David Mihm has been showing off his whiteboard skills over at SEOmoz whiteboard friday. I really want to share these 2 video’s with my readers.

The first video is about Local Search Inclusion:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Local Search Inclusion with David Mihm

The second video is about SEO for Local Search

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Inclusion and SEO for Local Search video’s

One of the most important things after you have registered your business is to know how much traffic this will get to your website. I’ve put up a very thorough tutorial on Mike Blumenthal’s blog and I suggest you all check it out.

I’ll put up a part here in this post to give you guys a preview of what I am talking about. This part is about adding URL parameters to your Local Business Center URL’s. In the full article you will also learn how to track the vertical ‘maps.google.com’ and the 3-click-path traffic from the Universal Search results.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on Mike B’s blog!

Track URLs in Local Business Center

First of all, we want to track the URLs in the Local Business Center. The Local Business Center provides very basic information. Impressions and Views. Google is very vague in their answers in the help groups/forum on what an impression or a view actually mean. Does it account universal search traffic as well? or just directly Google Maps related views/clicks? And is this data accurate? We will decide to monitor this not from the Local Business Center but rather with Google Analytics.

Imagine your business has 2 store locations. Each in a different city/state. Your website has one URL www.example.com.

We will give each location a URL with GA parameters. By doing this, we will create a ‘virtual’ campaign in GA for our local listing.

In order to do this we will use the Google Analytics URL builder tool, which you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

You only need to fill in your specific location URL. the campaign source (in this case; google), the campaign medium (maps) and give it a campaign name, for example local_location_1.

Now copy the full URL and enter it in the Local Business Center for that specific listing. Everything should work okay (although the URL might be a bit long for the LBC to display it properly). Note that Google Maps will only display the part of the URL before the parameters!

Track Local campaign using 301 Redirects

You can do the same using a 301 redirect. (this is my preferred method, but you will have to know how 301 redirects work. ) Using 301 redirects you will be able to have a clean URL in your local business center.

In this case the Google Local Business Center contains the following URL :

www.example.com/locationpage

Google Maps will display :

www.example.com

clicking on the link in Google Maps will actually bring you to :

www.example.com/location/city/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=local&utm_campaign=local_location_1

That’s it to track your Local Business using a virtual Campaign!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Tracking Local Search traffic using Analytics

Just before the weekend Google decided to launch a new help center. This time it is one that is well appreciated by small business owners and us local search people. Its a Help resource on how to set up the Local Business Center.
You can find the all new help resource at the following link:
Local Business Center User Guide. Here is that video that was accompanied with it:

the video has been set to private and is no longer available.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

New Help Resource for Local Business Center

Well this might be a no-brainer, but I’ve seen it often go wrong:
If you are a business owner (using Adwords), and have some ‘Local Business Ads’ running or if you have some of your competitors local business ads appearing in the Google Map near your store location make sure you don’t embed this map! Try using different keywords or your direct business location for your marker to appear and try again. Otherwise you might end up having an embedded map like the one below on your website – triggering info balloons that are too wide for the window to contain them, having links to your competitors, or even your own paid advertisements where people would be able to click, resulting them to go to the website where they already are or away from your website! In any case, money or effort not well spent.

an example, showing results for hotels in Barcelona.

View Larger Map

Now another question raises. My website is now displaying ads, although they are embedded in Google Maps, I still consider these ads to be shown on my website (although this open for discussion, being it an iframe). So where is my PPC award if someone clicks these markers? Isn’t an embedded map – into some extent – the Adsense content network?

Feel free to leave a comment and discuss..

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

When you embed your own Google Maps, don’t forget to…

In the meanwhile, colleague in the Local Search business, Mike Blumenthal featured a little story what Google needs to do to carry the burden of Global Map Spam. Hopefully Google will take care of spam issues now quicker than ever (task not to difficult eh? )

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Google Maps Spam report option – tiny hooray for Google

I might be wrong on this one, but I just was presented with the following when entering the Local Business Center. I have never seen this message before (maybe because I’m normally using european google engines )

The Local Business Center is asking me to provide my email preferences as you can see in the screenshot (click to enlarge).

It seems that now you are able to receive notifications when things are changing to listings in your account. That would be great! I look forward to the first emails!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Email preferences Local Business Center

Some ‘statistics’:
amount of impressions were in thousands, the amount of clicks in hundreds. But no URL listed. Oops!

lesson learned: provide Local Business Center with full details about your business. This will increase traffic at no cost.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Business Ads owners – please use the LBC to the fullest

We see highlights of the most important ranking factors, and also those that might harm your rankings. Must read for small businesses and anyone doing local optimization.

Although this article is quite focussed on the US market it still is extremely useful here in Europe. Most of the factors discussed apply here as well. Too bad Google Maps and Yahoo Local isn’t as developed here as we would like it to be.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking factors discussed

• How do I correct my incorrect marker position after I’ve added the listing?
• Where is the bulk upload feature of images like requested here
• The maps overlay in the LBc doesn’t seem to be working in Safari (for windows, or is my system just buggin? )
• Why is this still not available in Europe ??? (including the free category selection!)
• While using this interface I wasn’t asked to re-enter my PIN for my listings, maybe this is because I use bulk-upload instead of manual verification?

Also while trying to delete a listing I was presented with the following screen, which I’m a bit puzzled about, because will Google Maps remove your listings and those from trusted sources if you want them to? What about

“To geographically organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Or is this the useful part?

Here’s the screenshot btw (click to enlarge) :

Also, I must note that I really like the ‘verified local submitter’ idea in a comment from AmhedF back at Mike’s blog. Especially for agencies or people monitoring large accounts, it’s unbearable and a real pain having to re-verify and re-enter those PIN’s for all of your listings. There should be a better and more efficient way to fight map spam.

Update: Seems like they are having some problems using bulk-uploads in the new interface. In the meanwhile, people in desperate need of getting their business listings online use the bulk upload feature can use the work around I mentioned at Mike’s post about this at his blog:

“change the &gl parameter and/or domain to a european one, you can keep the hl in your prefered language“

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Pain and hassles new Google Local Business Center

Setting up your account and adding business locations is really easy, that is, if it’s only a few.

What happens when adding multiple listings using the bulk-upload method? For me this is the preferred method. It’s lightning fast, it tells you which errors to correct (if any) and you see your business listings appearing in a jiffy. Waiting for approval (takes up 2-6 weeks or even more).

So what’s the problem? Well, we want to flavour it up a bit. Add some pictures & videos. But where is the bulk upload feature for this thing? I want to have a branded icon or my company logo added to all the 200 listings I just uploaded using the bulk-upload feature. Not possible! So the next few hours you are busy doing hard labour work, manually adding images and videos per business location using an almost antique photo upload system. Where is the usability on this one Google? It might be good to pay some attention to the local business center.
Suggestion: just add some fields to the upload form with img src destinations to be used.

Instead of adding new features, try to improve the ones that already exist. Speaking of which, when is that category updating coming in Europe?

So hereby, I’m compiling a list of features I would like to see or updated in the Local Business Center.

the list of updates:

• category update (in Europe!)
• Interface redesign / usability upgrade
• Photo upload form
• Bulk-upload photos / videos
• statistics (define impressions / views ) , integrate with Google Analytics!
• insight in (trusted) sources used to gather my information (so I can contact them if something is wrong/missing or incomplete! )
• history on status of business listing (pending, awaiting approval, flagged, awaiting next update, marked as inappropriate, etc )

Feel free to leave a comment if you think something is missing!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Updates on Google Local Business Center – What would you like to see?