For the September Philadelphia SEO Grail Meetup, we had two excellent presentations that offered insights that everyone can use. To start, Ian Howells from True Action Network presented an analysis of click-through for search engine results that achieve a first page ranking. To conclude the evening, member Mike King offered a Philly-centric look at local SEO that offered some solid tips that will help businesses and individuals alike maximize their performance in the local SERPs.

Search Click Through Rates

Surprising SEO CTR DataThere has always been some speculation about just how much traffic the various search engine positions deliver and Ian provided a thought provoking analysis. Using anonymized traffic data for over 310 million impressions for large, ecommerce clients including both organic and paid search, he clarified current estimations based on the click through data leaked in 2006 from AOL. Here are several of the big takeaways:

#1 Position is Less Valuable – In short, the value of the first search engine result has declined. While hypothesized that this could be due to the inclusion of vertical search results (video, google places, etc…), the CTR has decreased by more than 30%

Total CTR Has Increased – As counter-intuitive as it may be, the CTR for first page results has actually increased since 2006. Moving from 49% to 53%, it’s clear that users are less likely to move off of the first page in search of an answer to their query.

Grabbing Real Estate is Important – With positions #2 – 5 increasing in CTR by at least 50%, it’s clear that occupying a larger number of those positions will result in more traffic. Therefore it makes sense to pursue multiple positions rather than fixate on the ranking # 1 for a given term.

In closing, this was an excellent presentation that can help everyone decide on the best strategies to pursue. If you’d like to dig into the details you can get a PDF of the presentation here: Search Click Through Rates

Put Your Business on the Map with Local Search

Put Your Business on the Map Using Local SEOLocal search has received a lot of attention recently and there’s no wonder why. The vast majority of businesses operate in a tightly defined region and it only makes sense to focus on those individuals or other businesses searching for a provider in that area. Thankfully Mike King offered some of his expertise and guidance in this area based on experiences that he’s had working with Philadelphia area businesses.

Frankly there’s too much good information in Mike’s presentation to cover it all, but I’ll attempt to hit what I think are some of the keys. If you want more, you can download Mike King’s presentation here: Put Your business on the Map with Local Search

On-Page Optimization for Local

There are relatively few areas upon which we have total control, so it only makes sense to start with on-page factors. While all best practices apply, there are several identified as being particularly important:

Keyword Research – Geotargeted keyword research using tools like Google Insights, Trends and the Adwords Keyword Tool should help identify productive keywords in your region that should be productive.

Maximize Use of Geotargeted Terms – Consistently use geotargeted terms in content, file names, anchor text and alt tags. This should include targeted regions, towns and cities that are crawlable. Moreover, include the NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) of your business throughout your site and it is critical that this is consistent not only across your site, but also with local citations, Google Places pages, etc…

Create Rich Metadata – You can get an edge over your competition by including rich metadata that describe your pages in greater detail. This can be achieved by creating & submitting a GeoSitemap to Google Webmaster tools, as well as adding microformat data that adheres to the Local Business category of Schema.org.

Create Targeted Landing Pages – If you have multiple locations or have a wide service area, you should create a targeted landing page for each area. Make sure to include a crawlable NAP.

Off-Page Optimization for Local

Once the more controllable factors have been addressed, it’s now time to look at those off-page factors that can have a big impact on your ability to rank for local search queries. Here are the big points:

Claim & Complete Listings – There are a number of local business listings including important local pages like Google Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local Yelp and others not to mention that both drive traffic to your website and act as citations for search engine ranking results. Claim these listings to ensure that they are accurate and no one else can edit them. Furthermore, make sure complete listings are submitted and ensure that all information is consistent with that found on your website.

Get Local Citations – In addition to the more popular online destinations previously mentioned, there are a wide range of additional local business directories that can strengthen your local SEO performance. Sites like SuperPages, DexKnows and Yellowbook are just a few examples. In addition, it can be helpful to review what your competition is doing and reverse engineer their approach. Once again, make sure that all submitted information is consistent with that on your website.

Encourage Reviews – Once accounts for your business have been established on various platforms, you should pursue reviews from your customers.  While you may get greater benefit from more local sites like a PhiladelphiaRestaurants.com versus Google Places, the more reviews the better. Furthermore, it may be worthwhile to offer a premium to each customer the posts a review.

Local Link Building – That’s right, there’s no getting away from building links to your site, however these should be from local sources and ideally use anchor text for your targeted location.

Participate in Social Media – Many businesses don’t participate in social media, however establishing accounts and building a presence will improve your local SEO performance. Using a service like Knowem http://knowem.com/ can help establish accounts quickly; afterward, using Google Alerts, Social Mention and Twitter Search can help you participate in any conversations about your business.

Mike’s Pro Tips

Mike offered a few of his personal favorite tips that he’s found especially useful when working with local businesses:

Build Service Area Pages – Although building locally targeted landing pages was previously mentioned, this takes it a step further. For each targeted area, build a page that includes a substantial amount of location based content that sends the search engines a strong message about the target area. There were many different approaches discussed, but the use of local news, events and weather information using RSS feeds can have a dramatic impact.

Grease the Review Wheel - Since obtaining reviews can be so important, it’s been found that segmenting your mailing list by email provider can break down the barriers to obtaining reviews. For example, users with a Hotmail address should be directed to Bing Local, Gmail users to Google Places, etc… This eliminates the necessity to register and makes it easier for users to offer a review without having to register for a new service.

In closing, this is just a summary of the presentations made at the Philadelphia SEO Grail Meetup and I encourage you to obtain the individual presentations:

Ian Howells:  Search Click Through Rates

Mike King:  Put Your Business on the Map with Local Search

Moreover, please consider joining the SEO Grail Philadelphia Meetup to get most out of presentations like these in the future.

Bill Rowland

Bill is a Senior SEO Manager at TrueAction Network, where he plans and implements SEO strategies and tactics for large ecommerce clients. In addition, Bill is the Organizer of the SEO Grail Philadelphia Meetup and Co-Organizer of PodCamp Philly.

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Two weeks ago I attended the August Meet-up for SEO Grail Philadelphia. As is the case with almost every SEO Grail meet-up I make it out to, I got to join in a discussion with some of the most talented search engine minds in the Philadelphia area. We reviewed a number of analytics platforms including the free basics like Google Analytics and some of the paid tools like Woopra and Clicky, you can find more information on the specifics of the meet-up in Bill’s follow-up post.

I participate in a handful of meet-ups in Philadelphia and can proudly say that I enjoy the liveliness of discussion and flow of new ideas that come out of SEO Grail more than any of the others. So when Bill asked me if I would write a post for SEO in Philadelphia, it was a no-brainer.

During the discussion we spoke about the varying benefits of different analytics platforms, many of which came down to real-time tracking  and custom reporting. Beyond Real-time data, I find it important to utilize tools that have some business intelligence functionality, in the case of tracking website visits and behavior, I like to look for things like conversion tracking, lead scoring, and ways to tie back marketing campaigns to actual revenue.

One of the ways I have been able to do this is though the use of call tracking. There are a number of platforms and services that offer the ability to track phone calls and tie these back to website visits. The one I prefer, mostly due to it’s low cost and simple functionality, is Hosted Numbers.

Hosted Numbers

Hosted Numbers markets itself as a call forwarding service, but it is much more than that. One of the key pieces of functionality that they do not promote enough is the ability to have your local or toll-free number hooked up to ping a URL. The benefit of this is if you are running specific marketing campaigns, you can purchase a local or toll-free number for each campaign (they’re only $7.95/mo) and then have incoming calls to these numbers ping individual URL’s on a website. The practical application of which is phone call conversion tracking right inside your analytics reports.

For example, let’s say you are running 3 AdWords campaigns to test conversion rates for different messaging. You want to track which messaging creates the largest number of phone calls in addition to click-through’s and on-site conversions. This is easily done by purchasing 3 phone numbers and creating a unique, hidden page (block robots) on your website for each campaign. You then configure each number within the Hosted Numbers dashboard to ping the respective URL every time a call is made to that number, BAM, you have call-tracking analytics to be sliced and diced in-line with your website visitor and AdWords data.

Lead Lander

Another platform that was mentioned at the meet-up was Lead Lander, which has some cool functionality for scoring leads and pulling down LinkedIn data, where possible. One of the easy to use functions can add some additional conversion tracking beyond Google Analytics to your user’s behavior on forms. This allows you to gather some more data on form abandonment behavior from your users and hooks easily into some of the most popular hosted form applications like Eloqua and Hubspot.

Optify

In my opinion, if you are going to spend money on SEO Software, you should expect for beefed up web analytics and intelligent lead scoring. Raven Tools is a crowd favorite, but for lead intelligence I would recommend a tool called Optify. Optify is not a cheap tool, with subscriptions usually starting around a couple hundred dollars, but it does offer a more advanced set of lead tracking and analysis tools.

My favorite tools within Optify are probably their keyword intelligence tool, which allows you to track not only the rank and visits from each tracked keyword, but also the actual number of leads generated, and their lead scoring dashboard. With Optify lead scoring you don’t have to guess which leads are hot versus passive, the software identifies which leads need immediate follow-up and then notifies the person responsible.

Furthermore you can create custom rules for lead distribution so say you have a geographically focused sales force, you can have medium priority leads go to local offices where hot leads of a certain size can be shipped to the senior sales team at headquarters.

Optify has also just recently finished launching their Cloud API which integrates directly with existing Google Analytics, Omniture, and even Salesforce to make sure all visitor data and lead scoring can be directly integrated into your existing tracking or ERM systems.

AweSEOm

AweSEOm SEO Tools started out as a set of free applications hosted to help SEO’s quickly spot low hanging fruit on web pages, such as meta elements, title  attributes, and keyword research.  I have used it a couple times in initial SEO consultations just to hit a prospects top-level domain to see if there are any red flags, especially when doing an SEO competitive analysis. The one tool in particular that I have found useful is the keyword density checker – this super simple tool allows you to enter in a target keyword and then paste in a body of content, which you can push or pull until you hit your target density (say 1%). While keyword density is not nearly the science it once was, it can still be important for things like avoiding too many keywords in your articles.

Nick Eubanks

Nick is the CEO of Factor Media, a social media company focused on helping people make better decisions. Nick has co-founded a handful of other technology companies including atomni, a leading website optimization company and M3thod, where they build amazing web applications. Nick enjoys competitive cycling, snowboarding, and french toast.

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