For the third year in a row, David Mihm has published the Local Search Ranking Factors. The LSRF 2010 consists of 32 local search enthusiasts their opinion (including me!) on how to rank well in the search engines. It is a definite must read for everyone interested in Local Search. It is also incredible to see how much has happened in the past year in the Local Search business and how a small community of enthusiastic people (and SEO’s ) are willing to share the ins and outs on the matter.

Top 10 take aways from the Local Search Ranking Factors are (thx Andrew ) :

1. Claiming your Google Place Page/Local Listing
2. Have a Business Address in the City That is Being Searched
3. Associate Your Google Place Page with the Proper Categories
4. Put Your Product/Service Keyword in Your Place Page Business Title
5. Proximity of Your Address to the Searched City’s Centroid
6. Product/Service Keywords in your Google Place Pages Description
7. Associating Photos with your Google Place Page
8. Associating Local Area Code with your Primary Place Page Phone Number
9. Associating Place Page with Marginally Related Categories
10. Location Keyword in Place Pages Business Title

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking Factors 2010

Following Mike’s example of Google still showing oneboxes on SEO related terms (which they banished some time ago ) I found another example where google decides to put up the onebox. Considering the Guidelines for inclusion in Google Maps you might find this example particularly funny.


or check out this one on webdesign and positioning in Google

It appears that a lot of this still possible in many countries! Google should be proactively stating at the submission process what can and what can’t be done according to the Google Guidelines.
Have you seen more interesting examples?

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

SEO oneboxes – not only in Duluth

This year I will be attending and speaking at SMX Stockholm. There you will find me presenting a Local Search business case with one of our clients; Boat Company Lovers. My fellow speaker will be Jaap Dijkstra, Business Developer at  Boat company Lovers –  one of the leading companies organizing Canal Cruises in Amsterdam. Some of the projects he is currently working on are the world’s first purpose build Fuel Cell passenger ship and an amphibious coach called Floating Dutchman, which will show passengers transferring through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol the city of Amsterdam.

When you are in the opportunity to attend SMX Stockholm, don’t hesitate to drop a note so we can meet up during the conference!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Speaking at SMX Stockholm – 13 October 2009

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

This must be one of the biggest pieces for Local Search to read on this year (like last year). David Mihm published its Volume 2 of the Local Search Ranking Factors.

The general idea of the Local Search Ranking Factors is to give business owners a chance in understanding the things that matter to Local SEO. Even focusing on a few of the elements included in this huge research can have big effects for your online marketing strategy.
David’s quote:

It is my hope that this study will help small business owners confused by Local Search, or those strapped for time, to prioritize their marketing efforts.

The total research included almost 50 questions asked to 27 experts in the local search optimization field (I was lucky to participate, thx David!)

I recommend all my readers to go check it out, and join the conversation on David’s blog.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search Ranking Factors 2009 are out!

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

Yelp, one of the biggest review sites in US is coming to the UK. Hopefully rest of Europe will be next, but will they be able to gain ground? Qype, touchlocal and some other more local oriented players already have quite a strong user base so will Yelp be able to set foot into this continent? If they use the same pro-active approach (by calling people) as in the United States we might be surprised.

Thus, I welcome the news to use Yelp in Europe, both for gathering reviews and citations. It will make a good addition to the list I presented in this post about Local Search Citations in Europe on David Mihm his blog.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Yelp coming to UK, rest of Europe next?

The following!

With each new year, people start creating lists. Things to do, things not to do. Well, here is mine for the year of 2009.

Luckily, the thing about lists is that you need to maintain them. So keep looking forward to more articles about the above topics covering Local Search Optimization, Universal Search and anything that might occur in the local space in the year of 2009!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Local Search will bring you in the year of 2009…

Some of us might know Slideshare, the online platform where you can store your presentation slides to share with the rest of the world. It appears that this website is a valuable source for local citation building. The real value, or the amount of it that might affect your ranking could vary. If your presentation on Slideshare is doing well, even the better. This all may sound a bit fuzzy, but I will try and explain with the following example:

I noticed our Local Business listing for our company was taken down. So I checked the Local Business center and found out it was not suspended, not inactive, it was just nowhere to be found in the search results.
The regular keyphrase I use to see if our business is still there is the company name. Whereas we normally we would be in pole position in the 10pack, we were now in 8th, but with a listing that derived its source from the Slideshare website.
Curious of course, I went to the Slideshare website where one of our presentations from SMX Madrid was listed. One of the slides had the company name and phone numbers listed and apparently was being indexed due to the transcript of the presentation.
The data of the company was blended with the results of Slideshare, causing the URL of Slideshare.net to appear. The information taken from the Slideshare transcript also appeared in the ‘webpages’ tab as one of the citation sources.

So I’m wondering, what is the real value of citation sources? Is it the domain that counts or just the per-page popularity? What is exactly needed to be a citation? In our case it was just the company name and phone number that was enough for Google to blend all our information in ‘the cluster’ with our listing. Please let us know your thoughts or experiences in the comment section!

PS: after entering the Local Business Center and updating our listing with basically no major changes it appeared back, where it should be; on top of the 10pack.

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Slideshare as a citation source

Spain is now the second country in Europe to have StreetView available, in 4 cities, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. This was the announcement made yesterday on the Google LatLong blog. The first country to have StreetView available was France, soon after the Tour de France took place.
So now you will be able to view the city I live in, Barcelona, by using the StreetView option. The LatLong blogs shows some examples of the architecture in this city, including the famous Sagrada Familia and the Casa Milà.
The imagery available in StreetView was quite recently taken, this seems to correspond with when I blogged about StreetView visiting Barcelona at the beginning of August.
As reports were made of seeing StreetView vehicles in other countries in Europe including Germany and the Netherlands I suspect these will be available soon.

Local Barcelona tip: This is the coffee shop (cafe mono) around the corner where we usually go. They serve good Italian coffee!

Post from: Local Search - martijnbeijk.com

Spain second country to have Google StreetView