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A few weeks ago our accountant asked for suggestions for getting a basic website up. And today I got the same request from another friend. I’m putting my recommendations here so I can point others to it when the need arises.

There are lots of different ways to skin this cat. And while I’ve tried a number of hosting platforms and content management systems, what follows is just how I would go about building a basic site. No more, no less.

1. Sign up for Bluehost. http://www.bluehost.com/cgi/info/hosting_features – Bluehost will provide everything you need: hosting, WordPress, domain name registration and email. It retails for $6.95/month, but there are almost always promotional deals available. Google “bluehost promotion” to look for promotions if they don’t list one on the features page.
2. Bluehost will walk you through the steps of getting your site set up. Bluehost will also help you find and register a domain name, or instruct you on how to use a domain name you’ve already registered.
3. Go to the Bluehost CPanel administration tool (log in if necessary) and add WordPress under Software/Services.
4. Log in to WordPress and go to Appearance > Themes > Install Themes – find a theme you like and install it. You are better off sticking with a pre-made WordPress theme versus having something designed. There are many good, free themes available.
5. In WordPress, go to Pages > Add New and create a home page
6. In WordPress, go to Settings > Reading and set “Front page displays” to “A static page” and specify your home page as the front page
7. In WordPress, go to Appearance > Widgets and configure your sidebar(s). You will want to remove the bloggy widgets that are there by default if you won’t be blogging. But a few thoughts on that: a blog doesn’t have to be a journal of your thoughts. Blogging in WordPress can be treated as an easy way to create articles or pages that relate to specific topics. You can configure WordPress to not show the date of posts, you can call the blogging page “articles”, and you can update articles over time. So instead of blogging about your cat’s latest hairball, you can use the same functionality to easily maintain a few articles of content that demonstrate your business’ expertise. And while I firmly disagree with the pervasive advice that every business should maintain a blog for SEO purposes, writing topical articles can help you show up in search engines.

From there, I think you will find it fairly easy to add pages. If you don’t want to use the blogging capabilities,  you can create a new page and specify that as the posts page (in the same place as step 6) and then make that page private under Visibility on the edit page screen. That will remove it from navigation.

What I like/don’t like about Bluehost:

• Like: it’s not the cheapest hosting service around, but it’s pretty close and they have lots of online support information and have been very responsive when I’ve had questions. They also have a ton of different tools and modules available if your needs outgrow WordPress.
• Don’t like: I’ve had some problems with my email getting blocked by spam filters, presumably because other Bluehost clients are abusing email. I solved this by switching my email hosting to Google Apps. There may also be cases where a big hosting provider like Bluehost can hurt your search engine ranking. If your site is hosted on the same server as other sites that a search engine has flagged as spammy, you may suffer guilt by association. I haven’t found this to be a problem, but I’ve heard others make this complaint. This problem could happen with any hosting provider.

What I like/don’t like about WordPress:

• Like: it’s easy to use, has lots of free plugins, lots of support and is well optimized for SEO without customization.
• Don’t like: there’s not much I don’t like. It is designed as a blogging platform first and foremost, so can be tricky sometimes to make it less bloggy, but plenty of businesses use WordPress to build basic, non-blog sites.

Ta-da! You’ve built your web site! WordPress has lots of free plugins available, so over time you can add almost any feature you can think of. If you have any other tips or experiences you’d like to share, please add them to the comments below. And let us know if you’d like help growing your business.

If you’re placing multiple ads in multiple channels across the web, it’s helpful to be able to track which of the ads are driving traffic to your website and at what rate. This data can help you track ROI for each channel, and plan future ad spending accordingly.

I made the whiteboard drawing below to explain some basic principles of campaign tracking to a client. Sharing the love here thanks to Kris’ handy iPhone camera. (I have one too, but hers is higher res.) I’ll use Google Analytics in my explanation below the drawing, but Webtrends, Omniture and other analytics tools offer similar functionality.

Unless you get into advanced tracking techniques, there are really only two things you need to do to track any web link, ad or campaign:

1. Copy the Google Analytics tracking code and paste it before the close </head> tag on any pages on your site you want to track. It’s easiest and best to put it on all pages, but sometimes this isn’t practical. The code and instructions can be found in your Analytics account under Edit > Check Status. If you have trouble finding it, here’s a little help from Google: Where can I find my tracking code? What Google calls “tracking code” is also called a tracking tag, tracking pixel or tracking beacon by some people.
2. Add tracking to any links, ads or campaigns you want to track. Google calls this “tagging”, which is confusing since many people call the tracking code a “tracking tag.” I prefer the term “tracking string.” You only need to do this step if you are buying ads or have specific links you want to track. You don’t need tracking strings to track organic search traffic, direct traffic, or to see what referring domains are driving traffic. If you want to track AdWords ads, you don’t need to do this step either, you just need to link your AdWords and Analytics accounts. If you do want to track links, banner ads, or paid search campaigns in Bing or elsewhere, Google has a handy URL builder you can use to create tracking strings.

Once you’ve added the tracking code and a tracking string, here’s what happens: a prospect is going about her day perusing web sites. She sees an ad for your business on a page she’s visiting. She likes what she sees and clicks on the ad. The ad takes her to your site, and included in the URL of the link is the tracking string. When she lands on your site, the tracking code on the page reads the tracking string and notifies Google Analytics that someone has clicked on your ad.

AdWords “Related-To” Links and the Importance of Negative Keywords

We have come across a number of instances recently where Google is broad matching terms that are barely related to the keywords we are buying. In some cases, the commercial intent of the broad match term is a complete miss with what our intent is for a campaign. If you are buying Google AdWords you need to be aware of this shift and should implement the recommendations we make below. (If you need a primer on AdWords match types, read this article: How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.)

We found one case where Google was matching the keyword “remote access” to searches for “remote control”. The former is an IT term that is very relevant to one of our clients’ business, and heaps of the latter exist in every household. In another example, a user searching for “sewing machine service” was matched with our ad for the keyword “computer service”.

Another broad matching issue we’ve seen recently is the new “Related-to” feature of AdWords. This feature comes up with categories that are related to the category of the keyword you are buying, then broad matches those. Here is an example of the “Related-to” feature in action:

So in this case Google is classifying Thomas Moser as Stickley furniture, then broad matching advertisers who are buying keywords that broad match to “stickley furniture” – that can get very broad indeed. Note that we’ve mostly seen “Related-to” ads appear next to brand-related searches.

Early on, AdWords broad matching stuck to fairly synonymous terms. “Hotel in Las Vegas” or “Hotel Los Vegas”, for example, would be matched to “Hotel Las Vegas”. Over time they have been gradually expanding their definition of broad matching

During my brief stint at Microsoft (in the Advertising Platform & Services division), one of the things we measured was the percentage of user searches for which we served ads. More ads, of course, meant more money, which meant more cupcakes for us (or other remuneration). Pretty safe guess that Google is looking at a similar metric, which explains the broadening of broad.

The safest thing to do to combat this is to stop using broad matching. Unfortunately, that is a bit of a baby/bathwater solution. While Google does make some questionable matching decisions, on the whole broad matching gives you access to a much larger pool of relevant searches.

We recommend two things:

1. Use both broad and exact matching for keywords. This will give you the ability to see how broad match variations perform in comparison to the exact match term. If the quality score or conversion rate of the broad match terms is much lower than the exact match terms, it is likely that they are being poorly matched and you need to investigate (by following our second recommendation). One thing to note is that Google does sometimes get better at matching keywords over time. We’ve seen cases where broad match keywords start out performing poorly, but end up doing reasonably well after a few months.
2. Check the “See search terms” report in the AdWords interface. This report shows you what actual search phrases are being matched to your keyword ad. If you see a match you don’t like, add it as a negative keyword. “See search terms” can be found under Campaigns > Keywords in AdWords. For more on negative keywords, see How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.

These examples are another good reminder of why you can’t just set up an Adwords account and forget about it, and expect Google to spend your money wisely. Keeping an eye on the search terms being matched to your keywords will help you target the right customers, improve the click through rate of your ad groups, and optimize your bids for the best ROI (return-on-investment). And please let us know if we can help.

Hardly anyone goes past the first page of Google results, so you want your ads to show up on the first page, right? That’s why Google prominently displays the minimum first page bid in the AdWords interface, right?

Wrong.

One of the things we do here at Two Octobers is to audit PPC accounts to point out any major problems or opportunities. An issue I often run across is that keyword bids are all over the place. It would be one thing if these bids were set based on return on investment (ROI), but they’re not. A PPC manager has set bids based on the minimum first page bid that Google reports. Here’s why this is a bad idea:

Google (and Bing) sponsored search ads are sold on an auction-for-position basis. On the whole, traffic goes up the higher you bid, whether you move from position 12 to 10 or 2 to 1. To get the best results, it makes sense to inch bids up or down evenly until you’ve hit your budget target or other constraint. As an example, let’s imagine a campaign with three keywords (A, B and C) and a daily budget cap of $50. When you launch the campaign, you set keyword bids at $1.

This results in a total cost of $18 and 18 clicks. You notice that keyword A is not meeting the minimum first page bid, while B and C are. Since you are well below your budget cap, you increase the bid for keyword A to $2 to get on the first page.

Now you are spending exactly your budget of $50 and you’ve gone from 18 to 33 clicks. But what if instead you adjusted all bids equally, from $1 to $1.40?

Now you are spending a total of $49 for 35 clicks. Your ad for Keyword A is still not on page one, but voilá you are getting better results!

These numbers are made up, but the underlying principles are accurate. I’ve simplified things a bit since my goal is to show the fallacy of bidding to be on page one. In fact when I am creating a campaign I do usually vary bids based on my best guess as to conversion rate and average sale. For example, if I’m working on a campaign for a vacation rental in Breckenridge, I will bid the keyword “vacation rental breckenridge” higher than “rental breckenridge”, since the latter could refer to an apartment or rental equipment. I expect that more visits from “vacation rental breckenridge” will result in sales so those clicks are worth more. As I collect analytics data I further refine bids based on ROI.

And some of you out there may point out that traffic volume in relation to bid is a non-linear function (and not always a monotonic increasing function either), and that it can therefore make sense to have uneven bids even lacking ROI data. That is true, but it takes a whole lot of data and math to understand the relationship between bid price and traffic for any given keyword, and it is still not a good idea to set max CPC based on minimum first page bid.

If you would like us to have a look at your paid search campaigns, please give us a shout.

Viral marketing news and other viral happenings in Denver Metro, Boulder and beyond.

After too long a hiatus, Rocky Mountain Viral is back! My goal is to get these out monthly from now on. Here’s hoping.

Colorado Girls – one of the most tried-and-true ways to get YouTube traffic is to parody another very successful video. Anthropomorphize a cat or work in some South Park characters and you’ve got yourself a viral hit. Katy Perry’s wildly successful “California Gurlz” video has been this summer’s favorite target, keeping hundreds of parodists busy. At least 37 states have weighed in so far, but it turns out that Colorado girls are among the most popular, with this video garnering over 600,000 views on YouTube. The video was created by three friends in a couple of weeks with no budget. The lyrics are clever and it is well put together, but the real star of the video is our Front Range. The tourism board itself couldn’t have done a better job of stitching together all the quintessential details that make us, well, not California. See for yourself:

Cherry Creek Dance – In another story of native talent, I love this video featuring Emily Sasson of Cherry Creek Dance. The video is promoting her Wednesday night hip hop class, and has received over 4,600 views in just a few days. Sure, that doesn’t compare to Colorado Girls, but this is no parody and includes no South Park characters, just great dancing and great local business marketing.

And then there’s whiteboard girl – in a perfect case study of the is-it-real phenomenon,  ”Jenny” took the internet by storm early this month with her very public and scathing announcement that she was quitting her job. She emailed her coworkers photos of herself quitting with a whiteboard commentary on her boss and his Farmville habit. The photos were leaked to the website thechive.com:

We received the following photos last night from a person who works with this girl. Her name is Jenny (not confirmed) – we’re working our contact for Jenny’s last name…

It turns out that Jenny’s last name is Porterfield and her first name isn’t Jenny, it’s Elyse. Porterfield is a Glenwood Springs native and recent UNC graduate who did not quit her job, but is an aspiring actress who did a photoshoot for The Chive. She has a pretty face and was given a funny set of whiteboards and is now a hot commodity thanks to the hoax. Oh, and she’s a California girl now too. I think that’s fitting.

Do politicians just automatically count as viral? – wanting to get a jump on the competition, Time Magazine has already announced the best viral campaign ads of 2010. Among them is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper trying to wash away negative campaign ads on his path to the governor’s office. I like his sentiment, but it seems like an ad should be viral to earn that distinction. With only 40,000 YouTube views for such a prominent campaign, I’m thinking Hick should hire the Colorado Girls crew to shoot his next video.

I was having lunch a few weeks ago with my friend Chandler who sells advertising at an online publisher and the topic of Twitter advertising came up. His personal viewpoint on Twitter is similar to one I’ve heard quite a bit recently: “I tried it out, but I didn’t get much out of it.” He said it tentatively, as if I might be offended, or exclaim some secret to extracting value from Twitter that had escaped him. But I have found myself questioning the value of Twitter recently as well. Our conversation evolved to this: there’s a lot of talking on Twitter and not much listening. As an advertising medium Twitter appears to have decent reach, but is reach meaningful if people aren’t really paying attention? Further, I have noticed that many of my recent followers look like this:

Notice the thousands of followers and the clear commercial agenda. What seems to be in vogue now is to follow thousands of people, then drop the ones that don’t follow back, then follow thousands more, and so on. Having lots of followers creates the impression that people give a crap, but it turns out that on Twitter, followers don’t equal influence.

My lunchtime conversation with Chandler concluded with the supposition that Twitter users must be getting more selective about who they actually listen to, if they are listening at all. An increase in advertising on Twitter will only heighten the need to filter out the signal from the noise, which means that advertisers will be putting a lot of effort in to marketing to the void.

I’ve been researching this topic and mulling it over since my conversation with Chandler, then got this email today from another friend:

It’s hard not to agree!
http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=3679
Hal

The link describes the story of Leo Laporte, a well-known technology journalist who stopped Tweeting for a few weeks only to find that nobody seemed to notice. In Leo’s words, “I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.”

Laporte has nicely phrased what Chandler and I were trying to articulate, but my intervening research tells me that we had it at least partially wrong. I didn’t find any data trending people’s propensity to listen. A few things I did find:

• Only 7% of Americans actively use Twitter, but those 7% are more affluent, more educated and tend to be early technology adopters in comparison to the online population as a whole. They also seek and give brand and product advice using Twitter. Source: Edison Research
• 300,000 new users are signing up for Twitter every day. Source: Huffington Post
• Globally, Twitter use has exploded.Worldwide traffic to Twitter.com has more than doubled in the past year. Source: Comscore

With that kind of growth, it is too soon to say what Twitter is or isn’t. The way people are using Twitter is bound to be evolving. And anecdotally I know several local businesses that are finding new customers through their Twitter accounts. I still believe that broadcast advertising will fail on Twitter, but I don’t think we can extrapolate from our own personal experiences to say that Twitter is not an effective marketing medium. It may take work to get people to pay attention, but the payoff is a fast-growing, affluent population. If you are an SMB with limited time and resources, you should gauge the effort versus the return. If your target market is well-to-do, educated early-adopters, it is probably worth it. If you are a plumber or a dry cleaner, you should give it an honest try and see if you enjoy tweeting. If you find it a chore, your time is better spent elsewhere. At least for now.

And if you are looking for more tweets to ignore, mine are as good as any  @nicobrx

This list is intended for someone who is creating a new paid search advertising campaign. Much of it still applies if you are looking to grow an existing campaign or researching keywords for organic search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, but not all steps will apply in those cases. To keep things simple, I am only going to talk about Google. I usually do most of my research and testing in Google, then copy keywords and campaigns over to Yahoo and Bing.

This process can be fun and instructive if you think of yourself as a psychologist trying to understand how and when your prospects search for what you have to offer. I enjoy constructing theories about what’s in the head of searchers – I’m sure I’m mostly wrong, but it makes it more entertaining.

Spaghetti Against the Wall
When I’m building keyword lists, I don’t worry about how much volume each keyword drives or how much it costs to be in a top position. There’s really no downside to having a lot of keywords, and sometimes your best performers will come from places you don’t expect. I call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach – throw a lot of keywords out there, and a few will stick. Those are the ones I spend time optimizing.

Match Types
It is very important that you understand how match types work if you are adding keywords to your account. For an explanation of match types, see the article How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.

On to the to-do list…

The To-Do List (& a PDF version of the list for printing)

1. Get your ad groups going - Ad groups should correspond to individual products and/or services you offer as well as product/service groupings. For example, if you sell a variety of hammers, you should have an ad group for hammers in general, and ad groups for each type of hammer. Use your judgement regarding how specific to go – people might search for “ball peen hammers”, but they are less likely to search for “ball peen hammers with red handles”. The former merits an ad group, the latter probably not.
   When you are first creating ad groups, you don’t need to come up with a big list of keywords for each. I usually create a bunch of ad groups at a time, and I don’t worry about researching keywords until I have them all live. For example, if I am creating an ad group for “ball peen hammers”, I’ll probably create it with the single keyword “ball peen hammers”. It’s more efficient to get ad groups going, then go back and add keywords using the following techniques.
   
2. Add more keywords with the Google Keyword Tool - In the AdWords interface, go to Opportunities > Keyword Tool
   The Keyword Tool is useful for coming up with variations on keywords, but it can also be slow and tedious to go through results. It doesn’t do a good job at all of sorting keyword suggestions by relevancy. I usually sort the results by the column “Local Monthly Searches” (by clicking on those words) to see what keywords get the most volume. “Local” here refers to the country in which you are searching.
   At this stage, I’m mostly looking for high-volume variations. The Keyword Tool comes up with a lot of junk, but I usually find a few worth adding. Since I have sorted by search volume, I go down the list until I hit some reasonable volume threshold, say at least 1,000 searches per month. It may be more or less than that, depending on the category of keyword. To add keywords to an ad group, select the ones you’d like to add and click Add Keywords. You will be prompted to select an ad group.
   
   It is very helpful that the Keyword Tool gives volume numbers, but take them with a grain of salt. It defaults to showing volume for broad match keywords, which can be deceptive. On the left-hand side there is an option to switch it to exact match, which will give you a better idea of how often each individual keyword is searched. The volume numbers are also pretty unreliable. It will often show that a search term gets very low volume when in fact it gets decent volume.
3. Add even more keywords with Google’s Add/Edit suggestions - In the AdWords interface, go to Campaigns > Ad Groups > [select an ad group] > Keywords > Add Keywords
   This functionality is similar to the Keyword Tool, but does a much better job of grouping and prioritizing keywords that are relevant to your ad group. Recently, I’ve been using this tool more than the Keyword Tool to build keyword lists. It works best after you’ve added some keywords to the ad group, so best to get things started with the Keyword Tool. Per above, I use the Keyword Tool to find high-volume keywords, then I use this tool to add more specific variations.
   
4. Spy on your competitors - There are several tools that show which keywords are driving traffic to competitor sites. Looking at what your competitors are bidding-on and optimizing-for can be a good way to discover new categories of keywords and unusual opportunities that the Google tools won’t spot. Several to try are SEMRush, KeywordSpy and SpyFu. I lean towards SEMRush right now, but there is not much difference between the three. Each offers additional capabilities for a subscription, but try out the free versions first.
5. Set initial bids - There are two ways to approach this. If you are on a tight budget, start by bidding low and collect some data before you start raising bids. The downside of this approach is that with low bids it may take a while to collect enough data to make a change. If you are not on a tight budget, bid keywords high enough to get a top 3 position and adjust bids up or down as you collect performance data. This approach will generate sales faster, but you will waste some budget on non-performers as you collect data. For more on setting bids based on ROI data, see this article: Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI

Using this process, I find I can get a typical campaign going in an hour or two. Over time, I’ll go back in and re-apply these techniques to expand ad groups that are performing particularly well, and to look for new opportunities. There are also a number of more advanced techniques people use. I’ll include a couple here as extra credit:

1. The Search-Based Keyword Tool - Go to Opportunities > More tools … > Search-based Keyword Tool
   I find this tool is very finicky, but useful if you can get it to work. It looks at your site and draws on Google Analytics data to come up with keywords relevant to your content. It also tells you which page each keyword is associated with, which can be very helpful for organizing keywords in to ad groups. Google won’t tell you this (as of this writing), but the tool only works if you are signed up for Google Analytics and have your Analytics and AdWords accounts linked. It also won’t work from an MCC login. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to worry about it.
2. The Webmaster Tools Keyword Report - Log in to Webmaster Tools  > [your domain] > Your Site on the Web > Search Queries
   This report shows which keywords are driving traffic to your site via Google’s unpaid listings. This can be very helpful for identifying SEO opportunities, but also useful for paid search. You should be bidding on any keywords that are relevant to your business but for which you do not rank in the top few positions. In particular, this tool will show you keywords for which you are getting traffic, but rank poorly in organic search. For example, if you rank in position 9 for a keyword that is one of the top drivers of traffic to your site, you should add it to your paid search campaign. If you are not familiar with Webmaster Tools, click here to learn more: Webmaster Tools

There are also some subscription-based research tools that help the process of managing and growing keyword lists, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery being two of the most well-known. I don’t believe these tools are worth it for an individual advertiser unless you find yourself spending many hours per month managing keywords.

Anyone have other suggestions for getting a keyword list put together quickly? I’d love to hear them if you do!

And if you’d like help with search marketing, please drop us a line or give us a call: Contact Us

Google AdWords allows you to specify a match type for each keyword you bid on. Yahoo and Bing do too, though there are some slight variations in how they work.  The three match types in Google are exact, phrase and broad.  The match type you choose tells the search engine when to match a user’s query to your keyword. Here’s how each match type works:

• Exact: your ad will be served when and only when a user enters the keyword you purchased. If you want to make a keyword exact match, you put square brackets around it when you enter it.
• Phrase: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased in the same order. For example, if you bid on “house music”, your ad will match the query “download house music”, but not the query “new orleans music house”. If you want to make a keyword phrase match, you put quotes around it when you enter it.
• Broad: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased, and not necessarily in the same order. Your ad will also be served when a user enters a phrase that Google deems equivalent to your keywords, such as misspellings, synonyms or pluralizations. For example, if you bid on “denver taxidermy”, your ad will likely match the following queries:
  • “taxidermy denver”
  • “denver taxidermists”
  • “a taxidermist near denver”

  Broad match is the default, so you don’t have to do anything to specify broad match.

Think of match types like funnels. Broad matching is like a big, wide funnel that catches lots of queries. Phrase matching is like a medium-sized funnel that catches more queries than exact, but fewer than broad. Exact matching is like a funnel that doesn’t get any wider at the top, which isn’t much good as a funnel.

Also, while they don’t behave quite like match types, you can add negative keywords to an ad group or campaign. A negative keyword tells Google not to serve an ad when that keyword is present in the query. For example, if you created an ad group with the broad match keyword “denver taxidermy” and the negative keyword “squirrel”, Google would not serve your ad if someone searched for “denver squirrel taxidermy”. If you want to add a negative keyword, you put a minus sign before the keyword with no space, e.g. “-squirrel”.

Here’s a crazy stat: people search 200 million keywords in Google that have never been searched before every single day*. That probably puts the total number of unique queries that have ever been done on Google somewhere in the hundreds of billions. Your goal is to get your ads to show for any of those queries that are relevant to the products or services you sell. The broad match type is the best way to do that, and is what I use most of the time. But broad matching can also result in irrelevant traffic, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on what keywords are driving visits to your site and add negative keywords where necessary. Most web analytics tools have a report that shows referring keywords, and the Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report shows some of the search phrases that were matched to your ad.

One trick I sometimes do is to add both an exact match version and a broad match version of the same keyword to an ad group. This allows me to see the performance of the exact match version, which is often better than the broad match version. Over time, I will bid up the exact match version if it is getting better results. For more on keyword bidding based on performance, see our article Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI.

It’s also not a good idea to just trust broad matching and not bother creating ads with variations of keywords you know are relevant to your business. Broad matching is a good way to catch keywords you don’t expect, but you should include any you do know about in your campaign. Doing so will help you understand the performance of each variation, and you can achieve higher quality scores by ensuring that text ads and landing pages are well matched to each keyword. See our article To-do List: Building a Keyword List for more on building keyword lists.

Lastly, Google’s Explanations of Match Types and Negatives: What are keyword matching options? – Adwords Help

* This stat is derived from search query data in these two posts: This week in search 1/8/10 and By the Numbers: Twitter vs Facebook vs Google Buzz

Here is a paraphrase of conversations I’ve had with several local businesses recently:

Them: “How do I get on the first page of Google?”

Me: “Show up in the local business results.”

In each case, these businesses have no real hope of cracking the first page of Google’s web results. They are relatively small, local businesses that sell products that are also sold by large national or international companies. These large companies have a much better shot at ranking well in Google web results and likely have significant search engine optimization (SEO) budgets as well. But in each case, Google is also including local listings along with web results for queries relevant to the businesses I’m talking to. Below is an example of the results I get from Google.com when I search for “plumber denver”. You can see that in this case local listings show up before the web results. Google shows local listings when it thinks I may be interested in finding something locally, and uses my IP address and other indicators to determine what “local” means to me. Sometimes, local listings show up at the top, and sometimes they show up further down the page. While Google has had local listings for a while, they have been putting more emphasis on these listings in the last couple of years, and this trend is likely to continue. This is fantastic news for local business. (And kudos to Google for supporting local businesses in this way.)

It can take a bit of work to show up in the local listings. Depending on the search term and other variables, Google may only show a few local results. Assuming you are not the only business of your type in your area, the tasks below will help your listing to be among those top results.

Before getting to the list, there is one dynamic you should understand about Google local business listings. With local listings, Google seeks to establish external verification of the content that appears on a business listing page (also known as a “Place Page”). Google uses public records of business data for verification, as well as business listings on yellow pages and other local sites. This verification process helps to prevent non-local or questionable businesses from showing up in the results, but it also means that you should be consistent in how you represent your name, address and other information about your business. For example, if your business name is ACME Plumbing, but you write it as “ACME Plumbing and Free Beer” in Google Place Pages, Google may not be able to verify your business name elsewhere, which could hurt your ranking and may result in a penalty.

I have organized the work in to a to-do list format, with explanations pertaining to each to-do list item. I also created a simple PDF to-do list for printing, without all of the explanations.

1. Claim your listing: if your business has been around for a while, Google probably already has a listing with basic information. If your business is relatively new, they may not. In either case, you need to claim your listing to be able to edit most of the elements described here. Here is a post I did a few months back describing the basics of claiming a listing: Adding a Google Local Business Center Listing
2. Enter Your Business Information
   1. Enter an Address – you probably don’t have much choice about this, but you will be better off if you can specify an address in the largest town or city in your area. Google favors listings that are in the city a user searches, versus towns and cities nearby. This factor is so important that it may be worth considering opening an office or somehow establishing a central address if you are near-to but not in a big city. But don’t be deceptive, Google is on the lookout for businesses that falsify locations with P.O. boxes and such. It is also important that the address you specify is reinforced by mentions of your business on other sites. For more on this, see Citations below. Google also allows you specify service areas for your business, but at the time of this writing doing so is more likely to cause harm than good. Also make sure your address is unique to your business, as multiple businesses at the same address can cause all kinds of headaches in Google Maps.
   2. Pick Categories – the categorization of your business listing is very important. Google uses categories to associate product and service search terms with your listing, even if those keywords don’t occur in your description or elsewhere. Google allows you to come up with your own custom categories, but it’s best to stick with standard categories as much as possible. As you are typing in category keywords, Google will suggest categories that relate to the keywords. These are the categories Google recognizes, and are likely to match to a wide variety of search terms. If you do feel that your business merits its own category, only do so if the category you create is a phrase people are likely to search. And don’t choose or create categories that are not directly relevant to your business. If the categories you choose do not relate to your web site or descriptions of your business on other sites, Google may penalize your listing.
   3. Pick a Business Name – you should stick with your registered business name or a registered DBA, but keywords here do matter. For example, if you offer physical therapy but your business name is just “John Smith”, you could consider getting a DBA of “John Smith Physical Therapy” and specifying that as your business name.
   4. Write a Description – the description can have a lot to do with whether or not your business gets a visit or a phone call, so above all else it should describe what you do in an accurate and compelling way. Try to introduce relevant keywords that are not in your business name or category selections, and avoid repeating category keywords unnecessarily.
   5. Pick a Phone Number – it is better to have a local phone number than a 1-800 number in your listing. And it helps if the number you specify is consistent with your business listing on other sites. It is also good if the number is unique to your business, so if you operate more than one business get more than one phone number.
   6. Add a Website Link – it is best if the link you specify points to a page that includes your business address. A “contact us” page is often a good choice, or if you have multiple locations you should create landing pages for each location and point to those with the corresponding Place Pages for those locations.
   7. Add Additional Details – Google allows you to add “additional details” to your listing such as brands carried or specific services. This is a great place to add lists of services offered or products carried, but don’t use this feature to repeat keywords you’ve already used in your categories or description, and don’t use it to stuff a bunch of new keywords in the listing. Additional details appear to have negligible impact on ranking, so limit these to information that will be useful to people visiting the page.
3. Add photos: the completeness of a listing has an impact on ranking, and photos are an important part of being complete. As far as the ranking algorithm goes, the photos don’t have to be particularly good or interesting, but your goal is not just to rank, it is to have people visit or contact you. Many business owners upload poorly composed photos taken with a phone or similar low-fi device. It is worth making a little effort to get photographs that stand out. Google Place Pages are not very attractive on their own; good photos can help your listing convert visitors in to customers.
4. Add a Coupon: adding a coupon won’t do a lot for your ranking (it will do a little), but it gives visitors to your page a reason to take action, and helps turn comparison shoppers into buyers.
5. Check for Completeness: as mentioned above, one of the metrics Google looks at when ranking listings is overall completeness. Make sure that you have filled out all of the information fields that are relevant to your business, and added additional content where possible.
6. Ask Your Friends to Review Your Listing: Google’s Place Pages UI feels like it is designed by robots and for robots. It is easy to get caught up in their drab world and forget that your goal is to share the excitement of your business with prospects. Have your friends look over your listing to make sure you are capturing what makes your business great.
7. Enjoy a Cold Drink and Wait for Our Next Checklist!

Extra Credit

1. Create a Video: while video belongs as part of a complete listing, I put it under Extra Credit because video takes effort to produce and plenty of listings do very well without video. Having video does not have a big impact on ranking, but video content can make your listing much more personal and it may be easier to create than you think. Production values are much less important than sincerity in a context like this. Below is an example of a small business video that has been wildly successful, with over 200,000 views. It is a bit over the top, but I also think there is a good lesson to be learned. Let your passion show and people will respond. You probably don’t need to swear as much as the man in the video, but he does make me believe he loves printing and I would give him my business if he was in my area.
2. Get Citations: It will also have a big impact if you get more listings and mentions of your business online. Being listed on the major directory sites and local sites such as Chambers of Commerce and local guides will help your Google Place Page ranking. If you have not done so already, create listings on the sites included in our article Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business. Also have a look at the David Mihm, Dave Cosper and Rand Fishkin articles below for more ideas on how to get mentions of your business.
3. Get Reviews: When you ask customers for feedback about your business, point them to an online review site such as Yelp or Superpages.com or your Google Place Page and ask them to provide feedback there. Google crawls many sources for reviews, so reviews almost anywhere can benefit your Place Page ranking. Some businesses are nervous about online reviews because a bad review can just sit out there forever-and-ever. If you are one of those, get over it. By encouraging your customers to review your business, the sum of feedback will provide a fair portrayal of how you are doing and you will appeal to a new generation of shopper that values reviews above all else. For more on soliciting reviews, see our article To-do List: Encouraging Reviews of Your Business.

Click Here for the Printer-Friendly PDF To-Do List

Additional Resources:

• Quality Guidelines for Place Pages – Google
• Local Search Ranking Factors – Various Contributors
• 8 Steps to Building an Optimized Local Business Listing – Dev Basu
  This is the 3rd article in a series of three. The first two are worth reading as well and linked-to from the top of this article.
• One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings In Google Local – Rand Fishkin
• Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link – David Mihm
• Optimizing Your Business Listing for Local Search Supremacy – Dave Cosper

[note: this article was updated on 1/17/2011 to reflect changes in Google's treatment of local listings]

I generally write here about topics related to online marketing with the goal of being useful to local businesses. This is a bit different, apologies in advance for my transgression.

One of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer who was also for a time the Director of the National Public Library of Argentina. He mostly wrote short stories, and his stories were often explorations of the quest for knowledge in the face of overwhelming quantities of information. That he wrote about this subject before the advent of computers and digitized information gives him a unique perspective on an area that I struggle with constantly.

One story in particular has been on my mind quite a bit recently, “Funes the Memorious.” The story describes a boy who fell from a horse and acquired a perfect memory, the ability to remember every sensory detail of everything he had ever experienced. The story is written from the point of view of Borges, who ends up spending a night in conversation with Funes. At the beginning of the conversation the reader feels awe and even envy at the boy’s talents. He learned Latin in a matter of days, and said of his life before the fall that he “looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.”

Of late I feel like I am capsized in a whitewater of media. I find myself wanting to comb through it all, to find fragments of knowledge and moments of human contact. Twitter epitomizes this for me. In Facebook I am mostly connected to people I already know. I use it to keep in touch, and to engage in casual interaction. In Twitter I am struck by the stark contrast between the torrents of repeated chatter and the occasional bit of insight making its way downstream. I learn new things and make new friends, but I also find myself wishing I were more like Funes. Where I find myself dragged under by the turbulence, Funes would find it as calm as a reflecting pool. Funes could follow a thousand twitterers and give every one due attention, even a thousand thousand.

But to be Funes is not a thing to wish for. Borges describes his plight:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the shaply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.)

Borges further explains that “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” Another way of looking at it is that ideas are given meaning by the spaces in between. If we think of everything that is called a “dog” as an individual entity without generalizing, it becomes difficult to tell where dogs end and jackals or wolves begin. This is the problem I have with media today. It affords me no spaces in which to build archetypes or even to let one individual stand out from the next. Sometimes I find it difficult to sleep, difficult to turn my mind from the stream.

I like to solve problems, but I can’t say as I’ve made much progress with this one. I think we are all suffering the plight of Funes to some extent. Some solve it by shutting off all of the streams, but that is not the right solution for me. I like meeting new people and learning new things, and to shut myself off from media would be to exclude myself from the prevailing currents of culture. Borges saw the coming challenges of an information society but he did not turn away from them, he faced them head on. We will find ways to bridge differences and make abstractions that allow us to be infinitely connected and yet sleep peacefully. In my own small way I hope to be part of that.