When was the last time you reached for phone book when you needed a hotel, a florist, or indeed…. a solicitor? We’re much more likely to reach for Google rather than the good old Yellow Pages, and “Local Search” is way the Internet presents geo-targeted information about your business, including location maps, customer reviews, and detailed information about your services.

Google reports that one in every thirteen searches includes a map in the search results. That means a lot of people searching for local businesses, and one of those people might be your prospective new client.

Local searching isn’t limited just Google web search. Yahoo! has a local business listing service (http://uk.local.yahoo.com) and Microsoft’s Bing search engine shows local listings and a map for most local searches (http://www.bing.com/maps).

Nevertheless, the major player in Local Search is, of course, Google. Run a search for a local business type, say “Solicitor Newcastle”, and you will trigger search results from the Google Maps service that includes a list of 7 local business listings, including mapping information. This display is known as the Local Onebox and the 7 business listing is the Local 7-pack.

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If there aren’t enough suitable businesses to generate a 7-pack, then Google might display the local 3-pack, and indeed sometimes just a single company listing is displayed, for instance for a search for your company name.

You can submit your business to the free Google Maps service at the Google Local Business Centre. You will require a Google account to list your business, and it is likely that your company will already have an account if it is using Google services like AdWords advertising, Google Analytics, or Gmail.

There is a very good chance that Google will have your company listed already even if you haven’t provided the information yourself. Google gathers information from a number of Internet Directory sources, and it may have created a generic listing for you. If that is the case, it is essential for you to claim the listing as your own. If you do not claim your listing yourself, you may find yourself victim of the scam known as “hijacking.” At its simplest, that means another organisation claims your listing, but changes the phone number to be their phone number, thus siphoning off your phone calls. Reclaiming a hijacked listing is tedious, so prevention is much better than the cure.

As you enter your company information into the Google Local Business Centre, keep in mind that how you enter the information will have a significant influence in whether your firm appears in the all important Google 7-pack.

Google publishes Google Local Business Listing Quality Guidelines and in particular these rules stipulate

you can only list

Tips for creating the perfect Google Local listing:

Name of your firm: it is important to use your official company name in the Title of your listing, but also making it clear what you do. So, if your firm is called Smith & Jones and you are solicitors, then make your entry Smith & Jones Solicitors. It is against Google guidelines to cram in keywords, phone numbers, or other SEO trickery in your company name.

Business address: ensure your business address matches exactly the address you are listing on your website, and the address that is listed on other Internet directory sites. The more identical addresses Google discovers for your website, the better.  You can only have one Google listing for each physical address of your business.

Phone number: 0800 numbers do not indicate any geographic area, so be sure to include your local dialling code phone number. You can add your 0800 number, but make your local number the first number.

Business description: You have up to 200 characters to describe your business, and you will want to include keywords in here. Keep in mind, however, that this content is intended for humans, so it will need to read well, and cramming too many keywords in here may get you banned.

Business categories: The categories you choose to classify you firm are exceptionally important, so choose them carefully. You should choose some categories from the suggestions provided by Google, as well as creating your own categories.

For Internet searchers using their mobile phones, Google Mobile Search uses the My Location feature to pinpoint your precise location and provides you with search results targeted to your physical location. Put in the word “curry” into your Google Mobile search, and you’ll find every curry house in the vicinity. (http://www.google.com/mobile.)

In addition to the search engines’ own local business directories, firms should be creating listings in the major Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) websites. Many of these listings are free, and offer you a way to provide consistent contact information for your company. These directories can be generic business listings like Yell (www.yell.com), City Visitor (www.city-visitor.com/), FreeIndex (www.freeindex.co.uk ) or Touch Local (www.touchlocal.com).

Review websites play an important role in local search, so make sure your firm is being reviewed in services like Qype (www.qype.co.uk) and Yelp (www.yelp.co.uk)

And finally, in addition to your listings on other websites, you need to ensure your own website is giving off clear local signals. Make sure you are including your physical address, including postcode and local phone number on every page of your website; typically this will be included in a footer on the page.

There are many more factors that influence local search rankings, but if you address these as your top priority you should start to see good results. The importance of Local Search for law firms in the UK cannot be underestimated, and the process of providing complete, accurate and consistent location information is what you need to do in order to take advantage of this relatively new and low cost marketing tool.

I have been playing around a bit with Google Sites lately and thought it would be worthwhile writing a quick review and investigating whether these “do it yourself” website services are appropriate for businesses.

One of my most popular blog articles is How to Build a Free Website, so I suspect this one will be popular, too!

The first thing I must say is that as these “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) template-driven website creators go, Google Sites is very flexible and easy to use. As you would expect from Google I suppose. Naturally, there are limits, but the built-in functionality and the extendable nature of the system makes for a compelling case for those of us not blessed with natural design and coding abilities.

There is no software to download or install, everything is done from within the web browser. You start by selecting a blank template or one from a fairly extensive selection, many created by users rather than Google themselves. You then choose a theme to match, which sets the colour scheme and background style for your pages.

Once set up, you can play around with the layout, colours and images used in your theme and template. Within a few minutes, I had a template looking like this:

Not the prettiest, but it demonstrates how easy it is to start playing around with things and shaping them to your taste. Remember, I hadn’t started to add any content at this stage, but doing so was easy – just click the Edit Page button and type away!

You should be able to make out in the screenshot above the editing controls, like a simple version of Microsoft Word. This is the classic “WYSIWYG” editing mode. It’s easy to insert images, make links, or add one of the thousands of Gadgets available for iGoogle. One thing that is missing is the ability to add files or documents for download – to do that, you’ll need to upload them somewhere else and make a link to them.

The options you have for changing the layout, colours, backgrounds and so on is very impressive, certainly compared to many similar systems I’ve encountered over the years. You are ultimately limited to having your navigation on the left or right, where many sites are now favouring navigation along the top. The amount of functions you can add in via Gadgets is huge, although many of them are pretty useless for business (Free Online Frogger anyone?)

You can point your own domain name at the website, so it has a professional address, and you can register the site with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, giving you great statistics on your visitors.

So, it’s easy to use, has a wide variety of functions you can add in and the design is easy to tailor, within the restraints of header/left sidebar/right sidebar/footer, which to be fair most sites use anyway.

Is it, then, a good idea to build a business website on the Google Sites platform?

I don’t think so, and I’ve compiled my reasons why:

1. You don’t own the site, it’s Google’s. Look at what happened to Geocities a couple of months ago.
2. Someone still has to design and build the site, even if it is easy. Does anyone in your business have the requisite graphic design and Photoshop skills? There is no training included in Google’s free offer.
3. Zero support if something goes wrong. Yes, there are online tutorials and a Google Group for support, but you can’t actually pick up the phone and demand something be done about it if there is a problem. There is no SLA on fixing problems. If the website is down for a reason out of your control, Google can’t be pressed into doing something about it!
4. You are limited to Google’s templates, which you might not want, or paying an approved Google supplier for a custom design. You will always have the header, left (or right)-navigation, middle-content layout, even if you want something different (e.g. a navigation menu along the top).
5. Tailoring the look and feel of additional functionality such as Calendars is nigh-on impossible, plus it will only do what Google allows you to do. This may be sufficient, or you may want it to work in a different way, but you won’t have the option to change it with a system like this.
6. Uploading files for your visitors to download requires the use of a third-party service, increasing the risk of files not being available and other technical problems.

These problems aren’t unique to Google Sites by any means and their system is actually one of the most flexible I’ve come across. Sadly, though, for businesses it just doesn’t make sense and in fairness to Google, they aren’t pushing Sites as a business solution, except for collaboration (i.e. internal or project-based use, rather than a main business website).

My opinion is that if you are serious about your business, you need a proper website, designed and built to your specification, so that you can be sure it does everything you want. Otherwise, you may well find yourself frustrated at the limits imposed by a system like Google Sites.

Contact me for information about independent website consultancy: How I can help you develop your website strategy and find the right web developer.

Google has given a bit of Christmas Cheer to it’s search results.

Search for Christmas and Christmas baubles decorate the page:

Google has announced its search results will display a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web, pulling updates from Twitter and Facebook, or postings from blogs and news sites.

Latest Results is yet another addition to Google’s already cluttered search page.

Many apologies in advance, but if you haven’t seen it in action, I thought I would demonstrate by doing a search the  key phrase X Factor.

Taking a look at this snip of the Google results, you will find my Twitter post mentioning X Factor in the new Latest Results section:

I’m preparing my new Social Media Marketing Training course, and  I think the big question for small businesses for Latest Search are:

What phrases are going to trigger Latest Results? At the moment it appears to be predominantly entertainment and news stories. As an example, the BA Strike is triggering Latest Results. On the other hand, Swine flu triggers News results, and Blog posts, but no Latest News.

What kind of content could your business generate to take advantage of this ephemeral content in the search results? Search engine optimisation doesn’t just mean web pages, but also means blog postings, and YouTube content, and Images, and now more than ever participating in the social media sphere.

What UK Centric phrases will trigger Latest News? It’s early days, and we will need to wait to see just how Google integrates this live stream into the search results.  Google provides a service called Google Trends that shows hot topics,  but I just don’t believe today’s UK data.  Are so many British searchers really looking for this kind of data:

Learn more by taking a look  at Google’s video introduction to Google Latest Results:

I was planning to write a post about using Region Tags on your web pages to help Google recognise your UK location.

Why are region tags important?  They help to geo-target content, and they will present additional information in the search page to help users to select the most suitable result.

The problem is I’m just not sure Google understands the UK.  Not really.

I live in Nottingham in the UK, but there is also a Nottingham in both Pennsylvania and Maryland in the United States.

A search in Google UK for “Nottingham potato” from a computer with a UK based IP address brings results in 5 of the top 10 positions being filled with American results for Potato Chip Factory tours in Nottingham’s in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

And worst of all, Google local brings up Derby as the top result on the Google map. Heaven forbid!

By the way, if you’re not impressed by my Nottingham Potato example, then scroll to the bottom of this post for some more serious examples.

Who ever thought watching potatoes get peeled and deep fried could be so much fun….

What did I expect to find when I searched for Nottingham Potato?

I would have expected to find lists of organic potato farming tips and ideas for people in Nottingham, or food wholesalers selling potatoes, or take away restaurant menus from Nottingham serving jacket potatoes, or catering suppliers.

Actually, what I would have liked to have seen is Bing’s results…

I know Nottingham Potato is silly example, but there is a more serious underlying issue:

it’s not so silly is when you search for Birmingham Airport, and as a UK user I’m served the Alabama results:

How about a pharmacy in Boston, searched on Google.co.uk:

Google recently announced a number of new features for Analytics, and I thought I would share some of the tips that will be incorporated in my forthcoming Google Analytics training course.

The first, most noticeable one, is the appearance of the Intelligence button in the main navigation. This is an alerting service that will automatically notify you of significant changes to data patterns. Be sure to change the Alert Sensitivity setting to high if your site doesn’t get large numbers of visitors.

Intelligence has already given me useful insights.  I wrote an article about Michelle Obama Image Spam recently that received prominence in the Google search results and was also linked to from Obama’s web page. My site received an unexpected wave of traffic.

Google Intelligence notified me of the unexected spike in traffic on the day of posting, and provided me with 4 Alerts letting me know I had:

• more Visitors than normal, up 306%
• more New Visitors than normal, up 394%
• more Organic Search visitors than normal, up 493%
• and finally more Google Organic Search, up 406%

Custom Alerts lets you set a number of options to have alerts sent to you if anticipate something unusual might happen. In the example below, I am setting up an alert in case there is a significant drop in AdWords (PPC) traffic. You can apply alerts to any of the profiles in your account and choose whether it should be on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You’ll notice that the settings follow the pattern for Advanced Segments with the “condition matching” format for choosing what data to use.

I’m sure you can think of many other uses for this tool – how about setting up an alert ahead of an email campaign or some PR being published, so that you are told if traffic from a certain source rises above a threshold?

Goals

Another significant change is to Goals. Previously you were limited to four Goals per profile, which were views of a particular page. Now, you have four sets of five goals (i.e. 20 goals) and you can choose from URL Destination (page view), Time on Site and Pages per Visit. You can see below the new format for choosing Time on Site as a Goal:

This is brilliant news for sites with multiple goals or goals with more subtlety than simply the view of a particular page.

Advanced Filters

Another excellent new feature, Advanced Filters let you analyze your data with much greater granularity than previously available – it used to require exporting to a spreadsheet and some fancy formulas.

Now, you can very quickly drill down into specific detail within a report. The example below shows me filtering a report by a particular keyword that led to a conversion. I’m looking for those phrases containing that keyword that actually generate revenue. You can see at the bottom how filtering can be applied – it’s very straightforward:

Other New Features

Other items of note, which some of you will find useful:

The Unique Visitors metric can now be used against any dimension in custom reports, so you can see unique visitors in a particular segment.

Extra Mobile tracking features: Google now provides code you can add to your mobile website to enable tracking of devices without JavaScript enabled (this is how standard Analytics code works, but some mobile devices don’t suppor it). Google also announced a method for tracking usage of apps on the iPhone and Android operating systems.
Multiple custom variables: Some advanced users will be utilising custom variables (using additional Analytics code) to track things like users who are logged in or users who viewed a particular page/section. Analytics now supports multiple variables at once.

Share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments: If you have a report or segment you’ve created and want to share it with someone else so they can use it in their own Analytics account, you can now do that with the Share link under the Manage Custom Reports or Manage Advanced Segments page.

So, there you have it – some very useful and powerful new features, as Google tries to keep its free Analytics software up to speed with the paid-for packages available. If you want help on using and understanding Google Analytics, take a look at my training events page for upcoming Analytics courses.

If you search for “Michelle Obama” on Google’s Image Search, you’ll find an offensive picture as the very first result.

Google has taken the rather extrordinary step of taking out an AdWords ad to explain the situation.  The advertisement clicks through to their explanation of why the image appears, and includes an explanation:

Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.

Michelle Obama Google Image Spam

How did this offensive image get to be at the top of the results?

I have written previously about how to optimise images for search engines, and the first step would be to check for a Googlebomb, or a campaign of inbound linking to inappropriately force a web page to the top of the search results for a particular page.

I’m perpelexed to see the page containing the image  doesn’t appear to have any inbound links?

Michelle Obama No Links from Yahoo

Yahoo Site Explorer reports 5 inbound links to the actual image

Michelle Obama Image Inbound Links

I’m sure there will be lots written about this, so I’ll update the post when more analysis uncovers why this image ranks as well as it does.

Matt Cutts of Google recently announced that the “new version” of Google, dubbed Google Caffeine, will be fully rolled out after Christmas.

How will this change the search results and, perhaps more importantly, how will it affect your site rankings in Google’s search results?

Looking around the web, you will find various folks writing about their experiences with Caffeine while Google had their testing version open (nb: the testing version is no longer available).

There is no doubt that searching using Caffeine is a lot faster, which is one of the key elements of the upgrade for Google. It also seems to have a much bigger index (database) of pages, so you’re more likely to find what you want. Whether it’s more accurate is difficult to say, as that’s a subjective thing, but there don’t appear to be huge differences in pages listed for any given search result.

The other big move by Google is to get into real time search – indexing content from things like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. As people are turning to social media to find what they want, the search engines have to react and it’s no surprise that all the major engines have signed deals with Twitter to index their content. Expect Google Caffeine to include more (and more recent) social media content. That’s a message to us all – social media isn’t going away and your social media footprint is going to start encroaching more and more into search engine results, so spending time on social media will have the added benefit of additional exposure in search results.

So what about us, the website owners? What can we do to prepare for Caffeine’s roll out?

Well, there is some evidence that domain authority gets even greater weight in Caffeine – that makes life more difficult for smaller websites targeting specific (long tail) keywords.

It also means “more, more, more” when it comes to getting links to your website. I guess most of us knew that already though…

As recently stated by Google, they are likely to introduce website speed as a ranking factor, which is probably part of the Caffeine roll out – so make sure your site is on a decent server and loads nice and quickly!

One other thing that some people noticed is that Caffeine seems to give greater weight to keyword-rich Title Tags and body copy, so despite its predilection for links, Google isn’t abandoning good old on-page optimisation any time soon. Make sure your pages are optimised for your target keywords, as relying on links may see you slip slightly.

So, as Matt Cutts has said more than once, this is an “under the hood” serious infrastructure upgrade, not a huge ranking algorithm change. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, but there are bound to be some changes to your ranking for various keywords. If you’re following good SEO practice though, you should be fine. If you want some more help on what SEO best practice is, have a look at my forthcoming training events page.

New – Google Maps is asking users whether the details being displayed from the Google Local Business Centre are accurate.  Perhaps Google is trying to let users help clean up the spam in their database?

I searched for John Lewis Nottingham, and Google not only provided me with map and details, but prompted me if the details are accurate:

I clicked on the “Is this accurate” prompt to find out what happens next, as you do.

Now, with the most sincere apologies to John Lewis, I must confess that I pressed the “Confirm” button to say I thought the details are wrong.

What will happen to this “vote” that I just cast?

• Will John Lewis be notified?
• Will a Google attempt to verify the results?
• Can unscrupulous competitors get a company blacklisted?
• Will the user generated content have an impact on John Lewis’s rankings in the Local results?
• What about unclaimed business listings?

With thanks to Mike Blumenthal who has an interesting collection of Google Local blog postings including one on this topic. Some of his articles do not pertain to the UK yet, but worth keeping an eye out might be heading our way. See also American Google vs UK Google.

Google has removed the Page Rank score from WebMaster tools.  No more little green barchart tellinig me my score from 0-10.  This is about a strong a signal as you can get from Google to say Page Rank just isn’t important.

Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, explained the reason for the removal:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it”

WebMaster Tools is Google’s essential, free set of tools to help you diagnose and  fix problems with  your website, discover links to indivdidual pages on your site, see the top queries driving visitors to your site, find suggestions for improving your site.

Despite removing the Page Rank information from Webmaster Tools, Google just can’t bring itself to remove page Rank Ran from the Google Toolbar.  Too many Page Rank Junkies would have a hissy fit, and it must be easier just to leave it there rather than take all the flak.

This isn’t something new;  we’ve been writing the misleading nature of Page Rank for quite a few years.  And our Page Rank articles still tend to be very popular in terms of readership:

1. Google Page Rank Update (Oct 2007)
2. Search Engine Optimisation Myths (Feb 2007)
3. Page Rank Update (May 2008)

Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim for the Google quote: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/google-is-finally-killing-pagerank.html