SEO for Local Businesses

Foremost Media Local SEO for Businesses

Every day more and more people are putting away that big yellow phonebook and turning to local internet searches in their hometown. According to a recent article published on EntireWeb.com, research has shown that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of households do some kind of search for a local product or serviceEVERY SINGLE DAY! What does this mean for your local business? It means you need to be in the right places when people are searching for your business.

"It's a GOOD THING that you're a small business, because that means we can position you to compete against only those businesses within your area, not any national businesses or coporations" 

3 Steps to Local Business Success

Site Optimization Just as any SEO program, local or not, you need to make sure that your website is doing everything it can to be detected by seach engines when someone in your local area is looking for a business with the services you offer. We make sure your site has the location and service area of your business in all the places the Google, Bing and Yahoo look for. We're talking page titles, footers, meta tags and much more that is imperative that you include your address and service area. We help you find the keywords that people are searching for already within your industry and transform your pages and site structure to conform to the things that search engines look for when ranking these terms. Doing this is your way of telling the search engine "I'm right here! Now let's work together to find locals looking for my services and goods!" "I'm right here! Now let's work together to find locals looking for my services and goods!" -Keyword Research & Analysis -Page Titles -Header and Footer Adjustments -Link Building

Social Media It doesn’t matter where you go, Facebook and Twitter are EVERYWHERE! Most local companies we talk to think this is stuff for the big wigs at giant corporations and thehigh money rollers on Wall Street…WRONG! If social media is built for anyone, it’s built perfectly for local businesses like yours. Running a local business is all about building and maintaining a good relationship with your customers and what better a place then being able to let them know about specials, sales and anything new then in their own home or on their smart phone.  Facebook is making it possible to offer discounts and coupons for those who frequent your store, sent directly to their computer or phone. Being able to reach out and interact with your customers when they aren’t even in your store or at your shop is extremely powerful. So let us help you build your Facebook and Twitter pages and we’ll show you the power of maintaining relationships with customers outside the walls of your business, and how easy it can be.

Google Places Getting Found Online by People in Your Community -Help customers find your business on Google -Show photos, respond to reviews, offer coupons and more -Get insights to make better business decisions When you search Google or Yahoo for a product or service with location phrases in your keywords (Janesville web design, Rock County heating & cooling, etc.), you will see the search engines display a map at the top of the search results with up to 10 “Local” search results. Below is an example of a local search on Google for “Janesville Wisconsin Web design.” The first ten listings are local Janesville Web Design companies, followed by natural listings. New Features of Google Local Search Google Tags: Want to help your business stand out from the competition? Add Google Tags, a new advertising feature, to your Google Places Local Search account: Tags are yellow markers that allow you the business owner to promote important aspects of their businesses. Scroll over tags on Google or click the sponsored link to view coupons, photos, or other select features. Get more customers  Save time advertising  Control your budget  Service Area: Let potential customers see your service area to show the reach of your company’s services and products Some companies operate from a home address, but offer services and products far beyond the reach of the business’ front door. Now you are no longer are you limited to only list your business location and address. You can now show customers searching for your services your service area customizable specifically for your business by location or distance from your business address. We offer all of this for a one time fee of $425! Sign up for our Local SEO package today and start attracting more local customers! (608) 758-4841 and ask for our SEO Expert Aaron Manogue!   For more information on getting started with Google Local and to start getting your business found online locally, contact Foremost Media at (608)758‐4841 or to speak with our Social Media & Search Engine Marketing expert Aaron Manogue, email him at amanogue@foremostmedia.com to see what Foremost Media can do for your local business TODAY!

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The Best Link Building Letter Ever

Let me preface this post by saying that building good quality links to your website is one the most effective things you can do to get better search engine rankings.  Apart from the actual content on your site much of where your positioned in the search engine rankings depends on the number of good quality related links to your site.

Here at Foremost Media we manage a lot of websites for a lot of different companies and there is hardly a day that goes by when I don't get an email from someone working on a link building campaign.  Typically those folks look at the "Whois" information (Domain Registration Records) for one of our clients sites and some how end up in my email box (Technical Contact).  Most link campaign letters sound something like this:

BAD LINK BUILDING EMAIL BODY: 
Reciprocal link request

BAD LINK BUILDING EMAIL BODY: 
I'm the webmaster of a MyWebsiteHere website at www.mywebsitehere.com

We are interested in putting a link to your site and we ask in return that you put a link to our website with the following information: (Info Deleted for blog post) 

Please give us a title, a description and an address to link to. We will put a link to your website, in the relevant region, as soon as you agree to the exchange 

If you have questions don't hesitate to contact us and please identify the website you are representing if you are a third party representative.

Today I received a really well written link request from a company claiming to be from a "Cancer Center Advocacy Website" (A specific type of cancer that has a lot of advertising around it):

GOOD EMAIL LINK BUILDING SUBJECT LINE (Almost):
Fire Sfaety Resource (They Spelled Fire Safety Wrong but other then that the letter was really pretty good)

GREAT EMAIL LINK BUILDING BODY:
Hi,
I was browsing through state fire associations online and I like that you have a section dedicated to fire safety/ health resources at myclientswebsiteaddress.com  (One of our fire department clients).

My name is Real Persons Name (I deleted it for the purpose of this post but a real name is a nice touch) and I'm the Public Awareness Coordinator for the "Cancer Center" (Name Changed Here). We understand that local fire departments are tasked with keeping the community safe. Thus, as a public service, we are teaming up with fire departments across the country to help educate the nation about the dangers of asbestos and how to avoid it. This can include how to spot asbestos (pictures), common locations, how to test the air, and even asbestos information specific to your community. 

I noticed you currently have some mesothelioma information on your site. I would be honored if you would explore our site, provide us with feedback, and consider using our site as a resource on your links page as an additional resource.

Anything you can do to help us spread awareness would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for the information you provide to your community. I look forward to hearing from you and have a great afternoon! 

Best Regards,
Real Persons Name (Once again I deleted the real name)    
Public Awareness Director

I can't confirm or deny this next statement but my guess is that the "Cancer Center" is not a real place but rather a website built with the sole intention of generating leads for lawyers.  While the site does contains a ton of great info on Mesothelioma it also contains some not so subtle links to receive a free informational packet on Mesothelioma.  Anyway, that's not the point of this post so let's get back to the good link building email.  Here are the key things I think this email does right:

1.  It's not a hard sell- They appear to be offering me some help.
2.  It's from a real person with a real title.
3.  It's actually targeted at a page on my clients site that is relevant.
4.  The email is actually tailored to my clients industry (Fire Departments).

I hope you find this post interesting.  I would guess that the odds of successful link building would be much higher for the "Cancer Center" then the firsts email example I gave.  For the record I'm not a big fan of spam emails to webmasters requesting links but as I said before incoming links are very important to search engine marketing.  My best advice to you is "If you really want to build good links build GREAT CONTENT and folks will link to it naturally!"

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Multiple Language Sites Done Right

Over the past year the Foremost Media team has completed over a half dozen multi language website development projects. At the start of each of these projects one of the most common questions we receive is "Should we build the site with all the languages on the same domain or you use local domains for each language (example.de, example.it,example.nl, etc.)?"

Google's Matt Cutts answers how webmasters should handle local content of a website.

One message that we got loud and clear form this video is that if your thinking about going the easy route and using an auto-translation tool to generate your translation websites Google might consider that spam.

According to Matt (Google) when ever possible, it's best to put your translated content on separate international domains. Doing this sends a clear message to the search engines about what language/country your website is targeted at.

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QR Codes Have Come Of Age

So how is your company using QR Codes?  Do you know what a QR Code is?  I recently read an article about how over half of the connections made to the internet on any given day in 2012 will be on a mobile device.  We have been using QR Codes in our written proposals for the last few months.  Below is an example of one of the little graphics we use in our presentations:

The time has come to take another look at these unique codes.  Your going to be seeing a lot of these guys!

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SEO Basics Episode 1 Keword Research | Foremost Media

SEO Basics Episode 1 Key Word Research | Foremost Media


Tune in and watch the Foremost Media team as we break down the steps involved in getting your site to rank well on the search engines. In this episode we discuss keyword research. Key word research is one of the first steps in the search engine optimization process and is often overlooked by webmasters. Jon Ballard breaks down some of the keyword basics and provides links to several tools used by our professional Search Engine Marketers to do Keyword Research.

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Have a Google Adwords campaign? Beware of "Invalid Clicks" or "Click Fraud"

Recently we had a client who we run a large Adwords campaign for that asked us, "Why are all of these credits to my account appearing on my statement for Google Adwords as "Invalid Clicks"? An "Invalid Click" is defined by Google as:

"Invalid click activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings, and for which we decide not to charge the advertiser. This includes, but is not limited to, clicks or impressions generated by a publisher clicking on his own ads, a publisher encouraging clicks on his ads, automated clicking tools or traffic sources, robots, or other deceptive software"

So since we clearly aren't going through and clicking on our own ads to run our cost up, what does this mean? Clearly there are certainly going to be instances that people click the ads and accidentally double click them or maybe they click the ad and then bookmark your page, meaning the cookie that Google puts into their browser on that page turns into a "click" each time they go back to your page.

But then there's the darker side of it all. Our client sat down with us and went over his Adwords invoice and there were typical "invalid click" credits to his account for $.10-.60 at a time.  These are obviously from the innocent double clicks or something of that nature. Then we spotted a few credits that seemed extremely suspicious to us. Two credits between $100-150; a considerable amount of money especially considering daily budgets are rarely set any higher than $50-100/day.

This meant that someone, more than likely a competitor, was purposely going and clicking our clients ads hundreds even thousands of times in order to reach their daily budget, thus shutting down the ads for the day.  They could have been doing so in many ways: paying someone to sit there and click the ads (Yes, there are companies out there that pay people to do this), sitting there themselves and doing it, or paying for a bot to go through and automatically click the ads until they don't appear anymore.

The client was very upset by this (and rightfully so) and wanted to know what action he could take to figure out who it was and take further action if necessary. Google offers little help on this end due to privacy laws in finding out who or what (bots) was causing the invalid clicks. Basically we were left with the following answer from Google (This is only a synopsis of what Google sent us):

"WHO IS CLICKING ON YOUR ADS : We are not able to release any information on the users that are clicking on your ads. However, if you have access to your site's web logs, they will often contain information on the IP addresses of the users that are clicking on your ads. You can obtain this information from your webmaster. 

HOW GOOGLE DEALS WITH INVALID CLICKS : The security of AdWords advertisers is a top priority for Google. Please be assured that we will continue to monitor all clicks on your ads to prevent abuse. For more information about the steps we take to combat invalid click activity, please visithttp://www.google.com/adwords/adtrafficquality/overview..html"

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How secure are your passwords?

Hackers are getting more sophisticated all the time.   Let's look at a few common passwords and the maximum time it would take a hacker to figure out each password using a simple key search attack:

Passwords using just numbers (0123456789):

• 2-4 number passwords etc: Less then 1 Second
• 5-6 number passwords:  About 10 seconds
• 7 number passwords: 17 Minutes 

Passwords using the standard alphabet all lower case or all upper case (abcdefghijklmnopqurstuvwxyz):

• 3 letter passwords: Less then 2 Seconds
• 4 letter passwords:  Less then 46 Seconds
• 5 letter passwords: 20 Minutes
• 6 letter passwords: 8.5 Hours
• 7 letter passwords: 9 days

Passwords using a combination of numbers and letters all upper case and all lower case or all upper case ( 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqurstuvwxyz):

• 3 character passwords or less: 4 Seconds or less
• 5 character passwords: 1.5 Hours

 Passwords using letters and numbers with mixed upper and lower case combinations:

• 4 characters: 24.5 Minutes
• 5 characters: 1 Day
• 7 characters: 11 Years

Below is a list of some of the most common passwords used on the internet:

• 123456
• 12345
• pass
• iloveyou
• password
• abc123 

By avoiding common passwords and using a combination of letters and numbers in both upper and lower case you can greatly reduce your risk of getting hacked.  Throw in a unusual character like a $ or ! and your odds are even less of being hacked.  Most experts recommend a minimum of 7 characters as well.

Learn more about password strength here

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