Last week, I had the opportunity to interview David Mihm and get his advice on the top 5 things that local businesses must do to be found online. David is a leading expert on local search strategies and local SEO. He was a panelist at a discussion on local SEO at SMX East, titled, “Must-Have Local Search Tactics”. I enjoyed his presentation and was engaged from the the get-go especially since local businesses can gain higher visibility using these SEO strategies.

David is the Director of Local Search Strategy at Moz. His annual Local Search Ranking Factors is the most well known study on local SEO. Every year, local search pundits and the entire SEO community eagerly await this study to determine their local SEO strategy for the year.

David usually presents at SMX and SES conferences. He blogs at DavidMihm.com and at Moz. He is also the co-founder of getlisted.org which is now a part of Moz. For those of you who are new to local SEO, Getlisted.org is a free resource to analyze and optimize your local search listings. David tells me that he and his team are constantly refining it to make it increasingly sophisticated every day.

Me: What are the top 5 things that businesses absolutely must do to optimize for local?

David: I ask this question every year to a panel of about 35 local search experts from around the world. Based on their responses this year, here’s what I’d say:

#1. Directories

Submit your business to as many important local directories as you have time to. You can start at GetListed.org, where we show you how you’re currently listed and/or not listed at all. At a minimum, you should do Google Places for Business, Bing Places, and Yahoo Local, along with Infogroup ExpressUpdateUSA, Acxiom, and Factual. Ensure that your Name, Address, and Phone number (your “NAP”) are accurate, and that you’re listed in as many relevant categories as those sites allow.

#2. NAP Citations in HTML format

List your business’s full NAP information on your website, in HTML format.
It’s critical that Google’s web crawler identifies your website as being associated with the physical location you submitted to Google Places for Business. The best way to do this is to make sure the same information you submitted appears in HTML — especially on your homepage, if you’re a single-location business, or on each location’s contact pages for multi-location businesses.

#3. Customer Reviews

Ask your customers for reviews. Reviews are becoming an increasingly important ranking factor in Local. Incentives for customers that leave reviews are generally frowned upon by search engines, but Yelp is the only one that doesn’t like businesses to ask their customers to review them. So ignore Yelp and focus on more business-friendly sites.

#4. Geographic Keywords in Title Tags

Include basic product/service and geographic keywords in your website’s Title Tags.
These are still the most important on-page elements that Google looks at to determine what kind of business you operate, and what city/town/region/state you serve.

#5. Local Community Engagement

Make sure you engage your local community. Whether that’s through being a member of community organizations like chambers of commerce, neighborhood associations, etc., donating to charities or local schools, hosting fundraisers at your place of business, all of these things lead to:

1. Shares and mentions of your place of business on blogs and other social media.
2. Links back to your website. These shares, mentions, and links are like “votes” for your business, and are one of the most important ranking factors in Local Search.

So, there you have it – the top strategies that you should follow so that your customers can easily find you online. Needless to say that these strategies will help you increase your business by getting you more traffic online from customers who can walk in and do business with you.

What about you? Do you have a local SEO tip to share that has worked for you? Please share with us in the comments below.

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This year’s Search Marketing Expo was one of the most productive and informative conferences I have attended in a long time. Danny Sullivan and the folks at Third Door Media put on an excellent show. I received the latest industry news from sources that I trust and respect, got an opportunity to network with my peers and also came back with several ideas for blog posts. The best part is that I also managed to get a number of interviews lined up with some of the leading experts in our field and will share them with you in the coming weeks.

Danny Sullivan addressing the audience at SMX East, 2013 in Manhattan, earlier this week.

As digital marketers, we are used to the constantly evolving world of online marketing. However, as far as SEO is concerned things seem to be evolving every day. Listening to industry leaders talk about Search, the future of SEO, current and future trends is really about understanding where the future of intenet marketing lies.

We’ll examine the future of SEO by looking at 5 important threads running through the entire conference.

#1. Local SEO

A common theme seemed to be the importance of local optimization for local businesses. One of the best presentations that I attended was on local SEO. There were several panelists and I really enjoyed the presentation by David Mihm, Director of Local Search Strategy at Moz and founder of getlisted.org.

Here are some key points that he covered:

• Every local business should be optimizing their sites for local Search . In addition to being on all the local directories, optimize your site for local SEO with structured data.
• Your NAPW (Name, Address, Phone Number, website) citations need to be accurate, across the online world.
• Be where your competitors (often referred to as the “7 pack” of local listings in Google) are. Use their exact NAPW and copy it into the Google search box to see where they are listed.
• Make sure you are listed with tier 1 and tier 2 providers. Tier 1 providers are local search data providers such as Neustar Localese, Infogroup and Acxiom. Tier 2 providers are local directories such as Yellow Pages, Kudzo, Mojopages. Listings in local directories count as local links.
• Links from local, high authority sites is also a good signal for search engines, as it proves you to be a legitimate business and an authority in your community.

#2. Semantic Search

Not surprisingly, there were several discussions and a separate track for semantic search. Google and other search engines are using semantic search to bring the searcher the most relevant results.
Semantic search systems try to understand the context of the search and use many factors such as location, intent, variations of words, synonyms, natural language queries to produce results.

Knowledge Graph

With Google’s Knowledge Graph and last month’s announcement of the Hummingbird update, the search world is changing from single keywords to relevancy of content. Information in the knowledge graph is derived from several sources that include Wikipedia, Freebase and CIA World factbook.

Hummingbird Update

The Hummingbird update algorithm is also based on semantic search, focusing on user intent versus individual search terms. According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, in his article, FAQ: All About The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm, “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query – the whole sentence or conversation or meaning – is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.”

Entity Search

Another excellent presentation was all about entity search in SMX’s semantic track. Entity search and the entire subject of semantic search are the topic for an upcoming blog post as we will delve deeper into the concepts and what it means for us and the future of internet marketing.

This is a major shift away from traditional SEO practices where the focus was on a single keyword. SEO’s today need even more to work closely with their clients to come up with different queries the user would type in to come into the site. Long tail keywords, focus terms all give your content more relevancy. It’s not a single keyword, but having search terms that search engines would expect to find about in your document. It’s also about long tail queries and their relevancy to your content.

#3. Structured Data Mark-Up

I heard time and time again about the importance of structured data. There were several presentations on preparing your site for structured data. Since structured data is a joint initiative by Google, Bing and Yahoo you will score big with all search engines if you use structured data.
Local businesses, customer reviews, medical information such as drug types, disease types, events are just some of the types of content that will largely benefit with structured data mark-up. You can find all you need to learn abut structured data at schema.org. This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.

#4. Importance of Google Authorship and Google+

Here’s what I learned about Google authorship and growing your Google+ account

• Not having Google Authorship is only going to hurt you. It’s also time to start taking author rank seriously. Even though Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, said that they have not yet incorporated author rank in their algorithm, many presenters talked about author rank and how this influences rankings. Currently, author rank is loosely determined by your engagement level on Google+, the number of +1’s you get, your number of circlers, comments per post and authority on non-Google networks.
• I also found out that Google+ profiles have page rank and having a Google+ profile establishes trust with Google.
• Also, if influencers have you in their circles, that boosts up your author rank.
• Google+ profiles have page rank and the more links you have to your Google+ profile, the better the page performs.
• Make sure that you have a link back to your Google+ profile from all the blogs that you write and guest-post on.

#5. Social Signals and Search Results

There were several mentions throughout the session of the current search and social integration. In the Top Social Tactics for Search Marketers session, Debra Mastaler offered these tips:

• Finding influencers in your niche can really help your marketing efforts.
• There are several tools that you will help you identify your influencers such as Klout, Facebook, LinkedIn, Followerwonk, Alltop and G+Data.

All panelists agreed that social is playing a bigger part in search results because it offers fresh content, personalization and it’s real information from real people… all things the search engines want to provide.

To sum it up, SEO is now more than ever before, part of an integrated marketing mix. With Google authorship so big, SEO specialists need to be content marketers and bloggers to build up their authority. They need to align themselves closer with social media. They need to know the technical aspects of the web and they also need to be good sales people. Clients need to work closer with SEO specialists to figure out the goals of the users. While SEO specialists cannot be expected to be experts in all these fields, the more knowledge they have of these fields the more they will be able to help their clients achieve engagement, conversions and traffic.

There have been plenty of content-related changes in the SEO industry lately, but technical SEO is one area where changes have been slow to come and where the basics are still relevant. Here is a short primer for those who may not be familiar with the technology or may need a quick refresher check-list.

Whether you provide content as a full-time employee, a freelancer, or a site owner, whether you deal with content as a writer, or editor, publisher or blogger, you stand to benefit from knowing the technical basics of website optimization of SEO.

The two areas you need to wrestle in technology are meta tags and roadblocks. Neither one has traditionally been the purview of the writer, editor, or publisher, but they are often overlooked by programmers and designers and often SEO practitioners are more worried about keywords and links and adword buys, so they ignore these, too. Here’s what you need to know.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are found in the website source code and other than the title, aren’t visible on the website page itself. To view them, right click on the Chrome page and “view source.” (How to view source code on IE, Firefox, and Opera.)

Title tag

Every page needs one and it has to be unique. Treat it like a subject line, not like a movie or book title. Keywords should be at the front, company names, if used, should be at the end. The title tags should be a maximum length of 70 characters. If your site is a creative effort like a story or movie page, using the story title makes sense.

Description tag

Every page should have one and it has to be unique. If you don’t write one, the search engine will create one for you. If the search engine doesn’t like yours it will create one, often from the content on your page. Limit your description tag to 150 characters including spaces and punctuation.

Keywords list tag

There has been a lot of talk recently on the relevance of this tag. Google does not use this tag anymore for rankings and some argue that showing your keywords to competitors is not a great idea. However, Yahoo and Bing still look at your keywords.

Some say you need commas between keywords and you should list all uses of the keyword; I have found success not using commas and using keywords only once, keeping related words together. Probably not worth spending a lot of time on this tag. In most blogs, the keywords list is called “tags” and these are important to add.

Alt tags

Search engines cannot read and do not notice images or graphics, even with words. Thus, to get indexing value from them, you need to add alt tags that include your keywords. This is especially important when a photo or graphic appears at the top of the page or when a site or blog is image heavy.

Image tags

Be sure to name images and graphics with keywords, not strings of letters or numbers that don’t serve any purpose. “Image001.gif” is wasteful for SEO.

Media tags

Same thing for video and audio tags – name them with suitable keywords.

Technical Roadblocks that Prevent Search Engines from Indexing Your Site

Roadblocks are the things done on a website that get in the way of productive indexing. Sometimes they are inadvertent; sometimes they result from lazy coding or running out of time to fix them. Often, developers or designers are simply not aware – and that’s where you can save your employer or client some headaches, suggesting a fix.

Excessive coding up front

I see this one all the time. Programmers load JavaScript and CSS coding at the top of the page above any text. Search engine spiders give up! Or they get bogged down reading code and penalize the site for slowing down the site. It doesn’t have to be that way. Coding can be created in a separate file and a line added to the page telling the browser where to find it.

Content lower on the page

I see this often, too. Look in the source code to see where the actual headlines and body text begin. Place content as high on the page as possible so the search engine sees it right away. You want the first content they read to be your keywords, not the list of navigation, not the ads on the left, not the garbage lines at the top, not the quotes on the right.

Left click and scroll down on your web page to highlight everything. Right click on the highlighted page and click “copy” (or Control + C). Paste into Notepad. That will show you the indexable text and in what order.

Keywords priority

Be sure your keywords are as close to the front of your headlines and body text as possible to make the most of them. Don’t force it unnaturally, but definitely don’t hide them. Also, make sure you mention your keywords at the bottom of your text, because search engines index from the top and from the bottom.

Heavy on visuals

Unless your site is an art site, you can’t afford to go too heavy on images or graphics. Certainly, you want some visuals, including images, graphics, and videos. But search engines don’t index them. When you do use visuals, don’t top the page with them and tag them with meta tags (see above). A page with fewer than 250 words won’t index well, and a page with fewer than 500 words may not be providing its readers with much value. There is no magical formula for how many words to publish, but search engines do look for value.

Keywords in File names, domain names, etc.

Use keywords in your file names, domain names, and URLs, including in blogs. Avoid random number/letter combinations in URLs as you often find with content management systems.

Better platform

If you have the choice of where to host your blog, host it on the server with your website and use the website domain for the blog’s URL. For instance, I have a Word Press business blog hosted on my business website and its URL is http://e-messenger-consulting.com/blog/ which is better for SEO than e-messenger-consulting.wordpress.com. As an alternative, you can host on Word Press and redirect to a private domain URL.

Link efficacy

There is no use in having a link that doesn’t work or that stops working. Check your links periodically (there is software to help with this) and when you discover broken links, find the new URL for it, replace it with a new link, or eliminate the link altogether.

Duplicate content

Search engines abhor duplicate content, including disguised duplicate content. Google Panda was created to penalize sites for duplicate content (among other low-quality content issues). If you publish duplicate content, get rid of duplicate content and link (or 301 redirect) to one article if possible. If someone else is duplicating your content and refuses to delete it, use canonical tags in your URL to indicate originality. If product copy duplicates for differences in size, color, or other SKU variations, talk to your programmers about options to avoid duplication.

XML site map

An XML site map, especially for a complex website, helps the search engine figure out your content plan and aids indexing. Without one, it’s up to the search engine to figure it out. Search engines all subscribe to a single XML site-map convention and can help you create one that will work for all search engines.

Robot.txt files

Keep these to a minimum – one is best. Too many confuse the robots. These should just let the indexer know exclusions to indexing your site.

Depending on your role in the organization, many of these may not be within your control. But whatever your role, knowing about these and being able to offer strategic advice should put you in a good position to help build traffic to your content. Being able to provide well written tags when you hand over content is often a valued added service.

If you are serious about optimizing your business to increase its online visibility, then local SEO is the best way to increase foot traffic as it introduces your business to prospects who can walk in and directly do business with you.

The recent changes to local SEO by Google will allow you to get more business, gain more leads and prospects. Sounds too good to be true? Well, be the judge yourself after reading about these exciting changes to local SEO. Don’t forget to leave a comment telling me what you think of these changes.

Local Carousel Search

Most industry experts are calling Google’s new way of displaying local search results a game-changer to local SEO. The local carousel is a horizontal strip of images with a black background at the top of the SERP. If the quantity of results are too many to fit the screen, the carousel slides from left to right. Although, currently all results are not displayed in carousel mode, it’s the way most local results will be displayed soon. The carousel occupies prime real estate and in terms of positioning is placed higher than even paid search.

How you can benefit: Since local carousel occupies prime real estate and is attractive, prospects tend to click on these results, first. It is even more crucial now than it ever was before to have a good pic and good reviews. Images are first pulled from your Google+ profile.

Local carousel for a Google search on restaurants in Manhattan.

Helpouts

Google announced just last week that it’s testing Helpouts, a service that connects people who need help with the right expert, consultant or business. Helpouts uses Google+ hangouts to connect people with the consultants and experts. The service is currently in testing and will be available soon. Here are the 8 categories that Helpouts will initially cover: Home & Garden, Computers & Electronics, Health & Counseling, Nutrition & Fitness, Fashion & Beauty, Art & Music, Cooking and Education. Google is serious about keeping up the quality of the featured experts. In order to create a helpout, you need to list your qualifications, certificates, training and experience. Helpouts can either be charged (with payment handled via Google Wallet), or for free. Google will take a platform fee of 20 percent for any paid Helpouts, which includes credit card transaction and Wallet fees.

How you can benefit: Local businesses and global businesses will benefit as physical location will no longer be that important. But if you are within a prospect’s geographical location, that prospect could easily set up an initial consultation before deciding to do business with you.

Google City Experts

Google’s new City Expert program recognizes the most active people who write reviews and upload photos of local places. You can sign-up for Google city experts programs and receive access to local events and recognition online. Currently, the program is being tested only in major cities but will eventually expand to include most cities around the globe.
How you can benefit: Reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, Bing and Yahoo help local businesses get more exposure and build their online credibility. A 2012 study published on Search Engine Land shows that 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Verifying a Google+ local business page should be the first task for any local SEO campaign and maintaining a strong presence on Google+ is a must for any business. It’s also important for local SEO to increase your influence in the Google+ community as Google will value your content better.

Schema Mark-up for Geo-based SEO

To pinpoint the exact location of your business can be a tricky proposition and using the structured data mark-up that is a joint initiative by Google, Yahoo and Bing makes it extremely easy for search engines to understand the latitude and longitude of your business. Although, structured data has been around for at least a couple of years, very few local businesses are using it to geographically mark-up their sites and gain the benefits of higher rankings.

The important thing with schema and with any local citations are that your contact information and geographic location should be listed correctly.

The Local Business section of Schema.org has a variety of categories that businesses can implement as part of the footer or contact page of their website, including address, phone, fax, operating hours, and even accepted payment types.

The schema markup is displayed via HTML div tags. Here’s an example of geo-schema mark-up:

</p> <div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Plumber”> <span itemprop=”name”><strong>Plumbers in Exton, PA</strong></span></p> <div itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”> <span itemprop=”streetAddress”>310 Lancaster Ave</span><br /> <span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Exton</span>,<br /> <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>PA</span><br /> <span itemprop=”postalCode”>19425</span> </div> <p>Phone: <span itemprop=”telephone”>610-123-1234</span><br /> URL of Map</div> <p>

In this example for a plumber, the only information that is displayed on the website is the information between the span and div tags. Visitors won’t be able to tell that a business is using schema unless they view the source code of the website.

The ‘itemprop’ in the span tag identifies the schema markup property for that piece of information. All available properties are shown on Schema.org in their applicable category.

Reviews and Testimonials
Using schema in tandem with in-site reviews and testimonials helps search engines find the information quickly and display reviews of a company’s product and services on search engine results pages:

</p> <div itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"> <span itemprop="name">Value purchase</span> &#8211;<br /> by <span itemprop="author">Lucas</span>,<br /> <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-03-25">March 25, 2011 </p> <div itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating"> <meta itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"/><br /> <span itemprop="ratingValue">4</span>/<br /> <span itemprop="bestRating">5</span>stars </div> <p><span itemprop="description">Great microwave for the price. It is small and fits in my apartment.</span> </div> <p>

(example from schema.org)

How you can benefit: In addition to using schema for on-site reviews and testimonials, local business websites should also link to their online review pages on sites like Yahoo, Bing, Yelp and Google. Having links to these profiles on the local business website will help them get indexed faster. Since Google, Yahoo and Bing all index schema mark-up quicker, it makes sense to have this for local search.