Flipping websites is a common and popular practice, but you can make more money in the long term by renting websites out, instead of getting a one-time payment for them.

This technique only works in a few niches; one in particular is the local business niche. Many local businesses are still in the dinosaur age and this means one thing: It’s time to cash up on local businesses that have no Internet presence whatsoever or a very weak one if that.

One reason local Internet business marketing can be so lucrative is that while the keywords have low search volume, they are still worth an enormous amount of money to the right people, and they also tend to have weak competition. City-service keywords are some of the most unique type of keyword phrases in terms of SEO and ROI on the planet and cashing up on them all starts with owning the exact match domain name.

How to GamePlan Your Strategy

Getting into the local business market fast is all about owning the right domain names to begin with. The “May Day” Google algorithm update of about a year ago – hit people banking on exact match domain names pretty hard. But exact match domain names are still very effective in the local business niche because competition for the keywords is very low, and thus the exact match still holds a lot of weight in the Google algorithm.

Rural Regions vs Large Metropolitan Areas.

Keyword research is absolutely crucial for choosing your domain names.

You don’t want to choose a keyword that has no search volume – and that is the exact problem with areas low in population. The search volume is so low that it not measurable, thus it is a good idea to use this strategy is highly populated metropolitan areas only.

The problem with large metropolitan areas, on the other hand, is that in the last two years, a large percentage of exact match domains have been registered – so you can’t get a hold of one unless you pay a premium on the aftermarket. However, if you find the right niche (HINT: Dumpster Rental is one good one still available widely across America) you will be able to cash up.

Side Note: There is a workaround for keyword research in low populated areas: use Google AdWords.

Create A Funnel of Web Sites

A funnel is when you create multiple websites aimed at targeting multiple different keyword phrases that all funnel people to dialing up the same number and reaching the same company.

You want to take this strategy to the large metropolitan areas. The reason is that in many large metropolitan areas there are suburbs whose keyword data is measurable. Your goal should be to make 3-15 different websites that have exact match city/service domain names. Example: “Miami Bankprutcy Trustee” and its suburb “Grapeland Heights Bankruptcy Trustee.”

Finding Clients and How to Charge

Finding a client(s) will be the toughest part of the whole procedure. The best place to start is with friends, family, or friends of the family. If no one you know owns any sort of local business then it’s time to start cold calling or further networking within the area. The good part about not having a client right away however is that it will give you time to work on the SEO for your websites so that you can establish rankings and have something to show them when you pitch.

Another good idea is to get a phone number up and running on the website. Phone.com is a pretty cheap way to get an (800) number up very quickly of which you can forward to any number you like (they provide numbers for around $5 a month).

It will automatically keep track of all your calls and how much time each conversation lasted and from who it was from. This is valuable information, especially when you are trying to make a sale. Any local business will tell you that there main goal is to get somebody one the phone – and if you can do that for them then you will have done your job in the marketing department. Some local businesses even have it down to how much money it is worth every single time the phone rings.

What you go about charging will depend on a lot of different things. You’ll need to price each niche differently mainly because a potential client is worth different amounts of money depending on what business you’re in. The higher amount of money a potential client is worth – the more likely that you will be able to charge that company on a monthly or annual rate.

The less a potential client is worth – the more likely you will have to charge your clients per lead. Although this is more frequently the case, each situation is different and you might be [doing the opposite:] charging a dentist per lead while you charge a dumpster rental company on a monthly or annual type deal.

When you design them you want to make sure that you use the triangle theory as part of your design. What do I mean by that?

The triangle theory was a study that Google did back in 2005 that shows that the first thing that a person looks at when entering a website is the top left corner, and that their eyes scope it in the shape of a triangle. You want to make sure that you get a logo, phone number, and any free estimate form you have in that triangle.

Side Note: Once you find a client that wants to run with you, this is when you will be plugging the logo and phone number in. A good way to do this is to order a number from Phone.com and redirect it to the company. That way you can see just how many leads you are generating them – which is essential if you are going to charge by lead.

While your off-site SEO like link building and social networking won’t be as important (exact domain name helps that a lot in this niche) your on-site SEO must be flawless. You really want to stress proper placement of keywords. Your link building will consist of 10-50 links obtained through quality paid link directories or some sort of contextual links.

You should begin to see these sites ranking within 3 months given that you chose some quality keyword phrases. After that it’s on you to go out there and get clients!

This article was written by Anthony Benedict. Anthony helps to run and maintain inetzeal.com. This website is an entity of an Internet marketing company which provides many services, which includes a white label link building service as well as many other services that you may get a SEO Quote on at any time.

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Excellent criticism of daily deals on TechCrunch

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/why-daily-deals-raw-deal/

The question is – how do local companies go about following up to make these deal seekers become repeat buyers? The startup that solves that problem will be bought for 9 figures asap by Groupon.

Some leads to follow:

http://www.blacksburgbelle.com/2011/04/3-tips-to-turn-first-time-customers-into-repeat-customers/

http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/columnist/abrams/2003-09-12-abrams_x.htm

http://www.startupnation.com/business-articles/9437/1/repeat-customers-raving-fans.htm

http://blog.garrettspecialties.com/2009/09/uncategorized/turn-one-time-customers-into-repeat-customers/

On a related note, I dispute his estimated acquisition cost per subscriber of $26.50 – that’s absurdly high. I’ve gotten emails+names for $3 or $3.50 average, and I’m an SEO/CRO guy, not a PPC guru.

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http://cc.talkpoint.com/gold006/021511a_mg/?entity=61_BX7P6Y2

Here are my notes on the interesting points in Google’s presentation to Goldman Sachs’ Tech and Internet Conference. It’s noteworthy not just for seeing the trends in where they’re going, but for the principles that govern their thinking and the way they want to be perceived.

1) Google saw Japanese users paying relatively less attention to ads vs organics results. They moved the Roman characters to a third line so it interfered less with the appearance of the Kanji script (Japanese lettering). This resulted in users paying more attention, clicking more and raising revenue. This was a “better user experience.”

Naturally, the following question was regarding the line between user experience vs revenue. Specifically, charges that Google makes the background too light and indistinguishable such that people don’t realize they’re ads.

Answer: They’ve run tests and picked particular colors for the sake of making it sufficiently obvious, e.g. for users of a particular Mac laptop. (Around 6:30 – 8:00 minutes in.) Thought: Are they serving different style sheets according to device? Hmmm … sounds quite similar to things I’ve shared in my book regarding dynamic navigation on lead gen sites.

- The interviewer asked whether it’s the case whether intermediaries and destinations are now going to be competing for placement – takes some cojones to not just throw softballs . The downside is that he doesn’t follow up and challenge any of the spokesperson’s comments but just accepts whatever is said. Not clear if he’s being too polite or is not sufficiently informed or if he feels the answers are satisfactory.

Google Places

“The focus is just on providing the best experience to the user,” “a place where they can find all the information they need on the business,” including reviews. “If that’s not the business’ site [responding here to complaints about displacing the organic listing for the business' site], then “that’s just the way it is.”

- But Google places ties into the ability to just click through and book a room, for instance…
- Google’s providing the opportunity to go to “OTAs” (online travel agencies? slang for booking sites a la Expedia I guess?) as well as the original site. Good for user experience [and for the auction's bids]. “We’re very clearly not doing the booking on Google itself, not entering into fullfillment.” [At least, until you fully integrate ITA Software and run a Google Comparison Ads type CPA auction? (G Comparison Ads are financial price-comparison ads that allow people to compare interest rates on mortgages etc.]

Mobile

- Don’t shrink a desktop experience onto a mobile – design for the mobile experience itself.
- There are some points where mobile is outright better than desktop – knowing where you are, having a speaker/mic, GPS integrated, etc.

- Names two areas where click-to-call monetizes well on mobile: home insurance and home security and alarm systems…

- They’re not too excited about adding lots of salespeople for local, but prefer simplifying the ad product to get more SMBs on board.

CPA

He’s very bullish. Wants to get product inventories and companies’ CPA bids to match against their search inventory. Strategy has been to go after the top 500 retailers in the US and to grow that way.

- What about using flashier ads, essentially taking the integration of product ads’ images a step further?

- They tested banners in China and that worked very poorly. Their preference/paradigm is to include the relevant info on a page – be it pics, pricing, merchant reviews, product reviews etc.

- The ultimate goal is that they can have both higher CPAs as well as more transactions in absolute numbers going on – they can show the products that are most likely to convert. [I read this as Google's going to optimize AdWords to show ads from higher converting advertisers, further squeezing the fat out of the ecosystem - e.g. of dumb advertisers with deep pockets and low conversion rates.]

- Google Checkout is not something they’re forcing on companies who want to use Google CPA. [Of course not, they're just incentivizing it with notably higher CTRs. They can't openly say that they want to integrate this closely because that would get them in hot antitrust waters.]

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1) Interesting fact: You can get 1 listing per practitioner (defined by separate phone numbers) and 1 per office, according to Google’s TOS.

How about getting your restaurants multiple lines for each chef? Or as suggested at the show, for each librarian in your book store .

The question, for those of you with your critical thinking hats on, is whether Google’s limiting this to ‘service’ businesses or whether physical product businesses can get in on the action too.

2) Some popular modifiers are nearby streets and locations. No surprise to me personally as I’ve been spying out competitors’ keywords.

2.2) Add city and street to title tags.

3) Discounts offer an extra line on your listing. In other words, offer a deal to boost your CTR. It’s a traditional question business owners need to test and measure – how much margin can you trade for greater volume?

4) Hcards take 10 minutes to set up and are apparently now a ranking factor. For those wondering about the jargon, hcards are a microformat; in this case, it’s just a way of formatting your address data on your own site.

5) Co-citation of your site in a review along with a targeted keyword helps you rank higher.

6) List everywhere – there are tons of review sites.

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This is a guest post by Brian Patterson, an SEO at Virginia based SEO & Reputation Management firm MangoCo. You can follow Brian on the Twitter at @brianspatterson.

Many businesses may be confused or worried with all of the changes that have been happening in Google’s local SERPs lately.  Google literally turned local search on its head about two months ago, and as the dust settles, many of the long-term effects are becoming clear.  One specific change which I’d like to cover here has many of our clients filled with pride, and has helped us close some new local SEO client deals.

The change has to do with local listings being more aggressively inserted into queries that previously did not trigger a local 7 or 10-pack.  To illustrate my point, lets take the phrase ‘roofing’?  What is a visitor’s intent when they type ‘roofing’ into a browser?  It could be a few things:

1. To find out information about different types of roofing materials
2. To look for roofing supplies
3. To find a roofing company
4. To learn the skill of roofing
5. others???

Until recently, Google assumed it was everything except #3, and they displayed whoever was best optimized for the word ‘roofing’.  Now, however, local results are included in the mix.  See the image below (with my location set to Washington, D.C.) for the current SERPs:

You’ll notice that the local 7-Pack is inserted after the third listing.  Effectively, ‘National Roofing Contractors’ now ranks for the term ‘Roofing’ when that is searched in their locality.

What are the client implications of this?

Is this a particularly surprising behavior to SEO’s?  Probably not, but clients absolutely love this.  We’ve noticed that many of our clients love to have a keyword they can ‘show off’, and this result in the SERPs scratches that itch for those that are local-focused.  

We’ve had referrals call us saying, “Jenn told us that you were able to get her on page #1 for XXXXX” where XXXXX is a head term like roofing. Although we do compete for some really competitive terms straight-up, in this case the calls were coming from people referencing the local insertion we’re detailing here.

Because we’ve had multiple clients react in such a positive way as they are now starting to see head terms in their SEO reports, we’ve adapted our sales pitch a bit for local clients to include information on this.  

The main piece of this is educating the client on how this works and what it means.  

Teaching a client about the search engine results is tricky enough, so explaining local optimization and inclusion is even more tricky.  We try to explain everything in the most simple terms possible and use a lot of analogies to help them understand the concepts.

But ultimately, a potential client is interested and excited about the prospect of being on Page 1 for a head term in their locality (which is all that matters to them).  This added benefit makes selling a local-oriented campaign even easier.

So, how do you optimize your local site to rank in this way for head terms?

Optimizing for this behavior is pretty easy – just do exactly what you would for any other local SEO campaign.  Consider the screenshot below, which is a search for ‘Roofing Washington, DC’:

You’ll notice that the blue boxes in each of the images are identical.  The 7-pack did not change at all.  So, ‘roofing’ triggered the same 7-pack as ‘roofing washington, DC’.  Thus, to optimize for a head term that triggers local results, you just need to optimize for the ‘head term’ + your location.  If you need some resources on local SEO, here are a few to get you started:

1. Local Ranking Factors
2. The Local SEO Guide (blog)

When are the local results being triggered on head terms?

Google is getting more aggressive in including local results in non-local search queries.  In taking a closer look at what they selected to include local results in, it seems as if they are pretty simplistic in their implementation.  It’s as if they just chose the most obvious head terms where local results might help, the surface if you will, but did not dive any deeper (yet).  For example, the following obvious head terms return local results:

• Landscaping
• Moving
• Packing
• Stationary
• Picture Frames

The above terms are pretty straightforward words with local companies in almost all localities that provide related services and products.  Now, lets dig into some other markets that are also present in near every location, but are of a more complex nature:

• Executive coaching consultant
• Trade show exhibits
• Pressure washer parts
• Infrared hair straightener

Given Google’s track record of including local results in more and more queries, I think its just a matter of time before they get smarter and include local results for more complex terms such as these.  As they do that, local SEO will become even more important.

Conclusion

Local results seems like an active experiment for Google, with ranking factors and displayed results constantly being tweaked.  Staying up to date with the changes can mean the difference between the success of some local businesses and mom-and-pops, and the death of them.  What are some other interesting local changes you have seen in the SERPs and the resulting client reactions?

Brian and his team run SEO campaigns for their clients as well as a number of their own online properties, including niche sites such as a Vibram Five Fingers Review site, a roofing jobsboard, and even a hair straightener site, among a bunch of other random stuff

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Beautiful as in, a beautiful mind.

1. & 2. The good gents at Ontolo do it again. Their tools keep expanding, and one of their latest is based on co-citation analysis of phone numbers. Based on that initial idea, they’ve developped the first local citation finder. Genius!

3. Darren Slatten, aka the World’s Greatest SEO, has some fascinating snippet experiments to share.

In fact, he seems to be running one right now, as you can see from this remarkable snippet screenshot (his current listing in Google).

Also check out his cool snippet optimizer tool!

If you like these advanced SEO ideas, you’ll probably enjoy my advanced SEO book. Preorder it now! Or get a free chapter if you haven’t already.

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This is a guest post by Jonathan Villiard. You can find him at his SEO website and at his Funny Blog.

Yeah, OK, so Gabriel knows about local SEO, cool. But he does not know all there is to know, since he never gave you the following advice!

Here is a simple yet effective tip about how to have your company show up on Google Maps!

Now I just have to wait to see if Gabriel will add this advice into his book…

Thanks Jon for this fun Friday Photo guest post !

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Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is to show humans one thing (the non-main-line phone number) and search engines another thing (porn, viagra, and all the good content [read: auto-generated] search engines love).

“But that’s evil blackhat, Gab!” Actually, all I mean is to recommend mediocre usability and coding in this exceptional case.

How?

In a image-editing/creation program, you type the phone number that you don’t want search engines and local listings publishers using. And then you post it – without alt text – on your site.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Step 1: Create an html frame.
Step 2: Block search engines from accessing it with Robots.txt and any fun cloak-and-redirect set up you want.
Step 3: Place the image of the phone number in the frame.
Step 4: Embed the frame wherever your phone number needs to appear.

If you liked this local SEO / greyhat seo tip, you’ll probably enjoy my upcoming advanced SEO book, which teaches the principles of such creative/critical thinking and offers 30 advanced tactics. Download a free chapter here. (There’s also a link to the download page in upper left, if you browse away from this page.)

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(A guest post…) Local search is a chance for businesses to connect with their community and gain local prospects. As the foundations of local search remain vital- things such as local listings, local on-page SEO factors, etc.- new developments are beginning to emerge as many of the biggest players online – i.e. Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare – are now designing plans that will have a significant impact on local search.

At its recent Chirp conference, Twitter announced 3 new initiatives that could potentially change local search forever: Points of Interest, Promoted Tweets, and Annotations.

In a Search Engine Land article, Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide describes each effort as follows.

Points of Interest allow users to see tweets from or regarding a certain place, as Andrew puts it “twecking in”.

Promoted (paid) Tweets will appear at the top of the Twitter search results for certain searches.

Annotations allow developers to add arbitrary metadata to tweets.

The potential implications for each of these could run the gamut of “no consequence” to “game-changer”.

It seems that the Points of interest could be one of the most crucial. As Andrew points out, it seems natural that Twitter would have profile pages for local businesses that would correspond to the tweets about them. If there were, in fact, profile pages and these become indexable by the search engines, this could provide a great opportunity for local businesses to be involved in the community and conversation about themselves and their industry.

And, as real time search comes in to play, these profiles could be shown with tweets- more visibility and real-time conversation. It doesn’t get more real than that.

If each of the mentioned initiatives takes shape as predicted, a slew of new opportunities could become available.

Along similar lines, applications like GoWalla and Foursquare are also gaining popularity and providing more areas for local businesses to create a presence and connect. Andrew Shotland also wrote about the increase in participation in these “check-in” sites and how it could affect local SEO.

Programs like Foursquare provide real, user generated info about local businesses. And in a world where customer reviews are prized and trusted, there is a lot to be gained by positive word-of-mouth about your business on these sites.

The implications for SEO are also on their way- the use of common terms to describe a place could become important keywords.

All of these opportunities work together to help small businesses gain visibility online effectively and work to grow their business. It will be vital to stay on top of the issues as the change and take advantage of every opportunity at your disposal. Get online, get more leads and grow your business.

Have any experiences with local search developments? Please share!

This is a guest post by Emily Thompson, the Online Marketing Coordinator for Kutenda Internet Marketing Software. Kutenda provides the tools, training and resources small businesses need to grow their business online.

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I spent all day Sunday with a buddy driving around Montreal’s most popular streets, photographing the city’s potholes and locations. Now, I’m combining that information with Google Maps, and particularly the K-Pack, in order to show Montrealers a map of the city’s potholes. Here’s what Google Maps K-packs normally look like (courtesy of Google LatLong).

Here’s what Montreal’s Pothole Google Map looks like:

…

…

The map:

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Noticed this through Sphinn, and I have to say, Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design has really hit a home run with her recent series on hyperlocal blogging.

She starts by elaborating on 5 tips. Then continues with Hyperlocal Blogging Sonoma County, CA – More SEO Copywriting Tips; Today’s SEO Copywriting Tip for the HyperLocal Blogger in Calaveras County, CA; Copywriting Tips for the Mendocino County Hyperlocal Blogger; and finally wraps it up with For the Bay Area Hyperlocal Blog – 2 Copywriting Tips!

There aren’t many seo blogs that cover original material or break new ground, but I must say that Miriam certainly has done so here! In addition, she’s recently discovered a new element of G’s universal search – local personalization. Not only that, but these personalized results are location independent!

On a related note, my friend and noted local seo expert Mike Blumenthal has picked up on the latest piece of industrial-strength Map Spam at G. While he’s reported on these before, and would not otherwise be particularly notable, this story has two twists:

• The spam is being monetized in an original way.
• It relates to STDs and HIV, and makes you wonder whether you can trust some of these places providing health care.

If you like the piece, I’ve sphunn it and encourage you to do the same. The nofollow is to avoid that piece outranking the original, fyi.

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Have a look – yours truly is in a Web Pro News video on buying sites, and at SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday, where I shared some local search stuff!

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Ok, I’ve actually been to SMX Advanced, where I spoke, celebrated my 21st birthday, during which I devoured delicious homemade cake (thanks mom!), been helping Ice.com Jewelry fix their SEO issues, which meant auditing and now planning implementation, and handling other stuff too besides!

After regaling you all with the wonderfully exciting tale of what I’ve been up to for the past week and change, I feel I should also clarify that Google maps guide Jen has suggested a solution to de-merge merged listings, but I’ve just not had time to blog it yet. This is in response to Mike Blumenthal’s post asking Google to come clean and deal with the problem of combined listings.

So that’s the in fairness to Google part. In criticism of Google, this issue has been publicized and known and blogged about at least for a few months, thanks to the tireless efforts of Mike Blumenthal on his local seo blog. I personally made a thread at the Google Group on Maps even prior to that, which tells you just how useful those groups are… But I digress.

In short, after complaining about merged listings for my client, this lovely little boutique hotel in Montreal, and their associated auberge de jeunesse (that’s youth hostel, to you anglophones) and theorizing about the cause, maps guide Jennifer Chin came by, commented – and also emailed me with a potential solution.

In short, she advised me to:

• Rename one of the sites/businesses
• Change one of their addresses

So we did that on the site. The youth hostel is now at 901A Sherbrooke east. And it’s no longer the Auberge de Paris but the Auberge Montreal (the hotel is, still, the Hotel de Paris).

The problem is that the solution is tentative, and I don’t see the youth hostel in Universal Map SERPs (it is top 10 generally … I mean duh, I’m their seo ).

If I controlled the youth hostel listing though, at least I could tell you guys if it worked or not. But as the hostel’s marketing director controls it, I have no way of telling how well/poorly he implemented the solution, if at all.

He says he did, so it may just be a question of time until the hostel’s back up and ranking. As things currently stand though, well, I just can’t tell whether he didn’t do things right with the Local Business Center listings, or whether Google still just doesn’t get it despite our best efforts. Consider these two listings, pulled from :

maps.google.ca serp

Nice Hostel in Downtown renovated its…? – 8 May 2008

Great hotel downtown? – A TripAdvisor Member? – 21 Apr 2008

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It’s no secret that this auberge de jeunesse in Montreal, the Auberge de Paris (I realize the name is unusual), is a client of mine. For a while now they’ve had issues with their reviews being merged with their sister downtown Montreal hotel‘s reviews.

The problem is that since the youth hostel’s reviews tend to score lower than the hotel’s reviews, on average, the hotel gets lower review scores. The result is that the hotel unfairly gets a bad rap.

(The hostel doesn’t get an offsetting revenue benefit because (i) hostel prices are lower and (ii) the Auberge de Paris doesn’t get shown in the Google universal maps results (in fact, only one youth hostel in Montreal does, oddly enough). )

So what causes these merged review listings?

There are a variety of possibilities, but the one that seems most logical to me is confusing external links. I was recently doing some competitor analysis and found an old link of the hotel’s on a page where its competitors also got links. The link featured the keyword “auberge,” which in French means inn. (An “auberge de jeunesse” is therefore a youth “inn” – a youth hostel.)

From having been with the hotel for a couple of years now, I know that there are other links of a similar nature elsewhere, featuring youth hostel anchor text. So I’d say it’s fairly likely that this is the causa causans or at least one of several causes.

The implications if this hypothesis is correct, as far as SEO goes, is that competitors could manipulate your search marketing results. They could build/buy links with messy anchor text to

• merge your reviews with their own (for extra publicity on your branded search terms) or
• merge them with a business in a different industry and thus reduce your sales as customers get annoyed due to the wrong numbers etc.

Note: I’m not claiming credit for the hypothesis – I believe that Mike Blumenthal said it somewhere only I can’t find where (it might also have been Mike Belasco or Andrew Shotland ?). If you know who’s behind the idea, do let me know in the comments. You’ll get a link like Antonio from Marketing de Busca earned.

Another possibility is the co-citation with other hostels. Like I mentioned, that link is far from being unique. So it’s possible that Google kept seeing http://www.hotel-montreal.com links in a youth hostel context and the co-citation lead it to think that the auberge and hotel are one and the same. Aaron Wall used to see his name offered up in SERPs as a related search to Traffic Power when he got sued by them; his hypothesis is that it was due to many common citations with TP.

A related but slightly different possibility is that the links to the hotel featuring the auberge keywords are often accompanied by the hotel’s pricing. Ergo, it’s really one and the same product just operating under two different names. The cause in this case could be described as a more advanced form of co-citation that is similar to how crawlers look for address info on a website for geolocation purposes. This could be perceived, as Mike Blumenthal suggested, as an attempt to avoid mapspam. “It is possibly a spam control strategy to prevent multiple optimized listings from the same business.”

A fourth possibility is that the two businesses share the same front office. People staying at either the hotel or the hostel check in through the same front office. In fact, both websites cite the same address. Publishing your address on your site is a common local SEO tactic, and this could easily be the source of the trouble.

Except that it’s not up to the Hotel and Auberge de Paris to rectify this problem – it’s up to Google. It would be totally unreasonable to have this small hospitality business add another front office and associated staff just for the sake of changing the address listed on the site for Google. Not to mention that Google is always encouraging site owners to to act like it doesn’t exist. But then, maybe I’m being shortsighted; does anyone have a workaround to suggest/share?

What do you guys think the problem is? If you’re a Googler and you read this, some help/rectification/clarification/separation of the listings would be great. And please don’t tell me to try this in Google groups – that’s proven completely useless. Besides that, if you guys liked this post, you might care subscribe to my RSS feed (link goes to XML, not Feedburner).

Update: I forgot to mention that Mike Blumenthal covered this earlier:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2008/02/21/google-maps-more-reports-of-merged-listings/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2008/02/20/google-maps-conflated-records/

Unfortunately, no word from Google on the real cause of the problem there nor have I seen it since. Hello? Webmaster communication effort? You guys there?

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Formal writing is really frustrating because it requires you to dress up simple ideas in complete sentences, edit your work for grammar and spend an unholy amount of time writing what it would take you a few minutes to express verbally. When you come up with new ideas or discover new stuff as often as I do, that can get really frustrating.

So I’m hereby inaugurating what I hope will be a regular column here: Scratchpad (scratchpad picture courtesy of one eye fish). I’ll share my latest ideas, in a raw scratchpad type format and be paying even more attention than usual to your feedback. (The Post #88 reference was the pre-naming version of this post’s title and I found it quite appropriate to an informal column.)

For this first issue, I’ve got

1. New uses for Google’s Keyword Tool External,
2. Mined ideas from Google’s Press Days 06 and 07,
3. Revelations of what the PPC arbitrageurs are doing to fool Google’s Quality Score algo,
4. How to mess with your competitors’ analytics,
5. Proof that Google Analytics is integrated into Google’s search algos, and how it’s buggy
6. Discussion on the latest in Google Maps

Google’s “Keyword Tool External”

Related keywords’ relevance is useful to:

- find places to earn links from

- find places to buy links from

- target with your content; become an authority beyond your narrow niche

- mix into your site to appear natural

- write a landing page that will get a better quality score

Where this data comes from: Co-occurrance data in Google’s index, probably. Also possible that some of it is derived from personalization/tracking individuals’ searches. This latter possibility would explain how travel oriented keywords I was checking into for my dad returned “additional keywords you might like to consider” that were about entirely different countries!

Google Press Days 2006 and 2007

Nugget from Matt Cutts: Personalization is oriented towards queries where intent is in doubt.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-press-day-2006/

“Q: How does the use of personal information to make search better while respecting privacy?
A: Terms like jaguar or bass are overloaded (fishing vs. guitars). Starting from scratch every query would be a disadvantage. Personalized search (which is opt-in) is important and there’s still room to improve there.

“Sukhinder: Mobile in China is 350M users while internet is more like 100M users, so it’s an interesting, different market.” ED: So Google’s Chinese mobile engine is going to be the focus?

“Ooh, now he’s talking about eval and how it’s difficult to impossible to make a change that is 100% better on 100% of queries. And that it’s hard to do eval really well. He mentions that we take quality wins in our algorithms when we see the chance. He also touches on how hard international queries are to do well (segmentation in Chinese, for example).

“Marissa is talking about the fundamentals of search: comprehensiveness, relevance, speed, and user experience.

Fast-forward to Google Press Day 2007

“Up to today we have relied on automation, but I believe the future will be a blend of both, combing the scale of automation and human intelligence.” Marissa Meyer – “She was one of the first 20 employees at Google and its first female engineer; she’s now vice president of search products and user experience.”

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/06/googles_press_day_2007.html

Ties in to what I was saying about Google being broken. Now it’s algorithms and humans, eh? Sounds suspiciously like Yahoo… (*cough Rand: if Google’s copying Yahoo, what does that tell you? cough*)

“She also said Google is already experimenting with exploring data patterns in searches, so it can try and detect what a user meant to search for, even if they didn’t type it. The beginnings of that can be seen in suggested searches, when you mis-spell a search request, for example.” Probably why the additional keywords to consider returns things that are not grammatically related (i.e. conjugations, plurals, variations, misspellings).

So my question is: If a human edited search engine manages to cover the short-tail, and spammers clog up the long-tail, where will that leave Google? “Oh, we’re the four-keyword-query search engine?” I can’t see that happening…

PPC Arbitrage: The Latest and Greatest in Content Scraping for AdWords Quality Score

PPC arbitrageurs are using scraped content from public domain books, in order to improve their quality score and drop their CPCs. This means that they can avoid using auto-gen content. However, there’s duplication issues. See TravellersDream.org, for instance. Look for the name of any large Canadian city and they’re bidding on it with an ad generally relating to hotels. The content on the landing page is scraped from some Canadian travel guide. And if they can scrape it, so can…

• www.condocenter.com/…/new-condo-listings/search-results2/CID/39/PID/55/city/353/ownership/all/style/both/
• www.lowest-airfare.com/airline-tickets/cheap-flights-to-montreal.php
• travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-191501843-montreal_vacations-i – LOOKEE! LOOKEE! (Ok, there’s an unlinked attribution at the bottom of the “more” page (i.e. the one you get to by clicking read more) … big deal.)
• www.vcu.edu/sitar/sitarnewsletter2-01C.PDF – I thought educational institutions were against plagiarism?
  
• www.hotels4all.net/country/CANADA/MONTREAL-PQ/
• www.alamo.ca/getMainContent.do?pageKey=car-rental-in-montreal – Well aren’t we in good company, huh?
  

What’s a lazy arbitrageur to do? Well, writing your own content or buying some original stuff might be a good first step. Having it integrate relevant keywords as per nugget 1, above, would be a second good step. Or – and this is extremely drastic, so only consider it as a last resort after every other possibility has been exhausted – provide real value. Scary, I know.

Mess With Your Competitors’ Analytics

One thing I’ve been doing to play with my competitors’ analytics is hiding my long tail searches from them. When they pop up in a SERP, I copy-paste the URL from google and slap it into the address bar. This allows me to disguise my visit as direct navigation, as from a bookmark, when in fact it’s the result of a search.

Another use for this is in regards to PPC. If a competitor is advertising with broad match keywords, and that has them advertising on your brand name, don’t let them realize that they’re advertising on your name by clicking the ad! If you do, then they’ll target your brand name specifically (see Future Now’s ad on SEO ROI ). Search for their landing page by searching for the text of their ad, instead. Or try copy-pasting the destination URL. This is less likely to work though, because most advertisers just use the URL part of the ad to add an extra keyword (keyword.domain.com or domain.com/keyword) for greater “relevance”.

On a related note, if you want to make it look to competitors like an organic keyword offers a poor ROI , you can do the opposite. Send bots to your competitor through a particular search query. When they don’t convert, they’ll figure that the keyword isn’t worth competing for. Just make sure that you don’t do this for a longtail query that they weren’t actively targeting to begin with, or you might draw their attention to it, especially if they figure out what’s going on by checking the “traffic” ‘s originating IPs.

My Proof That Google Analytics Data Is Used in Google’s Algorithms!

A little while ago, I read that you could use Google analytics to track site searches your visitors perform. I implemented the tip. The result of tracking these results with Google analytics is that my site search results pages are being indexed by Google and returned in the SERPs! I noticed this recently when searching Google for something I wrote about Facebook. I got a page from my site (which wasn’t what I wanted) and a page that looked like seoroi.com/index.php?s=mart

Authority spammers with thousands of indexed posts and articles everywhere are rejoicing as they code site search bots that will look through their sites for lucrative keywords. Try site:seoroi.com to see what I’m talking about. Currently, I’m seeing results like “Supposed | SEO ROI Services” and “Pagerank | SEO ROI Services” being returned, with urls seoroi.com/index.php?s=supposed and seoroi.com/index.php?s=pagerank.

Discussion on Google Maps

I recently broke the news that Google Maps’ SERPs were being updated. Google has been integrating Earth Booker (a hotel booking engine that uses Google Earth) into a huge number of its Google Maps SERPs, as well as Google’s own Panoramio picture site and showing reviews directly in the SERPs, as opposed to requiring an extra click to see them. The post also shared a list of places where Google Maps gets its reviews from.

Now, I’ve found some new integration of Google Maps into Google universal SERPs, with up to 10 maps results (as opposed to just three, which had been the case earlier) shown. Please share your thoughts in the Sphinn discussion on Google’s latest Maps experiments – I’ll cite the best and most intelligent comments when I speak at SMX .

Come back tomorrow for “Be Nice to the Loner Kid Lest He Destroy Your Reputation” – a true, personal story with ties to reputation management, social media, and most importantly: motivation and influence. I guarantee that you’re going to love it!

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Google Maps has been doing a lot of testing and playing with its search engine results pages (SERPs) lately. I’ve seen the EarthBooker hotel booking engine tightly integrated with many hotels. At the same time, when I performed a longtail search for a hotel to stay at during the SMX West conference, I found some reviews (or other stuff Google seems to find relevant) folded directly into the SERPs (you used to have to click more info to see the reviews). And there’s also pictures being folded in from Google’s Panoramio.com.

I can’t do screenshots for some reason, so have a look at this copy-paste from the Google SERPs. Whereas reviews used to be accessible from the more info/reviews link, these are directly folded in, it seems. (Speaking of copy-pasting, is scraping a scraper theft? Lol)

Results 1-10 of about 2,914 for hotel america parkway near Santa Clara, CA – Modify search

Categories: Motels & Hotels

	Embassy Suites Hotel Santa Clara-Silicon Valley – more info » 2885 Lakeside Drive, Santa Clara, CA (408) 496-6400 – Hotel embassy suites santa … … The Embassy Suites Santa Clara is an all suites hotel located right at the intersection of Hwy 101 and Great American Parkway. This hotel offers an extended … hotelguide.com
	Larkspur Landing Sunnyvale – more info » 748 North Mathilda Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA (408) 733-1212 – Hotel larkspur landing sunn… … The Arts and Crafts style hotel is located off Highway 101 within five miles of Moffett Field, Shoreline Amphitheater and Great America Parkway and seven miles … hotelguide.com
	Holiday Inn Santa Clara-Great America – more info » 4200 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, CA (800) 465-4329 – Holiday Inn Santa Clara-gre… … Hotel on corner. From San Francisco Int’l Airport (26 miles): South on Highway 101 to Great America Parkway/Bowers Avenue exit, turn left. … santaclara.org
	Marriott-Silicon Valley – more info » 2700 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA (408) 988-1500 – Recommended … The Marriott in Santa Clara is located on Mission College just south of Great America Parkway; the hotel is well located for visiting the local businesses. … tripadvisor.com
	A V Studio – more info » 5201 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA (408) 562-6017 Av Studio, Santa Clara CA 9… … 5201 Great America Pkwy Santa Clara, CA 95054. Tel: 408-562-6017. Av Studio. 5201 Great America Pkwy. Santa Clara, CA, 95054. work 408-562-6017 … merchantcircle.com
	ID Ventures America Inc – more info » 5201 Great America Pkwy # 270, Santa Clara, CA (408) 894-7900 iD Ventures America – Intel… … Take the Great America Parkway exit At the 5th light, Bunker Hill, make a right turn iDVA is in the Techmart building, second floor, … idsoftcapital.com
	American India Foundation – more info » 5201 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA (408) 982-9622 American India Foundation G… … Sankaran@aif.org / (408) 916-1973 American India Foundation 5201 Great America Parkway, Suite 526 Santa Clara, CA 95054 http://www.aif.org … yahoo.com
	Vagabond Inn – more info » 816 Ahwanee Ave, Sunnyvale, CA (408) 734-4607 – 4 reviews Coupons » Vagabond Inn Sunnyvale, Sun… … The Vagabond Inn Sunnyvale is located in Silicon Valley just two miles NASA Space Center and Great America Parkway, and five miles from the San Jose Convention … california-discounthotels.com
	Global Knowledge Network Inc – more info » 5201 Great America Pkwy # 219, Santa Clara, CA (408) 969-8500 The MathWorks – Training – … … It can be accessed by the driveway between the Techmart and Hyatt Hotel off the Great America Parkway … mathworks.com
	Enpirion Inc – more info » 2520 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara, CA (408) 454-2280 Enpirion … Turn Left on Great America Parkway After approximately ½ mile, exit right onto Mission College Blvd. You will pass the Marriot Hotel on your right hand side and … enpirion.com

Something else that I find noteworthy in regards to Google’s SERPs is that Google has folded in a hotel booking site that works with Google Earth into its Maps SERPs. The company in question is EarthBooker.com, which describes itself as having “80,000 hotels on Google Earth,” and offering “Global Discount Hotels on Google Earth.” The company that apparently owns Earth Booker is GlobeAssistant, whose copyright statement says that they are not affiliated with Google.

Try this search: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=casablanca+hotel

EarthBooker is the site for Le Royal Mansour. The same thing is going on with the Al Mounia: if you want to make a reservation, you’ll be sent to EB, but is now having its SERP link go to XS Web. Le Zenith’s also with EB. Earth Booker must be making a killing being the website for hotels that have none. Travelling the developing world? You’re likely to end up there.

Panoramio (this one is a Google company) has the page for the Casablanca Hyatt and the Hotel Barcelo. This is also true for the Riyadh Marriott. It appears to happen when the hotel in question has no particular page/site that Google is aware of. The Riyadh Marriott has its own page, and by the toolbar PR 5, I know that it’s indexed. Odd … and not so relevant. If I’m searching for “hotel + cityname,” chances are that I want to reserve a room, or find reviews. Panoramio offers pictures…

On a related note, the Alfa hotel in Riyadh gets the same treatment by Google Maps. The links goes to ~ge3b.kmz. It’d be interesting to see

Aaaand, as a bonus for those of you who read through all of this, have a look at this highly debatable use of sitelinks: http://www.google.com/search?q=casablanca+hotel

That better have GREAT CTR and 0 bounces (though bounces can be prevented, as dave N showed in WBF) because returning a NYC hotel for a “hotel + capital of Morocco” search is of dubious relevance. The map won’t show up despite repeated searches. Ironically, if you click to go to maps and it shows you the real Moroccan hotels: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=casablanca+hotel

On a related note, here’s the list of sites that I’ve found Google scrapes err, uses for reviews. These are the places you need to direct your satisfied clients to, in order to get them to review you.

• Travelocity
• Tripadvisor
• Priceline
• Mytravelguide
• Virtualtourist
• Holidaycheck.fr | HolidayCheck.de (spam?)
• GiataMedia
• Newyorkcity.com
• Booking.com
• Gayot.com
• Tablethotels.com
• NYmag.com
• 11870.com
• Hotelchatter.com
• Fastbooking.fr .it .de .es .co.uk etc. (Smart SEO use of the ccTLDs, incidentally.)
• Cityvox.fr
• Bestrestaurants.com.au
• Menulog.com.au
• Frommers

What do you guys think of the new Google Maps SERPs?

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Vanessa Fox and the team at Third Door Media have given me an incredible opportunity – the opportunity to speak at SMX. Following Danny’s great explanation of what they were looking for in terms of pitches, I thought about my experience and what I could share with attendees. I pitched some ideas for local and voila – I’m in for the local panel ! So Third Door: Thanks a lot for taking a chance on me. I can’t predict the reception, but I can promise you I’ll be working like mad to make that presentation worth it for your attendees.

I highly encourage you guys to grab the early-bird special before it expires – you save $400!  It’s THE search marketing conference, and besides, I’ll be there . Not to mention that you’ll be able to hear Eric Lander on the same panel as yours truly, plus three reps from the major (*cough incompetent cough*) SEs. Eric’s written at SEJ, SEG (does anyone else get them confused a lot too?), the ISEdb (hey, me too! ) and SEO Today. SEO Today? You know the man’s an OG.

In the meantime, see my latest post on how Google Maps have updated their SERPs with a booking engine, pics from their Panoramio site, and inserted reviews directly below each listing. This item on local-oriented domaining with Google Trends might also appeal to you. Did I mention my old blog also covered local search, and that it ranked for ‘local seo,’ in the not too distant past (if you’re wondering, that’s a useless keyword traffic wise).

I was trying to figure out how to make this post more informative and share some tips, but I’d have to get more info from Vanessa and co. on what they liked about my pitch. Considering how busy they are with preparations and organizational work, I think that can be best left to asking at the conference, in person.

Besides that, I’d like to ask if any of you other internet marketers (*cough Sphinn/SU/Youmoz friends, commenters, etc…*) who are going might care to share a room? I may be speaking, but $200+ a night is still expensive for me. FYI: I’m a clean guy, sociable, won’t wake you up if you like to hit the sack early and we might even trade some good tips . (On a related note, my sister used to rent a 1 and a half apartment here in Montreal for $800 a month …

Please write me at gab at this domain if you’re interested in sharing a room.

P.S. A pisher is Yiddish for a [usually little] kid. “Hey pisher,” is a phrase my older sisters frequently use .

P.P.S. For those of you wondering why I haven’t posted lately, there are 2 answers.

One is that my site’s technology has a bug; it’s supposed to output on a /blog page but doesn’t. Only posts categorized a certain way show up here on the homepage, but if I want the permalink to use a different category, I have no choice but to leave the post off the homepage. Hopefully it’ll be resolved soon. In the meantime, see what these credibility failures taught me about linkworthiness/linkability.

The other answer is that I’m working on a large SEO audit that’s taking up most of my free time, and what little I have left is going into working on a longer, more value-added post on motivation and influence.

Update: Motivation and Influence aka Be Nice to the Loner Kid is posted. Also, I had a blast at SMX and met a bunch of people, largely thanks to SEOmoz.

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