The Expand2Web Blog

Yahoo SearchMonkey is Yahoo’s open platform for enhancing search results. Its a great way to provide an enhanced search experience, but one of the problems is that users have to install your app in order to see the enhanced results.

At the SearchMonkey launch event in May, many of us asked for some of the more common apps to be turned on by default. I recommended to all my clients to make sure they had a Yahoo Local listing completely filled out, so that if Yahoo did this their business would stand out in the results.

Well Yahoo was listening to its developers, and has turned on these enhanced results by default.

Yahoo Local Enhanced Results

They’ve included the LinkedIn, Yahoo Local and Yelp enhanced results for all user searches by default. This provides enhanced search results for everyone, and provides a better search experience in my opinion.

I think Yahoo has been doing an excellent job of innovating recently, especially since the attempted Microsoft acquisition. Even though I used to work for Microsoft and have many friends there, I think it is better for Yahoo to remain an independent company. The cultures would never mix and in the event of a Microsoft acquisition many of the interesting projects at Yahoo would go away (like SearchMonkey and BOSS.)

If you are a small business owner and haven’t filled out your Yahoo Local profile yet, make sure to do that soon - it will help you stand out from your competition!

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Continuing our series Why Use WordPress for your small business website, this week we’ll explore the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and help you choose which one to use for your small business web site.

WordPress -vs- WordPress!

WordPress.org

WordPress is open source blogging software, and WordPress.org is where you can go to download it. WordPress.org offers free downloads of WordPress files, themes and plug-ins, and includes step-by-step instructions for installing and configuring WordPress on your own hosting provider.

WordPress.org Pros:

The advantage of this approach is that you can install any of the WordPress templates or plug-ins available, and customize your site so that it doesn’t look like just another me-too blog.

• You have complete control over the look and feel of your site
• You can install any WordPress plug-in to extend the functionality of your site (believe me, this is a very powerful and inexpensive way to add functionality to your website)

WordPress.org Cons:

[Read more →]

This is the first SMX event I’ve attended. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area so it was nice that the event was held at the JW Marriott in San Francisco. The day started off on the right note - I found $12 parking right across the street, which is kind of amazing for downtown SF.

SMX Local & Mobile Keynote - Yahoo’s Frazier Miller

Greg Sterling and Chris Sherman welcomed everyone and things started off with the keynote by Frazier Miller, GM of Local Search at Yahoo. He proclaimed that Local Search is in a “perfect storm” based on the trends they are seeing at Yahoo. One stat that amazed me was this: 100 million users per month visit Yahoo with “local intent”. This is an amazing number, especially when you consider Google has in the high 60% of the searches on the Internet today. It all adds up to a lot of local searches. He also revealed some of the trends they are seeing for search queries - they are increasing in length (e.g. evolving from “coffee” to “coffee in san francisco” to “coffee in san francisco with dogs ok” - longer more descriptive searches.) He concluded with the opportunity areas he sees emerging in local search. He also used a new (to me) acronym that was kind of catchy - ROBO (research online buy offline) and discussed some stats and trends around that.  It was a very good and insightful keynote.

Ranking Tactics for Local Search Session

The next session that I attended was Ranking Tactics for Local Search. Wow, this was a fire hose of great info. All the panelists had their own unique, super informative presentation - a nice way to do a panel, by the way - and shared their inside tips and tricks. They covered everything from citations in local listings to using video and YouTube to improve rankings to online reviews and backed these up with real world examples. This was an excellent group and session.

Monetizing Local and Mobile - Who is Making Money? Session

In the afternoon, Local and Mobile - Who is Making Money was another information packed session, where the panelists followed the same format. Some more interesting techniques and stats, like what the likely local search ranking factors are, the percentage of searches that use ZIP code, neighborhood terms and city names, some details about how you need to treat mobile searches differently, and a staggering statistic about the differences in cost per lead and cost per customer between organic search, PPC, and print Yellow Pages ($580 per customer in some cases!)

More Coverage of SMX Local & Mobile

Andrew Shotland has more great coverage at LocalSEOGuide.

Also, Michael Jensen’s LiveTwitting tool tracked some nice coverage of the conference too.

And Greg Sterling did a nice summary of the keynote here.

The Wrap Up

During the breaks I met so many extremely professional and fun people, including Michael Jensen, David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, Greg Sterling, Will Scott, Steve Espinosa, Andrew Shotland, Dan Hobin, and many other local search experts. Most of these folks I’ve only known via blogs and online and it was so great to meet them in person!

My only regret was that I could only attend Thursday. I really wanted to see Mike Blumenthal’s presentation, and also missed Mary Bowling’s presentation which I heard was great. And based on the sessions I did attend I’m sure there were many other great ones that I missed.

I’ve been to probably 30+ conferences while at Microsoft and Interwoven, and presented at many of them. This was one of the best - serious content delivered by experts in their field, and it was small enough that you could really get to know the people there.

Overall, I learned a TON of new practices and techniques that I’ll be able to put to work right away for my customers. I met many very cool people. And I’ll be back next year for more!

Wow, this was an excellent session - and I took down so much great information it took me a while to sort it out! That’s why this post came out of sequence with the others…

The presenters:

Steve Espinosa, eLocal Listing - Steve had some great tips about citations and linking to your Google Local or Yahoo Local listings from your web site, using your business title in the anchor text. Make sure to include your keywords in the title of your business description, but it must be consistent across all listings. They use Google TV to drive traffic…

Video: Interesting study found that if a search results page includes an organic result and a video result, someone is 3.3x more likely to click on your listing. Use video to help your rankings. Create a short video for your business, create a landing page on your website, and link there to your video on YouTube (using correct anchor text.) This will create a citation for your business.

Citations: Web citations have a direct impact on ranking in local listings. Find out where Google pulls business information from in your vertical, and make sure you have business listings there.

Michael Jensen, SoloSEO - Online Reviews. Great presentation here, online reviews help your small business stand out visually in the results. Eyes draw to where the reviews are. But the ratings better be good! Need 5 reviews in Google to before they will show the stars.

Getting reviews is hard. He’s got a lot of good suggestions here. I wrote an article about how to implement a simple process for getting your best customers to review your business here - How to Use Online Reviews to Get New Customers. And Michael has a lot to add here. Try coupons, discounts, upgrades, gifts. Make links easy to follow. Make a review page easy to find on your site. He’s got a very cool service called http://www.leavefeedback.org that I plan to check out. It allows you to create a coupon with a code, and sends them to an online review site for you.

Which review sites? Check out this diagram in his blog post: Sources of Local Business Reviews.

He also suggests - find out what people talk about in reviews for your type of business? Be exceptional in those areas to ensure you get great reviews. And make sure to track your reviews, the traffic and sources from them.

Gib Olander, Localeze - he had a lot of great insights, his primary point was to make sure your business information is consistent across all your listings. It’s up to you to take control of your listings and ensure this. There is no central source of business information, all the listings today are cobbled together from many sources. Great advice about digging deep for your keywords, go deeper than just the categories. Avoid 800#s on your listings, avoid PO boxes.

Will Scott, Search Influence - The basics matter: Keyword Selection, Content, Links (repeat cycle!)

Use domain names to your advantage. You will still want to show up high for organic results, because in many searches the local 10-box does not appear - the search doesn’t always get taken down to the local level. Will provided lots of great real world examples of local search rankings and tips.

He also had a bunch of great suggestions on where to get links in his presentation (e.g. Yahoo directory, DMOZ, Best of The Web, and many smaller ones.)

That rundown was kind of terse; there was a ton of great information I hope this captures some of the highlights for you!!

This session is a panel with individual presentations moderated by Greg Sterling. Here are highlights of the speakers presentations.

David Mihm - David wrote the excellent Local Search Ranking Factors report, and reviewed the top 6 factors in his presentation.

1. Claim your local business listings in Google and Yahoo.
2. Your local business listing address should be in the city of the search
3. Proper categorization of your business listing
4. Product/Services keywords should be in the title of your listing
5. Proximity of your address to the city centroid
6. Validation with third party data providers

This is a great report - click the link above for that report, some blog posts about it and his presentation.

Dan Hobin - G5 Search Marketing, they have a platform that helps track leads, conversions and calls. He showed me a demo of it, very nice reporting and visual charting. They do PPC and SEO and they also help track print Yellow Pages… he showed an example of a campaign where the cost for print yellow pages is $193 per lead, and $580 per customer!! This is vs $13 and $46 for AdWords and $5 and $18 SEO. WOW - no wonder many businesses are relying less and less on print yellow pages!

Ian White - Urban Mapping, Inc. shared some very interesting stats they’ve gleaned from all their geographic data and searches:

• .05% of search queries use the ZIP code
• 2% of search queries use neighborhood terms
• 5% of search queries use city name
• 40% of search queries are inherently local!

I know the top 3 do not add up to 40%, but presumably there are other indicators of “local intent” in a search query. The actual 40% number is debatable.

Bryson Meunier - Resolution Media. Bryson is talking about mobile, and the importance of having a strategy vs just jumping in. He showed an Android mobile app “Call a Cab” and a Weather Channel app for Android. He pointed out that Google Analytics does not track mobile visitors.  http://brysonmeunier.com has some links to analytics providers that do.

Mobile users search differently than desktop users. Google suggest has a mobile version that is different than their normal suggestions.

Think of mobile as the beginning of something huge, its a marathon not a sprint. Build links, they can be even more important. You can track mobile links in Google Webmaster Tools.  Another tips, join Mobile SEO Google Group.