Unique Content

This has been a good rule of thumb since the advent of Google and other major search engines. It is even more so now. The days of looking at what your competitors are doing and emulating it are gone. Your content now has to stand out from the rest in order to be ranked.

Keep The User In Mind

The experience of the user on your website is being monitored. If users are bounced, pages load slowly, or ads are constantly assaulting them, your website will be ranked lower and lower until it is beyond irrelevant.

Socialize

Google has incorporated social media into its results. No ignoring now. Tweet, Link, create a Facebook buzz, whatever you want, just get going. The more often your business is tweeted or the Like button is clicked, the better your site will rank.

Market Yourself

You are your best advocate. You must market your company and services in order to create a brand and a buzz. Panda will recognize your business and place you higher in the rankings if you are mentioned more often across the internet.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to promote your business online without the help of an outside company. Marketing, social media, and branding are not within the scope of a single persons expertise. It may be time to shop around for the right search engine optimization group to improve your sales and web relevance.

The post 4 Ways To Take Advantage of Google Panda appeared first on LocalGiant.

She said: ” We’re also seeing Click-to-Call taking off with more than half a million advertisers using these features.”. Isn’t incredible that over 500,000 companies are advertising directly to a mobile device through Google’s Click-to-Call option. The app does not have a PC equivalent, so this could be an area to explore to increase your company’s exposure to search engines and potential customers.

Some advertisers are creating separate ads for the Click-to-Call program. It seems to be effective. Google’s third quarter of 2010 earnings hinted at a ”billion dollar run-rate” in mobile. Additionally, Product Senior V.P. Jonathan Rosenberg said, on the 4th quarter of 2010 earnings sheet that, ”Click-to-Call ads are generating millions of calls every month”.

With millions of calls generated through the app every month, it seems that creating an ad targeted directly for it would only make sense. Depending on the ROI, Google may have hit another home run.

The post PPCall: The New Way To Advertise? appeared first on LocalGiant.

First, Bing Local provides listings to enabled mobile devices. This will allow any Bing Local listing to be found on a smartphone as easily as a computer. The user can also preview their listing and how it will be formatted on every available medium. This allows a user to tailor their listing for the most effective presentation.

When using the Bing Business Portal to set up a Bing Local listing, you will notice the attention to detail. A wide variety of available categories and sub-categories are available to help you classify a service or business. You can use up to nine images to further customize a listing.

The keyword function is the true value of the service. A user can select as many as five keywords and rank them based on their current business goals. For example, if a contractor would like to be found for their drywall service over painting services, they can assign a higher ranking to the keywords drywall service. The ranking of keywords can be changed as business goals change. This allows effective control, adding a refining element to search engine optimization.

Bing Business Portal seems to be the most innovative an intuitive product right now. No aspect is ignored, including: instant verification. Google and Yahoo both feature lengthy verification procedures, Bing Business Portal immediately verifies the listing and notifies you of inconsistent or missing information. Bing Business Portal may be the wave of the future in local search engine optimization.

The post Increase Your Presence With Bing Business Portal and Bing Local appeared first on LocalGiant.

Add in the fact that Google is placing a much greater emphasis on the Places pages as they try to move into review generation (Hotpot*) and social media and the mix puts added emphasis on local search engine data.
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Here are three reasons why local data will rule 2011:

Accurate data equals more quality citations

Citations are the local search engine equivalent of links for Google Places pages. With the recent Google algorithms changes data accuracy must be of great concern to growing businesses.

Data can prevent break lead generation

Nothing is worse than having all of your marketing efforts stumble because of bad contact information being listed on an unmonitored venue. Inaccurate information may prevent sales.

Data leaves a trail

Nothing on the internet ever goes away completely. If you leave your data accuracy to data aggregators, then you are at risk for having your information look jumbled to the search engines. A jumbled mess will rank low and work in opposition to your marketing strategy.

Insuring the accuracy of your business’s online information is essential to success. Hiring a company to manage those services is the best way to protect your online image and reputation.

The post 3 Reasons That Local Data Will Rule 2011 appeared first on LocalGiant.

Just this week, though, Google has clearly changed their mind about how they treat local businesses. The following changes were noticed:

1) The same business can now show more than one result.
2) Organic webpage placement no longer directly influence rankings.

A quick study of these new hybrid results seems to show that they are the same results that can be seen on the first page of Google Maps, but with the ranks on the first page of results altered. The strong bias of the near organic ranking algorithm had is no longer overpowering and the traditional Maps search results are shining through, again. This essentially re-opens the for local businesses and helps them achieve prime organic search results.

Aside from these change, Google is also displaying a lot more 7-Pack results at the expense of hybrid ones.

Observers have begun to call these changes collectively as the “Google Local Panda Update”, since they came so recently after Google rolled out their Google Panda search algorithm. However, it’s not likely that the new update has anything to do with these changes.

The post Google Hybrid Search Results Retaken by Local Businesses appeared first on LocalGiant.

A recently released study done by BabyCenter of over 5,000 moms has revealed the following interesting data:

59% of the mom-respondents had a smart phone of one sort or other, which is impressive when you consider that smart phone penetration among the rest of the US population is just above 30%.

Additionally, moms’ acceptance of smart phones has grown dramatically over the past 2 years. Just over half of these moms said that they bought a smart phone after having a child, with their mobile behavior being markedly different from prior to starting a family.

The most utilized smart phone features for moms, from highest to lowest, are: the built-in still camera, the video camera, and applications, with just over half of the moms saying that they had over 10 apps downloaded, with nearly a quarter of those related in some way to their children.

Moms use smart phones the most in the following cases:

Health: One-third of moms have used their smart phone for family related health issues in the past 30 days.

Social networking: moms are 40% more likely than average to use smart phones for various social networking activities, such as browsing news feeds, updating statuses, and finding answers to questions.

Shopping: 68% of moms use their smart phone while shopping to check product reviews and prices.

Compared to other gadgets and media, smart phone-toting moms use their phones twice as often as the TV and about 1.5 times more than a PC.

Almost half of respondents indicated they responded proactively to ads on their phones, with almost a third of them buying the featured items later on.

Everybody else uses their phones heavily during evenings and weekends, but moms are heavy morning and early afternoons users.

While the focus of most mobile marketing has been on teenagers and young males, moms are now an emerging dominant force in this area of the market.

The post Moms: The Untapped Market for Mobiles appeared first on LocalGiant.

The key to successful SEO marketing is thinking ahead. Every SEO marketing campaign will take some time before it truly takes hold, so you need to plan every step you want to take at least three months beforehand in order to get the best results. Let’s say you want to take advantage of the increase in the number of hits for the phrase ‘best surfing beaches’, which should peak around the summer months. To really get the most out of this trend, your campaign should be in place and ready to go by the end of February at the latest.

The next step is to figure out exactly when during the year specific SEO campaigns are at their most effective. The year-end holiday season, for example, is when searches for all sorts of items and phrases reach their peak as people rush to purchase gifts for their friends and loved ones. Your website must reflect the hottest trends at any given time, a feat that is not that hard to do with the availability of tools such as Google Trends. It provides a free listing of the most popular keywords, which is updated constantly. Effective use of such powerful tools at your disposal is one of the keys to a successful SEO campaign.

Getting the keywords right is one thing. You need to fulfill the other half of the bargain by making sure that the products that you market are appropriate to the season as well. It should be fairly obvious which products sell well during the winter months of the year, such as ski equipment, and which products are more inclined towards the warmer months, such as surfboards. Updating your site to take advantage of these predictable trends a month or two in advance will ensure that your sales stay at a high and steady rate.

The last thing you need to do is know your customer, because search trends don’t always necessarily translate to high sales. For example, if you’re selling summer holiday packages, then sales should spike in the months prior to the season, as these trips are usually booked a long time in advance. By studying and adapting to similar behavior, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the trends and consistently come up with effective SEO campaigns for all seasons.

The post Using Seasonal Trends to Maximize Your SEO Potential appeared first on LocalGiant.

A few of the more all encompassing changes were Google Instant and showing search engine results in real time. Results now change as search text is added, removed, or moved around. More emphasis is being placed on dates and timezones in order to provide more focused results for organic searches. Let’s not forget about Google Chrome, rated as the fastest browser available and destined to become even faster in 2011.

Some of the more interesting changes are the slight alterations to the user interface. These small alterations are designed to speed up and hone an individual search while offering a clean search engine with a plethora of possibilities. These changes include search tools that have been moved to the left side of the screen, an additional panel highlighting the most relevant search results, and predictive search queries automatically that bring up the most pertinent results(Google Instant). Additionally, a significant evolution to local search algorithm has been made. In the past, Google displayed top local search results that had optimized Google Places pages and a lot of web citations. Now, a lot of weight has been added for the website as a whole.

Google changes its algorithms often. In a very fluid market, it is impossible for the average website or small business owner to keep abreast of all of these changes. An SEO firm like LocalGiant could be your only viable option, if you want your company to shine in the local Google search engine results.

The post Google Changes For 2010 appeared first on LocalGiant.

If you type in the term “reputation management” into Google, you’ll find that near the top of the page is a link to a site that lets businesses buy positive reviews. These businesses employ “reputation management experts”, or a roomful of what are likely offshore employees who do nothing but churn out glowing review after glowing review without ever visiting the business they are writing for or trying out one of their products.

To counter the growth of fraudulent and improper reviews and ratings, Google recently revised its review guidelines, as seen below:

Conflict of interest – Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. Even if well-intentioned, a conflict of interest can undermine the trust in a review. For instance, do not offer or accept money or product to write positive reviews about a business, or to write negative reviews about a competitor. Please also do not post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.

The way review fraud seems to be picking up speed, industry analysts have begun to describe it as the new black hat SEO.

The post Pulling the Plug on Paid Reviews appeared first on LocalGiant.