SEO 101

Getting Going with Local Search

Local Search is one of the fastest growing portions of search. Ross and John discuss the basics of getting going with local search, including getting your information on platforms like Yelp and FourSquare. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 03 May 2010
Audio Format:: other

Local Search is one of the fastest growing portions of search. Ross and John discuss the basics of getting going with local search, including getting your information on platforms like Yelp and FourSquare.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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So turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse, and get ready to get back to the basics. SEO 101. SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello, and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing. And my co-host is John Carcutt, the Director of Organic Search for MediaWiz. How you doing, man? Hey, Rob, how's doing great? Good. Today's our Friday, so we're both kind of, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that's how I feel. I wish I was funny. I'm coming in this weekend, too, so. Very busy. I did that last weekend. I need some time with the kid. I should say, you should have seen him today. He was just absolutely take up the same even for a little bit. And he was, once again, upset when I had to leave, so I got to spend some time. It happens a little. It happens a little big, too, but actually, when they get too big, they're like, get away from me. So enjoy it while you can. That's what everyone tells me. Oh, this is awesome. I'm definitely enjoying it. Well, first of all, I wanted to get into one thing that you weren't able to join me on, but you're going to join me the next time. It was like medical fishing last week. Oh, geez, that's right. I want to go so bad. We do some fishing down here, but I've never been fishing up north. OK. Well, I wanted to give-- I promised the guy, because he did a good job at giving him a plug. So Bosley's fishing charters in Victoria kicks ass. What'd you catch? What were you fishing for? Originally, we were with halibut, but you need a lot of patience for that, and I've never really been wired with that. So we had to-- we went about two hours, and then we went to Chinook, and then-- or you guys call him salmon, and we limited it on that. So that was three people. We got salmon in 25 minutes, I think. Wow. Outstanding. Yeah, right off the front of the water, right off the tree here, so anyway. So I'm going to convince you, you better go fishing. Damn right. You ever come out? Well, you haven't been down here yet. I'll take you fishing down here, too. Eastern, Western, anyway. We should get to it. Local Search. Local Search. Man, there is a lot of local Search. And it's one of the fastest growing portions of Search right now, too. Local is just like exploding. Well, you know what I love the most about local Search? There isn't a single company. Well, with any kind of walk-in traffic for a certain that shouldn't be in it, even if they don't have a website, they don't even need a website. In fact, that's the whole concept. You don't need a website. It's essentially yellow pages for Google. It's genius, really. And it's got to be done. So where do we start? Man, there's some-- well, so it's actually different. For me, it's different based on-- like you said, any kind of a business has a physical location, but it changes. So if you're like a business and you have one location and your pizza spot and this your only location, local Search is different than if you're JCPenney's and you have 1,600 locations, there's a big difference depending on the size of your business and how many different locations you have to deal with. So I mean, we can talk about all the basics, but just keep it in perspective as far as if you're a one-shop business, it's going to be different than if you're 100, 200, 300 stores. Just wanted to throw that out there. That's very true, and maybe you can talk a little more about the largest chain I have as a hotel group. And they-- I mean, I work with other companies most of them are online, this one's physical and has hotels and about only five of them. So it wasn't too difficult to do that. But you know, it's not many. I mean, I've only read about it, quite frankly. Small and medium-sized is my area, so if you have anything you can weigh in on that, that'd be great. Very definitely. So when you're doing a small, medium-sized, where do you start? Well, first of all, I'll start with the site, frankly. Let's just at least review it. And that's the basic optimization. You know, look at the keyword research. Make sure that whatever they're going to be targeting in terms of categories when they go to their listing and optimize it, because you really do get to optimize your listing on, let's say, Google Local. Let's use that as an example, because that's pretty much everyone's focus anyway. So you get to pick your categories. And categories are obviously critical, because that's where you're going to-- actually, it plays a major role in how you're found when anyone's doing searches and whether or not you're going to show up in the local seven-pack, which to anyone listening that doesn't know about that, if you do a local-based phrase, like, say, in my case, Victoria BC Hotel, let's say you typed that in, you'd want to make sure that-- or, sorry, you would notice that the rankings would change slightly on a search. You would see a map show up and then a listing of the local areas or local hotels, some of them. And then the normal organic rankings would start below that. It's one of the universal search elements. So sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes I've already called the one box as well. So it used to be a 10-pack, and then it dropped it to 7-pack, because there's seven listings. But also, I've heard referred to as the one box. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the thing is you want to make sure that your website is set up so that, well, keyword research is really just about the categories. But let's jump right into the main thing, which is uniform address usage. I'm so guilty of doing this badly myself from my own site. But how you say your site is-- or your address is, like, for me, it's at suite 101. Is that how I want to type it? Or do I want to do 26-passion square suite 101? Or 101-26-passion square-- you know, there's so many different ways of doing it. And Google's, frankly, not that smart about this yet. You have to make it dumb, easy. It's got to be the exact same thing in your yellow pages, the exact same thing on your site. All your citations. It's, like, that's stick to it. And it's simple things you might think of. Is it, you know, are you on-- use your South Main Street, or you S dot Main Street? Do you abbreviate portions of it, or do you spell it out? Those need to be consistent. You're absolutely correct. Yeah, and what are they looking for? Why? Well, essentially, Google's just make one, trying to make sure that you actually have this location. And, you know, look, start to look fishy if you have various ways of saying the same thing. And far as we know, it's just kind of scary to think this way. But Google may not even be smart enough to know whether or not one is right and one is wrong. Oh, they definitely-- Oh, the fact that you're saying it a different way, you know? They definitely don't. And it's not so much that it looks fishy, if you do them different, to my experience. It's that you'll end up with multiple listings for the same location. And that's where it gets scary. You know, it's not fishy, but it gets scary because Google doesn't know which one's right. So if there's multiple occasions, it might not-- it might choose not to show any of them in the one box for the seven pack, because it doesn't know which one's correct. Yeah, not a good thing. So really, you know, when we're talking about the basics, that's the basics. For me, to take that one step further, it's not just the address. So I call it the NAP, the name, address, phone number. It's your NAP. Your NAP has to be consistent across all of your citations, all your profiles, all of your listings. So if you have one, it doesn't matter if you have one location or 1,000 locations. Each location, that NAP has to be consistent across the board on yellowpages.com, on city search, on Google, Yahoo Bing. Everywhere where you have local citations, it has to be the same. Yeah, definitely. And it's a little frustrating, 'cause I've heard mixed signals about if you have a, perhaps, a unique toll-free number showing up that you're using for tracking. What happens there, right? There's a lot of interesting things about the phone number. I've heard a bunch of different things. Actually, some people say it doesn't matter if you use tracking phone numbers. Other people say you can't use tracking numbers unless you use them consistently across to everything. But then if you use them consistently across to everything, they're not really tracking each individual place, so then it's not useful. And I don't know, I haven't confirmed this, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised. All of your phone number information unless you have a list of numbers, public data. I would not be a bit surprised if Google pulls in that public data and compares it. So if you're using a number that's different than the number that's associated with your address and the public data, that could be a problem for you. From that perspective, though, there's a very interesting thing going on. I don't know if you know this, but March X just recently signed a deal with Skype. And they've actually done a thing. So you know how, like, you have Skype installed? You can have the phone numbers show up and you can click on it and it's a call. Well, March X actually just did a deal with Skype that you can actually use that Skype number that pops up as a tracking number. And you can redirect it to, like, a call center or anywhere you want. You keep your original number, but if the click goes through a Skype call, they'll track it and you can redirect it to any number you want, which is actually kind of interesting from a local search perspective. I don't know what percentage of people that your target market are gonna be on Skype and have that activated, but for the ones that are, it could help you get some idea of what's happening. - It's really intriguing. I hadn't heard about that at all. I had been buried in the competitor analysis the last two of them now for almost a month. I just, I'm out of the loop. (laughing) But at least the basics of this stuff is consistent, really. You know, after considering the nap, I would also look at that point, local blog optimization. You know? Okay, well, let's just think, first of all, you've already done this. Next thing, I was trying to follow my guide here that does not get any good idea at this point. My notes, that's, that is, take the nap. Now you've got to go and actually get your listing on Google. I mean, climate, hello. (laughing) - Yeah. - Basic, but it's very important and a lot of people haven't done that yet. You know, claiming it, is it a huge importance in terms of whether or not you're gonna get ranked, but it's number four in the top 10 of 41, positive local search ranking factors by David and then his group there. So it's pretty important. - But I think it goes beyond that. You want to claim your listings, not only in Google, but you definitely want all the major agencies who are being in Yahoo as well, but also some of the major citation sites like Yelp and cities, city pages and Yellow Pages, some of those major sites, you need to claim the listings there too, mainly to help reduce the potential instances of duplicate listings there as well. - Definitely. And we'll get certainly more into that in a second, but for the moment, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back. - SEO 101 will be back right after recess. (upbeat music) - How would you like to not ever have to deal with a gatekeeper or a gift? Can't find the direct contact for the decision maker? Stop calling the main directory because now there's Lead Researcher from eGraber, the one stop source for finding contact information online. eGraber finds email addresses or lets you find people with their email address. 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(upbeat music) - Okay class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session. Only on webmasterradio.fm. - Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm, with John Carcutt, Director of Organic Search for MediaWiz, and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. For the rake we were discussing, some of the basics of getting going with local search. And John just finished mentioning how it was important to get some of the citation sites set up, you know, get your profiles on them, like Yelp and, I guess, pretty much anything that's local that you think could affect your site. I mean, these days, I think they're being added right left and center of the important ones anyway. - Oh yeah. - I believe the four square was added to some of the signals. - Oh yeah, if you've never been to the four square website and looked at some of the venues you've checked in, there's a very nice page talking about each individual venue on the fourth square of the website. I don't think I've ever seen them ranked, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they're being used as citations and used well. - Well, and four square, frankly, is still building. I mean, it's just taking a huge job recently in popularity, but it's gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger, and it's like everyone, pretty much who has been reading knows it's one of the up-and-comers for-- - Actually went to a new restaurant. Actually went to a new restaurant today, one of my team members said birthday, and we let her pick, you know, where she went to go. There's this new restaurant, and I'd never been there, so I wanted to check in, and it wasn't listed, and the guy owned the restaurant was like, what are you doing? 'Cause he's like really into, what's that other one? Something's spoon. Oh, there's another one's spoon. Anyway, he's like-- - I think another one, yeah. - But he was really into that, he says, well, what's four square? So I showed him four square and showed him how it works and talked to him a little bit about it. And I checked in, of course, and I created the listing because I've never done it before. And he gave us like a bunch of free dessert 'cause I showed him about four square. What's that? - Hey, hey, hey, sweet. Hey, so you've already had your birthday cake, he was all worried about not having birthday cake this afternoon. - Yes. - Not that you can have enough, but yeah. - But yeah, four square-- - I'll find out. - You're absolutely right, four square is a great citation for local search, and it will get even better. - Yeah, I'm really surprised it doesn't have rings yet. - Yeah, that's a real good point. - I don't know why they wouldn't have it, it's just a silly thing. You just have a thumbs up, thumbs down if they wanted to go really basic. But anyway, they don't have it. Anyway, on that note, yeah, I mean, start with getting your Google Maps listing claimed, and then you can go and you have to customize a few things. And one of the things you have to customize is the category, you know, you do put in your hours, you put in the services you offer, you know, that stuff, which is important and definitely try and keep your keyword targets in mind. But the category has been noted as being quite critical. Where is it in terms of the importance? There it is, number three, association of proper local business listing categories. Those categories are critical. Well, Blumenthal, Michael Blumenthal, has, if you type in his name is BL, last name, BLU, M-E-N-T-H-A-L. He's got a category checker online, which he's done a good job of mapping the categories that are available. It'll allow you to search for them because it won't actually tell you. It's really annoying, I don't know why they've done this, but you can type in a category and it won't pop up and say, "Oh, this is better," or, "Here are ones associated with yours." No, you can put anything you want. And if you put something in that's wrong, you're not gonna be found. It's just crazy. This is Jesus' category. - A couple weeks ago, we actually contacted our Google rep because I was working with one of our paid side people and we were talking about the category structure for AdSense because there's a very strict category structure that sites will fit into in AdSense. And it hit me that I wonder if that's the same category structure that they use in local search. So we tried to get the Google rep to say, "Yeah, that's the same one, but they wouldn't." So we tried so, but it's interesting to me that they have that public category structure in AdSense, but it won't do that in local search. - Honestly, it must be just, it just haven't gotten to it yet. It makes no sense to hide it. It's just weird, I don't know. Anyway, if anything, it would make their search engine better. So if they don't have any better one rather than that. - Bad Google. - Evil. - Google and timeout. How would that be good? - Yeah. - So let's rattle off. I mean, these have been talked about to, we don't want to lose a plate in the face in this industry, but for the benefit of our listeners, what are the top 10, 41, of 41, positive local search ranking factors? As of last year, I don't think they've done the recent one. What's the first one? - Address. I mean, you got to keep that address specific and it crossed everything. - Number two is citations from major data providers. So in other words, Yellow Pages has the same consistent, again, address or perhaps someone's reviewed you from there. Someone's reviewed you on Yelp. If you're a travel site or anything like that, TripAdvisor.com has links to you and has a great reviews, all those things. And even this is important too. Your Google, your actual Google profile allows people to go in and provide reviews. And I mean, I know myself. I mean, if someone's giving me a compliment lady, I'm saying, oh, okay, thank you. Do you think, it's okay if you don't want to input with your mind going to my Google profiles, I need a link and just leaving a read for us. - No, I have heard that the Google profile citations and reviews are not counted as strongly as the external ones by Google itself. - I would still think that's good though. - Yeah, and it is good to note also that a citation does not have to be a link. - Yes. - So it can be a mention of the site and the address and some content about the site and that can't count as a citation. - In fact, and sometimes it's bad. And then in our case, we've got this trying to use a word that I'm allowed to see in the air. - For some reason, a Indian site completely unrelated to ours. I guess it says our name on there somewhere and it's being noted as a citation and it's a search engine optimization company. It doesn't make any sense. It looks like it's one of our businesses. Oh, this is me. - Oh, I remember to show you that one time. I remember that, yes. That was very weird. - And they were spamming, it turns out they'd done the same thing for a number of companies. I guess this is their way of getting blanks or some crazy idea. I don't know. - Every YouTube, I haven't used it directly, but apparently YouTube can be a very good citation as well. - Oh, that makes sense. It's certainly connected to Google. (both laughing) So the next one is Association of Proper Local Business Listing Categories. We were just talking about that. Now that Bloomin' thought tool is very handy. And do you want to take the next one? - Yeah, and we were talking about this is really important to claim your listing. - Make sure you claim that listing. I think you actually get a little bit of boost if it's a claim listing versus a unclaim listing. - Yeah, and after that, it's product or service keywords in the local business listing title. Now this is touching, go, this one. I chose not to do this. I wonder whether or not I was smart. But when you create, you can edit your title, I believe, I forget how you do it, it's been a while, but essentially you put in the title of the business and you can edit it. You can say, in our case, we could say step forth web marketing and SEO services. - But marketing and SEO. - I can see now, Ross, it's going to be web marketing, SEO, local service, competitive analysis services. (laughing) - Exactly. - And you know what, I'm sure those people out there are done crazy stuff like that. The players, a lot of people are editing them, we're just changing them to reflect their services and stuff in their end. And it's, it's plain, it's wishy-washy. It's definitely a gray hat slash black hat. It hasn't been named black hat officially, but you got to know they're going to be cracking down that at some point. - But the same thing goes with the, you can also put, and I don't know when this falls on the list if it does, but probably the keywords in the listing itself in different categories, different places in your LBL. So people spam the heck out of that too. - It's definitely the Wild West still. It's like back in '97, it's closer to 2000 now. - It doesn't prove to a few things. You know, it's like the old organic search. Next is general importance of off-page and off-listing criteria. So what does that mean? Off-page is again, a sort of citation of people talking about you and off-listing? - I would say, I don't know about off-listing, but off-page I also think at some level, though I'm not sure how strong this level is, that category related links to your LBL, your local business listing with targeted terms, just like regular link building that you would do for your site, does have an impact. So I'm not sure if that's what they're talking about as far as off-page as well, other than just citations, but actually link building to your profiles. You know, if you want your profile, that you don't spam your title and you don't say that you're a, you know, horse trainer, you just put the name of your business. If you build links to your citation with anchor text, horse trainer, that seems to help some bit somewhat. - There you go. Okay, well, when we get back, we're gonna touch on the last three here. - SEO 101 will be back right after recess. 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With in-demand affiliates, you can tell us exactly how you want your payouts and we will deliver. - God, could you hold on for a second? Someone's at the door. - Wow, you weren't kidding. - We are in demand. You can be too. Sign up today at the letter ndemandafiliates.com. (upbeat music) - Afghan 2010, the trade show that you know where affiliates always attend for free is making its way to Denver, June 21st through 23rd. Register now at AFFCOM2010.com. (upbeat music) - Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session. Only on webmasterradio.fm. (upbeat music) - Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm, which John Carcutt, Director of Organic Search for MediaLiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. So we're just going through the top 10 factors for local search rankings and we just finished number six. Actually, we got four more here, so take it away. - The next one is customer reviews and the amount of customer reviews you have for an individual location. And most of these customer reviews are being pulled from third-party sites like Yelp and City Search and Yellow Pages. So you can put them on the major engines like Google itself, but they're pulling them from everywhere, which kind of goes back to another reason why your address, your nap has to be very accurate 'cause then those reviews, those other sites will tie into your review. An interesting thing to note about this, it's the volume. It does not matter at this point, though it may. My guess is sometime in the future it may. Whether it's a positive or a negative review, it does not come into play at all. It's just the volume of reviews. So if you got a lot of bad negative reviews, not only is it hurting you 'cause you have negative reviews, but if you have a lot of them, it's putting you up higher in the rankings and making your negative presence even more known. - Well, it's just a two, yeah. What is it, I think it's three. If you get three reviews noted, you will actually show up, your listing will show up with stars next to it. It'll actually show your ranking. It's been almost three. Maybe it's been 'em of five, I can't. I'm Fridaying out here again. - Yeah, I don't remember at all. - But you know, some of you, I can give you some examples. I did a lot of research on which certations work in Canada, for example. And I know some of these are crossed, obviously in this case as well, but I found things from urbanspoon.com. I think that's the one you were talking about. - That was the one I was talking about, yeah. - Okay, restaurant.ca, dinehere.ca, reviews.opentable.com. Open table is a very popular app, at least on Android. Is it also on iPhone? - Probably, yeah. Everything starts there anyway. Trap buddy, like travel buddy, but trap buddy. Fromers, of course, everyone knows that one. Holiday check, travelocity, virtualtourist.com. And you know, these aren't just really nearly added to the same. I think they really, they look at these to make sure they're worthwhile before they open up their trust to these sites. So, you know, there is a limited list. - Yeah, and it does tie to those categories that we talked about earlier. So I believe that each of those categories, there are different citation sites. I mean, there's some citation sites that are universal, but you're not, you know, travelocity is tied to the travel category, and you're gonna pull citations from travelocity if you're, if you're missing, you know, is related to that category, 'cause you're not gonna get urban spoon citations really counting for your vacation travel site, unless you're really focusing on restaurants, but do you understand what I mean? - Yeah, it's definitely, and I've actually broken mine down in the niches as well, so I can focus when I'm talking to a particular client, 'cause really, it's overwhelming. There's so many sites, and this way I can add to it as well. Okay, so the next one is, so that was volume. Next one is general importance of customer reviews. I guess importance being essentially the profile of its TripAdvisor versus urban spoon. - Yeah, and I think it's probably TripAdvisor versus some much, much smaller, you know, review type of site for travel. So the importance of your citation kind of ties into authority. - Yeah, and I imagine your profile on there too, there's just a lot of elements that, you know, that's why every year this David Mim and his gang put together this top 41, or this case it was 41 positive local search ranking factors, is because they need to pull everyone, to be sure. - Yeah. - I mean, everyone sees something different. I mean, it's a lot of cases. I don't think there's a lot of unanimous, there's a few obviously, but I'm sure there's some dissenters in certain areas, so it's really intriguing. What's the next one? - So the next one's the importance of on page criteria. And without actually going to the actual ranking site, I'm not sure if this one's related to the on page of the site that the business it has, or on page of the local business listing, 'cause it's really two different things. So your local business listing, there's many places where you can, you know, optimize from a on page perspective, keyword targeting to add any imagery and video and all kinds of stuff. But then there's the on page criteria of the site that you're referencing in that listing as well. - Right, yeah, and on page criteria, I would imagine it sort of ties into the next one, full address on contact on the contact page as number 10. So you want your full address on the site. It's kind of a no-brainer. I like to put it, and in fact, we did. We put it in the footer of every page. - And you want it done? - That's easier. - And you want it to match your nap that you've put out on all your citations and listings as well. - Exactly, and obviously it's easier for us, 'cause we only have one location right now. But it's, you know, that's nice. If it is, go nuts, why not have it in a rich footer? In fact, we even have a link to our Google match listing in the book, in a footer, because we figure it well. - Yeah, yeah. - Let's tell Google we know about it and we want people to go there. - Definitely, and really, and you mentioned you've got like one listing for some of the kind of sites where you have 100, 200 locations, it's a little hard to do that because, you know, you've got 100, 200 content pages, depending on how their site is built. A lot of these places have multiple locations. They build those pages dynamically, and they're just gonna say, well, you know, put it on our main URL and all the locations. You can do that, but you're not gonna be as optimized when you do that. You wanna look at your site from the perspective of, okay, I have 200 locations, I can build a search just to have my locations pulled by a zip code, or I can build a page for each one of my locations and reference that in my local search. - If you do it that way, you're gonna be much more effective in local search versus having some dynamically generated type of page on your site for each location. - Yeah, and they also was, I think at the time, it was a bit of a question, but I'm not so sure it is now. I mean, essentially, if you do the mass feed, essentially, till Google here, all are places. - Yeah, the bulk listing submissions. There's a bulk listing submissions, and it's not as effective. 'Cause I think some people are under the impression if you do the bulk submissions, then it actually claims your listing at the same time. It does not. And I've heard directly from people who have had, the local center that the bulk listings do not have as much authority as that the regularly hand-built submissions or crawl submissions. So bulk-- - Sense. - Yeah, and it's a horrible process if you have, if you've ever had to do it, it's not fun. They only submit them. If you do bulk submissions, they only update the database with bulk submissions once a month. - No. - So yeah, it's horrible. - It is 1997 on that one, anyway. - Yeah. (both laughing) It's got a lot of maturing to do. This is going to be changing. I swear so much, three months from now. - Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. I know, I don't know if it's, if I can talk too much about it, 'cause I don't know what the status is, but I know we're in a beta program with Google paid. 'Cause it ties directly into local. And there's some, so the local paid search is changing quite a bit. It changed it. I mean, the local, we didn't even mention this. Local businesses, things is now called Google Places. So it's not even Google Business Center anymore. It's Google Places. And tidying with that change, they've made some changes to how you can advertise on local. That's actually pretty interesting. So it's changed-- - It's all one thing that you guys probably end. - Sorry, go ahead, do you want to say that? - No, I was just saying, like you said, it's changing very rapidly and we'll continue to, you know? And if you, I know we're in a time, but we talked about this really quickly, from a larger business perspective, if you have lots of locations, there's really a three step process, 'cause it's because a lot of the stuff that you do when you have one or two locations is would just be not financially possible to do for a thousand locations in almost impossible to manage. So from a large company who has lots of locations, perspective, there's three things you do for local search in my mind. One, first you optimize your location. And what that means is, like we said earlier, all of your NAP name address, phone number has to be exactly the same across all the different citation sites. And you do that for each and every location. That's your first step. Your second step is now you go in, you optimize your listings. So each of those locations that you have a profile for, you make sure you claim it and you optimize it from a targeting perspective. And last is you manage it ongoing, building more NAP citations to the individual locations and dealing with the social media aspect of local, which we didn't even get to, I don't think, which is also critical these days. We talked about comments and reviews, but how do you deal with them from a social media and reputation management standpoint? It's a huge issue as well. So those are-- - It's a whole thing, it's huge. - Yeah. - We also been touched on HCard microformats. We didn't touch on, you know, the needs we could go on and on and on. Or even Geomeditase, geosight maps. Yeah, it's just a lot there. The one thing I do want to mention because it is very important is if, and I had this mentioned to the charity, was that a while back, a charity event, someone asked, you know, "I don't want people to come to my location. "I don't take walk-in traffic. "I only service people at their homes." Well, luckily, and we mentioned this in an earlier episode, but it should be noted here again, Google's changed things finally, so that you can say, "Well, yes, this is location, "but I serve people at their homes, "so this is the area I work through. "I can work for." It'll actually let you specify the, what is it, the whole, the radius, the radius of your business environment. So I think it's like you can go up to like 999 miles. It's pretty crazy. - Oh, well. - You know? - I think it's pretty high anyway. I think I tried 600, and it let you save it. I mean, there's no reason for me not to do that, because I'm international. So I'm just gonna cut down on that at some point, but you know, it's still effective. - Definitely, without a doubt. - And if you're like a plumber and you don't have a home, like a front office, people can walk in on, it's important to have something like this saying, look, I don't just work for this city. I work for this city too, which is just 20 miles away. It's important to say that. - Definitely. - All right. Well, I guess that's it. We've, at some point, we'll have to cover some of the work dance stuff. We should do that. - Yeah, this is definitely worth a follow-up show, 'cause there's all kinds of things about tracking local, and especially when it comes to lots of locations. How do you know where your citations are, and how do you know that they're correct, and what happens is when changes one, and there's all kinds of things to talk about without a doubt. - And how can you fix it? In fact, it would be interesting to do a live show and get someone on who does this full-time, and we do it, but I mean, there's so much to it that is, I think someone who's doing it full-time would have run into a lot more of the issues, and have more experienced answers than we would. - Well, tell my buddy Matt, and see if he wants to come on, Matt McEese. He's pretty-- - Super local, Matt. - Yeah, hyper local. He's, we'll see if we can't get him on to give us some high-end discussion about local search. - Yeah, that'd be great. He'd love it, I'm sure. Just matter of nailing him down, he's Mr. Busy, so. - Yes, he is. - Well, thank you, friend. And I think it was a good show, and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. On behalf of my self-rost done CEO of Step 4 Web Marketing, and John Carcut, SCM Manager for MediaLiz. Thanks for being here. Our show is at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern, every Monday, and tune in. My Twitter is @rostdone, and John's. - I'm @JohnCarcut. - And you don't forget, you can get us on my Twitter, too. - Yes, very important, man. And John doesn't converse much on Twitter by Chinese. (laughing) - Russia's gonna take a quick, and I am. - Yes. - Thank you, thank you, thank you. - Well, thank you guys today, and have a wonderful week. - Bye, everybody. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)