Many of you may only be familiar with local search to the extent that it is that little collection of search results in Google that show up before the rest of the natural listings.  What you may not be aware of is that nearly 40% of all searches are made with local intent.  Essentially this means that people are looking for products or services online with the intent to go offline to complete the purchase.  Research has shown that people who are completing local searches are not just browsing for options, but in fact are deep into decision making close to making their purchase.  Whether your business relies on locals or out-of-towners searching for you, it is becoming increasingly important to list your site in local search.  As you might expect, because local search has a different intent than typical search, it is presented in a different manner that is more helpful to the user (most engines will supply a phone number and address on the most basic level). 

Here is one thing you may want to consider when thinking about the notion of local search….currently… it is much less competitive than traditional online search.  Local search is growing fast as more and more local businesses are seeing the benefit, but there is still time to get in on the action and give your marketing efforts a boost.  Also note that with local search you do not need to have a website to participate.  While it will always be helpful to have a website to refer searchers to for additional information, profiles provided within local search can give visitors a substantial amount of information including location, contact information, and reviews.  In fact, some business profiles (Google Maps in particular) will allow you to add a video to your profile which is a perfect marketing opportunity.  Think of these business profiles as introductions that can be great supplements to a website.

As time has gone on, we as a people have learned how to use search engines more efficiently to get the most relevant results as quickly as possible.  Specifically, searchers have begun to use geographic qualifiers such as cities and zip codes to refine their results.  As local search has begun to grow so has the number of sites that provide this service; to name a few great local search mediums….Google Maps, Yahoo Local, MSN Live Local, Yahoo YellowPages, Superpages, and AskCity.  To answer the all important question…the majority of them are all FREE.

There are several ways searchers can go about local search that you should be aware of. 

Searchers can use typical search engines such as Google and Yahoo with the addition to geographic qualifiers such as using a city or zip code. 

Searches can be made within the local search section of popular engines such as Google Maps, Windows Live Local, and Ask!City.

Searches can be made using an online YellowPages sites such as Superpages.

Searchers can use websites that provide information on local businesses such as a local newspaper site or a chamber of commerce.

Searchers can also use vertical directories or search engines which are sites that focus on a particular good or service.  Hotels.com is a great example of a vertical search engine.

It is essential to formulate some sort of strategy before just jumping in and registering on every single site as it can be very time consuming.  It will be a much better use of your time to do some quick searching on some of the sites you consider to be more important and see what competition ranks within the existing local search results.  Ensure that you create detailed business profiles for each site and then monitor the progress you make with whichever analytics tools you use.  I hope you find this useful and there will be more to come…

A potential client approached us today for a large link building campaign and wanted to know what every client does:

1. How many links will $x a month get me?
2. How do you build one way links without buying them?

We work with a lot of really smart business people who like many really smart people figure if they don’t know how to do something then it isn’t possible. Or worse yet are hearing from the seo snake oil sales people that they can get 25,000 links for $29! Their traffic is down, their indexed pages are plummeting but still they want reassurances of how many links will they recieve for $x a month.

Unless you are buying links or submitting sites to a lot of not so high quality directories there isn’t a way for a white hat seo link builder to say we can get you x number of links for $x a month. When working in a similar industry we can provide a guesstimate based on past performance but there are so many variables that go into building relevant, quality links that often the most valuable links are the hardest to obtain but one quality link is worth so much more than 25,000 junk links….which if someone is getting you hundreds or thousands of links for just a few bucks you can be sure those links are junk.

As far as buying links, we stopped buying links for clients as part of an seo strategy back in 2007 with the smackdown on paid links and selling page rank. In case you missed it Google actively starting seeking reports of buying/selling link activity.

From Google’s Matt Cutts (head of Google’s spam team):

Update, May 12th, 2007: I finally got some time to circle back around to this subject. I wanted to add an example or two of the sorts of reports that we’d be interested in getting, and try to answer a few questions about paid links. Let’s start with some questions.

Q: Can you give me some more background on how Google views paid links?
A: Absolutely. Start with this post from 2005. It’s a pretty good review of our policies at the time (e.g. link sellers can lose trust, such as their ability to flow PageRank/anchortext. Also, we’re open to semi-automatic approaches to ignore paid links, which could include the best of algorithmic and manual approaches.). You can also read about panels at search conferences where we did a site review and how much paid links stood out in a site review. I even mentioned earlier this year that paid articles/reviews/posts should be done in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. Here’s a post from January, for example, where I said:

Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

So this post shouldn’t be a surprise; it’s inline with our previous discussion of paid links. Some people wanted a way to report potential paid links and that was the main reason for this post.

Q: Now when you say “paid links,” what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links” it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”

you can read the rest of this post here

There are many, many ways to build one way links, we don’t usually disclose our methods until we sign a contract as part of what our clients pay for is our ability to come up with creative ideas and solutions not because we are necessarily brilliant but because we’ve spent years online in the search marketing space and through a lot of hard work have come up with creative, legitimate solutions that keep us one step ahead of our competitors and at the top of the SERPs.

With the smack down heard round the seo world for selling links which resulted in a loss of page rank for some websites including high authority sites such as Forbes.com new pressure has been put on webmasters to find relevant quality inbound links. Anyone who was buying links is probably thinking twice about continuing to do so. 

One of my favorite tactics for getting targeted traffic and to improve my sites positions within the search engines has been with quality niche directories. Niche travel directories are an excellent source of targeted traffic for travel websites. 

Niche directories often allow links to pages deep within your website. It’s important when submitting to these directories to match the best page from your site with the topic of the directory. Most niche directories are reviewed by volunteer editors who are passionate about their subject so only submit to relevant categories with a good title and description. Make sure to vary your titles and descriptions from directory to directory. Spend a little time on the directory to see what types of submissions have been accepted in the past however try to make your travel websites entry unique and original to make it stand out from the crowd. 

Quality travel directories can help a website become relevant for that topic and are great for becoming part of a closely related hub. If your travel site is about a destination in Florida and you submit your site to one of the Florida travel directories by being accepted into a Florida travel directory your website has received a vote of confidence and becomes more relevant for Florida travel.  Niche directories generate targeted traffic. Someone visiting a niche travel directory about Cape Cod is more likely to visit your Cape Cod travel website than someone visiting a general directory. Many niche directories rank fairly well for destination specific keyword phrases and may get a steady stream of search engine traffic. Here is my shortlist of travel directories however not all of them will be relevant for your travel site. It’s important to remember when submitting to these niche directories to be respectful, read the guidelines and follow them closely. 

If you’re looking for help building links for a travel site, you may be interested in our link building services.