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The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues

Chris Silver Smith

If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Building A B2B Brand From Scratch Through Search

Katherine Janca

In the past few articles, I’ve talked about various search strategies to apply to your existing B2B search campaigns. But what if you’re starting from scratch, and you’re building your brand for the first time? Maybe your brand is embarking on a strategy to expand into the market…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

A Guide to Spanish Content Marketing

ZephSnapp

Posted by ZephSnapp

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Si prefieres leer este post en Espaňol, se encuentra en el blog de Altura Interactive.

Just like the rest of the SEO/inbound/internet marketing world, we have spent the last year learning how to shift from link building to link earning, and despite the fact that this stuff is really, really hard, we’ve found some success by building out processes. One challenge (advantage?) that we have is that we work exclusively on Spanish-language projects. This means that while many of the strategies are the same, some of the tactics vary. This post is primarily meant for marketers interested in targeting the Spanish-speaking world, but should also be helpful to full-stack marketers no matter the language.

Are you ready for Spanish content marketing?

There are a ton of great reasons to get started on Spanish-language content marketing. The Hispanic community in the US grew 67% from 2000 to 2011 according to Pew Hispanic, and cleared 50 million people for the first time (although reaching them does not necessarily mean you need to start marketing in Spanish). Also, while growth has slowed in Latin American countries over the past couple of years, their economies are stable enough that they aren’t as affected by downturns in the US economy as they once were. Just because Hispanic marketing is hot, though, is not a good reason for your business to invest time, money, and sweat equity in marketing to Spanish speakers. You need to validate the concept and ensure it’s the right move for you.

First, translate your main keywords. In some cases this can be fairly straightforward, but there are some products that shouldn’t be translated, since the term exists on its own. A great example is “e-commerce:” While there are ways to translate this term, most of the time we leave it in English. But please, a word of advice: Don’t use a machine translation. Get a human being to translate your terms for you, then have someone else check their translations. It is of paramount importance that your terms preserve the same query intent, otherwise, any work on keyword research will be wasted.

Next, make sure that your website is in order, and that you have decided on an international strategy. If you need more help on that front, check out Aleyda’s Whiteboard Friday about International SEO Do’s and Dont’s and her International SEO Checklist. They are both excellent resources if you are thinking about taking your business abroad.

The research phase

We believe in doing persona-based marketing at all times. There is no reason to belabor the point of how to build personas, since this topic has been written about extensively. Suffice it to say, we follow the process explained by Mike King almost to a T. The main difference in our technique is that in addition to this process, we have to think about the country/region towards which we will be targeting the content. This informs the type of data we should use for a given piece of content. For example, if you are going after US-based Hispanics, you may not even need to create the content in Spanish!

Armed with these personas, we find actual people who are active on social media and see what type of content they are sharing. Followerwonk is a great way to do this. These are not necessarily prospects, but It’s absolutely necessary to drill down as much as possible, otherwise your outreach will not be nearly as effective.

Arm yourself with information

If you are going to create interesting content for Latin American audiences, you are going to need data. Lots of it. Luckily for you, we’ve gathered a ton of data resources from all over Latin America. Some of them are country specific, but others look at the region as a whole. The information is in Spanish, but as we say in Mexico, “gajes del oficio” (comes with the territory). At least we’ve translated the description of the databases so you’ll be able to find what you are looking for. It is also a living document. As we find more data sets, they will be added (and if you have any suggestions, please put them in the comments, either here or on that post).

Since you already have your personas built, you can easily decide the data that makes the most sense for your project, and then move on to another important step:

Building the content

If you are a data driven marketer (the best kind in my opinion), when you are diving into the data, your aim has to be to understand the story that the data is telling you, and how you can use it to promote your client. Once you have the story in place, we start thinking about how to best present the data. In some many cases, a great blog post will do the trick. In those cases, we have one person start writing titles. We write a minimum of five, because we want to stimulate creative thought—it is rare that the first idea is the best.

Our lead editor reviews the proposals with the author, and together they decide which best fits the subject, as well as the websites/people the post will be targeting. Then the post is written, reviewed by the editor, and then another content creator to ensure that the piece is focused, creative, and grammatically sound.

In many cases, users will respond more favorably to a visualization than to text. This is especially true if you are explaining a process or giving instructions. We’ve found that video can be an awesome way get through to these people. If you don’t have the budget or the ability to shoot a video yourself (although you should—as Phil Nottingham explained at MozCon, good video can be created pretty cheaply), PowToon allows you to create an animated explanation video, even if you don’t have incredible design chops.

If you must create an infographic, at least try to be original in how you present it. We’ve used Piktochart and Visual.ly just like everyone else, but there are a ton of other ways to present data. We’ve created a list of data visualization resources that includes some very unusual ways of presenting data. In many cases, the main investment is in learning how to use the platform.

Shameless Plug: In my Mozinar next Tuesday I’ll be sharing the easiest way to build resources with outreach prospects built in. It’s seriously awesome. You should sign up now. ¡Por favor!

Prospecting for outreach

Generally speaking, we are looking for:

People

Usually the best way to find experts in a given vertical is to look at Twitter, and the best way to qualify them is via Followerwonk. Enough blog posts have been written about this already, so there is no need for us to get into that here.

Websites

If you are really strapped for cash, all you need is a list of keywords for your vertical and Google’s advanced operators. We use these on occasion, but most of the time, it is faster and more efficient to lean on tools built by others.

Link Prospector supports multilingual queries, and if you want to get a great list of prospects quickly, this is a great way to find them. (Full disclosure: We helped build the multilingual tool, and while we didn’t profit from it, we do get to use it for free. Still, if you told me I could only use Moz and one other tool, this would be it).

Buzzstream is an awesome tool which also supports multilingual queries, and doubles as a way to remember what prospects are in what stage of a relationship. We have found that the contact information that the tool pulls is not particularly accurate for websites in Spanish, so if you are using this tool don’t depend on them—go get the information for yourself. Another platform that we’ve been using that has proven helpful is GroupHigh. Their platform is pricey, but the prospects that you can get from here are excellent, especially if you are doing a bilingual English/Spanish outreach campaign. The metrics they provide are based on Moz’s stats as well as social shares, but they don’t always coincide with what we find when we check sites by hand.

To be sure, we prequalify every single website we are going to do outreach to. And we craft every single pitch individually to ensure that they are more likely to looked upon favorably by our prospective partners.

Once we have our prospects, we separate them into tiers. The top tier is of the most important people and websites in a sphere. We know that getting in touch with and convincing these targets to share our content will be extraordinarily hard, simply because they are pitched to so often. The advantage we have is that most of the pitches they receive totally suck. Knowing how to approach each influencer can make or break your outreach efforts, which leads to our next point:

Outreach to influencers

The goal of any outreach campaign is to get the person/website you’ve targeted to share your content piece, right? In most cases, no matter the quality of your pitch, it will be ignored. This is because some websites are abandoned, the webmaster might be too busy with other work (like a day job), or they simply might not care enough to respond. These are the facts.

And then there is the question of culture and language. We’ve used templates developed by some of the best link builders in the US and seen zero or even negative response. So, it is crucial to localize not just the content, but also the approach. By following our process, you can increase your engagement rate when doing outreach, especially when it is for a piece of content you have created. Here are a few tips that we’ve found to be effective when doing outreach to Spanish-speaking webmasters, bloggers, and journalists:

1) Write it in Spanish

I know that this might seem obvious, but my friends who are bloggers—including for the oldest blog in Mexico—receive dozens of pitches from professional PR companies IN ENGLISH. Unforgivable.

2) Make it relevant

Even if the piece of content that you are promoting is only loosely related to the target site, make sure that you make an argument for why it would be interesting to the readership of that site. Yes, this means you can’t just blast emails. Too bad.

3) Keep it short

In Spanish, we have a tendency to be a bit verbose. In fact, we use more words to explain something than people usually do in English. That being said, it is still better to be concise.

4) Have a hook

Whenever you are doing outreach, the goal is to provide value to your client or company. Keep in mind, however, that webmasters don’t care about how great it will be for you if they share your latest infographic about dog food. They care about their readers and community, so make sure that your pitch addresses the benefits for them, not for you.

5) Address the webmaster how (s)he addresses users

In Spanish, you can address readers either formally or informally. By making your outreach consistent with how they address their readers, you can be sure that your pitch fits their style.

6) Be legit, be honest

Despite what I’ve heard about other markets, we’ve found that being TAGFEE is the best way to get results from an outreach campaign. That doesn’t mean that you can’t sugarcoat your outreach (“Links, Please” is probably not the best subject line), but we send emails from our own domain, and own up to working on behalf of a client. We even link back to our profile pages in our outreach emails.

7) Prioritize outreach method

The best method for outreach depends on who you are reaching out to. This is our priority list when reaching out to bloggers, for example:

  1. Contact form
  2. Facebook
  3. Email
  4. Twitter

In our experience, the first two methods are easily the most effective. This is another place where being open and honest works to our advantage. Since we are using our own Facebook profiles to conduct outreach, prospects can look at our pictures, read our updates, and see that we are human beings, just like them. They are far less likely to say no to someone who likes the same band as them, right?

Of course, if you are reaching out to a journalist (or even a web-based magazine) it is probably going to be best to reach out via phone. Having a prioritized list of methods makes things easier for the outreach specialist to work.

There is obviously a lot more that goes into outstanding Spanish content marketing, but this guide is here to give you the basics. If you want to dig deeper into our Spanish digital marketing processes, please sign up for my Mozinar. ¡Muchas Gracias!

If you would prefer to read this post in Spanish, check it out on the Altura Interactive blog.

Si quieres leer sobre estrategia de contenido en espaňol, este post también se encuentra en el blog de Altura Interactive.

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Growing Sales Without a Sales Team: The Power of Distribution

AndrewDumont

Posted by AndrewDumont

Early on, we made the decision not to grow a sales team at Moz. We’re not anti-sales, per se, it’s just that it does’t fit our culture. We believe in practicing what we preach—inbound marketing—not interruption selling.

Consequently, that provides a bit of a problem for a B2B SaaS business like Moz. Growing through traditional inbound channels is immensely powerful, but at a certain scale, maintaining linearity in growth through content, social media, and search becomes difficult. Working with the role of Business Development at Moz, it’s my job to find those channels that will introduce growth at scale in a predictive way.

Which brings me to distribution.

Just over two years ago when I started at Moz, we began to ponder a simple question: If we offered an extended free trial on Moz (45, 60, 90, or 120 days) to select partners, could it move the needle on growth?

Before we’d be able to answer that question, however, we needed a few assets. The first was what we call a “partner page” internally—a lander that factors in a coupon code at check-out and offers a soft entry point from a third-party site. An example of that can be found below, which was shown in a recent partnership we launched with Get Startup Tools. It should be said that this is not an ideal partner page. There’s much to be tested in the way of alternate text length and incorporating partner logos, which have proven to bump conversion in relevant studies.

Next, we needed to find something to provide our partners with value outside of the extended trial period that they’d be offering to their community through the distribution. This brought us to the concept of a “perks page,” a collection of top web services that we could offer to Moz subscribers at discounted price, in a sense offering what we were looking for in return. With these two assets in place, were were ready to go.

Moz Perks

Which brings me back to the question I teed up for myself originally. Yes, it could move the needle on growth, but how much? Let’s take a look. Below is a breakdown of free trials and paid conversions that have come directly from the distribution channel since January of 2012.

(click for larger version)

Looking at these numbers, however unsophisticated the graph may be, it begs another question: Sure, the numbers are growing, but do they perform as well as organic free trials, or do they churn out at a higher rate? Below is an analysis of just that, comparing conversion rates and churn of organic trials versus distribution trials, broken down by month in their subscription.

(click for larger version)

As you’ll notice, month 0 and 1 are much higher than organic, but it then regulates out to something more manageable, a rate very similar to that of organic. Oddly enough, when we looked at trial length and the corresponding conversion rate, it didn’t increase with length. Out of a fairly large sample set of 45, 60, 75, 90, and 120-day trials, the 60-day trial performed best by far. Counterintuitive, to say the least. From a holistic view, the conversion rate was lower, but not by an insane amount.

(click for larger version)

Now, back to that needle. How much revenue—real money—have distributions brought in? As of August 1st, 2013, we generated roughly $139,788 in revenue on a monthly basis through the distribution channel, or $2.3M in revenue since the channel was created in January of 2012.

(click for larger version)

Not bad. But I haven’t even brought up the most amazing part of distribution: acquisition cost. Each one of these users that came through our partners via distributions came to us with $0 in acquisition cost, which is why step two of the legwork I mentioned was so darned important. By offering value back to our partners through their inclusion in our perks page, all of the numbers listed above were acquired without a rev-share or acquisition cost. The only spend was in the form of an increased operating cost from the extended trail. The hottest of damns.

That’s all and well for Moz, but how can you apply it to your business? Well, regardless of your business, it’s definitely worth adding to your tool belt as one of your 21 tactics, but it’s typically best-suited for SaaS businesses like Moz.

If you’re a service provider, you’ll likely have to get a little bit more creative. Though it’s not a direct corollary, the closest comparable in the service world would be a partnership with a software product like Moz, wherein Moz becomes a recommendation engine for new clients. You can see this in practice through our partnership with Distilled. For most software companies, they don’t want to derail focus from the product through consulting work, so there’s a lot of value to be added in becoming that missing consultation piece.

Regardless, the same concepts apply. Provide value and receive value; that’s the nature of any partnership. Yet for some reason, partnerships typically aren’t thought of as a growth channel in the inbound marketing mix, when they can clearly have an impact.

Hell, in this example, they even build links, if you’re into that sort of thing.

A huge thanks to Alyson and Kurtis for making all of this data possible, both for our internal analysis and for the sake of this post, they employed some serious mySQL-fu.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How To Win In Local Internet Marketing: The Practical Guide For Small Businesses And Local Marketers

vedrantomic

Once a training ground for novice SEOs, local search has evolved into a complex, unpredictable  ecosystem dominated by Google. Corporations and mom-and-pops shops alike are fighting for their place under the Sun. It’s everybody’s job to make best out of local Internet marketing because its importance will continue to grow.

This guide is geared towards helping you deepen your understanding of the local search ecosystem, as well as local Internet marketing in general.

I hope that, after you finish reading this guide, you will be able to make sense of local Internet marketing, use it to grow your business or help your clients do the same.

Objectives, Goals & Measurements Are Crucial

Websites exist to accomplish objectives. Regardless of company size, business models and market, your website needs to bring you closer to accomplishing one or more business objectives. These could be:

  1. Customer Acquisition
  2. Lead Generation
  3. Branding
  4. Lowering sales resistance
  5. etc.

Although not exciting, this is a crucial step in building a local Internet strategy. It will determine the way you set your goals, largely shape the functionality of your website, guide you in deciding what your budget should be and so on.

Getting Specific With Measurement

Objectives are too broad to work with. They exist on a higher level and are something company executives/leadership need to set.

This is why we need specific goals, KPIs and targets. Without getting into too many details, goals could be defined as specific strategies geared towards accomplishing an objective.

For example, if your objective is to “grow your law firm,” a good goal derived from that would be to “generate client inquiries”. Another one would be to use the website to get client referrals.

When you have all this defined, you need to set KPIs. They are simply metrics that help you understand how are you doing against your objectives.  For this imaginary law firm, a good KPI would be the number of potential client leads. After you set targets for your KPIs, you have completed your measurement framework. To learn more about measurement models, you can read this post by Avinash Kaushik.
These will be the numbers that you or your client should care about on a day to day basis.

Lifetime Customer Value And Cost Of Customer Acquisition

Regardless of size, every local business needs to know what is their average lifetime customer value and the cost of customer acquisition.

You need to know these numbers so you can set your marketing budget and be aware if you are on the path of going out of business despite acquiring lots of customers.

Lifetime customer value (LTV) is revenue you expect from a single customer during the lifetime of your business. If you are having trouble calculating this number for your or client’s business, use this neat calculator made by Harvard Business School.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the amount of money you spent to acquire a single customer. The formula is simple. Divide the sum of total costs of sales, marketing, your overhead, with the number of customers you acquired in any given period.

LTV & CAC are the magic numbers.

You can use them to sell Internet marketing services, as well as to demonstrate the value of investing heavily in Internet marketing.

Understanding and using these metrics will put you and your clients ahead of most competitors.

Stop – It’s Budget Time

Now when you have your business objectives, customer acquisition costs and other KPIs defined, and their targets set, it’s time to talk budgets. Budgets will determine what kind of local Internet marketing campaign you can run and how far it can essentially go.

Most companies don’t have a separate Internet marketing budget. It’s usually just a part of their marketing budget which can be anywhere from 2% to 20% of sales depending on a lot of factors including, but not limited to:

  1. Business objectives
  2. Company size
  3. Profit margins
  4. Industry
  5. etc.

What does this mean to you?

If you are selling services, you will need to have as much of this data as possible.

Planning And Executing Your Campaign

Now when you know what business objectives your local Internet marketing campaign has to accomplish, your targets, and your budget – you can start developing a campaign. It’s easiest to think of this process if we break our campaign planning into small, but meaningful phases:

  1. laying the groundwork,
  2. building a website,
  3. taking care of your data in the local search ecosystem,
  4. citation building,
  5. creating a great website,
  6. building links,
  7. setting up a review management system,
  8. expanding on non-organic search channels
  9. and taking care of web analytics.

Laying The Groundwork


Local search is about data. It’s about aggregation and distribution of data across different platforms and technologies. It’s also about accuracy and consistency.

This is the reason why you need to start with a NAP audit.

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. It’s the anchor business data and should remain accurate, consistent and up to date everywhere. In order to make it consistent, you first need to identify inaccurate data.

This is easier than it sounds.

You can use Yext.com or Getlisted.org to easily and quickly check your data accuracy and consistency in the local search eco system.

Start With Data Aggregators

Data aggregators or compilers are companies that build and maintain large databases of business data. In the US, the ones you should keep an eye on are Neustar/Localeze , Infogroup (former InfoUSA) and Axciom.

Why are data aggregators important?
They are upstream data providers. This means that they provide baseline and sometimes enhanced data to search engines (including Google), local and industry directories. If your data is wrong in one of their databases, it will be wrong all over the place.

Usually, your business data goes bad for one or more of these reasons:

  1. You changed your phone number;
  2. You moved to another location;
  3. Used lots of tracking numbers
  4. Made lots of IYP advertising deals where you wanted to target multiple towns/cities
  5.  etc.

If you or your client have a data inconsistency problem, the fix will start with the aggregators:

Before you embark on a data correction campaign, have in mind that data aggregators take their data seriously. You will need to have access to the phone number on the listing you are trying to claim and verify, an email on the domain of the site associated with the business, and sometimes even scans of official documents.

Remember – after you fix your data inaccuracies with the aggregators, it’s still a smart idea to claim and verify listings in major IYPs as data moves slowly from upstream data providers to
numerous local search platforms your business is listed in.

Building Citations Is Important

Simply put, citations are mentions of your business’s name, address and phone number (full citation) or name and phone or address (partial citation).

Just like links in “general” organic search, citations are used to determine the relative importance or prominence of your business listing. If Google notices an abundance of consistent citations, it makes them think that your business is legitimate and important and you get rewarded with higher search visibility.

The more citations your business has, the more important it will be in Google’s eyes. Oh, there is also a little matter of citation quality as not all citations are created equal. There are also different types of citations besides full and partial.

Depending on the source, citations can come from:

  1. your website;
  2. IYPs like YellowPages.com;
  3. local business directories like Maine.com;
  4. industry websites like ThomasNet.com;
  5. event websites like Events.com;
  6. etc.

We could group citations by how structured they are. This means that a citation on YellowBook.com is structured, but a mention on your uncle’s blog is not. Google prefers the first type. The bulk of your citation building will be covered by simply making sure that your data in major data aggregators is accurate and up-to-date. However, there’s more to citations than that.

What Makes Citations Strong?

Conventional wisdom tells us that citation strength depends mostly on the algorithmic trust that Google has in the source of the your citation. For example, if you are a manufacturer of industrial coatings, a mention on ThomasNet.com would help you significantly more than a mention on a blog from some guy that has visited your facility once.

You also want your citations to be structured, relevant and to have a link to your website for maximum benefit.

How To Build Citations?

You already started by claiming and verifying your listings with major data aggregators. Since you are very serious about local search, you will make sure to claim and verify listings with major IYPs, too.

Start with the most important ones:

  1. Yellowpages.com;
  2. Yelp.com;
  3. local.yahoo.com;
  4. SuperPages.com;
  5. Citysearch.com;
  6. Insiderpages.com;
  7. Manta.com;
  8. Yellowbook.com;
  9. Yellowbot.com;
  10. Local.com;
  11. dexknows.com;
  12. MerchantCircle.com;
  13. Hotfrog.com;
  14. Mojopages.com;
  15. Foursquare.com;
  16. etc.

You shouldn’t forget business and industry associations such as bbb.org or your local chamber of commerce. Here’s where you can find your local chamber of commerce.

Industry Directories Are An Excellent Source Of Citations

Industry directories such as Avvo.com for lawyers or ThomasNet.com for manufacturers are not just an excelent source of citations, but are great for your organic search visibility in the Penguin Apocalipse.

How do you find those ?

You can use a couple of tools:

Want even more citations?

Then pay attention to daily deal and event sites. Don’t forget charity websites either. If you are one of those people that are obsessed with how everything about citations works, I recommend this (the one and only) book/guide about citations by Nyagoslav Zhekov.

Make Your Website Great

While it’s possible to achieve some success using just Google Places and other platforms to market a local business, it’s not possible to capture all the Web has to offer.

Your website is the only web property you will fully control. You have the freedom to track and measure anything you want, and the freedom to use your website to accomplish any business objective.

Marry Keyword And Market Research

There’s nothing more tragic nor costly than targeting the wrong keywords and trying to appeal to demographics that don’t need your services/products.

To run a successful local Internet marketing campaign, you cannot just rely on quantitative data (keywords), you need to conduct qualitative market research. This is very important as it will reduce your risks, as well as acquisition costs if done right.

Let’s start with keyword research.

Getting local keyword data has always been a challenge. Google’s recent decision to withhold organic keyword data hasn’t made it any easier. However, Google itself has provided us with tools to get relatively reliable keyword data for any local search campaign.

Coupled with data from SEOBook Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, and Bing’s Keyword Tool, you will have plenty of data to work with.

Of course, you shouldn’t forsake the market research of the equation.

You and/or your client can survey their customers to discover how exactly they describe your business, your services/products or your geographic area. For example, you’ll learn if there are any geographical nuances that you should be aware of, such as:

  1. DFW (Dallas/Fort Worth)
  2. PDX (Portland)
  3. OBX (Outer Banks)

Use this data against keyword research tools. If you’re running AdWords, you can get an accurate idea of search volumes. To do that, click the Campaign tab, followed by the Keywords tab, then Details and then Search Terms. This data can be downloaded. The video below shows how you can get accurate search volume data if running AdWords.

Keep in mind that the quality of data using this method depends on your use of keyword matching options. This practically means that if you want to get exact match search volumes for a certain number of keywords, you have to make sure to have those keywords set as exact match.

If you’re not running AdWords, Google gives you a chance to get a good representation of your local search market using the Keyword Planning Tool as described in this post.

Content And Site Architecture

Largely, your content will depend on your business objectives, brand and the results of your keyword research. The time of local brochure type sites has long passed, at least for businesses that are serious about local Internet marketing.

Local websites are no different from corporate websites when it comes to technical aspects of SEO. Performance and crawlability are very important, as well as proper optimization of titles, headings, body text etc.

However, unlike corporate websites, local sites will have more benefit from:

  1. “localization” of testimonials – it’s not only important to get testimonials, but it’s crucial to make sure that your visitors know where those testimonials came from.
  2. “localization” of galleries, as well as “before and after” photos – similar to testimonials, you can leverage social proof the most if your website visitors can see how your services/products helped their neighbours.
  3. location pages – pages about a specific city/town where you or your client have an office or service area. Before you go on a rampage creating hundreds of these pages, don’t forget that they need to add value to the users, and not just be copy/pasted from Wikipedia. The way to add value is to make them completely unique and useful to your visitors. For example, location pages can show the specific directions to one of your offices or store-fronts. You don’t have the “big brand luxury”  of ranking local pages that have virtually all of their content behind a paid wall. 

  1. local blogging – use your blog to connect with local news organizations, charities and industry associations, as well as local bloggers. In addition, blog about your industry; this way, you will get the best of both worlds.
  2. adopting structured data – using schema markup, you can increase click-through rates from the SERPs and get a few other SEO benefits. You can use the Schema Creator to save time.
  3. adopting “mobile” – everyone knows that local search is increasingly mobile. Mobile websites are not a luxury but a necessity Luckily for you or your clients you don’t have to invest a lot of resources in developing a mobile site. You can use tools such as dudamobile.com or bmobilized.com to create a fully functional mobile website in hours.

Link Building For Brick And Mortar Businesses

Links are still important. They are still a foundation of high organic search visibility. They still demand your resources.

But a lot has changed – since Penguin. Building links has become a delicate endeavor even for local websites. But there is a way to triumph, all you need to do is change how you view local link building.

See link building as marketing campaigns that have links as a by-product.

What does that mean? It means that your are promoting your business as if Google doesn’t exist. Link and citation building overlap to a certain extent. They do so in a way that makes good links great citations, especially if they’re structured.

Join Business Associations

BBB.org has an enormus amount of algorithmic trust. It’s also an excellent citation. As a bonus – displaying the BBB badge prominently on your website you will likely receive a boost in conversion rates. Similar is true with your local chamber of commerce. Would you join those if Google was not around?

You probably would.

Join Industry Associations

Every industry has associations you or your client can join. You will get similar benefits to ones one can expect from BBB. However, being a member of  trade associations will add an additional layer of value to your business in form of education or certifications.

Charity work

Every business should give back.  Sometimes you will get a link sometimes you will not but you will always benefit from this type of community involvement.

Industry websites

There are plenty of industry websites and and directories in  almost every industry. Sometimes these websites can refer significant traffic to you but they almost always make for a good link and a solid citation.

Organize Events

Events are good for business. If you organize them you should make sure that it’s reflected on the web. There are plenty of websites you can submit your event to. Google is not likely  to start considering organizing offline events spam any time soon.

Find Local Directories

Every state has a few good ones. It’ likely that your town has an  online business directory you can join. These types of links can make good citations too. They are usually easy to acquire.

Local Blogs

It pays to a friend of your “local blogosphere”.  Try to include local bloggers in your community involvement, offer to contribute content or offer giveaways.

Truly Integrate Link Building Into Your Marketing Operations

Whenever possible, make sure your vendors link to you:

  1. If you’re offering discounts to any organization, make sure it’s reflected on their website.
  2. If you’re attending an industry show or an event, give a testimonial and get a link.
  3. If you get press, remind a report to link to your website.

Review Management

In local search, customer reviews are bigger than life. Consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations while majority (52%) says that positive online reviews make them more likely to choose a local business. Influence reviews have on your local business go well beyond social proof. Good reviews can boost your local search visibility, while bad reviews can destroy your business.

Reviews – The Big Picture

Every organization that strives to get better at what it does should use consumer reviews to improve its business operations. Customer reviews should be treated as one of the most valuable pieces of qualitative data. You should be surveying your customers daily and use their feedback to improve your services, products, customer service etc..

This holds true for corporations, as well as mom and pops shops. It’s not complicated to ask your customers about specific aspects of their experience with your business and record their answers. It’s not expensive, either.

The benefits of taking reviews seriously are enormous:

  1. More search visibility;
  2. Less potential for online reputation management issues;
  3. Increased Credibility;

 What can you do to win at review management?

Since you need to get high rating positive reviews on different websites in a way that doesn’t break any guidelines and keeps you out of jail, your best bet would be to use reviews as a customer service survey tools.

This means that you should seek customer feedback systematically in order to improve your or your client’s business. You can ask your most ecstatic customers to share their experiences with your services/products on major local search platforms. Remember that you cannot provide any type of incentive for this behavior.

To save time, you can use a tool such as GetfiveStarts.com. This tool will do everything described above.

Think Beyond Organic Search

Internet marketers tend to be blindly focused on organic search. It’s understandable – organic traffic is relatively cheap (in most markets) and seemingly unlimited.

It’s also a mistake.

Organic search channel is getting increasingly more unstable. And with that, more expensive to acquire. Since you’re aware of your customer acquisition cost and have a measurement framework, it’s easy to know how affordable traffic from other sources is for your business.

Paid Search Traffic

Paid search advertising works, especially if you did a good job gearing your site for conversion. You shouldn’t leave your PPC budget to Google, though. Bing/Yahoo! are a more affordable source of paid traffic with similar conversion rates.

If you’re planning to run a local paid campaign, don’t forget to:

  1. target geographically;
  2. use negative keywords and
  3. be fanatical about acquisition cost.

You can also read this post by PPC Hero on what you should keep in mind when running local search advertising campaigns. You can also check out this post on Search Engine Land about managing and measuring local PPC campaigns.

Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) Sites

Sites like YellowPages.com or SuperPages.com don’t have the traffic Google or even Bing get, but they do have a significant amount of traffic. They also have traffic that’s at the very end of the buying cycle. This is the reason one should be serious about IYPs.

What does that mean?

It means that you should have most of the big IYP listings claimed, verified and optimized to the best of your ability. So use every element of your listing to sell your products/services. In a lot of markets, it’s wise to explore advertising opportunities, as well.

If you want to take an extra step, or simply lack the time, you can sign up with a service such as Yext.com and control the major IYP listings from a single dashboard.

Keep in mind, though, that Yext.com doesn’t come for free, and you will have to pay a few hundreds dollars for a year of service.

Another avenue to take would be to outsource this process. In this scenario, you will most likely pay a one-time fee for verification and optimization of a predetermined number of listings. However, if you would like to change some of your business information somewhere down the road (such as name and phone number), you will have to go through this process from the beginning.

Social Media

These days, social media means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Local businesses should use social media platforms to connect with customers that love them. Empowering these customers and giving them an incentive to recommend you to their family and friends.

You should automate as much of your social media efforts as possible. You can use tools like HooteSuite or SocialOomph.

Always try to add value in your interactions and never spam your follower base.

Classified Sites

It’s amazing how many businesses miss to build their presence on classified sites like Craigslist.org. Even though Craigslist audience the type of audience that is always on the lookout for a great deal, the buying intent is very strong.

If you’d like to get the most out of Craigslist and other classified sites, remember to make your ads count. You need:

  1. persuasive copy;
  2. targeted ads;
  3. special deals;
  4. etc.

Other sources of non-search traffic you should explore are local newspaper advertising, ads on big industry websites, local blogs and others.

Tracking And Web Analytics

If there’s only one thing local businesses should care about, it’s tracking. As we established in the beginning of this guide, everyone needs to know how much they can afford to spend in order to acquire a customer.

Proper tracking ensures that you don’t make a mistake of spending too much on customer acquisition or spending anything on acquiring a wrong type of customer.

You can use a number of free or low cost web analytics solutions, including Clicky, KissMetrics, Woopra and Google Analytics.

If you’re like most people and don’t care if Google has access to your data, you can use Google Analytics. Take advantage of custom reporting and advanced segmentation.

In order to make the most out the traffic you get, and to get more of the traffic that is right for your business, you should create custom reports. They will enable you to know how you’re doing against your targets.

To create a custom report, click the “Customization” tab in Analytics and then click the “New Custom Report” tab.

Pick your metrics first (I recommend a Unique Visitors and Conversion Rates and couple that with the geographic dimension)

Tracking Offline Conversions

This step is crucial for local businesses that want to measure performance. Fortunately, this is not as complicated as it sounds. Depending on the type of your campaign, you can use tracking phone numbers, web-only discount codes as well as campaign-specific URLs.

Avinash Kaushik has written extensively on best ways to track offline conversions. I highly recommend this post.

Tying It All Together

Focus on improving the quality of products you sell and/or services you provide. Remember that every Internet marketing campaign works better if you’re able to provide a remarkable experience for your customers.

Build your brand and make your customers fall in love with your business. That would make every aspect of your marketing, especially Internet marketing, work better.

Vedran Tomic is a member of SEOBook and founder of Local Ants LLC, a local internet marketing agency.

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