Judging from the amount of inquiries that have come in this year via my contact form, there are a lot of small businesses that are just now starting to dip their toes into this whole SEO thing. I’d love some cold, hard stats to back up what I’ve seen … but short of that, gut instinct tells me a lot of people are wondering how to get started with SEO.

Getting Started with SEO

Here are some questions you’ll need to answer and things you’ll need to know if you’re just now getting started with SEO.

1. “I want to rank well in Google” is not a goal; it’s a means to reaching a goal. Why are you getting into SEO? What do you want to accomplish? You’re a business owner. Your goals should be about making money and growing your business, whether it be through selling more widgets or acquiring more leads. It sounds cliché, but you need to begin with goals. Don’t focus on rankings.

2. Will you hire a consultant or do it yourself?

This is the first question you need to answer. Once you have a clear list of goals, it’s time to figure out how to get there. If you have more time than money, you’ll probably need to learn SEO yourself. Don’t feel overwhelmed. You can do it. Most SEO basics are not terribly complicated. If you have more money than time, you’ll probably need to hire an SEO consultant. But you still need to be involved and as active in the project as possible. Don’t just write a check and assume your SEO consultant will take care of everything without any input from you.

3. Who in your company will be involved in your SEO campaign?

Whether you’re doing SEO yourself or hiring a consultant, you’ll need to know who all will be involved in the SEO project. If you’re a one-man band, move on; it’s all you. If you have employees, though, you’ll need to get your staff on board and make sure the right people are contributing in the right ways to the SEO work. SEO will probably involve updates to your web site. It’ll probably require new content, in the form of articles, blog posts, maybe even videos. It may require some tweaks of a technical nature, so if you have an IT person/department, make sure they’re involved. Everyone needs to be committed; one person not pulling his weight can quickly derail an SEO campaign.

Hiring an SEO Consultant

If you’ve decided to hire an SEO consultant, here are some things to consider:

1. Hiring an SEO consultant requires due diligence. While there are all kinds of SEO training/certification providers out there, our industry lacks an all-encompassing oversight organization. That means the burden is on you to find a good, honest consultant. Take this seriously. You’ll essentially be putting your business in this person’s/company’s hands for a period of time. This isn’t like hiring a company to service your copy machine. If you make a bad choice in hiring an SEO consultant, it could substantially damage your business or, at minimum, cost you a lot of money with no return.

Interview potential clients and ask a lot of questions. Ask for references/testimonials. Ask them if the tactics they typically use are risky, or are within the search engines’ webmaster guidelines. Make sure you’re on the same page as the consultant where risk vs. reward is concerned. Don’t hire someone that tries to get you to take more risk than you’re willing to accept.

2. Don’t hire anyone who contacts you first. SEO is very much in demand these days. The best and most trusted companies don’t need to spam you with offers of free web site analyses. Delete those emails right away.

3. SEO is usually not inexpensive, but usually is a great source of new clients and revenue. I’m sure there are some good SEO consultants out there that are only charging $75 per hour or so. I just don’t know who they are or where they are. Most top SEOs, and certainly the ones I’d recommend, charge $200 per hour and up. Some SEOs charge as much as $500 or $1,000 per hour, and these folks are not lacking for business. When done right, SEO offers tremendous long-term ROI. Spending $10,000 on an SEO campaign can often lead to years of business growth that dwarfs the original investment.

Learning SEO Yourself

If you plan to devote the time to learning SEO, the following should help you get started:

1. Basic SEO is not terribly difficult. You can learn the basics, and don’t let anyone — especially an SEO consultant who wants your business — tell you otherwise. SEO basics include a lot of low-hanging fruit — things you can do relatively quickly and easily and begin to see some rewards. Most of these low-hanging fruit are the same no matter how big or small your company is, no matter what industry you’re in, and no matter how competitive the landscape is. I’m talking about things like improving your page titles, improving your usage of keywords in web site copy, improving the anchor text of your internal links, and other on-page factors.

Where SEO gets more complicated, and where an experienced consultant can really help, is in keyword research/selection, competitive analysis, link building, content promotion, technical issues like redirects and URL rewriting, and so forth. Still, there are a lot of great resources on the web where you can at least get the basics. Read on….

2. Continuing education is a must. While the basics of SEO are pretty much the same today as they were years ago, the overall search/SEO landscape never stops changing. Fortunately, there are a lot of places where you can learn for the long haul:

• Sorry for the self-promotion, but I’ve been writing this blog for almost four years with the goal of teaching SEO and online marketing to small business owners. I think the world should read and print out my SEO Success Pyramid, and read all the related articles linked from that page. I also think beginners should spend $25 on my How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes e-book. It covers all the basics of on-page SEO with specific instructions for improving your web site. Also watch for the link recap posts I publish at the end of every month, with links to the best articles I read during that month.
• I’m also biased in this recommendation, but I think most SEOs would agree that Search Engine Land offers some consistently great instructional content. In particular, check the Small Is Beautiful column every Thursday, and the Locals Only column (local SEO tips) every Monday.
• Search Engine Guide is another excellent source of instructional articles, and it focuses specifically on small business issues.
• The SEOmoz beginner’s guide to search engine optimization is in the process of being updated, but is still a great resource in its current version.
• GetListed.org is a great place to learn about Local Search, especially the Resources section.
• Some of the best how-to material written over the past couple years can be found in the nominations for the SEMMY Awards. You’ll find lists of excellent articles about SEO, Local Search, Link Building, and much more. (Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders of the SEMMY Awards.)
• You can learn a ton at educational conferences, and for small businesses I’d especially recommend Small Business Marketing Unleashed (don’t know when the next one will be, however), Learn About Web (ditto), and SearchFest, which will take place next March in Portland, Oregon. Two larger conferences, SMX and SES also offer sessions specifically for small business owners.

3. Read every day, and with a critical eye. I spend at least an hour a day reading other SEO blogs and web sites so I can stay informed on current strategies and tactics. You may not need an hour, but I do think a consistent schedule will be helpful. Also, read critically — don’t believe everything just because an SEO blogger said so. When you can, test the strategies and tactics for yourself and see what works best in your situation.

Final Thoughts

There’s one more thing you’ll need a lot of when you’re getting started with SEO: patience. SEO is not a quick-fix; it usually takes at least a few months to see any real benefits from your SEO efforts. It usually takes a year or two to build up a site that search engines trust enough to rank highly for semi-competitive terms. SEO is a long-term process, not something you do once and see results from as soon as you’re done.

In fact, you’re never really “done” with SEO. Search engines regularly tweak how they rank pages, so you’ll need to adjust over time. Plus, your competition probably isn’t “done” with SEO, so you’ll fall behind quickly if you stop. The most important thing is to get started — the sooner, the better. Whether you’re doing SEO yourself, or hiring a consultant, there’s no better time to start than right now.

I’ve been contacted twice in the last three months by small business owners looking for SEO help — but needing PR and social media a lot more than SEO. In both cases, the companies offered what I’d call fairly innovative products and services. The problem is that no one would ever think to use Google, Yahoo, etc., to search for what they offered. Joe Customer can’t search for something he doesn’t know exists.

So I had to tell both of them that SEO wasn’t really what they needed. That’s not something this SEO likes to say, but it’s true:

If you have a product or service that no one is searching for, SEO isn’t your ticket to success.

Real-Life Example: When SEO Wasn’t Enough

Many years ago, I had a web design client who sold a strap that held a baby carrier/car seat tight while sitting on top of a shopping cart. You’ve seen moms at the grocery store with a baby in the car seat just sitting on top of the cart, right? That can be pretty dangerous if the car seat is just sitting there loosely. This strap connected the car seat to the shopping cart so that baby would never fall. Great idea. But the business failed.

Why? The web site worked great and we optimized the site for the most relevant keywords. But no one searched for things like “grocery cart baby strap” or “keep baby safe when shopping” and things like that. Since this was a mom working from home, selling these straps from her living room, she didn’t have the budget to go after infinitely more competitive terms like “baby safety” and “baby safety equipment.” Social media, you ask? This was long before Twitter and Facebook was still for college students, when social media options weren’t nearly as plentiful.

If this sounds like you and your unique business, read on for some thoughts on how to overcome this challenge.

It’s Easier Today

The two companies I’ve chatted with recently have more options available to them. Yes, they should make sure their site is in good shape where SEO and design/usability are concerned, but those won’t be the primary ways they attract new customers. Here’s what they’ll need to do:

1. Use traditional PR. Thankfully, sending out press releases is easy and generally inexpensive. PRWeb and PR Leap are two options worth looking at. Target your releases to individuals and publications that might be interested in your unique product/service. If you’re only doing business locally, target it to outlets in your region.

2. Get on Facebook and Twitter. SEO is about bringing people to you. But if they’re not looking for what you offer, you have to go out and find them. That’s what social media is all about. Facebook and Twitter are, in my opinion, two of the best options right now for small business owners. If you’re not familiar with the possibilities of both, see this recent Chicago Tribune article for some help and ideas.

3. Reach out to bloggers in your niche. Entire articles and seminars are given about how best to do this, and I won’t pretend to explain it all in a couple sentences. You can find bloggers via Technorati, Blog Catalog, and any number of similar sites. Once you identify blogs that might be interested in your product/service, read their blog for a month or two before you email them. Leave some quality comments first. Your first impression can’t be a sales pitch.

4. Find local neighbors online. There are lots of places online where you can specifically find and connect with people in your own town. Read my article, 8 Social Media Sites for Local Networking, for some places to get started.

5. Advertise & network offline. Again, if people aren’t searching online for what you offer, you have to work harder to get noticed. That can include offline advertising, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Sponsor a local Little League team or your favorite high school sports team. You can (and should) also make local connections via your area’s Chamber of Commerce and other local networking groups.

Final Thoughts

That whole thing about having a Unique Value Proposition is undeniably important, but when it comes to SEO, there’s such a thing as being too unique. If people just aren’t searching for the products and services you offer, SEO won’t be your primary method of attracting new customers. That’s when public relations, social media, and a little bit of creativity comes into play. It’s not easy, but it can be done. You can create search demand by first going in different, non-search directions including PR and social media.

Janet Meiners wrote a good article Monday on Small Biz Trends: Practices of Top SEO Companies for Small Businesses. It’s designed to help small business owners understand the basic/minimum services that an SEO company/consultant should be providing.

But what about the cost of small business SEO? What should a small business expect to pay when hiring an SEO consultant?

In the comments on that Small Biz Trends article, a man named Jeff says this about the cost of SEO services:

“…many companies that offer SEO services charge an arm and a leg, usually monthly (anywhere from $300-$1000/monthly) and many don’t provide any kind of guarantee on results.”

There are a couple things in there that probably represent a fairly common view of SEO services for small businesses. I’m nowhere near the most expensive SEO consultant around, yet on phone calls with prospects, I’ve been asked: “Why do you charge so much?” There seems to be this idea that SEO shouldn’t cost much more than your satellite/cable TV bill.

Here are five points that I hope will help small business owners understand more about SEO, pricing, and services.

1.) The price you’ll pay for SEO depends on the consultant’s business model. My business model is to do consulting only; I don’t change my clients’ web sites. I analyze and provide specific recommendations, but it’s up to my client to implement my ideas or not. I generally charge an hourly rate for consulting, but I also have some pre-arranged services (like a Site Review) that have a fixed price. My clients pay for my time, my expertise, and my experience.

There are other SEO companies/consultants who charge differently. Some also serve as webmaster — not only recommending improvements, but also going in and changing your site. Some of these SEO consultants might even do performance-based contracts, where the small business owner pays a percentage of the revenue created by the SEO work. I could never do that because I can’t guarantee that my recommendations will be implemented. The point for small business owners is this: your SEO costs will depend in part on the type of consultant you hire.

2.) The price you’ll pay for SEO services sometimes depends on geography. If you hire a local consultant, a small business in Seattle is probably going to pay more for SEO consulting than a small business in Walla Walla. This isn’t universally true, but it is generally true that many services are more costly in larger cities. The Seattle market can support a higher cost for SEO consulting, just as it supports a higher cost for web design services, attorney fees, and many other types of services. This should color your expectations when looking for an SEO consultant.

3.) I generally wouldn’t trust an SEO company that only charges $300/month. $300 is closer to the hourly rate, not the monthly rate, for a good SEO consultant. An SEO that’s only charging $300/month probably isn’t doing much for you, doesn’t understand the true value of his/her time, and may have a very basic, limited definition of what SEO is. My approach to SEO projects is summed up in the SEO Success Pyramid. I can’t imagine a way to offer those strategies and tactics — five levels worth, 15 different blocks — for only $300/month.

Are there small businesses who can’t afford $300/hour? Of course. If that’s you, then you’ll have to spend time learning the basics of SEO yourself. There are a lot of great blogs and web sites where SEO knowledge is shared freely, not to mention several SEO e-books that cost less than $100 and offer terrific information. I sell one that costs $25 so that small biz owners who can’t afford my services can still learn to do SEO themselves.

4.) Focus on ROI, not costs. Much more important than the cost of SEO is the return. $1,000 per month may seem like a lot, but what if you get $5,000/month in increased revenues? Seems like a good deal to me. SEO, like any marketing, is about ROI. If you spend X and get back 3X or 5X or 10X, the actual amount that X is really doesn’t matter. Let’s use real estate as an example:

For Sally Smith, each client transaction means about $5,000 income, on average. Sally hires an SEO consultant to fix up her web site and make sure she’s listed on all the right local search engines. She also learns how to blog, how to use social media to make connections with local people, and more. This takes about six months and costs Sally $15,000.

Over the next year, Sally starts to get a lot more leads. Out-of-town real estate agents are also finding her online and sending referrals. Here are three scenarios:

* If Sally starts doing one more transaction every two months, that’s six more transactions per year and an additional $30,000.
* If she starts doing one more transaction every month, that’s an extra $60,000 per year.
* If she does two additional transactions per month, that’s $120,000 more income.

All that from a $15,000 investment over six months. That $2,500 per month seemed like a lot, but it was money well spent.

A few years ago, before I was a solo consultant, we had a medium-sized retail client that sold products nationally. Their SEO campaign was close to $22,000 for six months of work. They later told us that revenue from natural search traffic had gone up more than $120,000 in the months immediately after we started the campaign. I don’t mention this to brag. I mention it to point out that what you spend on SEO is not nearly as important as what you earn from it.

5.) No SEO can guarantee results.

The search engines could drastically change their ranking algorithms tomorrow. The new visitors that you get from SEO might decide they don’t like your product or service. Your competitor could be spending even more on SEO and online marketing than you, and might be buying links or doing other things that search engines don’t like. Your webmaster or IT department might implement the SEO recommendations incorrectly, etc., etc. The point is: SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are a number of factors outside of your control that will determine the success of an SEO campaign.

When I work with a client, I don’t make guarantees, but I do say, “If you take my advice and correctly implement my recommendations, you will get more traffic from natural search than you’re getting now, and you should increase revenues from natural search, too.” That’s about as close to a guarantee as I can give. (Note: As I explained above, there are SEO companies who operate as more than consultants; they take over your web site and make the changes themselves, thereby giving them more confidence in guaranteeing certain results.)

Final Thoughts

When considering SEO and what it should cost, please keep this in mind:

• You have to invest either time or money.
• You usually get what you pay for; if you invest only a little time or a little money, you can expect little success.
• There are no shortcuts to true, long-lasting SEO success.
• Nothing matters more than ROI.
• If you spend your money wisely on SEO, it should bring back returns that are substantially higher than the costs.

My goal with this post is to shine a brighter light on what small businesses can and should expect where SEO campaign pricing is concerned. I hope I’ve succeeded, but the comments are open for any questions, constructive criticism, or other feedback.

(top photo courtesy AMagill via Creative Commons)

John recently emailed me with a situation that isn’t uncommon for business big or small: a variety of spellings/versions of the primary business keywords. John wants to know the best way to optimize for these variations, and specifically if he needs to create tons of landing pages to target each one. I haven’t seen John’s web site, his keyword list, the pages he’s talking about, or the copy he’s writing, but I’ll share some general advice after you read John’s email.

Situation: While doing keyword research related to our dog exercise and pet sitting business, I noticed that my main keywords have a variety of spellings, word spacing, and use of suffixes of “-er”, “-ers”, and “-ing”, for example “dog runner”, “dog runners”, and “dog running”. If I take all of these into account – and especially if I add location modifiers – I could easily have up to eight landing pages for each main keyword/phrase.

Question: If I have multiple and different landing pages for a similar term, such as a unique page for each of: “doggie day care”, “doggy daycare”, and “doggy day care – Chicago, Evanston, Northshore”, will the search engines reward me for being so specific or will they penalize me for having near duplicate content other than the different spelling/case/spacing of the key words (I will have unique page titles and meta info for each keyword/phrase)? I don’t mind the effort/time to make all these pages, but just want to make sure I’m not doing myself harm.

My Reply

You don’t need to — and shouldn’t — create separate web pages for every spelling variation of your primary keywords if the only thing unique on the pages will be how you spell the keyword. It’s not user-friendly, nor is it SEO-friendly. Will the search engines penalize you? Well, generally speaking, there’s no penalty for duplicate content. But if you overdo it and create a lot of junky pages with no benefit to users, you get penalized indirectly when the search engine sees that a high percentage of your pages are of no value.

Consider the Google search results for the phrase “doggie daycare”:

(I’ve removed the Google Maps results to keep the screenshot a reasonable size.)

In the top five pages, there are three different versions of the keyword, and the exact match (“doggie daycare”) isn’t even ranked first. Search engines algorithms are very good at handling multiple spellings and versions of words and phrases. They recognize that “day care” and “daycare” are the same thing, and that “doggy” and “doggie” are the same thing. This means you don’t have create separate pages for each version of your primary keywords. But you can, and probably should still target the spelling variations in different ways. Read on….

How I’d Optimize John’s Keywords

1.) Geographic considerations: I’m not super familiar with the geography John mentions, but on the assumption that Evanston is a unique city/town and not part of Chicago, I’d have separate pages for the two cities. On each page, I’d talk about the fun things you do while taking care of other people’s dogs. I’m guessing there are different parks and locations John uses when walking/running dogs for his clients in these areas. Talk about the best places for dogs in each area.

2.) Runner vs. Runners vs. Running: All of these can be used on a single page. Keyword research should reveal which one is the primary keyword, but you can use these kinds of phrases in your page copy to cover all versions of the keyword:

“…professional dog runner with XX years of experience…”
“…many dog runners to choose from, but none offer the attention we do…”
“…our dog running service is…”

And you go from there, continuing to use the different versions of the main keyword in your page copy — without overdoing it.

3.) Doggy, Doggie, Daycare, Day Care: This one is a little different because you’re talking about different spellings of the same thing. If you had a ton of time and money, you could do all kinds of keyword research and competitive analysis to determine what spelling would be best to target, but since you’re a small business, I’d guess you have better things to do with your time and money.

As the screenshot above shows, it really doesn’t matter much how you handle this. So, I’d probably find a way to elegantly put both “daycare” and “day care” in the page title(s). Then I’d choose either “doggie” or “doggy” and use one across the site. And I’d call it good and move to something that’ll be a better use of your time than fretting over “doggy” or “doggie” and “daycare” or “day care.”

Your turn: How would you suggest John optimize in this situation? Did I give bad advice? Did I forget something important? Comments are open, please share your thoughts!

(image courtesy Bogdan Situ via Creative Commons)

The structure of a Web site’s URLs can have a dramatic impact on crawlability, SEO, and user-friendliness. A good SEO already knows how to craft effective URLs, but web developers, IT staff, and management may not understand why the web address matters. In this article, I’ll share a list of best practices for choosing URLs and explain why they matter.

But before the list begins, here’s the first rule of URL Club: Do not change your URLs unless they’re broken. If your web site is being crawled and indexed just fine by search engines, and/or if users are having no trouble clicking on your URLs despite them being long or ugly, don’t change things. The potential SEO boost is smaller than the potential risk that something will go wrong on your end, or on the search engines’ end. If you’re URLs are broken, however, here’s how to fix them.

How to Fix ‘Broken’ URLs

1. Keep URLs as short as possible.

Usability impact: According to several studies, people prefer short URLs. Searchers more likely to click a short URL. Google’s Maile Ohye wrote that a long URL “decreases [the] chances of [a] user selecting the listing” in the search engine result pages (SERPs). A Marketing Sherpa study confirms that users click more often on shorter URLs.

SEO impact: Weaker sites with few inbound links are unlikely to see spiders crawling deep content. Spiders may visit and revisit content closer to the root directory more often; these are pages with shorter URLs. Also, it stands to reason that other webmasters and bloggers will be more likely to link to pages with shorter URLs; as a publisher, I trust short URLs more than longer ones and tend to avoid linking to long URLs that I’m not sure will remain active forever.

2. Remove session IDs from URLs.

Crawlability impact: Spiders are less likely to crawl a URL with a session ID because there’s a strong likelihood the content is a copy of another URL. Long parameters can look like session IDS and should also be avoided.

3. Limit variables and parameters in URLs.

Crawlability impact: At conferences, Google’s Matt Cutts has said it’s best to limit the number of parameters in a URL to “2 or 3.” As described in the Google Webmaster Central article referenced above, URLs with too many parameters are likely candidates to be duplicates of other URLs, so spiders try to avoid crawling them.

Usability impact: As mentioned above, users prefer short URLs.

4. Use keywords in URLs.

SEO impact: Keywords in the URL help tell the spider what the page is about. A URL such as www.domain.com/green-widgets.html is obviously about green widgets, whereas a URL such as www.domain.com/product.php?ID=23476234 is not obviously about anything. Keywords in the URL are an additional signal to the spider.

Usability impact: As the Marketing Sherpa study (and many others, too) indicates, users prefer short, clear URLs that help them pre-determine what the page will be about before they click.

5. Use hyphens to separate keywords.

SEO impact: Spiders recognize hyphens as a space. Underscores and other symbols may not be recognized the same way. Matt Cutts recently explained in a video that hyphens are best when it comes to separating keywords.

Disclaimer: Don’t overdo it. A file name like electronic-green-widget-repair-store.html looks spammy and untrustworthy.

6. Fix your URL canonicalization.

To a search engine spider, www.domain.com and domain.com are not the same. Your web site should not be available at both addresses; choose one (the “canonical” domain) and use that 100% of the time. Make sure the secondary domain uses a 301 redirect to the primary domain.

BONUS TIP: Not sure which to choose, the www version or the non-www version? There are two main considerations:

1. Which domain gets the most inbound links?
2. Which domain would be easier to change on your own pages (i.e., internal links, references, etc.)?

For example: If you have a lot of inbound links pointing to domain.com, and it would be easy to switch your internal links and references from www.domain.com to domain.com, that should be what you do.

SEO impact: Choosing a primary domain will help avoid duplicate content. It will also help focus your inbound link “juice.” If your home page is available at both domain.com and www.domain.com, chances are good that both URLs are getting linked to, and your home page is not getting the full benefit of all those inbound links.

7. If changing URLs, use 301 redirects to point from the old URL to its new version.

If you absolutely must change your URLs, you can minimize the impact by using a 301 redirect from each old URL to the specific new URL that matches. Don’t 301 all your old URLs to your new home page; that’s not spider-friendly or user-friendly.

SEO impact: By using a 301 redirect, you are telling the spiders that the old URL has been permanently replaced by the new URL. The impact of this is that all of the inbound link “juice” will be passed from the old URL to the new one, giving it a better chance at replacing the old URL in the SERPs more cleanly.

Usability impact: The 301 redirect will also help your human visitors reach the appropriate new URL immediately.

Word of Warning, Repeated

A complete change of URL structure should never be taken lightly. I advise clients not to change URLs unless they’re completely broken. You can expect to suffer a short-term loss of search engine visibility when you change your URLs, even when changing them to more SEO-friendly versions. In the long run, you should regain your visibility and even exceed it if your URL structure is improved correctly. There’s no way to estimate how long this might take.

URL Examples

Here’s a quick look at sample URLs using the best practices explained above.

Okay: http://www.domain.com/Shopping/Categories/Apparel_Clothing/
Better: http://www.domain.com/shopping/clothing.html
Best: http://www.domain.com/clothing/

Bad: http://www.domain.com/?cat=3423&pid=45345345&sessID=325646VGHD36523746&ref=56756
Okay: http://www.domain.com/?cat=3423&pid=45345345
Better: http://www.domain.com/shopping/clothing.html
Best: http://www.domain.com/clothing/

Your Turn

What rules would you add to this list? What are your thoughts on my rules for writing URLs? Comments are open.

This great question came in today from Mary Ann:

I am helping a small dance/fitness business with local SEO. Keyword research yields zero (0) search volumes (Keyword Discovery) for keyword terms once I add the location or any variation on the location/general area (Westport, Connecticut). Any suggestions as to the best keyword strategy in such cases?

My guess is that almost everyone involved in local SEO has run into this problem; I know I have. As much as I love Keyword Discovery, it has its limits (like every tool out there). In Mary Ann’s case, neither Keyword Discovery nor Wordtracker show results for possibly prime terms like “westport fitness club” and “westport dance studio.”

So, here’s a list of what I’d do next if I’m working with the client Mary Ann describes:

1.) Do non-local keyword research

The first thing I’d so is stay on Keyword Discovery and forget that this is a local client. Just do research on the industry/business terms. Find out if “dance club” is generally a stronger phrase than “dance studio.” Find out if “fitness club” is stronger than “fitness center.” Find out if “fitness dance studio” is a strong term. Look for appropriate misspellings and related terms. Do all the keyword research you would normally do, just without the location-related terms. Generate a list of relevant non-geographic terms and save it.

2.) Add geographic terms to that list

Once you have your list of industry-related terms, it’s pretty easy to just add the appropriate city, town, county, neighborhood, and other geographic terms as modifiers. If you’re dealing with a small geographic coverage area, this shouldn’t take long. If it’s a big coverage area, use this local keyword generator tool. In Mary Ann’s case, she’d input her non-geographic terms, a central zip code, and a radius, and the tool will spit out a list of keywords that mashes it all together. Mary Ann will probably need to prune that list because (like all tools) it’s not perfect.

But, at this point, we now have a big list of keywords that includes well-researched industry terms with appropriate geographic modifiers. The only problem is that we don’t know for sure how strong any of the individual keywords are.

3.) Try other keyword research tools

The Google AdWords keyword tool draws a blank when you type in “westport fitness club”, but it does show some numbers for “westport fitness.”

Again, that’s not perfect, but it’s progress. Using related keywords like “westport gym” and changing to nearby city names like Norwalk or Fairfield should help create new keywords and/or confirm those already on the list. On a related note…

4.) Pretend you’re in a larger city.

Since Westport seems too small to generate a lot of good keyword data, I might pretend I’m in a larger city nearby and see if there’s good keyword data for that area. Hartford might be a good substitute for Westport, and if that doesn’t work, I might even try Boston. True, many cities have their own language, but there should still be some good insights to be had by substituting a nearby city’s name.

5.) Use Internet yellow pages for keyword ideas

You can go to Superpages.com, for example, and type the word “fitness” to see a list of related categories — note that you’ll have to hit the ENTER button twice, because the first time it demands a location. Just click again and you’ll get a page like this with several dozen category names in the left column. Each one that matches your client’s business is a potential keyword. And you can take these category names and redo the keyword research you did earlier.

(Note: It’s not a yellow pages site, but you can also browse categories with Google’s Search-based keyword tool.)

6.) Setup a PPC account

This is the best way, in my opinion, to do local keyword research, especially when you’ve hit a dead end with the traditional tools. Unfortunately, it’s not free like the options above. But setting up a PPC account, even one with a smaller budget, will give you exact keyword counts for all the terms you bid on. The danger is that, if you set your budget too low, your keywords won’t show enough to collect good keyword data.

What I would do is take the keyword list I’ve built via the previous items on this list and create several keyword groups and ads, run a campaign and watch over time to see which keywords get searched.

Your turn: How would you have answered Mary Ann’s question? What did I get wrong or right in my reply? Comments are yours…

The Google Webmaster Central team is doing a bang-up job of posting videos to their YouTube channel on a daily basis. Some are really, really helpful to webmasters and small business owners … others not as much.

One of the really, really helpful ones was just posted, and involves Matt Cutts answering a couple questions about the [link:] search operator. That’s the operator you use to check the backlinks of any domain.

Here are the primary takeaways from the video:

• Historically, Google has only shown a small percentage of the backlinks it knows about because they didn’t have the servers to show the full set.
• They have increased the amount of backlinks shown over time, but it’s still just a sample — a “relatively small percentage.”
• The [link:] operator only shows a random sample of links; it used to show only the highest-quality backlinks, but now it’s completely random.
• Google will show both high-quality and low-quality links via the public [link:] operator. It may include both followed and no-followed links. It may include links that do and don’t pass PageRank.
• They don’t show all the links because it might encourage someone to try to reverse engineer Google’s rankings, and/or allow them to spy on a competitor’s full set of backlinks.
• You can see “practically all” and a “vast majority” of the backlinks Google knows about your own site by registering with Google Webmaster Central.

I’ll put the full video below.
Continued

“Tapping Into Image Search” was one of the sessions I moderated last month at SMX West. We had a couple marketers on the panel, along with reps from Google and Yahoo. It was on day two of the conference, and several times later that day and on day three, I had people tell me it was their favorite session of the show. The information presented both from the search engines and the marketers was really good — lots of actionable tips about taking advantage of image search.

I just put one of those tips into action and want to share this with you. Peter Linsley of Google specifically suggested that images should be above the fold on your page.

On the U2 site that I manage, our news system places photos at the bottom of stories. So, unless it’s a really short article, the image will always be below the fold. Last night, one of our staffers covered a private U2 gig in Boston. We posted the story today, along with a great photo of the band on stage. Here’s the article. (link will open in a new window)

Since our system also doesn’t create thumbnails, I used the cheesy, bad-webmaster method of just resizing the photo and placing the smaller version above the fold at the top of the story. Have a look at how Google News treated our story:

We never get the extra thumbnail when we just have our images at the end of the stories we publish, but by putting a picture above the fold as Peter suggested, our listing on Google News and in Google News Alerts (email) looks much more attractive and eye-catching than listings from more well-known publications.

This isn’t exactly what Peter was talking about — he was referring to Google Image Search. But this shows that the same rule applies on other Google properties, too. Images above the fold can be a great way to get your listings to stand out on Google News and Alerts.

By the way, Peter recently made a video version of his presentation. You can watch it on YouTube.