Website Design, Search Engine Optimization

14.32

Google Places Phone Number is key. #smx Be careful when changing. Learn about GP tools to audit your  data

Data sources for Google Places:

• Local Business Center – Google
• Yellow Pages ad feed data providers
• Scraped content from other websites
• User generated content

The main determining factor – N.A.P.

• Trustworthiness of the source
• Recentness of the data
• Completeness of the data
• Number or sources displaying the same data

1. Owner verified vusiness data via google places
2. Data via business directories, in order of importance
   Super Page
   City Search
   Yellow Pages
   Info Group
   Yahoo Local
   Insider Pages
   Niche Industry websites
   others
3. Approved UGC
4. Scraped data

Preventing problems:

• Check your NAP (name, address, place)
• whitespark.ca, helps you find all the sources your business is listed for consistency
• Yext – Local Search Scorecard
• GetListed.org (by David Mihm Inc.
• Local SEO Check up – Bright Local this is not free
• Be careful which account you use when claiming / creating listing
• Check the email associated with this account frequently
• Update your listing frequently
• Follow Google Places quality guidelines

When problems occur -

• report a problem via “Report Problems”.
• Editing the information via Map Maker – to fix duplication
• Google Troubleshooter -
• Google places help forum

Search Influence with Joseph Henson:

How can an audit help you? Audit and organize the local data first.

The Local Search Ecosystem is huge all the places that feed into places

1. confirm business name  be consistant if you have many
2. usps.com/zip4 confirm your address
3. One unique primary phone number per location, should be a local number
4. Check for duplicate and merge listings
5. Whitespark – analyze your listing, there is a paid version

Data Aggregraters:

• InfoGroup
• Localeze
• Aciom – mybusinesslistingmanager.com

Use one email account for each location and it should be a domain email account.

Local landing pages for each location: embedded google map that goes back to your Google places page

Optimized: Resolving Data Confusion in Google Places Mary Bowling

Presented a good Case Study of a Google Places disaster

Some of her points:

• Places Troubleshooter tool once she learned how to use it started to work after 60 days.
• MapMaker – is inside places account

• Losing good reviews. LIstings are merged and replaced and they should get merged. Report via troubleshooter if they are not merging
• Phone number is key. Be careful when changing phone number

Corey Morris – sharing a Case Study on Houlihan’s Case Study @coreydmorris @emfluence

14.46

Q&A For Google Places Presentation:

Recency what are tactics for keeping your information recent and fresh?

• coupon
• twitter like announcement
• Fill in new quality data

Multiple listings for the same Drs.? Multiple Lawyers and Drs. in a single firm

• Practitioners don’t want to use the same business name
• Phone number use a different one for each practitioner

Businesses that have merged together?

• Mark one as closed, choose the one you want
• Neither have the right info you need to start over.

Agregators – good to use the paid service for good information.

First delete from Google Maps and then to all the places you are listed and delete.

Phone verification is better than the post card on Google Places.

10.29

Setting up for How Google & Bing Personalize With Search History & Geography #smx #12D

10.53

Personalization is done by where you are and how you search, Next session on #SMX

10.54

Google Guy showing the same slides from the last session #smx. Talk more about contextual

10.56

Context Search is considered:  #smx

• Geography
• Language
• Context from previous queries

10.58

Try to get the best results down to the city level #smx You don’t have to keep restating yourself to Google

11.07

More personal to you, tries to get you to the sites that you like. Google puts those results higher #smx

How can webmasters help?

• Make content that users want
• Claim your place on Google Places and made sure that all info is correct. Let them know about all your locations.
• No phone numbers, address in images. Make it all readable
• Make your site work on mobile
• Lots of Geos and different languages. There are guidelines you should follow. Read through best practices.
• Use Geotargeting in Webmaster tools
• You can turn personalization on or off. Toggle on the results page.

Make sure people are getting things in the right language and geography.

11.10

Rangan Majumder from Bing also funny. first time speaking at #smx

Personal history and geo at Bing.

10  blue links on the left, he decides the ranking of those links

11.13

Bing: What is context, set of circumstances or facts around a particular event, situation

• Social
• Personal- long and short term
• Location – where are you

Never abuse a user’s trust they take this very seriously. They give you controls

11.22

Per Bing Rank=Authority + Quality of keyword match + personal and social preference #smx
Demo for auto suggest,
Change location:
Hit settings button and type in where you are from that will change where your results are from

use brackets around ambiguous search results ie radio station: {98.5} San Jose {98.5} Seattle
Help us understand who your page is for:

• Keywords, anchor text.
• Add a location to your page make sure it is very clear, city and state

11.48

Both engines want to get you very local maybe even to the block you are on if they can #smx #12b

How do you decide when to make it local:

• Google: do their best to make it local, depends on the query. It is not just a game of local words
• Bing: there are some words that will trigger local more than others.

• If you are signed out of Google, they keep track of your searches for 180 days, cookies. If you are signed in then they use your web history. If I am logged out can I see my recent search history – NO
  Bing: does not know the number of days they go back for cookies. Logged in search history very similar to how it is done on Google

General Questions:

If you were an ecommerce company how does geo hurt. Google: don’t do weird unnatural things. If your biz is international you don’t have to do anything bazaar to be found (My note: I am not sure about this) Have a page in the language people are querying for.
Bing: Trying to figure out if you want international. There seems to be questions here.

How does anyone discover new stuff? No good answers

Don’t have access to peoples Geo data because it is private.
Bing: this is in the future

I am national and I can’t compete with the local. What do I do:

• Google: Tries to balance global popularity. Not our goal to knock out buying things on line. Try to bring in the online presence
• Bing: This is a problem and still trying to figure it out. Maybe this is good for schema.org
• Danny asked if anyone in the audience has a solution to this  and no one had the answer

What is the % of personalization?

• Google: There is no target %. We do analysis to figure what % of these searches are local or personal. Varies a lot by query and ability to do it.
• Bing: We are still showing there is a lot of opportunity. There is more today than in the past and there is a lot of opportunity.

Bounce rate how does this impact a site?

• Google: Try to figure out if searches are good. Not just bounce but lots of factors
• Bing: You should look at these things as a person. If you bounce from it then it must not be a good site. Was this user satisfied. There are other things also considered

Mobile -

• Google, even customize a little bit for mobile. Is his word of recommendation. There are differences with mobile search
• Bing: Mobile is a context. If your pages are good on mobile then they will rank better.

11.58

Q&A on Personlized Search History and Geography. #smx #12B

Personalized results is different between the sizes of an actual city. Larger cities are getting the priority.

• Google: Tries to give you the best results
• Bing: If an area is more dense then you need to be more precise on the location

Ranking reports, how do you do this with personal search:

• Google: trying to get users to the content they want We know how difficult it is to measure
• Bing: Complexity, but users are more important
• Danny: ranking reports should have been thrown out long ago. You should be looking at your traffic

09.08

Personalization and Social Search that is contextually relevant to you. #smx
First Speaker is from Google  Jack PM Director for Google Search

09.17

Personalization part of search is: #smx

• Preferance
• Pattern
• Social

The end goal is to get more relevant content to the user as fast as they possibly can.
Can pull up blog posts from my friends when it knows a little bit about me.

Notion of endorsement when one of your friends has interacted with a search result that will show up.

Connections between people and Google will understand our connections with people and bring up the search result they think you want. Trying to connect you with people you may want to have a conversation about a topic.

09.20

a button to turn off personal search, click on the world button to the right of search results #smx

09.21

Create a google plus page and link it to your webpage. #smx then as you post on Google Plus it will post to the search result

09.21

Adding the Google +1 button to your site makes your content more shareable. #smx

09.22

Bing is up next Paul Yew – #smx

09.23

Bing’s take on personal search. Speaker is funny. #smx

09.27

Bing takes in both twitter and facebook results #smx I don’t think google has twitter results

09.29

Tweet an update make sure you include an actual URL makes it higher quality #smx

Tweet ranking and updates with link gives Bing information on how to list your comment.

09.31

You need trustworthy people sharing your links on twitter #smx

Watch who you follow and who is following you. That is very important on Twitter

Popularity: # of people retweeting or liking what you said/shared in the last minute

09.35

Your friends can actually be a result on the Bing page #smx personal search

If you have a popular or common name. Bing allows search result to have just friends search #smx

09.37

Bing can help you curate the results on the page for yourself #smx

Makes it easy to like and share content.

• Quallity
• Trust
• Popularity -Lots of tweets, likes and shares. Gives you more exposure.

10.17

Q&A – Danny asked if links are out #smx Google: you need to have a good balance of linking and social

Bing Links are still an important signal:

• Social signals are important but it is only one part
• Include the URL in your tweets and updates

Don’t link to bad neighborhoods. How are you using these signals?

Google: You see the signals from Google+, but they don’t have access to all FB data and can only use what is public. The content that people enjoy and using is when someone actually says something rather than a couple of words. Less important the source of the information. More important that something is hot right now.

Bing: We look at tweets, public likes and shares. Do you get Google+, there is public content but I don’t think they do.

Social signals and looking beyond a twitter page, SE are trying to understand the reputation behind the link that is being shared. Authority score when you get re-tweeted often on a certain subject.

Google: High quality content and the person has a reputation. This is a relatively new thing in search and making the connection.

Danny: Social shares seem to get lost. Google does best to forward on information with redirects in search but social networks have not matured enough to re direct this information.

Social connections are paying a role in search. Google: The web as a whole effects your searches. How often things are linked and retweeted goes into the rankings. Social signals are definitely playing a role.

What if you don’t want to know what your friends like? Google: More people appreciate the recommendations.

Overall mission of adding authority to the web is who are the experts and getting their information to you. We are just in the beginning of pulling all this together.

Bing profile pages: helping the find what you want on the internet.

If you are signed out you will still get personalized information by language and geography. Therefore put what you want in your query. There is also a cookie based information when not logged in.

Log into FB, then I leave … then go to Bing they can personalize your results from your FB login. If you log out of FB then they don’t know who you are anymore.

Google: Can toggle personalization off.

Google: Personalization outside the US? It is worldwide. Search + your world not sure how far that goes. Basically it is international

Bing: FB integration is only in the US. don’t do anything that is country specific in Twitter

Pinterest? What is up?
Google: Tries to include everything. Therefore it ranks. Not treating it special

Is social search being driven by users:
Google: What don’t you like about social search? Take a screen shot and send it to him. Jackm@google.com @jackm

Advice:

• Google: Social is new and we are doing our best to try and get it right. On a daily basis we are making improvements. Keep engaging with users.
• Bing: The same rules in term of optimization of search is the same as social. You are building up your quality authority over time. Hard to be a one time celeb. it needs to be over time. Let us know when you see irrelevant results.