Foot In Mouth Internet Marketing- Content Writing Advice » Geographically sensitive keywords

Thoughts on Local Search

Jeremy Rivera — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:27:46 +0000

Recently I did a guest blog post about Taking your Local Search to the next level of awesomeness. While researching into the impact of local search on small businesses I had the pleasure of talking to Todd Butcher of Pepperjam, who had some great ideas about local search. I did quote some of his thoughts in that article but thought that the rest of his ideas would be very helpful to businesses interested in local search.

Question: Given that fact that Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Yelp and other “yellow page” type services now include geo tagging, address, and often a map of a business location, would you say that getting these entries could
be helpful in your organic rankings, if you have a geographically
centered Keyword?

Todd: If a business cares at all about local search, they have to go after these entries. Here is why: First, if a searcher is sophisticated enough to actually search with a geotargeted term, the local results are the first thing you see on the SERPS. In addition, for many local listings there are sub categories linking off to sites that google feels provide valuable information about that business.

Quality Local Information

This means that sites which are acting as local aggregators of business information are going to motivated to provide thorough and accurate information to be listed there. This will greatly improve the overall search experience.

Google is Getting Geographic

Second, it seems many people simply search a term like “pizza” or “car dealer”. Search on these terms and Google will ask you to enter a zip code to better refine your search locally. This is just another example of the importance that is being placed on local results.

Also, I think Google is trying to take the emphasis away from other aggregators like Superpages and try to keep it all “in house” so to speak. For that reason, I think it’s important now more than ever for the 100% local business to position themselves to take advantage of these local results.

Advice for Local Business Owners

The bottom line is, if you are a local business, it doesn’t make sense to go after broad keywords. Geotarget. Do everything you can to get listed in these results. Of course, to make sure your site shows up in these results is a whole other SEO discussion.

City pages and providing relevant content

Jeremy Rivera — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 04:26:04 +0000

If you were curious about a community you’d like to move to, what type of information would you want to know? What makes up a city? Is it the sheer number of people in the area? How much is their average income? What is the weather like? What is there to do for activities, or recreation, what cities or resources are nearby? What is the city government like? What part of the city is the most expensive? Is it a new city or does it have some history behind it?

When you build your content for a particular city remember that the page is only valuable if it is something that somebody actually might want to know. People are not going to go and see how much corn was raised in a city before they move there. Be sure to write interesting information that you would like to find yourself if you were moving to a new city.

If you believe in tele-kinesis..raise my hand.
Kurt Vonnegut

Geo Keywords – Geographic Placement and Search Engine Placement

Jeremy Rivera — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:20:07 +0000

The thing that I love about search engines is that common sense rules the methods they use to determine value. It’s common sense that if you’re providing valuable content for website visitors about a particular topic, the search engines will view that positively and increase your relevancy to the keyword.

This brings us back to the concept of keywords specific to a geographic area, I’ll call them Geo Keywords for short. When your business is based around a Geo keyword, you have a open door for content writing that you shouldn’t ignore. Your opening is that when you have a Geo keyword, you aren’t competing against all of the people across the world for the term. Look at the term “Content Writing Advice“, the search engines are going to look for information relevant to Content, Writing, Advice, Content Writing, Content Advice, Writing Advice, and other terms that are relative to that area of information on your website. This means that anybody, anywhere who posts information to the world wide web that the search engines see is going to be competing for that keyword. Now lets take a look at “Riverside Content Writing”, now the search engines are going to look for content writing, but also for your relevance to Riverside. The advantage is that you have now narrowed down your competition from a international scale where large companies are most likely going to dominate, to a more local scale where your competition less fierce.

The second advantage to Geo Keywords is that you have a term of relevance that has large amounts of information available to you to use. You can go to city hall and pickup a fly-er on the city, pick up a book from the library and like we learned in our public school system, paraphrase to success! This approach makes writing content half as difficult to achieve, because the research is done for you already. This also applies to your strategy for your site visitors. If your a real estate agent, and are trying to get people to buy homes in your area, having unique relevant content about the community they will be moving to is paramount to capturing out of state buyers. Having that content at your fingertips just makes it easier for you to build up your content.

Good Night and Good Luck

Content writing for Geographically specific keywords Part 1

Jeremy Rivera — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:59:00 +0000

“Location, Location, Location” this business mantra has been applied to marketing strategies for years. This also applies to internet marketing, and here is how:

It seems like there are a category of keywords that are specific to an area. Certain industries are tied almost exclusively to these “Geographically Specific Keywords“, like the real estate industry for example. Realtors obviously are only able to service certain communities, and so their keywords become something like “Riverside Real estate”, or “Riverside homes”. Once you have determined what keyword you’d like to get placed for, you want to target your website to get rankings under that word. How does Google pick what websites are relevant to “Riverside” and to “Real estate”. The primary element is going to be what verbiage actually appears on the site. Like it says in the Google Webmaster Tools, “Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.” So, posting up hundreds of images of “Riverside”, and “Real Estate” won’t get you anywhere.
First, you should ensure that if your hosting company has given you any default content, be sure to remove and replace it with your own unique information. This content is by it’s very nature “duplicate content” and will give you no benefit whatsoever in the search engines because so many other sites use the same text. You can of course use the default text as an “idea” to base your verbiage off, but be sure that you COMPLETELY rewrite the text, and don’t just modify a word here and there.
Second, make sure your homepage includes your keywords. I know this seems simple, but you need to actually look at your page and make sure that actual text, and not just fancy JPG images contain your keywords.
Location also comes into play in deciding where to place your keywords, the search engines are not going to think that “riverside real estate” is a very important keyword, if the first time it is seen is at the bottom of the page in font size 8.
So remember, the location of your keywords will affect the location of your rankings.

So long and thanks for all the fish.