, etc.  You may ask why I didn’t do a case study showing client data.  The answer is this:  Since I do not track phone calls to their offices or the number of times someone contacts them via other means, it is hard for me to show a real case study for local search.  With the site I used, I was able to show ACTUAL SALES with no human contact in between.  This is real, hard data.

Video 1: What is supposed to happen…

Video 2: What happened…

Video 3: What to Take Away From This…

The big search engine news of the month is the recent release of “Google Instant”.  Google now automatically populates the page with the search results as you type.  Let’s say I’m searching for a wedding photographer in Boulder.

When I type “wedding” the search results for “wedding dresses” are instantly shown. When I then type a space and a “p” (”wedding p”) those results are replaced with the results for “wedding planner” and so on. There’s no need to hit the “enter” key.

Click the video link below to understand the biggest concern that Google Instant has brought about for online marketers, and see how our SEO work will change to make sure that our SEO work… still works!

Google Instant Video

I’m sure you’ve noticed that many websites offer a free report of some sort.  I’m often asked why this is done, and if it helps to get more clients.

The answer is… well, it depends….

Why Have a Free Report?

Reports are great in that they can be a great lure to get people to opt-in for your mailing list (more on why a mailing list is important, below). If the title of the report is curiosity-provoking enough, the report will work really well. If the title is boring, or the report isn’t well targeted to the visitor, then no one will opt-in, and the report won’t have done any good.

Report topics (and titles) are harder to nail when you don’t know exactly why someone is at your site. For this reason, they are easier to write for a tightly focused site than they are for a more general site.

What Kind of Report Should I Write?

I create a lot of websites and do site promotions for therapists — the psycho kind . If a therapist specializes in couples counseling or marriage therapy, possible reports include:

• 3 Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Relationship (and How to Stop, Today)
  
• Miss Those Days of Feeling Close?  4 Easy Steps to Get That Feeling Back, For Good

(Notice that both of these titles are “problem-oriented”, and may sound a little like the cover of a woman’s magazine…  The reason they are written that way is because that is what works!  Really.  Study magazine covers!  Study the front page of newspapers.  These folks are masters at getting people to buy their words, and this is what you want, too.)

If I’m working with a therapist who is more of a generalist, we’ll have to work a little harder to come up with a curiosity-provoking report.  The focus could be on general unhappiness, or on self-esteem.  Anxiety is also a great bet, as most people looking for a therapist for any reason feel a certain amount of anxiety.  A great one could be:

• 3 Ways to Tell If You (or a Family Member) Really Need Counseling

This or other “assessment” type of reports appeal to our desire to know if we’re making the right decision.  We all want to feel that we’re doing the right thing.

Get Into Your Visitor’s Head

The bottom line is this:  Anyone at a therapy site is obviously considering counseling, or they wouldn’t be there.  You can rest assured that they are scared, as counseling is about vulnerability.  By presenting them with a report such as the title above, you are entering into a conversation that they are most likely already having in their head.  In your report, you can help them feel less stigma about getting help, and also give them permission to go ahead.  You can also show them a little bit of your counseling style, so that you increase their trust.

The same applies for any profession, or product.  People who have just been in an accident and are at a Personal Injury Attorney’s site will have certain questions and fears.  People looking into building a green home will have certain questions and fears.  Provide a report that will answer what someone MOST wants to know, regardless of what field you’re in.

Also, once someone engages with you (by giving you their email address) they are much more likely to take the next step to call you.

And, even if they don’t do it right away, then they may call you after you send them some thought-provoking articles you’ve written.  This brings us to the next… the mailing list.

What Do You Send Them After They Opt-in?

If someone opts in to your “list” then you can “drip” on them each month, continually reminding them of your presence, your expertise, etc. After so many exposures to you, they’ll just automatically think of you when they’re finally ready to take action. This could be a month, or it could be six months, or a year. But, no matter how long it may take, you increase your chances of being “the chosen one” 100 fold if you’ve been showing up with great tips in their email, over a period of time.

Many people cannot afford to hire an SEO company to do their SEO for them.  If you are in this boat — wanting to rank but short the $500-1000/month that it costs to hire a good SEO company –  then here is a tool  you should check out.

DIYSEO - beginning SEO

DIY SEO is only $49/month and its a great way to learn SEO and optimize your site.  While you could spend a lot of time picking up tips at a variety of sites online, DIY SEO does a good job of giving you a little plan to follow and helping you track what you’ve done and what you still have to do.  Then, so that you don’t just ignore your tasks, DIY SEO sends you a status report/reminder each month, telling you where you’re ranking for your keywords, and what you need to do to keep going!

Before I recommend anything to my clients/readers, I always test it out first.  I signed up with DIY SEO and entered one of my own websites into the system.  Based on my experience, here is my assessment of tool.

Pro’s
The suggestions given by DIY SEO were good, and in fact, the tool brought my attention to an oversight that I fixed.   The tool is very effective in helping you to:

• Understand basic SEO lingo
• Keep your focus on the most important (few) keywords for your business
• Understand how to optimize your site pages for your chosen keywords
• Get specific directory submissions done
• Keep informed of your progress as you rise in the rankings

Cons:
The one thing the tool lacks is helping with advanced link acquisition concepts and techniques.  Sure, links are obtained through directory submissions, and a little social bookmarking, but those are only going to go so far.  Perhaps the best attempt at this is the Competitive Links section, where the tool identifies links your competitors have, and suggests that you attempt to get the same ones.  The problem is that the way they suggest doing it is tedious at best, and often not successful.  But this won’t hurt if you don’t need the links to start with!

All in all, I think the tool is a great help to the new person who wants to get their site in shape.  In a really, really non-competitive market, this tool could help a site rank.  However, link building will definitely be required in medium-high competition niches.

DIY SEO fits into the first bracket nicely at $49/month or $499/year and in my opinion, if you want a step by step way to learn SEO and optimise your site then it’s money very well spent. Yes you could try to learn everything from forums but the thing DIY SEO does very well is to list all the tasks so you simply can’t avoid doing them. The biggest thing that prevents people from succeeding at SEO is procrastinating and not putting in the hard work, especially people new to the industry.

One of the most wide-spread misconceptions people have about building websites is in regards to “Duplicate Content”. People fear they’ll be penalized by Google if they have an article that appears on two different sites, or that if they have similar sites for two different cities in which they operate, one of these sites will be banned because it may have a lot of the same content as their other site.

Bottom line, there are a lot of rumors and wrong ideas floating around on the web, concerning duplicate content.

In the video below, you can get some clarification, straight from Greg Grothaus at Google.

Note -- unless you’re fairly technical, the first 6 minutes of this video will be enough for you.

If you aren’t collecting names and emails on your website, you should be.  For all the work you’ve done to get visitors to come, you should capture their name and email so that you can send them something now and then and remind them of you.

Opt-ins are much more effective if you promise your visitors something in exchange for their contact info, such as a video or a free report.

In the example in this video, there is not a “lure”, but you can still learn how to add an opt-in to your wordpress site, using the Aweber service.

Click here to see the video: Adding an Aweber Opt-in Form to Wordpress

Free SEO Analysis

In my first post on this site, I promised that I’d show you how to perform a “Website Physical”.  I was waiting until I had some time to devote to that project, since it there are a lot of steps in involved.  Just as a doctor checks your ears, throat, eyes, chest, stomach, and all our vital signs when you go in for a physical, there are quite a few things to check on your website, too, to make sure that its health is not in danger.

Well, I have a surprise for you.  There is a wonderful tool the enables you to give your website a quick checkup, just to get you started, and this tool is…

• Fast
• Easy
• FREE!

The name of this wonderful service is Website Grader, and you can access it at http://websitegrader.com.

Simply enter your domain name, and voila!  In no time, you’ll have the results of your physical, complete with detailed explanations of each assessment involved.

Now, this is a quick checkup.  There are a few vitals that this tool does not check, and if you work with us, we’ll let you know if you have any problems there.  We’ll put on our stethoscopes and…

• Check to make sure you have an XML Sitemap that helps search engines crawl and index your site easily
• Take a look at your W3C Validation status, to make sure your code is clean
• Check your page load times (the faster they load, the better)
• Check your page sizes – if these are enlarged (larger than 120k), then Google won’t look at the whole page and they won’t be fully indexed.

There are many things that will affect your ability to get traffic, and they aren’t necessarily obvious.

But, in the meantime, go get on the Website Grader treadmill and see how you do!

Let us know if you have any questions.

Becky

Have You Tried Whiz Bang Trick #42, Yet?

These days, there is so much information available about marketing yourself online, that it can be very overwhelming.  You may hear of someone that tried Whiz Bang Trick #42, and it got them tons of traffic and they made lots of money.  You may then think that Whiz Bang Trick #42 is the THE ANSWER and that if only you can do that, then you’ll have it made.

Slow down there, just a minute…

The one thing that seems to be missing from most “trick” stories is the background.  What I mean by that is — what took place, or what was IN PLACE — before Whiz Bank Trick #42 was applied?  What is the “baseline” to which we are applying Whiz Bang Trick #42?

A simple example in the real world…

Let’s say that a new herb came on the market.  It was tested on elite athletes and showed that they were able to recover from muscle fatigue in half their normal recovery time.  They could tell you that instead of it taking them 10 days to recover from a half-marathon, they could now recover fully in 5 days and then they’d be able to run another another one.  In fact, this new magic herbal pill allowed them to now enter into a new half-marathon race each week!  Sounds pretty good, eh?

Well, now, let’s imagine that Average Joe came along and heard this story.  He was a smoker, a drinker, was 50 pounds overweight and had a heart condition.  Do you think that magic herb is going to enable him to run a half-marathon once a week?  No.  Don’t think so.

Is Your Website an Elite Athlete?  Or is it an Average Joe?

Usually, when we’re asked to look at improving someone’s online marketing, the first thing we do is to look at the website.  (Well, to be truthful, we look at the market, too, to see if there is demand for what is being sold.  But assuming that’s there…) We look at the website to see how healthy it is.

What Makes a Website Healthy?

The answer to this question could be a book in and of itself, but suffice it to say, that we look at how well optimized the site is to attract and delight traffic that it should or could be attracting. In other words, we give the website a physical exam.

In my next post, I’ll show you how you can do a “Website Physical” for your own site.  You can quickly see what parts of your site are in good shape, and what parts are struggling.

To your success,

Becky