SEO Nashville | Local Search Masters

We’re happy to announce that Local Search Masters was recently certified as a Google Adwords Partner. One perk from this is free vouchers from Google good for $100 of clicks to anyone who would like to try Adwords. If you’ve never tried paid marketing with Local Search Masters we will fund an online account with $100 FOR FREE just to show you what we can do. This month we’re going to fund a limited number of accounts, so you need to act now to take advantage of this great offer. Please call our newest team member Calvin at 615-584-8436 or email Calvin@LocalSearchMasters.com to get started today.

Well, it looks like all of those small companies that worked their asses off to earn the top SERPS for highly competitive keywords have been devastated by Google’s newest “update” to the algo. Aaron Wall at SEO Book created a great post about the new heavy emphasis on branding from Google. It seems that now you can “buy relevancy”. For once, the SEO community is not overreacting to subtle changes in the SEROS, because Matt Cutts has addressed this newest incarnation in the algorithm.

What Does This All Mean

Well, if you have been competing on highly competitive, generic keyword phrases, then you are going to lose a lot of revenue from search engine traffic (unless you are a household name). So it seems that paid links are prohibited by Google Spam Team law, but having a 9 figure marketing budget is the new “SEO trick of the day.” This isn’t good news for small players that have developed a great niche on the web. There is one caveat to the new change: Most long-tail keywords are not going to be effected by this change. Local search you ask? In the clear.
The fact of the matter is that most of the generic phrases that this change applies to tend to have a low conversion rate for most sites. These companies need to understand that their long-tail keyword visitors are much more likely to convert that these visitors that are typically at the top of the sales funnel. Will it affect the bottom line? Yes. There are always people that become aware of your company from very broad keywords and come back later to convert. Anyone that is feeling the pain from this blow needs to take a step back, take a deep breath, and then needs to establish a plan of action to regain their revenue using the same skills that pushed them past the big dogs the first time. If any of you guys need help developing a new strategy, LSM is here to help.

Do you know how much you spend on marketing to drive a conversion on your website? If you don’t, find out immediately. For our example today, let’s assume that you are paying $10 for each on site conversion (Aren’t word problems fun!)That number could be great for your company or it could be far higher than you can afford, according to your specific product. Now let us now assume that your website has a 1% conversion rate. That means that for every 1 sale, you need 100 visitors to your website and at $10 per conversion, you are paying roughly 10 cents for every visitor. This leads me to my question-does it make more sense to continue paying $10 for every sale or does it make more sense to increase your conversion rate?

If in the above example you were able to increase your conversion rate all the way up to 2%, that would decrease the cost of every conversion down to $5. That would mean that, with all other variables holding true, every visitor to your website would now be worth twice as much to your business. But how is this possible you ask? Stick around for the rest of the pos

Start With Your Web Analytics

At LSM, this is always our first step with new clients. Show us how your site is performing and we can show you how your site can perform better. The most important stat that we look for when we are developing the initial conversion optimization strategy is how many people that make it to the form/shopping cart that do not finish the process.

Create a Test

So the page with containing your lead form has an 80% exit percentage. This is where the magic begins. I look at your form and you have 25 required fields. I ask you why you have to have someone’s fax number and you, the client, didn’t even know that the fax number field was required. We sit down together with the form and determine that you only really need 5 fields of the original 25. We make the assumption that if we drastically decrease the number of fields on the lead form, more people will complete our desired task. We implement the new form, measure the results, and compare them with the prior numbers. Ladies and gentlemen, we have just conducted a conversion optimization test.

Applying the Method to the Rest of the Website

We have laid the foundations of basic A/B testing above. This process can be used on testing new background colors on the website, through testing different sized images on the homepage. The end result can be decreasing the bounce rate on the homepage, or it can for increasing the number of people that finish watching a video on your “how to” page. With the use of a product like Google Website Optimizer, anyone can create, implement, and measure their own tests on their site.

Before launching your next online marketing campaign, take a deep thought about whether it makes more sense to focus on increasing your conversion rate for the long-term success of your website.

Google maps listings showing up on the first page of search results has been around for some time now, but as with all technologies, it has extended it’s reach to now include non-local search phrases that Google assumes are local in purpose. Example: Now, if Google has placed me in Nashville, TN by my IP address and I search for the generic terms “restaurants”, I see the Google Maps 10-pack near the top of my results. Did I specify that I wanted to see local results? No. Could it be assumed that 90% of the population would find this information to be useful? More than likely.

Who Does It Help?

This update helps out the little man. If you are a one location, brick and mortar store, then (more than likely, there are exceptions) the only way that a visitor would ever see your company on the front page of a highly competitive keyword would be through PPC. Now, as long as you have properly optimized your Google Local listing, you have a shot of getting free traffic from the first page of results.

The people who are going to feel the most pain from this change are the portals and ad revenue dependent sites that have spent years developing enough great content (not to mention the massive amounts of SEO work) necessary to be in the top five SERP’s for these keywords. If these players ranked #4 like Zappo’s is showing on my results for “shoe store”, congratulations to the awesome world of below the fold and significantly less revenue from that phrase.

As bad as I do feel for companies who have spent years developing businesses off of generic keywords, the fact is that most of the time, the searchers were probably looking for a local company when they found your site. Until fairly recently, most search engine users didn’t understand how the engines worked and didn’t have enough experience to know how to get more relevant results on their own. You guys gamed the system and at the end of the day, the local businesses whose business has suffered at the hands of the internet employ more people as a whole, making this pretty good for the economy. I guess it is time to re-optimize a whole lot of Google Local listings!

I say why not? 99.999% of small businesses do not have the same online credibility as does craigslist. If your service or product is the kind that has traditionally been driven by classified ads, then you would be a fool not to use craigslist as a tool. Lawncare, animal breeders, and many other small businesses that have typically lived off of newspaper classifieds have seen there business go down significantly. The one thing that most of these people haven’t realized is that a whole lot of people know go to the online classifieds for their information instead of newspapers.

History of Craigslist

Craigslist started in 1995 as a emails about events in San Francisco and was started by Craig Newmark. Since 1995, Craigslist has expanded into 50 countries and has listings in over 570 cities. The success of the website directly relates to it’s policy of serving free listings (Now job postings do cost some money, but far less than any of the major online job portals). I guess we could say that Craigslist is the “Open Source Classifieds”.

How to Utilize Craigslist for Your Business

With the ability to list three unique ads per day, that are given the red carpet by search engines, Craigslist allows small players that don’t even have a website the ability to have their businesses ranked on the first page of results for certain relevant phrases. The key to a successful listing is to utilize the architecture of the site. The keys to success with Craigslist are:

• Using keywords that are relevant to your business in your headline
• Make sure that your product or service is legit and that your offer is community centric
• Be upfront about your business. Craigslist is constantly spammed, so transparency is a must.

If you follow these suggestions and are diligent with your efforts, you will be pleasantly surprised with how successful Craigslist can be for your company.

Doing great SEO work isn’t the easiest job on the market and doing quality work takes time. Forunately, those who have been in the industry for a while have developed tons of tools to make our jobs a little bit easier. Let’s look at the list of tools that I use on a daily basis:

• SEO for Firefox- Ever wished that you could see your and your competition’s pagerank, number of links, domain age, and dmoz listing from a simple google or yahoo search? This tool makes it a reality and gives you a lot more for free.
• Adwords Keyword Tool- This tool was developed to help Adwords advertisers to find new keywords, but with a healthy amount of hand editing the lists in Excel, it is a great tool to get some keyword lists that include “Google’s monthly traffic estimates” for each keyword. The data probably isn’t right on, but no one is closer to the exact number than Google.
• Web Developer’s Toolbar for Firefox-Would you like to see every nofollow link on a webpage highlighted? Check. Would you like to see if any of your competitor’s are doing any form of cloaking? Check. Would you like to just validate the css on a page you are building? Check. This tool is amazing and with some creativity with it’s functionality, you will be amazed at how powerful it actually is.
• Google Webmaster’s tools- Webmaster’s tools gives you everything from the ability to see if your website has any indexability issues in the eyes of Google, you can find out if you have duplicate title tags, you can create your own robots.txt file, and quite a bit more from this easy to use set of tools.

This is by no means an all encompassing list of all of the great SEO tools on the internet, but it is a list of some of the tools that we use at LSM on all of our clients’ sites. I hope that any SEO noob’s out there that stumble across this can save a couple of hours a day from these tools!