Masterlink Interactive Blog

Let’s say you’re out running errands in Dallas, and need to make a last minute stop for some, let’s say, size-15 stilettos — but you don’t know where to find a pair. The wonderful, magical world of local search already makes it easier than ever to find a shoe store: Search “Dallas shoe store” on your smart phone, and Google gives you an interactive map chickenpoxed with area shoe stores (including contact information).

But Google’s just taken local search a step further—bridging the web and local businesses together in a way where customers can now—at the push of a few buttons—find out if those shoe stores even have the Sasquatchian stilettos in stock… without ever setting foot in the store.

In other words, instead of local searching for a specific store, you local search for a specific product. Google shows you where to find it.

Cool? Information overload? The end of the Internet is near?

Google’s Paul Lee tells a story illustrating the company’s hope for the service:

One weekday evening a few weeks before our son was born, my wife commissioned me to find a box of raspberry red leaf tea for the delivery. I promptly drove to the nearest grocery store, which has an awe-inspiring wall of tea. After diligently scanning the wall and not finding the tea, I began to wonder if it even existed. Was the similarly-labeled raspberry tea the same thing? What about red leaf tea? Stumped, I pulled out my phone and looked up “raspberry red leaf tea” on Google. Beneath the “Shopping results,” I saw a red map marker for a nearby Vitamin Shoppe and a link, “In stock nearby,” next to a picture of Alvita Raspberry Red Leaf Tea. I hopped back in the car, and 15 minutes later had accomplished my mission. Two weeks later, my wife accomplished her much more important mission and we welcomed Benjamin, a healthy and happy baby boy, to our family.

To take part, your business would need to do a few things:

1. Make sure your business is listed and verified on Google Places.
2. Fill out a local shopping interest form.
3. Submit an “accurate and complete” data feed, including UPIs.
4. Wait for Google to accept your submission (they aren’t accepting every business right away, but are keeping submissions on file until they can).

It’s a natural progression considering Google’s aim to be able to provide searchers with any type of information needed at any time, and it should come in handy for local search-adept smartphone users. But like most new tech marvels that should ostensibly make life easier for everyone, it’s worth asking the question: is this good for your business?

There are a few obvious drawbacks: Fewer customers coming into a store means less opportunities for sales pitches and impulse buys. And less personal interaction with shoppers could make it more difficult to build lasting customer relationships.

But it could also help you reach potential customers who otherwise might not ever have reason to come into your store. And if your competition offers the service while you don’t, you could definitely miss out on local search-using customers.

Either way, it’s a development worth watching, and one more way that local search should be an important part of any company’s Internet marketing strategy.

Search engine optimization around location increasingly matters. Here’s what you need to know:

What is it?

It’s optimization for searches that take into account location—of both the searcher and the local business—as well as other, more traditional searching factors. According to Google, 73 percent of all online activity relates to local content. Each of the major search engines now routinely mix local elements in with regular search results.

What’s led to its development?

The rise of smartphones and mobile web usage. The growing integration of web-usage into all areas of life and business. The demands of a more web-savvy public.

But also just the basic mission of the search engines: as we talk about often at Masterlink, their primary goal to get you the best, most accurate, most valued-by-the-wider-web-community information possible at any specific place or time. And if such best possible information can be tailored to your current location, then they’re going to try to get you that as well.

How does it work?

So let’s say while out on the town you get an urgent craving to slurp down some spicy green curry—Google is waiting, wok in hand. Search for “Thai food in Dallas,” and you get a result that looks something like this:

Boom: Directions. Prices. Reviews. Phone numbers. Links to websites and access to menus. Everything a customer could want short of a ticket to Bangkok.

But even if your office location doesn’t really matter — say, you’re a Dallas web design and Internet marketing company working for small businesses all across the city as well as nationally — location SEO still matters. Why? Trust. Familiarity. Community pride. The fundamentals of good business are still, well, fundamental. And customers and clients will still value the ability to meet you in a concrete location and build that business relationship.

How does it change SEO?

Look back at that Thai food listings. Let’s say you owned a local tom yum shop, and had worked really hard over the past year to get your site listed at the top of the search rankings. Suddenly, with the local business results occupying the top of the page, your well-respected, well-linked, well-optimized site might find itself in the middle of bottom of the page.

Furthermore, users are increasingly likely to look for more narrow results when it comes to location searches. So instead of “Thai Food in Dallas,” check out “Thai food in Plano.” The results change. A site perfectly optimized for a larger, more competitive area might get missed by more specific searches.

What can I do?

We’ll talk more extensively about this in the coming weeks. But here are some basics:

1. Register

The obvious first step is to register your business (even if you don’t yet have a website) with mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Also make sure your business is listed on directories like Yelp and Citysearch, plus more traditional paid listings like Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com.

2. Spread the (Your Own) Good News
After registering, ask your best clients to write reviews. Ratings and reviews are one of the first factors clicked on by searchers.

3. Experiment. Have Fun With It. Just Don’t Forget About SEO Basics.
Since location searching is still relatively new, there’s plenty of space for exploration about what boosts rankings. But the game hasn’t completely started over, and all the standard elements that search engines love still matter the most. The location-specific elements are just a new twist on an ever evolving marketing arena.

Speed now matters in SEO, according to an announcement on the Google Webmaster Central Blog by by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team.  The search engine behemoth revealed that it will start factoring in website speed (how quickly a website responds to web requests) into its search results algorithm - a decision based on split seconds it thinks have no business being wasted.

Google recently added Site Performance and Page Speed suggestions in Google Webmaster Tools accounts and actually indicated it would start tinkering with the idea a of speed as a ranking factor last year, and soon realized they were onto something. According to Search Engine Land, Google sees this as a win for both its interests and those of the wider web.

In addition to the numerous studies over the years that show Internet users prefer fast pages, Singhal says Google ran its own testing on how users respond to page speed, including experiments on Google.com. Singhal and Cutts point to a June 2009 blog post on the Google Research Blog that talked about how Google purposely slowed down its search results to measure the impact on search behavior.

All other things being equal, more usage, as measured by number of searches, reflects more satisfied users. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!

“When we slow our own users down [on Google.com], we see less engagement,” Singhal says. “Users love fast sites. A faster web is a good thing all around.”

Speed makes for an interesting SEO factor, because it’s one of the few that directly rewards website performance (as opposed to design factors like site architecture and keywords). And it’s a reminder of what good search engines try to do: give searchers quick, accurate access to the best and most relevent information they’re looking for. Slow sites inhibit that goal.

So here’s a few tips for keeping your website humming:

1. Consider SEO ramifications before adding heavy, unnecessary features — especially if the benefits of such features are unproven (we think a sleek, uncluttered web design looks better, anyway).

2. Tinker with tools. Google has a bag full of tricks that can help “make the web faster” in addition to the specific page speed suggestions provided in Google Webmaster Tools.

3. Limit HTTP requests. According to the Yahoo Developer Network: “80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.”

Google recently announced another big change in how they will be presenting search results. They are extending their Personalized Search to everyone, this means all Google users, whether logged in or not, will start seeing personalized results.

Google explains Personalized Search:

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

The customized search results are based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. And you can tell when customized results are being shown because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google customized your search results and also let you turn off the customization. But I’m guessing the average “Joe web surfer” won’t know about the personalizations or how to turn them off.

Previously Personalized Search was only provided to users who were logged into a Google account and had Web history enabled (Google has it turned on by default when creating a new account).  This caused some confusion with many of our Dallas SEO clients as they began to see their own site rankings fall in the search results pages for their major keywords. Clients would call in a panic about their rankings and I would explain about Personalized Search and most of the time the client was logged into Google and once they logged out their own site was back to ranking where they had previously seen it. Turns out these clients had been studying their competition’s websites for their main keywords and were not clicking on their own sites, so Google assumed they actually preferred the competitor’s sites over their own.

So what does this mean for SEO?

As WebProNews puts it:

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

Rest assured the internet marketing team at MasterLink is keeping abreast of the changes at Google. I don’t personally foresee this affecting the way we preform SEO, but may increase the need for social media marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach your targeted audience.

The biggest change I see happening is that focusing on keyword rankings to gauge a SEO campaign’s success will become completely irrelevant as everyone will be seeing different results for the exact same queries based on past browsing history (if they have not figured out how to turn it off). So, as always, but even more so now, we will focus on actual results that show a positive ROI to determine success. Is your site gaining traffic for your top keywords as well as long tail keyword phrases? Are you getting more conversions, sales, leads from your website? These are the types of statistics a results-orientated, ROI-focused SEO campaign should be tracking. SEO for rankings is dead!

The Apple “It’s Only Rock n Roll” Event happened with Steve Jobs appearing in public the first time this year. With the fan-fare came the expected release of the new iPod, iPhone, and iTunes releases. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an owner of the new 3Gs. With Obama being a Blackberry customer, the smart phone revolution is in full swing!

I can never avoid the temptation to go see how each of the searches engines fare in comparison to new news. The first thing I look at is the displayed text on the search results page to see if there are any relevant terms. After which I click on some of the links to see if I gain anything of use. Using the keyword “iTunes” in this case would theoretically contain relevant terms such as “iTunes 9” or possibly “iPhone OS 3.1”. The next thing I look for are the dates to see how fresh the content is. This may require me clicking into the link to check, as well. The third thing I look at is the layout combined with the variety of relevant items. The last one seems to be superfluous, but in all honesty, who really wants to see a single, vertical column of nothing but Wikipedia links?

I always start with Ask.com. Jeeves may have left (but he’s back in the UK!), but I think many of us remember AskJeeves fondly. Besides, as far as traffic goes, Ask is still competitive with Bing.com. Either way, it quickly becomes clear why Ask is no longer considered a “major” search engine.

The term “iTunes” returned a somewhat barren, but clean results page. Each of the links had a “binoculars” icon that allowed a mouse-over preview of the link. Without the “binoculars” I would have been discouraged as the only relevant terms discussed were iTunes 8, which sounds like slow indexing to me.

There was an image mid-way down the page with a couple relevant-looking links. I clicked on both of them and realized they were forum pages for their Q&A (beta) tab. A few of the links on the main search result page did wind up discussing iTunes 9, the iPhone. They were scant on details and they did not include the latest relevant terms. Most of the links were a month or two old.

What I did like is being able to find the listings of numerous songs provided in iTunes along with easily accessible iTunes download pages. The “binoculars” icon is a nice feature. The Q&A Tab could grow into something more like Yahoo Answers over time.

Unfortunately, I find Ask slipping faster and further behind in the search race. Next week I’ll see how Bing stacks up in comparison.