More Favorite Posts - Local Search and Minnesota Combined

I’ve been doing more “favorite” posts lately, and there’s a reason. There are great posts out there. Let’s share them.

This time it’s a bit unique. Often, the favorites are Minnesota-based Internet marketing posts. Sometimes, they’re about local search in general. This time, it’s about Minnesota-based local search posts.

First, Jennifer Lind talks about the root of local search & where it could take us.

Local search… is it the new way we search or the old way? It’s both. Local search connects us to our community and to our neighbors. The old way of search is now online and it will continue to develop further than it ever could in the traditional means.

It is in fact both. Many people will use the Internet to search for products and services to go offline and physically make a purchase. Jennifer makes some great points including different online options, actually touching a product before making a purchase (this is kinda’ important), and opportunities for local customers to be involved online with businesses they purchase from.

Aaron Weiche has some cool local SEO results with his new company, Five Technology. They have five SEO initiatives so far. I really like number three, which is to create content for users first and search engines second. On a side note, see Barb Prindle. She’s is simply a fantastic writer! Five Technology is doing some very cool things so far (including video optimization) and you will see more of them in the future.

My rollerblading partner (who leaves me in the dust) Ed Kohler gives some insight on where offline shopping beats online today. It includes dealing with disappointment, negotiable pricing, proactive help, and bundling opportunities.

Ed, let’s get on the Greenway and rollerblade!

Naymz Doing AdWords on Your Name?

Maybe I’m the last kid on the block to see this but it strikes me as a bit strange.

I am in the naymz network I guess, but was surprised to see this. It can give the assumption that I would actually pay for a PPC ad for users to see my Naymz profile that I’ve never really done much with.

For those unfamiliar with Naymz, it’s an online reputation management and networking tool where members can say nice things about each other and get a good rep score because of it.

I don’t know if it’s clever or annoying. Any thoughts? In Naymz? Google your name and there’s a good chance they’ll have an ad in your name.

Update - Thanks for the comment Tom. That explains it. I should check out my Naymz email more often

Favorite Posts of the Week - Search Engine Guide Style

I’ve been both fortunate and honored to be a guest writer for Search Engine Guide since late 2005 (Jennifer and Robert, I’ll write more - really!!)

Since 2005, there have been some great writers that have jumped on board. I’ve met a few of them and hope to meet more the next time I hit a search marketing conference. It seems fitting to give SEG some (well-deserved) love back and provide a Search Engine Guide favorite posts of the week.

The first is from Manoj Jasra titled common web analytics issues. Manoj makes some great points, including a paragraph about the wrong data going to the wrong people. Depending on whether your client contacts are marketing managers, CEOs, or Internet marketing departments should give you an idea of what type of data you can provide them.

Next, David Wallace writes on Matt McGee’s local search workshop presentation during the recent Small Business Unleashed conference. The post is quite lengthy, but it sounds like the presentation was too at 90 minutes! Kudos to both Matt and David. Matt talks about maps, SEO, PPC, local search engines, and even provides a relevant lists of industry sites. It’s a great post! Just read it.

Liana Evans is also at the conference blogging on Sage Lewis’ building a community workshop presentation. During the presentation Sage talks about different community channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Digg. He begins with YouTube and how easy it is to use, and how to properly optimize and tag your videos. He goes on explaining how you can promote this with other social sites such as Facebook. Lastly, he stresses the importance on participating yourself.

Search Engine Marketing Firm Gets $100,000 Fine - What to Look for in a Search Marketer

Just like in many industries, you have your honest companies and shysters alike. The search engine marketing industry certainly has plenty of both. One of the latter just got a $100,000 fine for misrepresenting their clients in a number of ways.

Fellow Search Engine Guide blogger Sage Lewis has a video post that mentions the culprits, and the Washington State Attorney General office announced their petition to enforce a court order against them in November, 2007.

This post isn’t to “out” the culprits, but to hopefully give some tips to non-industry business owners and marketers who get pitched from search marketing firms.

Many (not all) will pitch “rankings” for keywords related to your business and will often offer some sort of “top 10″ guarantee. I actually don’t have a problem with this since savvy sales professionals know that’s what potential clients often want to hear. The problem is that rankings simply do not automatically equal net profits.

There’s one word that most of these search engine marketing firms tend to forget:

Marketing.

Yes, marketing.

It seems strange, but it does happen. What are the business overall goals for marketing online?

I hung out with some industry friends tonight and we had a pretty big discussion on SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Remember that from beginning college marketing classes? Something so simple as understanding your business SWOTs can definitely help in a search marketing campaign.

There’s another word that is sometimes forgotten in pitches.

Analytics.

This is key. There are plenty of decent analytics packages out there. There are great and worthy ones that can set a price of over 50k a year. Some analytics experts will disagree, but Google Analytics works well for many companies… and it’s free.

Analytics is crucial. It can measure how users navigate your site, how you can continually improve on not just your search marketing efforts, but your usability, design, and development. The possibilities are almost endless. This has everything to do with marketing. Not just search marketing, but marketing in general.

Net Neutrality - Here’s How You Can Show Support

I’ve written about net neutrality a couple times and I can’t stress the importance of it enough, especially for small businesses. Big telco and cable execs would love to be able to restrict Web access to sites that would benefit their pocketbooks while disrupt pocketbooks for small businesses and those who market online. Here’s a way for you to help.

Check out this ClickZ article regarding net neutrality and next week’s hearings. Then, you can sign a petition to support net neutrality.

Favorite Posts of the Week - All Local - With a Mapspam and Video Twist

As with all other favorite posts of the week, this one is all local… with a twist. Instead of being all local to Minnesota, it’s all local to local search marketing. These blogs would be included in the blogroll if they were located in Minnesota.

Many know that I’m not a big fan of fake user reviews as I wrote about it on Search Engine Guide. I’m also not a fan of “Mapspam”, which basically artificially manipulates search results in places such as Google Maps and Yahoo Local.

Earlier this week, Andrew Shotland from the Local SEO Guide wrote about a company called SEO Champion who spammed his local Las Vegas company in Google Maps results in many cities across the county. Now it looks like these results have been removed. Kudos to both Google and Andrew.

Mike Blumenthal writes on how Yahoo affiliate Mapspam is now gone. For anyone unfamiliar, these local results have been loaded with affiliate sites to local businesses such as hotels. Affiliate sites don’t offer nearly as much value as the actual business sites. Affiliate spam isn’t totally gone, but it’s good to see that Yahoo is taking action.

Finally, Mike Boland from The Kelsey Group writes on how local search meets video search with the company PixelFish. It’s a great read. To me, the concept is including local videos in search engine marketing to bring online customers to your physical door.

For those in the Twin Cities area, Localmn doesn’t currently offer video search solutions, but I do believe that Five Technology does. Every few months, I get to hang with the VP and founder, Aaron Weiche, and we talk about this often. There are a lot of opportunities to make compelling videos, and if done right they can become viral as well.

How to Use Negative Keywords to Help Your PPC Campaigns

Negative keyword options have been around for years, but not many advertisers use them to help ensure targeted traffic. This post is to help identify negative keywords, how to easily place them in both Google and Yahoo campaigns, and how to find new ones in your analytics program.

For anyone unfamiliar with negative keywords, these are the keywords that you do not want to show up in your PPC ads once users perform a search query. A few common starting ones are:

• free
• download
• cheap
• ebay

Basically, if you sell red staplers your ad can be blocked by users searching for “free red staplers”.

Finding additional negative keywords can be as easy as tracking your analytics. Whatever analytics you use, find what keywords that you’re getting traffic for that does not provide quality traffic and include them as negative keywords. The amount of these words you find can be amazing and they’re very easy to find. This can be updated on a weekly or monthly basis in as little as a few minutes.

While finding negative keywords is easy, implementing them can be a bit tricker depending if you’re advertising on Google or Yahoo.

In Google, it’s pretty straightforward. You can go into your campaign, click on the “tools” tab and you’ll see the option that says “edit campaign negative keywords”.

Here is some more information on negative keywords, straight from Google.

Yahoo is a little more tricky. Once you log into your account and select a campaign, you can then click on an ad group. On the right site, you can see a blue box that says “ad group settings”. In the drop down, select “tactic settings”.

From there, you’ll see a box to show “excluded keywords” (negative keywords) and you can now implement them. Keep in mind this is done at the ad group level. Here is some newer information on excluded keywords, straight from Yahoo.