The thing about link building for local sites, is that you don’t need as many to compete as you would for a site that is relevant on a national basis, but the links are usually a lot harder to come by because they are specific to a region – and yet the way Google treats links is always changing as well. It is cost effective to outsource your links to a company that provides a link building service as you don’t need many, but they can be tricky to get.

Some things will always be changing but some things will always stay the same. Here are three onsite techniques Local businesses can use to help with SEO.

Proper (and Tricky) Keyword Placement

The “h1″ tags are a very critical part of your local business SEO. You want to make sure that they have: 1) The main city you operate out of and 2) the main service or product you are trying to promote – inside of them.

Sometimes that doesn’t work with the flow of you web site. However that is fine, and not to worry about, even if it does work with the flow of your web site, there are is a very unique way of using these h1 tags that can tremendously help with SEO.

The first couple words that Google reads off of your web site are very important. Take a look at this Detroit roofing web site. What do you notice in the top right corner? That’s an h1 tag with the desired keyword phrase sitting right there at the top of the page so it is the first thing that Google sees. At the time this article was written, it currently ranks number one for the phrase “Detroit Roofing” and is consistently in the top 3. This is not a coincidence. The h1 tag does miracles for this website.

A Page for Each and Every City and Service Combination

Local search is a frontier that is being quickly gobbled up by Internet marketing entrepreneurs, but ranking for small cities will always be easy as the competition will be quite like it is for cities like Chicago and Detroit.

Take a look at paintingcontractorUSA.com. This website is simple, yet it ranks on the 1st page of the SERPs for many city, county, state combinations all over the nation (it even ranks on the first page for the term painting contractor).

It doesn’t have a page for every single combination – it has a few – but it gives Google a chance to credit them with area specific services with the tool on the bottom of the home page: A simple dropdown bar that names all of the cities and services that the company can provide. Google loves sites like that use strategies like these, and will reward sites that do in the search engines.

What Domain Name to Use

Brand-ability. That’s what Matt Cutts (top search engineer for Google) wants people to use. He wants people to steer away from exact match domains.

Why? – Did you notice something about the two examples I gave you? They both have exact match domains. That’s because they have a huge advantage for ranking, especially in the local market when links and social media do not play as big as a role as they do in other niches. A good strategy to use is to have not only one website, but many website to promote your business. Get the best out of your brand-able domain name, and then build a website for the top search queries – the ones that will benefit your business the most – using those search queries as your domain name.

Using a combination of these three tactics will help you tremendously in the SERPs, and you can see results quickly with not more than a week’s worth of work.

This article was written by Anthony Benedict. Anthony helps to run and maintain inetzeal.com – which is an internet marketing company that provides a white label SEO service.

As for me, my 2011 search and social media resolution is to dive right into the location based search marketing game. Sure, I dabbled in the area in 2010, but for 2011, I plan to design an entire marketing strategy around location based product search. Led by the projected rise in smartphones over the next few years, search marketers, pay per click advertisers, and social media marketers are all investing in location as the next big area of growth.  Therefore, while all organizations and services can benefit from participating in location-based marketing platforms, my post today will primarily aid those places that will profit most: small, B2C businesses.

Get Your Business Listed

I abide by a simple rule: If it has places in the name, make sure your company is listed as one of those places. While this doesn’t cover all the sites your business should be listed on, it certainly covers the bases: Google Places, Facebook Places, and Twitter Places. It seems that all of the tech giants today give you the opportunity to share your business information, so why not claim your address and page. I admit, it may take some time to verify your business with so many sites, but it is definitely necessary.

A wide variety of customers are all across the Internet, and unfortunately, you will not be able to target all of those customers with just one social network or search engine. My suggestion: Schedule a morning to dedicated to listing your business. More specifically, prioritize where you can benefit most and plan to have your site listed in 10 networks by the end of the month. Here is a quick list for you to get start with:

• Google Places
• Facebook Places
• Bing Local Listing
• Twitter Places
• Foursquare
• Yelp
• YellowPages.com

Get Your Products Listed

In 2011, take the extra step to list your products as well as your business with the search engines. Bing Shopping for Merchants and the Google Merchant Center both offer opportunities to upload your business product feeds to optimize your services in their respective shopping channels. Just last month, Jen wrote an in-depth article on the benefits of the Google Merchant Center and further explains how product listings and product extensions can improve your ROI.

Additionally, if you have an actual physical address and store location, make sure to get listed on Milo. Milo displays real-time, in-store inventory availability. Described as the “anti-Amazon,” Milo.com attempts to bridge the gap between online and in-store commerce by highlighting local inventory in product search results. With smartphones becoming more ubiquitous, this is a great chance to target those customers who are researching products and deals while they are out and about in your town.

Watch for the real-time, local inventory market to heat up in 2011 as EBay recently acquired Milo for $75 million and Google entered the space in March 2010 with Bluedot.

Smartphone Coupons

Next up for your 2011 search resolution: Mobile coupons. Start simple, polishing up your Google places profile and then, create a mobile coupon. Ideally, coupons are more inviting to a potential customer and give a greater opportunity for interaction between your brand and that consumer. A good coupon can often lead to customers reviewing, recommending, and sharing about the deal and the business.

After setting up your Google places coupon, get creative with your coupon offerings and target a number of niche audiences through other mobile coupon services. ChaCha coupons, Yowza, and MobiQpons are a few alternative mobile opportunities with larger fan bases for local small businesses.

Social Coupons

Facebook places, Gowalla, Yelp, and Foursquare are all platforms that allow small businesses to uniquely geo-target ads and coupons. While it’s hard to imagine Facebook not eventually taking the stronghold over this market, for now, Foursquare and Gowalla still have a large user-base and serve much of the market. Thus, when offering social coupons, I’d advise not leaving any of the big location-based advertisers out in your marketing strategy.

Although the location “check-ins” is becoming mainstream as a social network feature, the adoption rate of these platforms has been very slow in smaller cities. Thus, if you are a small business owner outside of the top media markets in the US, then take the opportunity to standout from your competitors, offering innovative deals and services to your community. Promotion tip: Consumers are searching for deals and coupons in a variety of ways online, and many people using location-based networks are enticed by small discounts and freebies.

Daily Deals – King Groupon

In 2010, Groupon, a localized deal-of-the-day website, rapidly caught the attention of the SEO Boy team (our latest Groupon purchase pits us against each other for a day of paintball). Quite frankly, Groupon seems poised to improve its market share throughout 2011 becoming a very profitable tech giant by the end of the year.

Today, if you want to be a featured in a large media market on the daily deal juggernaut, it most likely takes weeks if not months of waiting. However, Groupon is currently expanding its city-based deals across the nation, so if you are a small business owner, be on the lookout for when Groupon enters your city. Other alternative deal-of-the-day options include LivingSocial, Tippr, BuyWithMe, and even Yelp.

Although a featured deal may cause a rush of branding, publicity, and ROI for your business, setting up a shop in the recently released Groupon Merchant Center is probably the best alternative option to this wait. Allowing for just a few days to verify your company, signing up for the Groupon Merchant Center gives you instant control over the timing and restrictions of deals and promotions. Furthermore, Groupon users can choose to “follow” your merchant store and opt-in to notifications about your latest product deals. If Groupon and the Groupon Merchant Center is not a part of your social strategy in 2011, you will be missing out on a very big opportunity.

Hello 2011…

I hope this post gives you some new ideas for focusing a search and social media strategy on local deals and promotions. Let us know if you have any plans for location-based marketing in 2011.

Until next time, best of luck in the New Year!

Local Search

This year, the vastness of the Internet has reminded us that it still is, after all, a small world.  Local search results and ad listings have risen in importance to searchers, thanks in large part to the development of smart phones and other platforms with fully-functional browsers and strong, accessible wireless connections.  The major search engines have responded by launching tools and programs that explicitly promote local businesses and services: standouts include Google’s Places, Facebook Places, Localeze, Info USA, and Acxion.  Less obvious but no less important has been a noticeable change in algorithms that favor local results and ads over others, based on a user’s IP address, language settings, and past history.   Truly, 2010 was a big year for local, and as the Internet continues to become increasingly integrated into everyday life, it is almost a certainty that we will see this local trend continue in 2011.

Google Instant

“SEO is dead.” Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant. Google Instant makes SEO dead-on relevant. These are just some of the headlines that created a stir in the SEO community when Google Instant was launched on September 8, 2010. The new search enhancement tool shows results as you enter a query, allowing users to find the information they need much faster than ever before. Two months later the company launched Google Instant Previews, just another step on its never-ending quest towards instant search. This tool provides searchers with a snapshot of each website on the Google results page. Both Google Instant and Google Instant Previews will impact SEO but exactly how is still up for debate. We look forward to finding out more about the effects of these tools in the New Year.

YouTube

YouTube isn’t exactly “traditional” in terms of search, but it is the second most used search engine behind Google.  This is pretty convenient for Google, as they own YouTube.  Video Search Engine Optimization continues to become more important as more users realize they can use YouTube as a source of useful and/or tutorial information.  For some industries, it’s easier to rank well on the SERP with an online video strategy.   Video SEO offers potential benefits for branding, and the competition for search results when compared to organic listings are typically much lower.

As well as some of our expectations for SEO in 2011:

Facebook Search Engine

The debate began earlier in 2010, but there are still players on both sides of the table taking sides – will Facebook roll out their own search engine that will take Google head on? Will it happen in 2011? Our prediction is that Facebook is going to continue to become a larger player and will continue to refine its integration with search in the coming year. Will it take over Google? Probably not in 2011 but it is something to keep a close eye on.

Google Goggles

Google attempted to make search even faster and easier with the creation of Google Goggles. Instead of typing or speaking your search, you can simply take pictures of objects you’d like more information about. Currently, Google Goggles works well for landmarks, works of art, logos, contact information, products, barcodes and QR codes. Since text falls into this category, for example, if you are in another country and don’t know the language you can take a picture of an object and Google Goggles will translate the words or symbols for you. This cutting edge visual search application is currently only available for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 devices through the Google Mobile App, as well as Android devices that are running Android 1.6 and above. This visual search app is bound to be a valuable resource once the final kinks are worked out.

Social and Search Becoming One

Location, Location, Location … and don’t forget location. Who doesn’t love a great local deal? Sure, Foursquare and Gowalla had their time in the spotlight in 2010, but localized marketing deals will go the way of Groupon and Facebook in 2011 (and of course, don’t forget about Living Social, which was recently funded by Amazon).  Groupon will be the big winner in 2011, and we’re excited to see how the recently unveiled merchant store will stimulate their growth.

Location based technologies, such as Facebook Places and Google Hotpot (Google’s Yelp), will also be interesting to watch as marketers harness the power in local mobile apps. Facebook Places will expand in marketing usage and may overwhelm the smaller competitor Foursquare. On the other hand, Google Hotpot is Google’s best chance at entering the social arena right now as Google Places, Google Maps, and the Android allow Google to easily build a niche in the mobile phone consumer market.

Trust Expands

In November 2010, the New York Times very publicly questioned Google’s search algorithm and results page after an Internet company used cyber bullying, negative customer reviews, and bad publicity to increase their search ranks. For the company, the negative marketing and SEO tactics seemed to work, but for Google, it was a blemish on their reputation.

In 2011, trust in search will expand to include a searcher’s social graph. A searcher’s social graph will more significantly influence purchasing decisions and will play a powerful part in both search engine and referral visitor traffic. What your friends like on Facebook and Twitter influence are already starting to have influence on search algorithms, but more importantly, the ability for search engines to show real-time referrals and recommendations from friends will help to reinforce trust in the search results.

What were some of your favorite changes in 2010? How do you think SEO will evolve in the coming year? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

For those that don’t know, Google Places gives the user information about local businesses that are related to the keyword or keywords that the user searched for.  For businesses, you can have your business listed for free as long as you have a physical address and fill out the required information. Basically, as a business, you have to give information about yourself. Mainly this information pertains to business category (like keywords about the features/products of your company), photos or videos, or other additional categories. Basically, the more you fill out, the better you will look in terms of your Places profile. In addition to this basic profile, you can update and write short statuses, and much like a Facebook update, you can post about discounts or giveaways to your Places profile.  Basically, this profile can make it easier for users to find you in local organic searches, and if you don’t rank well for general industry keywords, you can see your traffic skyrocket if you optimize for local SEO terms and fill out a Places profile.

One of the most important aspects of Places are the reviews that customers can submit about your business.  Getting reviews is key to legitimizing your Places page—more reviews, the more relevant and busy you will look to prospective customers, and in turn the higher you will rank on the Places results. It goes without saying that bad reviews will hurt you, so try to limit those with positive customer experiences.

In addition to these features, Places also allows you to “tag” your location for twenty –five dollars a month. Basically, this will place a small yellow tag next to your places location on the Google map, adding some emphasis to your Places profile. These tags can announce promotions, discounts, coupons, or really any pertinent information you want to get across. And, you can track the performance of this “tag” as well as all other analytical data for your account from the easy to use Places dashboard.

Hotpot is the next step for Places, as it takes all of the features of Places and adds a social element. Unlike Places, Hotpot is designed primarily for the consumer, as opposed to both the business and the consumer. It has a much easier to use interface, and focuses more on the customer side of the business interaction. Hotpot data doesn’t supersede the pre-existing data of Places—it still keeps all of the business information the same. It simply eliminates some details from the profile for quick and easy viewing, such as destination URL and phone number. But these are still accessible should the user decide to research more into your business profile.

Each Hotpot user is required to choose a nickname that is different from their Google account. Then they can either start searching for businesses and reviewing them based on their experiences, or they can check what their “friends” (added in much the same way as Facebook or any other social utility) have reviewed. Based on these positive or negative reviews, Google collects data on the user’s preferences (as well as all user preferences on businesses and locations), and then offers suggestions on different businesses based on these preferences. Also, the preferences of the user’s friends will be taken into account, especially if the several users have similar reviews. So the more people who review your business, especially in a positive manner, the more information that Google will have from users. In the case of positive reviews, this will drive many more customers your way. This will all result in Google being able to more accurately recommend you to potential customers.

In terms of best-practices in order to rank highly in Place and Hotpot Searches, it is important to properly categorize your business. This is much like page optimization for SEO—if you don’t categorize your business accurately and thoroughly, you could be missing out on traffic. Also, be sure to recommend to your customers that they review your business. As of now, it seems that quantity of reviews is more important than quality in terms of Places page rank, but in terms of Hotspot its best to be positively ranked. Both factors need to be taken into account. A good way to ensure more reviews is to offer free Wi-Fi at your business, then remind customers to review you. And finally, make sure that like in standard SEO, that the citations (similar to links from sites in SEO) you are receiving are legitimate and from sites with good authority, according to Google.

The wider implications of Hotspot is that Google may be looking to compile the data that users input as their personal preferences to start to flesh out local listings for smaller population centers. Because most small towns don’t have many Places entries for businesses, this data that is entered by users living in these areas may help to expand the reach of Google. In essence, Hotspot users could be used as human crawlers for small towns. So, be sure to stay up to date with Hotspot and Google Places, as not only can they be utilized for cheap advertising, but you can have limitless people referred to your company by their trusted friends and Google in the local area as well!

I hadn’t touched an iPad at this point because there wasn’t a need. I am not a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th adopter of technology simply because of the radical shift of technology being thrusted to market so quickly. I wait for stable releases of products to pass before I become invested in a technology for my own personal use.

PDAs, Smartphones, Netbooks, Desktops, Internet TVs, laptops and the various browsers they support give me a lot of constant research to see what technology makes someone happy, efficient and productive. If one gets distracted by fads, you can really screw up your direction.

The thing about the iPad is that it captured my mother-in-law who would represent the casual modern American female in her mid-50s. She’s not into technology, save for cell phones, and is more interested in people than things. The last time I saw her get that excited about a product was a new refrigerator and she didn’t hug it.

Why am I mentioning all this? Simply because she referred to it as her new computer. It wasn’t an additional device. This was it. She wasn’t going to go onto her husbands Dell-beast anymore. With a few apps loaded she was off doing what she does best – organizing and communicating.

She’s not the only one in love. She’s telling others about it. She will tell others about it. She will show it. She will show others what the new COMPUTER is.

So after a bit I was able to take it for a spin. I wanted to gauge my own reactions while I played around with it. I already have an iPhone and wanted to see what this experience would be like.

My first inclination was to look for more apps – NOT SURF THE WEB. This was only compounded by the fact that this was not my iPad and I couldn’t download apps. Now this was more of a novelty mindset because after having “app fever” when I first got an iPhone, I did go back to surfing.

My second inclination was how un-fun it was to use the web. With all the flashy motion neatness and fluid-ity of the iPad, loading Safari seemed mundane in comparison

My third inclination was I forgot about Local SEO. What came up were less expandable features of Local SEO, but that paled in comparison to the biggest thing I noticed – the inability to get to a Google Place Page.

I tried to get to a client’s Google place page and I couldn’t. Every time I “touched” on the reviews, it lumped it in with the phone number and address and threw me to the map app. On the map app, I couldn’t get anything from Google Places. I had to hit the home button to get back to the iPad screen and go back into the browser app.

This is a problem. Not only can you not get content on Google Places, if the iPad user (like my mother-in-law) doesn’t know about Google Place, then she has no knowledge of its existence. With Google’s latest product of Hotpot, it makes me wonder if there will be a gap just because the interface didn’t allow it. Looking on my iPhone, I see the lack of Google Places as well in Local SEO results.

At the time of this writing, it’s just not there. It may be later, but here are some things to keep in mind.

1. Though the Google Places content won’t display, it will still play a part in Local SEO results.
2. You need to be mindful of how Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and other search engines are moving around each other. Keep watching.
3. Make your content easily digestible and call to actions simple by working from the lowest common denominator up. The next device might only allow people to “point” to your listing.

First consider this:

This year, 46% of retail sales will be influenced by the web – but more than 90% of total retail transactions will occur in-store, from small neighborhood boutiques to national chains.

-       Mobile Marketing from In-Store: A Potential Game Changer, eMarketer, June 2010

When you couple that with the fact that 20% of Google’s search volume is Local (April, 2010), you can see that optimizing for local search should be a vital part of any online marketing strategy. Keep in mind that a traditional SEO is different from local SEO, because instead of optimizing websites you are optimizing locations.

Have brick and mortar stores? Get that information on the web!
This really is the most important step in making sure your store locations are seen. Knowing that more and more consumers will locate your store not only online this year, it’s well worth the short time it takes to make sure you have an updated and accurate information in a variety of local listing platforms.

1. Be consistent. Be sure your name, address and phone number are the exact same in every listing.
2. Claim your listing. Make sure another company hasn’t taken your location, and make sure you clean up duplicate listings.
3. Be there. You MUST have a physical location in the city being searched if you are going to show up.
4. Optimize your store pages. Include the address in the HTML of your store page, and if possible, create a page for each individual location.
5. Get Listed. Make sure you have a verified listing with all the big players like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, etc.

Google Places
Google Places is where you need to start to get your business listed on Google. If you have a physical address – sign up! Start by answering all of the company questions, and getting your business verified. From there you can start to add extras like videos and images.

You can also take advantage of the offers tab where you can add promotions to your map listings, and customers can print them off and bring them in. You still have time to get this information uploaded before this weekend, so take advantage of it, and try to get a leg up on the competition.

Set up a Google Merchant Center.
You have to have a Google account (like Gmail) to create a Google Merchant Center. Once you have created a Merchant Center you will be able to upload a data feed of your products, view performance reports about your products on the dashboard, and add additional information to assist your customers like tax and shipping rates.

Before uploading your data feed, you need to be aware of the strict policies:

1. All of your links must go to active pages that are actually about your items. No pop ups or redirects allowed!
2. You must be able to purchase all products being shown. If they aren’t in stock, don’t put them in your data feed. In the end you want to remember that your customers will be looking for the best deals, especially over the holidays, so why make them mad by showing a product you won’t be able to sell them?
3. You get one listing per product, and content must be unique for each item. Your descriptions must be void of promotional text, and should be kept to a concise description of the product you are selling.
4. Upload only products with fixed prices. If you require a membership or are a paid club, you unfortunately can’t upload your products. Bulk products are allowed, but you need to show the total price and the minimum order amount.

Visit the official page of policies for the Google Product Search for more information.

So once you have verified that you will be able to comply with the policies, you can submit your data feed. For the record, Google defines a data feed as:

A data feed is a file made up from a grouping of attributes that define each one of your products in a unique way that allows customers to search and find your items.

Your data feed will need to include the six required attributes, and can also include any number of the recommended attributes that Google allows. The feed can be uploaded in either an XML or a text file.

Sign up for Local Product Availability.
Local product availability is the newest feature from Google that was released last week that allows shoppers to not only see product information, but also find store locations that have that item in stock.

So I admit – I’m not the biggest shopper, and I’ve never once woken up early on black Friday to take advantage of the hottest deals. However, this year I’ve got my sights set on a stand mixer, and I have to confess that if I were to find the right price, I would scoop it up, even if that means racing to a store before dawn. So once I saw that stores were ramping up their sales even earlier this year, I started doing a little research:

As you can see I’m being shown results with images AND links for nearby stores. Though I’m a fan of the red one, I decided that the price of the mixer on the right was better, so I clicked on the nearby stores link, and was taken to a map that shows me 10 locations that carry this item, as well as their inventory levels:

I’m sure you can see by now why I’m confident that local product availability will be so important to retailers, especially during the upcoming shopping season.

So if you aren’t one of the 70 retailers that were included in the initial roll out, how can you join in? It’s simple. Just fill out this form and give Google some information about your store(s). You must also apply for a second Merchant Center account that will be used specifically for your local availability. Your site will be reviewed, and after it has been qualified you will be given a new Merchant Center account within three business days.

A few things to note: local availability is only viewable on desktops right now, and is currently only available in the US.

I hope that this has motivated you to get all of your brick and mortar stores on the web and working for you. Good luck this holiday season – I’m off to find my stand mixer!

I’ve talked a lot about reviews and managing negative reviews, but there are still a lot of us that are still trying to get online reviews. Restaurants scoop up the review traffic but online reviews are still important to every business.

One problem I had was trying to gather online reviews for a company that generally doesn’t have a strong constant online fan following -  a service company. The methods to generate reviews would have garnered maybe 1 review every 2 years … maybe. Not only that, but a negative review would be disastrous and a lot of ground would have been lost.

But then a ray of sunshine hit…

My client brought out a notebook of actual “reviews.” They were letters of thanks; some were handwritten, others were typed on personal stationary. “We were going to put it in a book in the waiting room, but we never got around too it.” Well, sir, they ain’t going on no table! We’re putting them online!

Now you are probably saying “Isn’t putting reviews on your own website kind of chincy?” Heck no! Why? I can only say that it isn’t chincy because I was able to convert traffic because of it.

“So how did you do it?”

I put one page on my site that was simply titled “Company Name Reviews” and linked to it from the home page. Sure enough, I started gathering traffic from that simple search phrase and converting off of it with a contact form on it.

So what we have here is:

• a way to capitalize on people looking for reviews on your company
• a way to bypass a lack of reviews on search engines
• a way to quickly convert after a rush of positive feedback

… and it’s all real.

I should qualify this blog post first by saying that I mostly work in Local SEO with small businesses. Google Place Search is poising one of my clients into one of the most beneficial spots at the most beneficial time in its 2 year campaign. They are approaching their busy season while ranking number 1 for most of their top keywords.
Yes, I’m excited about this new layout.

Before:
All SEO and competitive research left you ranking high organically, but being below the map and all that below PPC results.  Pay-per-click didn’t bother me, but the map did. My clients bring services TO their clients. Clients don’t come to their office. Because of that, it was a skewed view of what was a qualifying service provider regardless of the ability to reach a client in need quickly.

Illusion: “Well, Plumber D is all the way across town, I’m not choosing them, they’ll never get over here.”
Reality: “Because of GPS, dispatch and two-way radio, we’ll get one of our vans to you under 30 minutes.”

Of course, you can’t use SEO to account for that unless their are human SEO rankers who watch for such things. You really need to rely on your marketing to get that point across in your top-of-mind marketing if it is that much of a need to convey.

After:
Map is moved to the right, Pay-per-click is now below it leaving the map results at the top followed by organic. I can’t help but notice that the map algorithm might be reworked a little as well because some problem keywords weren’t placing me high on the map, but now I am. I’m not complaining, of course. I’m just pondering all that changed and wonders who else is keeping tabs.

There is one thing in all of this that keeps haunting me though – where does this place 3rd party directories?  I’ve written about my annoyance of 3rd Party companies, but there are some that Google is treating with favor above others – superpages, at least. Do a search for local services and see which 3rd party directories still show up.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the quarter finishes out, but in the mean time:
1. Fill out your Google Place Page
2. Put descriptive local terms in your website
3. Keep content relevant with videos, images and links.

With Google Instant, when you type a query into Google, the results are streamlined with each letter you type. So, as you’re typing a query, results (both Paid and Organic) change with each letter typed. Based on what you’ve typed so far Google does a search and lists results that are common completions of your query.

Compared to the power steering feature of a car, the product was rolled out Tuesday at Google’s Search Event in San Francisco and is now available in the US. The feature is also expected to roll out overseas in the next week and will eventually expand across all platforms including mobile (much like the auto completion function).

If it is used (users have the capability to turn it off), Google Instant will certainly change the way searches happen, which demands the question, what does this mean for SEO?

Opinions from around the Web…

TechcrunchTV caught up with Marissa Mayer, Vice Present of Search Products and User Experience, after the Google event yesterday and asked this same question. Mayer answered, “Search becomes easier but it’s still search. The ranking remains stable so people who have optimized their site to achieve a certain outcome that’s still the outcome when users use those queries. So we really think it will be a smaller affect for the SEO community.”

Steve Rubel of Edelman Digital disagrees. In his post, Google Instant Makes SEO Irrelevant, he writes, “Google today launched an ambitious effort to speed up searching. But what they really did is kill SEO.” He continues with the point that no two people will see the same web as results change so quickly.

“Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.“

Matt Cutts weighed in, suggesting Rubel’s headline is a bit dramatic, but offering his opinion that overtime, yes, Google Instant could change search engine optimization.

In his post, Thoughts on Google Instant, Cutts writes, “The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

I can see his point that this may change the way browsers who are casually surfing for information may find this feature useful. For instance if I’m looking to go on vacation and I search for “trip to europe” –

I can quickly browse the results, easily changing them as I scroll down Google’s predictions (trip to europe cost, trip to europe planning, etc.), and then read Meta Descriptions to identify informative sites. The feature is nice for research-based searches, but what about other types of searches?

If I’m quickly looking for a specific answer, not doing extensive research, I’m not sure I’d use the feature for a couple of different reasons. First, Google Instant doesn’t seem to work well for local based queries. For example: doctors offices in Bloomington, IN, hair Salons in Bloomington, IN, restaurants in Bloomington, IN, etc. When I tested these, all of my queries needed to be completely typed before relevant information was listed. Geo-modified search queries are incredibly common and I don’t see how the new feature will really increase the speed here.

The second reason I may not pay attention to the feature is if I’m in a hurry, which is most of the time. If I know what I’m looking for and just need to pull up the website, I’m going to ignore the Instant results and complete my query as I have always done, knowing it will definitely give me what I’m looking for.  For example, colts website, nike, Toms Shoes, etc. If I know the brand or the service but I’m just not sure of the URL, I know these queries will give me what I’m looking for.

Third, for most of my searches I use the search function within my browser. I rarely go to Google.com. The Google team is working on adding this feature to the browser search box but this may not be available for months.

FYI: Location Matters

One note to make about the feature is that location does matter. Type in a “W” and most likely the first result is you’ll see is weather for the location near you (or your IP address registration). Sam Diaz from ZDNet.com took this a step further and tested the same query from two different computers (one located in Silicon Valley and one located in Philadelphia). Screenshots provided in the blog post show that when typing the letters “ea” in Philadelphia, the first result is the official fan page for the Philadelphia Eagles. When typing “ea” in California, the first result is news on “earthquakes”.

On a side Note: Yahoo’s Lost Opportunity?

According to Stephen Hood, one of Yahoo’s former product managers, the company was working on something nearly similar to Google Instant 5 years ago. The product was called LiveSearch and from his description it sounds right in line with the features of Google Instant. So, why have you never heard of it? In his post, “Google Instant is an example of how Yahoo could have won in search”, Hood explains that due to a more conservative nature in management at the time, Yahoo would only release it on a smaller search engine (AllTheWeb).

Hood also points to a Blogscoped post on the AllTheWeb Livesearch feature back in 2006. The author of this post gave a quick review of LiveSearch, saying: “though it might be one of those good-looking search tools that you still don’t end up using on a daily basis. And while you change between pages, the actual speed before results get displayed is about the same as when you’re at Google.com and hit return.”

I think this person may have been on to something. While we’ll have to wait a while to see if this catches on with users and how exactly it’s going to change SEO, what do you think? Is Google Instant a feature you’ll use very often?

For those of you who remember when a day before “blog” was a newfangled term and “twitter” didn’t even exist yet, the year 2000 was a huge buzz year for the death of local businesses finally hit the media. Suddenly, consumers were given two options:
1. Go to a store or
2. Leisurely search for the item you want and have it shipped to you

I remember little news packages where they tried to incite people to rise up against Internet commerce with “Can the local mall survive?” and “Brick & Mortar stores obsolete? what does this mean for local economies everywhere?” For myself, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy because it intrigued me enough to stop working on multimedia CD-ROMs. I fired up my dial-up connection and did my Christmas shopping from my office chair. The future was here!

That was 2000. The following years started to be less glossy as more copy-cat “e-tailers” came onto the scene. Competition is a good thing but it turned out not to be the best thing. Remember Froogle? Launched as a product comparison project for Google in 2002, it seemed a no-brainer. However, Froogle never left beta and actually got dumped.

Why? The underestimation of the power of desperate people wanting to gain a money online. Read this as a peak into the sheer determination people will go to defraud a system to gain something – anything – no matter the cost. To sum up, the exploitation of shopbots, phishing sites and bogus items brought the trust of the system to a lurching gate. Froogle also piped in eBay listings thereby bringing all of e-bays woes into froogle’s lap and increasing the problem
for honest sellers and buyers alike. A simple idea to cash-in legally by sitting on a load of Tickle-Me Elmo dolls can turn really ugly and a lot of finger pointing can happen. So this hullabaloo happens enough times to enough people and an opportunity for reputable eCommerce sites seize an opportunity while the attitude to eCommerce changes ever so slightly.

So where does that leave us?
1. A handful of widely known and branded eCommerce websites.
2. Large Retailers with eCommerce options.
3. Local SEO

Relevant Searches mean “finding you stuff where you are right now in life.” If you live in Toldeo and desire a certain product, Local SEO will bring the product that is in a Toledo store up on a search result before the same product that is in a warehouse in Miami.

Basically, we are continually being conditioned to “want it now” and the value of time over the value of a shipping charge has tipped. Now the possibility of finding your desired item is 6 minutes away, not 2-3 days away (4-5, it’s over a weekend.)