Utah Search Engine Optimization | SEO

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Recently, Google has introduced Google Voice Local Search. It’s currently in beta version but it’s pretty neat. If you dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) you can get connected local businesses by stating your location and the business industry you are looking for. The results are repeated to you on the phone or you can get them sent to you in a text message.

When asked for the city and state you can tell it the city and state, zip code, or punch the zip code in on the keypad. Also, when asked for a business name or category you can tell it a business name (i.e. “Outback Steakhouse”) or say a category name (i.e. “restaurants”). There are also other features like saying “details” to get more info on the current listing or saying “text message” to get the info in a text message.

Google’s OneBox is even more important now because the results are coming directly from that. I tried it by stating I was in “Salt Lake City, Utah” then stated I was looking for “Web Design”. As a voice read back results I compared them to this Utah Web Design Search and they matched up directly with Google’s OneBox. It’s time to take localized search engine optimization more seriously. This is going to be a very vital and serious approach to your internet marketing strategies.

The long tail, in reference to search engine optimization, is all the keywords and keyphrases that hold little traffic by themselves, typically longer 4-7 word phrases, but collectively add up to a large amount of traffic. Illustrated below is a diagram of the head and the long tail.

If you’ve ever ran a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, in your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, for a popular keyword you can certainly appreciate what a drain on financial resources that can be. Especially, if you’re landing page content isn’t “sticky” and doesn’t provide optimal ROI with conversions. There is a much cheaper way of leveraging value of PPC campaigns while driving your organic search engine optimization (SEO) efforts full force. The trick of this trade is maximizing the long tail search terms for PPC and the head terms for SEO.
You’re probably wondering how you can find your what the long tail of your own Website is. There are a few tools out there for that. My favorite is HitTail. Through an external JavaScript placed on your Website, HitTail records all search queries coming to your site and separates the head from the tail. It shows you a diagram of the percentage of long tail visit vs the percentage of head visits. SearchtheWeb2 is a semantic search engine that clusters word phrases related to your search query via natural language processing. It clusters the popular keyphrases and the long tail keyphrases in a list for you to narrow down your search if desired. It’s great for seeing what kind of long tail phrases are related to certain keywords. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and Microsoft’s adCenter Lab Keyword Group Detection Tool are both really great to find semantically similar keywords that people might be searching for in their longtail queries. So bookmark these tools and revamp your search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies for maximum online profit.

Recently, Yahoo! and Google have both been adding new options to their search engine result pages (SERPs). These options include Google’s PlusBox and and Yahoo’s Quicklinks. Illustrated below is Google’s PlusBox for Walmart. They have a PlusBox for their stock quote that expands to give stock information. Along with that, they have category or sub-page links within their site. Google typically does this for strong authorative Websites with a high amount of Trust Rank.

Another example below shows Google’s PlusBox being used for localized search. They have a PlusBox that shows the localized listing in the SERPs with their map, address, and phone number. You don’t have to be an extreme authority to have a PlusBox with this type of localized integration.

Yahoo’s Quick Links are similar to Google showing subpages for authorative sites. However, Yahoo! will also be charging for these Quick Links if you’re a site that doesn’t get them naturally. The think I like better about these Quick Links in the search engine result pages is that they are inline horizontally. Thus, they take up less room.

Good or Bad Usability Practices?

In my opinion, I think Google and Yahoo! are getting out of hand with their SERPs. I firmly believe in allowing the Websites, authorative or not, to display their prominent content to the user (i.e. stock quotes, maps, sub pages, shopping categories, etc.). It is a search engine’s job to display quality and relevant results to queries, but it is not the search engines job to display a site’s content to the user.

When you have more options on a Webpage you have more:

• Distraction
• Noise
• Thinking
• Load Time
• Code
• Images
• Bandwidth (a problem for mobile search)

I think Google became the most popular search engine not by their results but by their simplistic user interface and good usability. Both Yahoo! and MSN have searches integrated into their news pages whereas Google has just had a single standalone search box.

I’m sure I stand alone on this because I’m sure Google and Yahoo! both held extensive case studies, focus groups, stakeholder research, and testing before putting this into motion. I guess they know what they’re doing, but I’m annoyed by it. Sometimes less is more, right?

The way SEOs conduct search engine optimization is changing all the time. The future of a large portion of search engine optimization is really just good usability, accessibility, development, design, information architecture, and marketing. All those measures are going to lead to one thing: developing a quality site that gets users to visit, read, bookmark, act, and come back for more.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN will start observing how users behave on your Website to add to a hidden trust rank score, similar to a page rank score. Google already has the tools in place to observe this data through Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Analytics, and sites that have registered XML sitemaps with their Google accounts. With these kind of tools Google can measure how many people visit your site, what pages they land on, how long they stay, what they click on, what they book mark, form submissions, etc. This data is invaluable in calculating the authorative value and trustability of a Website. Once this information is collected it can be used in their algorithm to give further trust rank to Websites and thus boost their SERPs.

There are two approaches to this for whatever hat you wear. Whitehat SEOs will have to make better quality sites and focus on user retention and driving calls to action. Blackhat SEOs will figure out some methodology of fake user-surfing emulation. Either way, it’s time to start preparing for the inevitable.

Google’s changing the game of search engine optimization with their recent release of OneBox. Google OneBox appears at the top of results whenever a popular [city] phrase is combined with a popular search query. For example: [Salt Lake City internet marketing] returns the following results.

How does this changes the game of SEO?

Well not only do you have to aim for top organic search results, but now you have a new algorithm in place to rank on local results such as Google’s OneBox. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have always had local search but Google has been the first to implement theirs into the regular search results as well.

What can you do to optimize for local search?

• Social Local Search - Submit your company’s listing to some of the top social local search sites. This article states social local search is up 44% in the past 12 months. Yelp, InsiderPages, CitySquares, Judy’s Book, and Mojo Pages are good examples of these.
• Internet Yellow Pages - SuperPages, Yellowbook, InfoSpace, SwitchBoard are also good examples of these.
• Local Search Engines - Submit your site to Google Local, Yahoo! Local, ASK, MSN Local, and TrueLocal.
• Data Providers – Acxiom, GeoSign, and InfoUSA are two major powerhouses for supplying local search databases. Submit your company listings to these sites as well.
• Contact information – Have a dominant address and phone number on your contact page and at least one other page, preferably the homepage. This information builds trust rank value in your Website as well.
• Microformats – Microformats are an open format for data specification. hCard’s represent data about people and specifications. Visit microformats.org to learn how you can incorporate hCard’s in to your Website. One more search engines catch on to microformats this will be quite revolutionary for Local Search.
• Meta data – Use geo meta data to tell search engines your location. Code detailed below:

<meta name=”geo.position” CONTENT=”latitude; longitude” />
<meta name =”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Place Name” />
<meta name =”geo.region” CONTENT=”Country Subdivision Code” />