The recent SMX conference got us thinking about forecasts for future changes that will affect all of us as online marketers. One topic that dominated conversation at the conference was the increasing importance and dominance of local search.

Increasingly, local listings have come to dominate search results pages. For many queries, after paid ads and local results, there is only room for one organic, non-local result above the fold on a search results page. In order to show up above the fold for many of these competitive terms, you either need to pay per click for traffic or totally crush your local SEO campaign.

Furthermore, Google has stated that 20 percent of searches on its properties have local intent, a figure that doubles to 40 percent for mobile search.  These factors all point to the fact that if your local business is not ranking in local search, you’re almost certainly missing out significantly on visibility and traffic.

Even if you’ve dabbled in local before, it’s a good idea to revamp your campaign at regular intervals. If your campaign has grown a bit stale or simply isn’t producing the results you were expecting, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.  Below I’ve outlined some tips to help put you on the map (Bet you didn’t see that local SEO pun coming!)

Benchmark Your Efforts

First things first, keep up to date with the number of citations you have. An easy way to do this is to do a search for your business name, address, and phone number.  By now you know that the more high quality citations you have the better, so keep an accurate count of these and monitor new ones that come in. Doing so will help you identify opportunities and “low-hanging fruit” as well as help you be more effective overall with your link building/citation strategy.

Find Alternative Citation Sources

As Will Scott (@w2scott) from Search Influence put it (paraphrasing here) – “If it has your NAP [Name, Address. Phone Number] info and it’s near a link to your website, it’s a citation.” It’s worthwhile to look outside the most common citation sources like Yelp and CitySearch to go after additional,  outside-the-box citations.

Below is a citation for Grimaldi’s, a classic Brooklyn pizzeria. The citation comes from nycgo.com, a particularly relevant citation source for someone in the restaurant business. Even though this isn’t a traditional citation source, it’s a valuable placement on a high quality site.

Whenever possible, incorporate your NAP information into your link building strategy.

Inspire Reviews

Reviews should always be organically achieved. Don’t try to game the system by buying reviews or enlisting employees to write them for you. It’s a better use of time and money to try to inspire genuine reviews from real customers. Leverage email and social campaigns to encourage these reviews.

Amazon does a good job of following up with customers throughout the purchase process – even after the transaction is complete. Amazon’s strategy could easily be repurposed for a local campaign – all you need is an email address. Send follow-ups whenever possible, thanking customers for their patronage or purchase and asking them for a review. One SMX presenter recommended segmenting email lists so you can direct logged in Gmail users directly to a Google review page, and Yahoo! Mail users to Yahoo! Local.

If you don’t have a large email database to pull from, try reaching out to your social communities. If they love you, you shouldn’t have trouble inspiring a number of them to write reviews.

Speaking of Reviews…Diversity Counts

Google does not pull in reviews from other sites to show on their own search results pages, so reviews from Yelp and others will never show up in SERPS. That said, Google has stated that reviews from a variety of sources may be used as a factor to determine the location prominence score of a business.  If you only have reviews from one or two sources, make an effort to encourage diversification of review sources.

Local Information On-Site

Securing a large volume of high quality citations can be difficult and time consuming. Luckily, there are onsite factors you can work on to make a difference in the meantime.

If you are a multi-location business, building out single location landing pages as opposed to using a single page format will make a huge difference in ensuring that all locations have a chance of ranking in local search.

Do This:

Not This:

Also consider incorporating your NAP information in onsite elements, like title tags and HTML tags, on local landing pages to give strong signals to the engines that you are a local business.

Let us know in the comments if you have any other tips for optimizing local campaigns!

Don’t do this.

“Put Simply: If your content isn’t good enough to attract good, natural links, it doesn’t matter how “optimized” that content is.” – Brian Clarke, founder of Copyblogger

The best way to create something new and original that people will want to read is to do your own research. If you’re writing an article about home design, interview an interior decorator. If you’re writing an article about a landmark, get your butt out there and take some original photos. At the very least make sure you’re providing your unique perspective on the story. Research is the first step to a solid article, and if you’re writing on a topic you’re only vaguely familiar with your readers will know.

General Best Practices

• Avoid big blocks of text. Take into consideration that people just don’t have attention spans anymore and get easily distract
• Have a hook. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention right away you’ve lost them.
• Use Pictures. An appealing photo can grab a visitor’s attention in less time than it would take to read the opening paragraph. Avoid using stock photographs whenever possible – people have learned to spot a stock photo from a mile away and it’s a big turnoff.
• Work from an outline. An outline will help you organize all the points you want to cover and provide your article with fluidity.
• Stay away from five dollar words. Never try to impress a reader with fancy words like fluidity. Don’t dumb down, but also don’t show off. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
• Don’t edit an article on the same day you wrote it.Once you finish your rough draft, put it aside and forget about it. Look at it again in a couple days with fresh eyes and you’ll likely find mistakes you missed the first time. I find editing easier from a hard copy than from a monitor, but that’s not the case for everyone. Also try reading it aloud. Sometimes when you actually say the words it makes it easier to spot the errors, especially for auditory learners.

SEO Best Practices

Keyword research. Understanding what keywords you should be targeting is vital to every aspect of search engine optimization, from link building to content generation. Take a look at what keywords are relevant to your site and what search terms you want to bring people to your site then optimize for those terms.

One helpful strategy is to use a tool like SEMRush to find out which terms you already have decent rankings for and focus on them. If your site ranks at position two for a term and you get it up to one, you’ll likely double the amount of traffic you get from people searching for that term. You’ll also want to see who your competitors are to determine if it’s worth the effort to outrank them. Top sites like Wikipedia and WebMD can be very difficult to surpass.

After you’ve created a list of target keywords, a couple ways you can optimize for them is by creating relevant content or using those keywords in the anchor texts of inbound links – this is covered in more detail below.

Tags. The Keywords in the title tag have a lot of SEO value, so it’s generally more important to have a title with keywords that people actually search for than to have a title that’s clever. Let’s look at Manhattan Time Service’s website as an example: the title tag on watch engraving service landing page is “Watch Engraving | Laser, Diamond, and Machine Engraving.” The term “watch engraving” is short, to the point, and it’s what people search for when they want this service. Not surprisingly, Manhattan Time Service ranks highly for this term – 1^st position.

You can always change the title when disseminating your content through social networks and bookmarking sites. Also, keep in mind that keywords closer to the beginning of the title tag have more SEO value than ones following. Hx tags signify headers and are also important ranking factors. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags to organize the sections in your content.

Internal links. Interlinking, or linking to your pages from within your own site, signals to search engines which pages you think are relevant for which terms. For Instance, if you’re running a site that helps new authors get published, and you have an article on your blog about how to pitch a novel to publishers, you’ll want to link from that article with relevant anchor text pointing to the page where writers can submit their work for publication.

As a general rule, try to avoid reciprocal linking. Of course these kinds of links are going to occur naturally, but don’t go out of your way to acquire them since they’re value has been downgraded by search engines. Same goes for linking to spammy sites or having broken links – these are both signals of a low quality site to search engines.

Keyword density. Stuffing a page with keywords used to help rankings, but SEOs took advantage of this ranking factor and now search engines have not only devalued keyword stuffing but also penalize for it.

Link Building

Link building is one of the most difficult but also most valuable ways to optimize your website. The quality and relevance of your inbound links are two of the most important ranking factors that search engines use to determine the value of your site. In this section I’ll go over a few types of link building strategies and their pros and cons.

Create high quality content. This one’s a no-brainer. If you have interesting or useful content on your site people will naturally link to it since they want to share compelling content with their visitors too. The hard work comes when you have to create that content. See “General best practices.”

Article Dissemination. This is where social media comes in. People won’t link to your content if they haven’t read it, so you have to get it in front of as many people’s faces as possible. You can spread your content through social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, email, etc. If you post a great article with viral potential, readers will take over your work and spread it around themselves. This can be significantly more effective if you already have a strong presence and connections on these sites.

In addition you’ll want to target niche sites that are relevant to your article. If you’re trying to promote an article about baby pacifiers you’ll want to start participating in online parenting communities since your content will be more relevant to them.

Article Syndication. This used to be a popular link building strategy in which SEOs published articles across multiple syndication sites such as ezinearticles.com, but Google massively devalued content farms earlier this year because SEOs took advantage of this strategy and brought down the quality of articles on these sites. Do not pursue online article syndication as a way to build links.

Directory Submissions. Having listings on certain high value directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo Directories can be valuable, but don’t spend a lot of time submitting your site to directories. There are thousands of directories out there and most of them are low-quality low-value sites. Besides that, you also want to have a natural linking profile. This means that if you have a thousand links pointing to your site from business directories but only a few links that look natural, search engines will understand that you’re trying to game the system. The same is true for anchor texts – if all the anchor texts pointing to your site are the same this signals unnatural linking.

Guest Blogging. This is one of my favorite ways to acquire inbound links, and it’s also one of the more creative. This strategy involves reaching out to blogs relevant to your site and offering free content. Of course this content will have links pointing back to your site in it, and that’s where you benefit.

First you’ll want to compile a list of top sites to target, and then start reaching out to them. Become a member of their online communities; follow them on twitter; comment on their articles. If you’re an expert in a certain subject, present yourself as such and offer topics you could write about. Make sure to inform that you’re offering this service for free since many webmasters aren’t familiar with guest blogging as a link building strategy and will think you’re looking for a job.

This is another area where keyword research is important, since the keywords that you choose to link back to your site, or the anchor texts, greatly influence how your site will rank for those terms. Generally guest bloggers are allowed a byline with a link or two at the end of an article, but links within the body of the article are better since search engines treat links that are closer to the top of a page with more value.

There are also guest blogging communities such as www.bloggerlinkup.com and www.myblogguest.com where you can find sites looking for guest blog posts and bloggers looking for host sites. These communities can save you a lot of time since you already know these people are interested in guest blogger content.

As I final note, I’d like to encourage all online marketers to espouse white hat (honorable) SEO tactics, not only because this will make the internet a better place for everyone, but also because it will be in your best interest in the long run. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, and betting on black (hat) can hurt you in the end.

“Unfortunately, too many assume that SEO means trying to trick search engines. It doesn’t. It simply means building a site that’s friendly to them.” – Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land

“I want you to use “black hat” methods to raise our website’s ranking on search engines.”

“What do you like best about that ideas – the fact that it’s unethical or the near certainty of getting caught?”

“That’s sort of a loserish thing to say.”

“Talking doesn’t work for people like me.”

In recent years Adams has appeared to relish taking on search giant Google. Below are a pair of strips poking fun at the company’s omnipotent presence.

Dilbert’s company institutes Google health plan: Employees must Google their own diagnosis.

Dilbert defends Google and its company motto.

Blue Fountain Media has received an advanced copy of Econsultancy & SEMPO’s forthcoming State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010. The report is based on a world-wide survey of over 1,500 advertisers (companies) and advertising agencies across a wide range of business sectors.

SEO’s Double Digit Growth

The SEO/SEM industry grew 8% to $14.6 Billion in 2009. This year things are expected to be even better as the industry will grow by 14% to $16.6 Billion. But where’s all that money coming from?

How SEO Killed the Newspaper

Companies and agencies are increasing SEO, SEM, and Social Media Marketing budgets at the expense of other advertising spending. This is particularly true of print advertising like newspapers and magazines.

Of the companies re-allocating budgets to search engine marketing, around half (49%) are moving it from print advertising. More than a third (36%) are shifting money from direct mail, and almost a quarter are moving budgets from conferences and exhibitions (24%) and web display advertising (23%).

Agencies see the print advertising sector even more heavily hit, with 69% of supply-side respondents noticing a shift of budget from newspapers and magazines into search engine marketing.

Perhaps the single biggest loser in the move away from print is the phone book industry. SEMPO’s survey found 85% of agencies see local search as a significant trend.

Why bother with newspapers or The Yellow Pages when you could just sign up for a free listing on Google Maps or do a cool Mayor offer on Foursquare?

Blue Fountain Media has approached the same problem—we work with large, Fortune 500 companies; we work alongside PR companies and ad agencies; and we often work with websites that use legacy software, and companies that face strict regulatory issues. Here’s what we’ve learned about integrating search engine optimization into larger campaigns.

1. Find out what the broader goals are: if the PR company is rebranding a client as a premium provider, it’s a good idea for us to avoid targeting keywords that start with “cheap”. At the same time, it’s good to find out how their marketing materials describe the company. If they describe themselves as “The only company in the X industry that offers unconditional full refunds,” you can guess that customers who don’t remember the name may remember the pitch—and target keywords accordingly.
2. Learn who to communicate with: there’s nothing worse than realizing that a week-long email thread could have been resolved with a five-minute phone call to the right person. At Blue Fountain Media, we go to the source: if we’re doing something that involves media outreach, we’ll talk to the PR people first; if we need to edit a client’s website, we’ll work with the IT team to do it as efficiently as possible.
3. Get ready to share credit—in both directions: The PR team got them into the top industry trade magazine. The SEO team made sure that mention came with a link. Obviously, the PR team scored a major hit—but the SEO team helped get even more value out of it.We’ve gotten the best results when we measure what actions we’ve taken, and what results those actions usually get. When a PR company, an SEO firm, and an internal IT team work together, they can compound the results—if something goes wrong, keeping close track of the actions taken lets you pinpoint what didn’t work.
4. Share insight: SEO and social media marketing simply can’t be matched when it comes to finding data. It’s impossible to get so much high-quality information—on what customers are looking for, what convinces them to buy, what prices and discounts they respond to.But we’re happy to share. If an SEO campaign reveals that customers love “25% off your first two purchases!” and don’t care for “half off your second purchase!” that’s information that can be used in TV ads, in-store displays, and other forms of traditional marketing.At the same time, PR agencies can give us good people to contact, and general advertising agencies often come up with great creative ideas that we can incorporate into search and social interaction.

At Blue Fountain Media, we don’t operate in a vacuum. And we don’t want to! We’re web design and search engine marketing experts, and we’re happy to work alongside experts in other fields. The most common result is that we all provide a better service to the client.

1. Keep your enemies closer, but keep your friends close too.

When you start an SEO campaign, the focus is usually on competitor research: what are your competitors optimizing for, where are they getting links, and how can you do a better job at it than them? But through Google Analytics you can also see what sites you are already getting traffic from. Well, a lot of the time, the users that come in through those referring sites ended up there because of a previous search query. Why is the referrer ranking, and what can you do to get your site on that SERP too?

2.  Exploring site search

A lot of websites have a search bar that allow you to search through the content of the site. This is a nice safety feature, but once a user is on your site, you have control over their experience, so they shouldn’t have to: important information should be accessible through site navigation. Luckily, you can track popular internal search terms with Google Analytics. If a lot of users are searching for the same pieces of content, it’s probably a good idea to investigate how easy it is to navigate to them.

3. Using advanced segments in Google Analytics data

There is a lot of data in Google Analytics, but the default reports are not always easy to sort through. Sometimes you want to look at a the performance of a whole group of keywords, without the distraction of extraneous data; or you want to look at the sources, conversion rates and actions of only the “highly-engaged users” who visit more than three pages. Advanced Segments allow you to view custom sets of data in a single report.

• Decide what to target: If you don’t have a big budget and an experienced search marketing team, don’t try to compete with someone who does. You should try to target the name of your business, and the names of any of your principal employees. You can also rank well for extremely local, extremely specific keywords. You probably won’t get “New York Auto Repair,” but you might get “Sunset Park Ford parts.”

• Create Useful Content: You know your business better than your customers: so show them. Write a section on your site that includes your main targeted keyword in the title, and includes related keywords in section titles. Don’t overdo it: read your page out loud and see if it sounds natural.

• Link effectively within the site: Once you have something worth reading on your site—a useful description of how your business works, a history of your company showcasing your experience, an impressive biographical page about the founder—you can start linking within the pages.

Your founder bio can link to your company page (and vice versa). Your company page can link to specific services pages in context, to give readers more information.

• Promote, but just a little bit: you don’t need to work full-time to promote your website. But you can link to your company page through your social media profiles, and you can contribute to online news sources that are relevant to your business. This gets your name in front of people who could be interested in your business—and it shows search engines that relevant sites are willing to link to you (and webmasters don’t mind the free content!)

• Get active, locally: Add your physical address to the footer of your site, and add your business to location-based sites like Yelp. You should also add yourself to local search listings on the main search engines.

• Test results—patiently: You won’t get instant results, and you shouldn’t expect to. But once you’ve created your content and gotten a few links, wait a few weeks and check your rankings. You should be ranking well for your brand name; you’ll probably be near the top for employee names, behind LinkedIn and Facebook. If you don’t rank well for local searches for your product or service, look at who outranks you, and find out what they’re doing differently: more links? More targeted content? A more popular site in general? If you can match their advantages, do it—if not, get more specific about where you are and what you do. Ranking well locally is better than ranking decently on broader queries. Who is more likely to be your next customer: the one who searches for your products in your city, or the one who searches for your product in your exact neighborhood?

Here are some of the techniques they use—the internal linking structure, the user guidelines, and the content aggregation methods they use to rank well even if they don’t know what they’ll rank for.

• Yelp.com’s SEO has quite a pedigree: they’re one of SEOMoz’s clients. There’s a detailed (but now obsolete) description of the SEO tricks Yelp used to optimize their site:

• Yelp’s SEO: Part I

• Yelp’s SEO: Part II

Essentially, what Yelp does is combine a ‘directory’-style front page (with hierarchical information easily accessible to search engines) with fresh content that entices users (and means that frequently-updated pages get indexed). At the same time, Yelp used to aggressively use the nofollow tag, a technique that is not nearly as effective as it used to be.

• LinkedIn.com’s SEO is designed to do one thing and one thing only: make sure they own your name on Google. To do this, they’ve created several alphabetical directories (which search engines can quickly rip through to gather the data they need) and a few subject-specific pages. LinkedIn also brings in links by giving people badges they can post to their sites.

• Ezinearticles’ SEO stands out from the group for a couple reasons: one, the site is not as well known as LinkedIn or Yelp—and yet, you’re almost guaranteed to have encountered it at some point in your life. If Yelp is for places, and LinkedIn is for people, Ezine is for “Misc.”

They use some standard SEO techniques—detailed category views, ‘related-articles’ links to give search engines contextual clues, and a front page full of random articles so something five clicks away from the homepage will still get noticed by search engines. But the most important thing they do is require quality: they edit articles to reject grammatical errors and tone down salesly language, and the result is that you can’t help but write something helpful if you’re using Ezine. They could operate the site as a loophole in search engines’ ranking algorithms, but instead they closed the loophole and created a source of reasonably high-quality information.

As we prepare to launch a very exciting user-generated site (with a great chance to change the industry and a decent chance to change the world), we’re doing everything we can to learn how other user-generated sites succeed.

Why do some companies “get it” and some are being left behind in the dust? Why are Nike, JetBlue, and Zappos the poster-children for companies that “get it”, and how are they achieving their social media success? Why is transparency so important? Will these things have a positive ROI and how do you measure it?

We have to remember that social media is just one piece of the puzzle and a component of branding. The following are things you have to remember when trying to build a strong brand interactively:

Listen:

I’ve mentioned numerous times that as a brand you have to actively listen. Create ego-centric searches on as many social media platforms as you can—Twitter, Facebook, Google Blogsearch, Friendfeed, Technorati. Read blogs and people’s comments—understand what people are saying, and always ask yourself why. Why are people saying what they say?

Care:

Ultimately one of the core aspects as a company or brand is that you care about your customers and your own product or service. I know this sounds fundamental, but many companies’ online presence suggest that they just don’t give a damn about either—and they didn’t have to in the past. Customers were forced to rely on brands that gave them bad customer service and they had no say in it. The power of broadcasting bad customer service wasn’t transparent.

Online Real Estate & Interaction:

Wherever there is conversation you have to connect with it—connecting with people is integral, not only as a brand but as a society. Build your brand on:

• Twitter (Word of Mouth on steroids)

• Facebook and/or Myspace (soon becoming obsolete unless you’re a musician)

• Flickr (for photos)

• Youtube (for video)

• StumbleUpon/Digg (for discovering websites and voting on them)

• LinkedIn to connect with your employees and business related individuals

There are other social networks out there like Plaxo, Friendfeed, Bebo, etc., but those depend on your needs versus wants and on the audience or consumer you want to target.

Signing up for these services is just the first step, actively listening and participating is the second step. Participating on a timely manner and correcting situations is the next.

Content:

Content is key! Create new content regularly. Think about it as your interactive voice—you want to have something to say, but don’t be annoying and obnoxious (no one really likes jerks). Create content on you website or blog regularly—at least twice a week (create one if you don’t have one—it also helps your website’s SEO). Create engaging content—company and industry news—and make it personal (people like human emotions, we’re hardwired that way). And if you promise something follow through with it. Many have promised the world to their customers (*AHEM—Cuil*) and don’t follow through 100% of the time. You lose credibility as a brand and trust is hard to get back once you lose it.

Conversation & Community:

Now that you are listening to the conversation, you should participate to stay actively pertinent. Comment on blogs and converse with “Tweeters”—all in a reasonable time-frame (the sooner the better). If you discover bad news or negativity of your brand, try not to be too defensive—be honest, professional, and deal with the situation as best as you can (and always try to go above and beyond what’s expected) .

Also make sure that you are easily “accessible” by the community, since you are so connected. When a customer needs some customer service, don’t shun them! Connect with them!

Also be human—I know this sounds stupid, but people forget (intentionally or unintentionally). These social media platforms are tools to connect—Twitter is a powerful tool to connect, sometimes faster than email and phone communication. Quick response is optimal, but any response is better than no response.

Passion:

Last but not least, have some passion! Passion is one of the most important factors, if not the most important factor as a brand. I’ve briefly touched on this earlier with caring for your customer and product. Sure you have to have a quality product, conversation, avenues, listening skills, but if you’re doing all those things without passion, you may as well not do them at all. Because it will show.