Your Search Advisor, LLC » Local Search

Location-Based Domain Splitting: Bad Idea?

Andrew Miller — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:09:17 +0000

Imagine being able to lease space on a high-value domain name like Attorney.com with the exclusive rights to your geographic area.

RootOrange is making it happen by showing different websites on a generic URL based on the browser’s IP address. Basically, if I browse to Attorney.com from Richmond I’ll see a local attorney’s website, while if you visit the site from Seattle you’ll see a Seattle-based attorney’s website instead.

In geek-speak, the different sites are served in an i-frame and targeted based on the browser’s IP geo-location.

Is This a Bad Idea?

From an SEO standpoint, I can think of many reasons this is a bad idea for local businesses concerned about SEO and long-term sustainability:

No Ownership or Equity in the Domain – Businesses essentially lease the domain name from RootOrange. At the end of the lease (or when lease rates become unsustainable), the businesses are left with nothing of value. No domain name, no website, no way to tell repeat visitors where to find them in the future.
No Visibility in Search Engines – Maybe RootOrange has concocted a solution, but currently search engines either ignore content in i-frames or attribute the content to the site that serves it, not the site that hosts the i-frame. The proposed implementation would seem to indicate that the generic domain (i.e. Attorney.com) would have no unique content of its own. Currently it is a parked domain with ads on it and no apparent content strategy to rank well in the organic search results.
Potential Cloaking Issues - Cloaking occurs when human visitors are shown different content than search engine crawlers in an attempt to manipulate search results. Again, maybe RootOrange has figured this out but I can foresee issues when these previously high-ranking domains are penalized for serving different content to humans and bots.

Is This a Good Idea?

Then again, domain leasing could be the equivalent of leasing a prominent office location on your town’s Main Street. Type-in traffic (web users typing in attorney.com) would be equivalent to drive-by visibility or window shoppers that notice your business just because it’s there.

It also may be a cost-effective alternative to the industrial-strength SEO required to compete on generic, high-volume keywords.

But to the sophisticated marketer that knows the value of “the long tail” of search queries, location-based domain splitting may just be a short-term distraction that delays the inevitable leap of faith into SEO that gives your competitors a few more months or years head start.

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Imagination Is Endless, So Are Keywords

Andrew Miller — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:48:53 +0000

Google Queries in 2009

According to Google’s 2009 search stats, over 1/3 of unduplicated search queries entered into Google in 2009 HAD NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE.

Let that sink in for a moment. That’s up from about 25% a couple years ago.

Does your content strategy allow you to take advantage of people’s creativity and difficulty finding the answers to their queries? Or are you stuck with stagnant content that does not evolve and adapt to meet consumers’ changing needs and vocabulary?

But Wait, There’s More…

If you are not concerned about your position in today’s search results, you should at least be preparing for tomorrow’s. The Google ranking algorithm literally changes daily:

Number of search quality improvements made by Google in 2009: 540, ~1.5 each day

And if you’re not effectively competing in local search results, consider this whopper:

Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results: 1 in 13

Do Not Be Alarmed

I share these stats not to scare you, but to open your eyes to the nearly infinite opportunities to attract quality search engine traffic from a wider set of keywords and search channels.

Sure, your boss questions every day why you don’t rank on the first page for “widgets”, but the smart marketer knows that there are still plenty of battles to be won. It’s just a matter of picking the right ones.

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7 Signs Your Competitor Hired an SEO

Andrew Miller — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:58:36 +0000

Competition is usually a good thing in a capitalist society, but it’s not always friendly and it’s not always fair. If your website is being outranked by a competitor’s site when you Google your products or services, it may be because they hired a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant to improve their site’s visibility for various high-value keywords.

A good SEO consultant leaves very little evidence of their efforts (other than better rankings and more traffic), but you can spot the work of a competent SEO if you know what to look for.

Here are 7 signs your competitor may have hired an SEO:

1. The rel=”nofollow” Attribute

This little bit of code in a website link is used to prevent search engines from crawling through the link to the destination page. People familiar with SEO use it to keep search engine crawlers from passing PageRank to pages that shouldn’t appear in Google’s index.

A normal link looks like this:

Your Search Advisor

a link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute will look like this:

Your Search Advisor

To look for this on your competitor’s site: Click the View > Page Source menu option in your web browser. Use the Find command and search for “nofollow”.

Exception to the rule: Some Content Management Systems (CMS) include the rel=”nofollow” attribute by default on some outgoing links, so your competitor may not even know they are doing it.

2. A sitemap.xml File

An XML sitemap is a “Table of Contents” for your website that is coded in a way that search engines find very useful. Most human visitors will never know it’s there. Search Engine Optimizers use them to tell a search engine crawler where to find each page on the site, when it was last updated and its importance relative to other pages on the site.

To find this on your competitor’s site: Go to their home page and add /sitemap.xml to the end of the URL. This is the default location for a sitemap although it can be placed elsewhere.

For example, my sitemap is here: http://www.yoursearchadvisor.com/sitemap.xml

Exception to the rule: Again, some CMS platforms generate a sitemap.xml file by default. Other times, your competitor or their SEO may place the sitemap in a different location to keep it away from prying eyes.

3. A robots.txt File

Similar to a sitemap.xml file, a robots.txt file is a specially-formatted text file that webmasters can use to keep search engine crawlers from accessing certain parts of a website. For example, you may not want pages from the “insider information” section of your website to appear in search results so you would include that section in your robots.txt.

To find this on your competitor’s site: Go to their home page and add /robots.txt to the end of the URL. This is the default location for this file.

4. Google Webmaster Usage

Savvy SEO’s will register websites with Google Webmaster Central to get more detailed statistics about how and when Google crawls their website. To “verify” site ownership, Google provides a META tag that must be uploaded to the website to prove that you own it before sharing the crawling information.

To look for SEO involvement: View the source code of your competitor’s home page and search for the term “verify-v1” in the section. Chances are somebody on their team is knowledgeable about SEO if you see something that looks like this:

Similarly, the tag for the Yahoo! Site Explorer code looks like this:

Exception to the rule: The engines provide an alternative method of claiming a website that involves uploading a unique HTML or XML file to their server. These are much harder to find since the file name is random so you won’t find it unless you know what to look for. Your competitor might have registered their site this way and you wouldn’t know it.

5. Claimed Listings in Local Search Engines

Google Maps, Yahoo Local and other local search engines allow business owners (or their SEO or marketing people acting on their behalf) to “claim” or “verify” that they own the business. Once they have done so, they can add or edit the business listing, remove inaccurate information, upload photos, fix incorrect map placements, and a variety of other useful fixes.

To look for SEO involvement: Search either of those sites for your competitor and click on their listing. In Google, it will say “Provided by the business owner” within the “more info” section. If you see that, it could indicate that an SEO consultant encouraged them to claim their listing and update the details.

6. Optimized Meta Data and Page Titles

If an SEO is working on your competitor’s website, they will likely be optimizing each page’s copy for specific keywords. Sometimes they overdo it and it’s obvious which keywords they are targeting.

To look for SEO involvement: Check your competitor’s source code (File > View Source) and look for blatant over-use of high-value keywords in their page titles or Meta descpription and keywords tags.

They look like this:

This is the Page Title

7. Links Increasing Over Time

Proper SEO requires improving the quality and quantity of links pointing to a website. If your competitor is utilizing a competent SEO, you might expect to see the number of links to their website increasing over a period of weeks or months.

To look for SEO involvement: Use the Yahoo Site Explorer tool,type in your competitor’s web address and click “Explore URL”. Click the “Inlinks” button and then use the Show Inlinks selector to choose “Except from this domain”. Write down the total number of links. Check again every few weeks and keep track of the link counts. If their link count is rising faster than yours, it might indicate that they hired an SEO to build links to their site.

Exceptions to the rule: If your competitor is doing a lot of marketing, public relations, promotions, or is in the news, it could result in an increase in awareness for their site which could lead to more links regardless of whether they are doing it with SEO in mind.

What Next?

None of these signs are dead giveaways, as mentioned in the exceptions to each rule. But if you find more than 3 or 4 of these elements in your competitor’s site, you may consider fighting fire with fire and learning more about SEO.

Remember, search is a marathon not a sprint. If they have a head start, it doesn’t mean you can’t run a smarter race and beat them to the finish line.

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Time to Focus on Google Local Search Results

Andrew Miller — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:27:37 +0000

This is no surprise to anybody that has investigated local search marketing lately, but Google just announced a fundamental shift in the way they represent local search results within the normal web search results.

You are probably used to seeing Google Maps local search results show up when you type a normal location-based query into Google. They tend to look something like this:

Google Local Search Results

So what changed? They are now using your computer’s IP address to geo-target the local results even if you don’t type in a geographic modifier keyword.

According to their blog post:

We like to make search as easy as we can, so we’ve just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don’t type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you.

That means you can search for “pizza” or “dentist” without adding a location keyword such as “Richmond, VA” or “Ann Arbor, MI”. Google will show you the closest results based on your IP address if they can determine it with any accuracy.

Implications for Search Marketers

If you have a local business or any physical presence (storefront, office, distribution center), head over to the Google Local Business Center to create or claim your business listing in Google Maps. From there, you can take advantage of the following offerings:

Verify that your information is correct and correct any errors
Add more detailed information about your products and services
Upload photos or videos
Add coupons

Additionally, focus on optimizing your website for local search terms. Be sure to include your address, zip code, and phone number (with area code!) in your site’s footer, on a contact page, or any other appropriate place. Even if people don’t have to type them in to Google anymore, you want the search engine’s crawlers to note your physical presence.

Don’t try to fake your location to appear more relevant than you really are. Many companies are trying to create fake, spammy business listings in Google Maps. They are routinely getting removed and penalized for this behavior. Keep it legit!

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Goats On The Roof Marketing

Andrew Miller — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:32:33 +0000

Differentiating a commodity is difficult, just ask anybody that sells gas, rice, or copper. These products are relatively undifferentiated and therefore can’t be sold at a premium. A supplier must bend to the will of the market and price their products properly or risk being undercut by another supplier selling the same product at a lower price. These price wars benefit the consumer but hurt the suppliers.

What if you are a supplier in an increasingly commoditized market such as Search Engine Optimization consulting? How do you differentiate your services from your competitors without straying too far from the “mainstream” SEO consulting business?

Unique Selling Propositions

Vast fortunes can be made based on a proprietor’s ability to develop and promote a Unique Selling Proposition (USP, also called a Unique Value Proposition or Unique Selling Point) for their product or service. A USP is critical because it conveys a unique benefit to the consumer.

Unique: radically distinctive and without equal

Benefit: something that aids or promotes well-being

If you sell pizza and can demonstrate that YOUR company delivers pizza faster than anybody else, you can persuade a lot of customers to buy from you simply based on the fact that they will get it sooner. Although your pizza may be exactly like your competitors’, your faster delivery time is the unique benefit.

Goats On The Roof

Want a practical example? Imagine you own and operate a small country store in small town in rural Georgia. Thousands of travelers drive through your town each week on their way to and from a nearby recreational lake and they have a half dozen country stores to choose from in your town alone. How do you differentiate your business and get more than a 1/6th share of the customers and revenue?

Simple, you put goats on your roof. Build them an intricate series of bridges, houses, and ways for visitors to feed them.

Goats On The Roof

The Goats

This is an actual country store in Tiger, GA named Goats On The Roof.

The Results

Drive through Tiger, GA (Google Map) on any given weekend and you will see that almost everybody stops at Goats On The Roof simply to feed the goats and marvel at the novelty of the idea. My hunch is that not many people would care to stop if it were simply Goats In A Field or even a Goats In A Petting Zoo. You can bet this attraction has resulted in significantly more business for the proprietors and a better shopping experience for the customers.

The Lessons for SEO Consultants

You may notice a lot of competition in your town or across the country for the consulting services you provide. This is validation that SEO works and that companies are deriving enough value from it to invest and recommend it as part of a larger marketing strategy to other businesses.

What are you doing to differentiate yourself from the other SEO consultants or firms in your town? Livestock might not be the answer in our industry, but perhaps you can position yourself as the “go-to” person for reputation management crises, local search marketing, or mobile search optimization.

Can you offer anything different? Faster turn-around times? Better and more useful reporting? On-site training and knowledge transfer for your clients’ marketing teams?

By developing and promoting your USP, you are able to differentiate yourself from seemingly similar businesses. This will lead to greater visibility and for your services, and most likely improve your client acquisition and retention efforts.

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Local Search Marketing on Civic Wikis

Andrew Miller — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:42:40 +0000

One often-overlooked local search marketing tactic involves contributing content to civic wikis. Much like Wikipedia, a civic wiki (or “city wiki”) allows anybody to add or edit content. The “civic” component means they focus on a specific city or town and are usually much more detailed than national or international sites.

Just like a solid directory strategy, contributing content to a civic wiki is meant to increase your company’s (or client’s) visibility in the organic search results. Before jumping in, realize that there are a few pros and cons to using civic wikis:

Pros

Companies are often encouraged to create articles for themselves.
Anybody can add or edit content, and in some cases upload images, documents, videos, maps, and other digital media.
Established civic wikis tend to rank well in organic search results.
Most wikis are free to edit and free to read.
Most wiki article pages aren’t cluttered with ads, “premium” listings, and other distractions.
Most of the visitors to the civic wiki will be from the city or town. If you run a local business, these are the people you want to speak to.
A strong wiki page can increase your company’s visibility in the SERPs for your targeted keywords.

Cons

MediaWiki (the most popular wiki software) adds rel=”nofollow” to all outbound links by default. Wiki sysops can disable the nofollow for the entire site, but not on a link-by-link basis. Most leave the nofollow setting set to true to de-motivate spammers.
Most wiki admins require a neutral point of view (NPOV), so check your “happy” marketing-speak at the door. Factual, unbiased information only.
Anybody else can edit your company’s article.
Most of your edits can be traced back to your IP address (if not logged in) or your username (if logged in). Don’t assume you can post libelous or untrue content and expect not to be called out or banned.

Additional Civic Wiki Marketing Tactics

Consider going beyond just writing your article. Contribute more content to the wiki. Write about your industry in general, or create articles for local community groups or charities that might not have the resources to do it themselves. Or, undertake a project to clean up existing content in the wiki. Sometimes this means re-categorizing articles or applying templates where needed to provide data uniformity. This will generate good karma and help you develop other connections that may come in handy.

Update your User page. Add a short bio and include a link to your website in it. You’d be surprised how many active wiki editors check the User pages when they see a new editor become active. The power of this increases as you contribute more content since a link to your User page is included with every edit you make.

Add links to and from other wikis. Wikis are meant to be open content platforms. Therefore, it is completely legitimate to link from one wiki to another. Wikipedia gets a ton of traffic, perhaps there are articles related to your town or things within your town. Add content and/or a wiki link from Wikipedia back to your civic wiki’s article on that topic.

Where to Find Civic Wikis

These pages list various civic wikis:

Can’t Find Your City Wiki? Start One!

It’s really not that hard to get a MediaWiki installation up and running. If you know anything about running a website (or anybody that does), you’re no more than a few clicks away from installing a wiki on your server. The installation process is simple and only requires a few configuration settings.

I recommend you check out these resources if you are interested in starting a city wiki or need help administering one:

MWUser.com Forums
Mediawiki Book – Daniel Barrett, Safari Publishing
Guidelines for running a City Wiki

Shameless Plug

I recently launched RichmondWiki.org, a city wiki for Richmond, VA. The inspiration came from Arborwiki.org which is led by a very active and smart group of people from Ann Arbor, MI. You can follow my wiki exploits on the RichmondWiki Blog.

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SEO Work Life Balance

Andrew Miller — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:36:29 +0000

What if I told you that you could become a better search engine marketer by working less? Sounds too good to be true, right? I’m usually not a big self-help kind of guy, but I realized that many people in the industry can relate to most (if not all) of the warning signs of being too wrapped up in the job.

Warning Signs of SEM Burnout

Increasing reliance on caffeine or energy drinks to keep up the frantic pace at work and avoid crashing
Constantly feeling like you are drowning in data
You don’t sleep well because your mind is racing and/or your body is unable to drift off to la-la land
Never finding enough time for your other hobbies
Family and friends are forced to deal with your absence or tardiness more than you would like
Difficulty staying motivated to work or on-task, productivity suffers

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about work/life balance. For those of us lucky enough to be involved with SEM, it’s easy to see how this rapidly evolving industry can demand much more of our time and energy than ever before. After four years in the industry I recently found myself at a crossroads. I had a hard time focusing on the work and drumming up enough motivation to stay at the top of my game. It was clear that I was getting burnt out.

If you’ve reached that point you know you have two options. Either find another line of work or take a step back and re-evaluate your priorities. For me, leaving the industry that I love was not an option so I focused instead on redefining what I want out of life, both personally and professionally. Here are the six areas I chose to focus on. Your mileage may vary, but I’d love to hear more about how you balance your personal and professional lives.

Work Smarter

Obviously we can’t simply stop working. Taking time to re-prioritize and re-evaluate your working habits does not mean stopping work completely. You still have to work hard, keep up to date with what’s going on in the industry, practice what you learn, and teach others.

What’s important is not how hard you work, but how smart you work. I’m not here to tell you how or when you should work, but there are plenty of books and other resources that can help you find your preferred working style. How much of your workload can you outsource or subcontract out? Do you have any processes that can be streamlined or eliminated? Could you produce or find a common template to use as a starting point for client proposals, audits, or reports?

Get More Sleep

Your body needs it. I don’t care what your mind tells you, sleep is essential to maintaining good health and productivity. Some people need more, some people need less. But listen to your body. Most of us have racked up so much sleep debt that our bodies simply learn to function at a lower level and we become unaware of how tired we really are.

Find ways to try to get to bed earlier each night. Don’t watch that last Family Guy re-run. Save some blog posts in your RSS reader for the next day. Find a good stopping point on your current project and force yourself off the computer. Whatever it takes, don’t put off sleep longer than you have to.

Make Time for Friends and Family

Social relationships are part of what make the human experience special. Is your work getting in the way of family time or social time? Clients and bosses will come and go throughout your career, but the relationships with your spouse, kids, friends, and relatives are the ones that will truly stand the test of time.

Remember that when lying on your deathbed, you won’t be wishing you spent more time at work when you had the chance. Re-evaluate your priorities. Are you making time for what really matters in your life?

Get More Exercise

Face it, we all need more of it. The government recommends a minimum of 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week (or 2.5 hours of moderate exercise). That’s just a minimum. Your body requires and can handle more. You may not notice the toll that sitting in front of a computer all day takes on your body, but over a period of several decades it becomes pretty evident that humans were not built to be sedentary for long periods of time.

Even if your to-do list is pages long and you have gigabytes of unanswered emails, make time to get a little exercise each day. Even if it’s just 30 minutes of walking around the block, it’s better than nothing. You’ll be amazed how it can help take your mind off work and relieve stress. You’ll look better, feel better, live longer, and gain productivity. What’s not to love?

Unload the Information Overload

Given the fast-paced nature of our industry, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the volume and frequency of data. Whether it’s via blogs, RSS, email, magazines, books, podcasts, forums, or any other digital medium, there is just WAY too much information for any search engine marketer to digest. It’s easy to get swamped and feel like you might miss something vital.

You won’t. Simplify. Ditch a lot of the data. Get your news from aggregators. Read your RSS reader less frequently. Try to improve the quality of your interaction with the industry rather than the quantity. For example, if you have trouble keeping up with 50 RSS feeds, unsubscribe from all but 10 of your favorites and try to invest more time in the actual dialog by commenting and responding. Look for ways to get your industry news and information more efficiently. It will save time and you’ll still feel connected and in touch.

Get a Hobby

Pick something you love to do and do it. Just get yourself off the computer and away from work. Do you like to paint, draw, or write? Make time each week to do it. Join a rec sports league. Volunteer at a local charity. Anything other than search engine marketing or computer-related activities will do the trick. Variety is the spice of life.

I guarantee that the additional perspectives you’ll gain and people you meet will make you think about your job differently. My best ideas about work come from the interactions I have in other areas of my life.

Putting it all Together

Again, I’m not a self-help kind of guy, but by devoting a little more time and energy to these pursuits you may just find a refreshing change of perspective about your job as a Search Engine Marketer. This could lead to increased productivity, more free time, and an improved work/life balance. Which, in the end, is all that really matters.

What do you do to unwind and take your mind off of work? Do you think it helps or hurts your career in search engine marketing?

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