Creative Development

How Google Places works – Improve your position

Posted on 24. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in SEO

Google Places is the new primary goal for SEO experts. As your website can sit, in most cases, at the top of Google, with a map, it is the most likely place people will click on when searching for businesses in their area. Google relies on a large amount information from a few different places. However, they claim the information that you submit to Google is the information that they trust the most.

Anyone with a physical address can submit their business to Google Maps. However there are a few things they do to make sure the system is not being manipulated. To make sure the basic information you submit is accurate, Google will ask you to verify it first by entering a PIN that will be sent to either your business address or phone number.

There are a few things you can do to improve your chances of being listed high, or on the front page, of Google Maps. Before we get into the nitty gritty here are three quick things to remember about Google Places

1. There is a far higher value placed on information from authoritative listings, such as Yellow Pages, White Pages and other directories. The closer the information in Google Maps to your Yellow Pages listing, the better.
2. It relies on your physical location. There is more emphasis placed on the city/suburb of the search than the keywords
3. The more you try old SEO tricks to manipulate the results, the worse off you will be.
4. Google Places relies on proximity to the centre of the location to determine which results are called up. If your business address is in a large city, and you are far from the centre, you are going to struggle to improve your listing position.

The Easy Stuff

1. One listing per physical location. Even you cover multiple towns, don’t use two listings. Instead, use the description of your business or categories to explain the different services your business offers. Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors or health centres, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
2. Use information as it would appear in the real world. People are going to be looking for you using your business card etc. You will also find your business listed by its real address in professional directories etc. You should try to be as official as possible.
3. Do NOT try to “SEO” your business name and business listing. Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. Again, this comes back to directories and professional bodies, (authoritative listings), listing your business name. Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.
4. Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. PO Boxes do not count as physical locations. The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
5. Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center. Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location. Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.
6. Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.

The Harder Stuff

1. Pick your Battles. If you have the chance to list your business in a small local area, do it. Do not try to go up against larger competitors in bigger areas.
2. Try to get your address listed in as many places as possible. Add your physical location to every time you list in a local directory.
3. Local citations are king. You should try to get your business and address listed in as many local addresses as possible.
4. Good reviews through Google Places will improve your position. You should encourage your customers to write a review of you as much as possible.

Finding your strongest link sources

Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in SEO

Generally speaking there are three rules of thumb to ensure you are searching for the strongest link sources to build relationships with.

• The first is that the website AND page are both relevant to your business.
• Second you want the website AND page to be well ranked and have a high level of authority FOR YOUR KEYWORDS.
• Third you want the website to have high traffic and to pass that traffic on to your business.

There are a few different ways you can find these links, and mostly you will have to do this by hand. The strongest links can be found by using the following tools;

Directory Search Engine

You can use this tool to find directories that already rank well for your keywords. This will ensure that you are getting links back from websites that are building strong profiles and already have traffic associated with your keywords. After using the top directories from this search, we increased our pageviews by about 10% and we increased our ranking by a few points on some keywords. We get, overall, around 30% of our traffic from a few well placed directories.

Google Blog Search

Use this to find blogs that rank well for your terms and have posted information about your industry. Blogs are great for building relationships with because they already understand about traffic and the value of links.

OpenSite Explorer

This is by far the best tool for finding out where your competitors are getting their link value from. It assesses every page against a range of factors to find out how much authority that link is passing.

Link Market

This is an excellent resource for finding other websites that offer links and are looking to trade links in your industry. The best thing to do is, before accepting a link, is check out the website on opensite explorer and check their pagerank. This will give you an idea of whether the website is serious about link building or not. Some of our strongest backlinks have come from website that we have found in Link Market.

Links that you should be wary of

Article Directories

We are still vary wary of the effort to result value of article directories. Over the course of a year we probably have over a hundred links back to this website from articles we have written. However they are some of the lowest ranked links, as well as the lowest trafficked links, we have. They are probably not bad for a website when it is starting out, however very few, if any, of the website we compete against or use gain anything from article links.

Paid for links

We never pay for links, not even in the Yahoo directory. The main reason we question the logic, again, goes back to where your money is better spent. If you are only paying $5 for a link, then is the link even worth that much? If you are paying over $100 for a link, would you be better of sponsoring a local table tennis club? What about it you spent the money on a Facebook campaign?

Our top 9 Blog Posts

Posted on 11. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing, SEO, blogging

Seeing as our blog has gone from strength to strength, and now has a fairly strong readership, I thought I would show you, and summarise, our top 9 blog posts;

Online Advertising Comparison – SMH.com.au/Fairfax

We decided to create an ongoing series of posts on the choices available to marketers for online advertising. This post was one of the first we produced and was one of the longest. We also did posts on Stumbleupon and a few other online advertising options. We are still waiting on a response from Reddit, Digg, and anyone from Google Adwords. SMH were the first to get back to us on what it means to be an online medium in the advertising market, and they were certainly one of the most thorough.

Evaluating Content Sharing Methods

We took a look at a few different content sharing methods, and how to use them as a marketer. It was a broad overview, but it seems to have been quite timely for some readers, as it is our second most read post in the last 6 months.

Tough Mudder – A Marketing Case Study

Tough Mudder is every action man’s fantasy. It is a grueling seven mile race through muddy hills, cold water and burning bales of Hay. What started out as part of the Harvard Business School’s Business Plan contest is swiftly becoming a rising star of endurance races in America. During the Business Plan contest, judges felt that getting 500 people to put themselves through hell was a little optimistic. However in our post we walked through the things that really worked for Touch Mudder and how other marketers can learn.

Hidden Pizza Restaurant – A Wasted Opportunity

This was our biggest and most controversial series of posts. We still think it was a wasted opportunity both for Sensis and the pizza market in general. At the moment we are working on our own version, soon to be released. Most of the companies we work for are pulling back on their Yellow Pages advertising basically because of the reasons we outlined in this post.

A Comparison of Social Advertising – Digg, Facebook, Reddit

This was the kick start to our posts on social marketing and how you can use it for any business. Although we did not get ANY comments from the media we studied, we did dig up a lot of case studies. We found enough data to convince us that social media marketing can work and is great value for money. In the same way that businesses are sceptical of setting up a blog, or really starting any conversation with their customers, they are sceptical of social media. They really shouldn’t be.

Free High PR Directory Search Engine

This is a tool we built for us and our clients to search over 400 directories and find the best ones to list in. This is not just from a SEO point of view, but also from a traffic point of view. There are some directories that now give us over a third of all our traffic. As long as the directory is in your niche, and targets the keywords well, there is no reason why you should not try to list in them. We would question the value of spending time listing in more than 10 or 20, especially those that are not ranked well

Marketing Trends for 2010

We wrote a great overview for the marketing trends for this year. Covering mobile marketing, keyword inflation, smartphone apps etc, we went over the lot. One of the things that is certainly coming true this year is adwords cost creep. One of the major reasons for advertisers moving to other media is that the cost of advertising on Google is become prohibitive to all those without very deep pockets. We are hoping that by the end of the year Google will have a solution, but for now, it is just not worth looking at for most advertisers.

8 ways law firms can use social media

We were lucky because this post got picked up by a could of law blogs and it was promoted around the web. Obviously we can actually write well. It also proved the old addage that there is nothing like a list, at least as far as blog posts go. The main aim for the post was to show that even law firms can use social media in their marketing mix. Also social media does not have to be about facebook and getting friends. Linkedin can be used for recruitment and Digg can be used to track industry trends.

10 ways plumbers can improve their direct mail flyers

This post was in response to a swathe of plumbers that started knocking on our door, not just to offer to unblock our drains, but because they are working in a competitive market, and they want to increase their market share. There are a lot of things people can do to increase the conversion rate of their marketing, not just the usual test, test, test. The main thing Plumbers need to do is try something different from their competitors. There are loads of plumbers out there trying to get their slice of the same pie. The best thing you can do is invent your own pie and fish in a different pond.

Google and the 10 Commandments of SEO

Posted on 29. Jul, 2010 by Marketing in SEO, Web Design

We thought we would throw together our own version of the 10 commandments of SEO. There are a few versions of the SEO commandments around, but we thought we could do a better job. Firstly we wanted to keep to the original script of the commandments, with easy to understand and critical laws that can be passed down through generations. If I had had my way, the main picture above would have had me coming down from an Apple store with two giant iSideTables in my hands.

These commandments also have a bias towards those guidlines created by Google, partly because they are readily available, but mainly because Google makes up about 500% of seo attention at the moment. We tried to pick the 10 that were critical for the performance of your website, not just the ones that we all do, like link building, that are nice.  Our 10 commandments are;

1. Thou shalt not link to bad guys
2. Thou shalt not keyword Stuff
3. Thou shalt not cloak pages
4. Thou shalt not steal content
5. Thou shalt not use hidden links
6. Thou shalt create original content
7. Thou shalt use meta tags
8. Thou shalt use Robots.txt
9. Thou shalt link sparingly
10. Thou shalt provide a site-map

We also had a few commandments that got left over, and may just end up getting moved to our version of the sermon on the mount. Maybe that one will start with something like “Blessed are the bloggers…” Here are some of the things we could have included;

• Thou shalt have clear page hierarchy
• Thou shalt be accessible
• Thou shalt check for broken links
• Thou shalt use pretty URLs
• Thou shalt cross browser test
• Thou shalt optimize load times
• Thou shalt  make pages primarily for users
• Thou shalt not spam the search engines
• Thou shalt avoid “doorway” pages

If there are any more out there, we would love to hear them. Maybe one day we will rewrite the bible from the perspective of search engines. Perhaps it could start with

“In the beginning TBL merged TCP/IP, hypertext and DNS to create the world wide web, and he saw that it was good.”

Maybe Moses is AOL and Jesus is Google, I don’t know. Perhaps someone else has a better idea of how this tortured metaphor fits together.

Top 11 SEO methods for plumbers

Posted on 27. Jul, 2010 by Marketing in How To, SEO, Tutorials

Over the last two weeks we have had dozens of plumbers ask us for SEO advice on growing their business through their website. Plumbing is a highly competitive business, particularly online. The top plumbing business, for the search “Sydney Plumbers”, on Google has a PR of 6, over 4500 indexed links, and has a domain authority of 63.

What SEO methods do plumbers use increase their traffic and increase their sales leads? It is the same as any other highly competitive industry.First you need to know you should be focussing on quality traffic. That means you are looking to attract visitors that are looking to hire you right now.

SEO is about getting people to spend money with you, NOT your competitors. To that end, chasing after people looking for “Sydney Plumbers” may not be the best way to go. Your primary goal should be to drive people to search for you, find you and then spend money with you.

You need to know your tools. We use the following;

Google Keyword Tool – You will use this to find low-competition/high traffic keywords.

OpenSite Explorer – You will use this to find the highest ranked AND most relevany pages linking to your competitors

Directory Critic -This is where you will find the most relevant quality directories for articles and links.

Yahoo – This is a much better search engine for finding links, who is linking to you and your competitors. Google Webmaster tools are ok, but for some reason they don’t list all of the links.

1. Use Google Analytics. If you outsource your SEO functions, make sure they give you a full detailed report, or at least access to your analytics data. This will allow you to see where you are getting the most traffic from, what is working for you, and what keywords most people are using. If anything it will open your eyes to the volume of traffic that can come from the most random places.
2. Spread your keywords/look for the long tail. Everyone is competing for “sydney plumbers”. I am not saying abandon this completely, but start thinking outside the box. There are more people searching locally for “Hot Water Service” (12000+) than for “Sydney Plumbers” (~9000). Also there will be people who are more likely to buy when they are searching for “Emergency Hot Water Plumber”. Also would you rather do business with people looking for a “Cheap Plumber” or “luxury home plumber” or “best quality plumber sydney“?
3. Build Content. This means you have to look at building up your quality content around lots of related keywords. I would suggest building a blog. You could write a few “how to” articles. Once you have written them, wait 2 weeks, and then submit them to the article directories listed in Directory Critic.
4. Follow these rules; Use unique interesting title tags for each page. Do the same for the meta description.
5. Use Video. Firstly, few plumbing businesses do use video, so you will stand out. Secondly, it is a great way to bridge the gap between those that do and don’t trust your business.
6. Don’t look for high PR links only – Use the Open Site Explorer and Yahoo to find out where the most authoritative links are coming into your competitors. Try to get links in relevant directories. You don’t have to chase the top PR websites on the web, because not only is that unrealistic, but you will probably miss out on a lot of other places that could give you quality traffic.
7. Strive for publicity. Sponsor a local soccer team, donate to the local hospital, hold a “How to change your water heater” event for old people. Write information that can be used by the press and local media. The bottom line is, by doing all of this a) you will get a lot of people linking to your website and b) it will raise your profile in the local area.
8. Get links in sparingly. Only initiate link exchanges and directory submissions from website that are highly relevant and have been indexed for a long time. If you do use a reciprocal link exchange read this first. Avoid buying or selling links. Pretty much the only place you should buy a link from is the Yahoo directory. After that you might want to get a premium placement in a plumbing directory online. Everything else is a waste, until you know where your traffic is coming from.
9. Control the number of outbound links on your pages and on pages where you place your links, avoid link-farms, links to gambling, pills, etc. If you want a rule, never link to other plumbers in your country, only overseas. Only link to websites related to home improvement or plumbing. Only link to websites that are ranked on the firsst 3 pages of the search engines.
   
10. Spend money on other things, like Facebook/Twitter, before Yellow Pages. The yellow pages rarely rank top for any of the keywords you would want. Few people actually read the books any more, and there are better ways to spend your money. If you want a cheap alternative to PPC, look at social media, or having a Facebook page, and spending some money on PPC. Also think about using Twitter actively to find clients.
    
    
11. Get a Google Places listing, and focus on improving that. Firstly your location matters in Google places, and that can’t be faked. Secondly it relies on a lot of data sources to see where your address is, so every time you place a link back to your website, make sure you put your telephone number and physical address down.

Want some more great reading about SEO for Plumbers? Here is some great information about the SEO Success pyramid, which has a great, in depth, breakdown of the things you should be looking for.

How To Increase Web Traffic & Boost Leads (a dentist’s guide)

Posted on 02. Jul, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing, SEO, Web Design

SEO experts seem to claim all the time they know the number one secret to building your position in search engines. Usually you will see them claim that links are the key, or that content is the key, or that site design is the magic tool. However most of them forget one key thing, and that quality traffic is what businesses, especially dentists, need and sometimes having a huge number of links, and building a large website just are not going to bring in the patients. Of course, having great content that is meaningful and helpful will build links and traffic. Also great content could be used once on a blog, and then syndicated through a newsletter, a podcast etc, it does not have to just be a blog.

However, here are 8 tips and ideas to generating quality leads that you may not have considered.

1. Build multiple link sources. The above graph shows where this website gets its traffic from. As you can see, referring websites make up almost a third of our traffic. We are always working to get linking, blogging partners to write reviews, write about our articles, or provide an alternative point of view. We are also always working to find businesses that could do with our help in exchange for a link on their website. In fact, if there are any readers out there that want some FREE SEO ANALYSIS, we will do so in exchange for a link. Just comment below with your web address and we will contact you.

   

2. Niche Directories. We are listed a lot of directories, both to get relevant links to our site, but also because they are great traffic builders. Three directories make up about a third of all referring traffic. Don’t just look for directories that give you a free backlink, or claim to be “seo directories”. Look for directories that list businesses in your niche and your local area. Use google to “find dentist list directories” and consider paying for a premium banner. Do not ever pay for a link in a directory that will give you no traffic.
3. Video. Consider putting together a short video on your services, on the benefits your clients have gained, on how you are helping save the world from cavities. We have created several videos for clients, and they represent the source of up to a quarter of all the sales leads that come in.
4. Industry forums. Four industry forums represent another quarter of all our traffic. We use the forums to build our brand, provide quality advice for people who need marketing help, and to learn what are real concerns of potential clients. Use signatures to intriduce yourself, and provide a key offer or tool that people in those forums might benefit from.
5. Engage with other blogs. Blogs need information like the normal newspapers. Why not offer to write a guest post? At least write an insightful comment on something they have written. What about if you offered to allow them to write a guest post. Again there are about 3 or 4 blogs that we work with that contribute a large portion of the traffic for us. Also make sure you use trackbacks on your posts, (this is automatic with WordPress.)
6. Engage with traditional media. Send out press releases to your local newspapers. Conduct a survey of your patients and publish the results. Offer support to newspapers in the form of writing about their articles or pointing to their website.
7. Social Media. Social media can be a great way to build traffic, but don’t let it guide you in everything you do. The bottom line is, make sure you read reddit, digg and other people’s posts on facebook. Make sure you have a facebook fan page, so that your clients can interact with you. Use social media to find  out what are the hot topics, and write about them!
8. Newsletters. Some of our clients use newsletters pretty much as their number one way of building traffic. They only send out emails to those that have given their permission, and they use it every month. Each newsletter has content that is important and timely and it drives clients back to their website. As a dentist, you could write about reducing cavities, snoring, teeth grinding and so on.

Do you have a great way to build traffic? Is there something you do that drives clients to your website?

Free High PR Directory Search Engine

Posted on 24. Jun, 2010 by Marketing in SEO

Search over 1000 high page ranked free directories to find the one that is best optimised for your keywords.

Directories are great for building backlinks in the early stages of launching a website. Finding one that has been optimised to your keyword will not only give you a strong backlink to your website, but it should also drive traffic.

Google indexes website based on keywords, and the only way to guarantee you are getting a link that is optimised to your keywords is by using the Google search engine to find directories.

All of the directories in this search engine should have free and paid options for adding your website. If they don’t please leave a comment below and we will update the code. We are always looking for free directories that provide a qulaity way for businesses to get listed. Improving your business listing can be good for your own SEO.

Creative Development provides SEO services to businesses all over the globe.

All the directories and code are updated monthly, so you should be getting only the best links back to your website.

Most Valuable Google Adwords.

Posted on 15. Jun, 2010 by Marketing in Advertising, Marketing, SEO

eGoogle Adwords cost creep is becoming a major concern for advertisers, and it is one of the major motivators behind companies moving away from Adwords as being their sole avenue of online advertising. We were working on some SEO and Search Marketing for a client when we notices some trends in costs associated with Google Adwords.

Using the average cost per click of Google Adwords and the total number of local searches, we were able to ascertain the most valuable google adwords right now.

As you can see, per month, the whole of the top 20 search keywords are dominated by “insurance” terms, making one single search term, “best car insurance quote” almost worth $1 million. We also noted the top 10 keywords by average CPC.

We question whether, at an average of $92 per click, Google Adwords is the most cost effective method to advertise to sell anything! Including postage and printing, you could send out $10 vouchers, redeemable only through your website, to 9 people for every one person you are getting to come through to your website on Adwords. More importantly, you could run a long term search optimisation campaign, including on page content building, every month for every 5 people that click on your ad.

This marketing blog is “Do Follow”

Posted on 30. May, 2010 by Marketing in SEO, Web Design, Wordpress

We thought we would announce our experiment into making this blog “Do Follow“. We noticed that while we get several thousand hits on individual posts each week, we get close to zero meaningful comments from viewers. So we thought we would encourage comments by making this marketing blog “Do Follow” so that those that do comment will get some link-juice and it might help their page-rank.

If you have a marketing blog that is also “Do Follow” then all you have to do is link to this post, and we will post a track-back. All the links will be checked to make sure they are marketing blogs, and to make sure that the link is also “do follow”.

Creative Development is a marketing and web design agency based in Sydney.

The Importance of Keyword Targeted Domains in SEO; Almost Zero

Posted on 14. May, 2010 by Marketing in Domains, SEO

There is no doubt that carefully selecting a domain(s) can make a difference to a website. There are not just SEO factors to consider, there is also trust by the customer, branding etc. A few different reasons for selecting a domain may be;

• Making it memorable
• Linking the domain to your company name
• Making to relevant to the products or services you sell
• Making it industry relevant
• Not making it too obscure
• Making it difficult to copy
• Making it optimisable
• Securing the domain before your competitors
• Making it easy to market

That said, how important is it to choose a keyword relevant domain name? How much should you go out of your way to purchase an old domain, or multiple domains across several TLDs linked to your keywords?

Most website and SEO guides claim that the choice of domain for purely SEO purposes is an important one, however few, if any, go into any detail as to what value that might be. SEO MOZ ranking places the value at “60% valuable” compared to other factors, and 3rd overall behind keyword use and title tag relevance. Another website claims a domain name is 25% of the equation. Again, though, this does not give us any real quantification of the importance of having a domain the same as your target keyword. There are a swag of websites claiming that purchasing a keyword relevant domain should be the first thing you do. Yet, how much of a difference is it going to make if you don’t manage to get your domain, but still optimise your website well?

There are so many factors to consider when looking at why a search engine ranks one page higher than another. Not only do you have page based optimisation, there are also site based factors to take into account. For this excersize we came up with a simple methodology. We took a look at 6 random keyword terms, Insulation, blu ray players, pilates classes, handbags, mp3 and consulting. We then looked at top 30 ranked websites in Google and grouped them into either having the keyword in their domain, or not. The difference in average rank between the two groups is our value. We did not remove wikipedia, government websites or news website from our ranking.

Using this method, if keyword relevant domains were seen as valuable or more valuable to search engines than title tags and content they would appear, on average, in a higher position than those without. For instance, if the value of relevant domains was high, then those optimised well and with a relevant domain should appear higher than those with just the relevant domain.

You can download the raw data of our findings here.

Obviously there are some issues with our methodology. To name a few things, there were only 3 domains containing “pilates” and some keywords (eg:insulation) are heavily populated by news and wikipedia articles.

Based on these inital results, on average, websites with a keyword relevant domain rank no better than those without.  For the 6 keywords we looked at, the number 1 spot was taken in 3 instances by websites without the keyword in the domain. Even if you look at the top 3 places websites appear, non-keyword relevant domains still appear higher up. In every instance of analysis, having a keyword relevant domain does not guarantee a website will feature higher in Google.

There could be many reasons for these results, for instance website owners could have purchased the domain, and then carried out very little SEO. The domains could also have been punished by Google for some unknown reason. In the future, we may have to carry out the exercise on a wider range of keywords, across hundreds of websites and analyse the SEO factors for each website. However, on the face of it, keyword relevant domain names are low on the list of priorities where search ranking is concerned.

For pure search ranking purposes, there are more efficient ways to optimise your website than buying a keyword relevant domain name.

We are not discounting the importance of one or many domains for other reasons, such as those listed above. We certainly recommend purchasing a domain, if available, to ensure your competitors don’t beat you to the punch. However, optimising the content on your website, building quality backlinks and building content should be priorities when spending time and money on your website.