Recap of ‘Local Search Marketing Techniques’ – SES San Jose 2007

Having attended this session with great anticipation last year (2006), and having been disappointed in the lack of creative tactics and actionable advice that was presented, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by the actionable techniques offered by the panel this year.

Justin Sanger of LocalLaunch was up first, starting the panel with an explosive stat: 2.2 billion queries each month carry a local intent (though critically, some of these do not include a geographic qualifier).   Local advertisers (and I’d even say Local search marketers!) are easily confused by the myriad of optimization dilemmas and advertising strategies available in this emerging space.

Justin’s advice for local optimizers: think BEYOND optimizing just the website.  Get as MANY listings for your clients as you can on local data sources and review sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, AskCity, Google Maps, InsiderPages, CitySearch, SuperPages, and the Online YellowPages.  Because of the scale of these sites, they’ll often rank better for certain local searches than an individual business website ever has a chance to.  Additionally, Google is pulling data like reviews and ratings from these sites and integrating these tidbits directly into Local results.

Citysearch actually employs people to perform SEO on business profiles so that they show up better & the relevant ones get clicked on.  (Often these are displayed as indented results on the main SERP!) There’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same with your own profile!  Treat the profile the same way you would traditional webpages & use SEO best practices when you create these profiles. Use keywords, anchor text on-page.

As far as on-page advice, Justin recommends mixing up the use of State abbreviations (like CA) with the full State name (like California) in your address, body copy, and title tags.  He also recommends linking out to a number of local business authorities like chambers of commerce.

Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch was up next with a presentation focused on PPC advertising for local businesses.  Patricia noted that businesses should use two types of PPC targeting: locally-focused campaigns with national keywords, and national campaign with local keywords.   Whatever the most important criterion people use when selecting someone in your industry should be featured prominently in your ad copy.   Yahoo featured local listings are a great option if your business can afford it.  Sadly, Patricia noted that bigger companies are finally starting to wake up to the local SEM and advertising marketplace :(.Matt Van Wagner of FindMeFaster wound down the presentation with a few more PPC tips:

• Keyword + State outperforms Keyword + ST.
• Good keywords for local campaigns are prepositions and adjectives: near boston, in boston, boston area, northern boston (use { } match for large-scale local campaigns).  These will help your ads show up higher with their quality scores & clickthroughs will be higher because the words will be bolded.
• People search for county names when thinking about a broader local area.