What is the Difference between Google Places and Google Plus?

Google has been fairly confusing during the changes that it made to how local businesses are listed in its Maps and Search that rolled out last year, and it has not made things easy or clear for local businesses.

Originally, a local business could create a listing for themselves on Google Maps by using Google Places. After the creation of Google Plus, Google also made it possible for businesses to create social pages on Google Plus, called Google Plus for Business — similar to Facebook pages for businesses.

Google’s ultimate goal has been to combine the map listings of the Google Places pages with the social aspect of the Google Plus pages. The first step in this process was to upgrade the look and feel of a Google Places page so that it looks more like a Google Plus page. With the redesign also came a new name: Google Plus Local. Totally not confusing at all, right?

Some months later, Google rolled out a process by which you can combine your Google Places (Google Plus Local) page and your Google Plus for Business page into one complete page that is both listed on Google Maps and has social features. Take a note here: before you run to go do that, it might not always be a good idea, depending on what type of business you are. See the “Combining” section below.

How to Set Up your Google Places and Google Plus Pages

Important things to note about setting up your pages:

• Fill out as much information as possible. Business name, address, and phone number aren’t enough. Fill out hours, fill out your business category, add a description and pictures and videos. Note: if it’s a Google Places page, any videos you add won’t be displayed. Those must be added to a Google Plus page or a combined page.
• Your address should appear on your Google Pages exactly as it appears on your website. Google has its own standard way of displaying addresses, so if Google displays your address differently once you enter it into your Google page, you should change the address on your website. Google is more likely to rank you higher if all of your addresses everywhere on the web all match exactly.
• Don’t use a P.O. Box or a UPS Store as your address. Google will delete you. If you can’t receive mail at your address, Google does have some guidelines about what to do.
• If you are a Service Area Business, or a business that only serves customers at their location (such as a locksmith or a cleaning service), you must hide your address by checking a small box that says “Do not show customers my address.” The reasoning behind this is that the reason customers want an address would be so they can come to your place of business, and if you don’t serve any customers at your place of business, Google doesn’t want to confuse people by showing them an address. This little requirement also means that you should not have a “local business” Google + page since the address cannot be hidden, and you should not merge your Google Places page and your Google Plus page (see below).
• In general, the name that you put as your business name on either your Places or Plus page should match the signs that you have outside your business and the business name that you use when you answer the phone. Google moderators may check your street signs on Street View, or they may call your business to double check your information. Unless everything matches, they may delete your listing.
• If you have time, familiarize yourself with the Google Guidelines for these types of pages. If you violate Google’s guidelines, you may be subject to removal. Most of the guidelines are pretty straightforward, but there are some exceptions depending on what type of business you are, such as service area businesses.

Combining Your Google Places Page and Google Plus Page

Tired of managing and updating two separate pages? Google has made it possible to combine your Google Places page and your Google Plus page. However, you should only do this if you fit these specific criteria:

• You don’t use the Bulk Uploads feature
• You are not a Service Area Business that only serves people at their homes
• If your Google+ page is not listed as a Local Business
• You have a Google+ page
• You can receive verification postcards
• Your business’s Google Places listing and Google+ page were claimed by the same email address

If you fit all the above criteria, merging your Places listing and Plus page should be possible. However, merging the pages will not necessarily help your SEO in any way. Benefits to doing this mostly include ease of managing pages.

Where to Get Help

The first place to get help is to look through Google’s Places Help pages and Google’s Plus Help pages. In addition to articles about common problems, there are also ways to troubleshoot and report issues and receive support from Google.

In addition, Google also provides the Google and Your Business Forum where business owners can ask questions and get answers from other knowledgeable people and Google employees.

For even more good information on this, see the dedicated, well-researched information on local search — primarily Google, but information about improving your business across all local search platforms in general.

The post Google Places and Google Plus Pages Explained appeared first on 435 Digital.

In this edition of What’s Your KPI?, we will discuss search results rankings.

This article discusses in depth what a ranking is, how rankings work, and the aspects of an SEO campaign that rankings can and cannot measure. If you don’t want to read the whole article, the short and sweet version can be found at the end in the Bullet Points for Review section.

What Are Rankings?

Before we start, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about terminology. For the purposes of this blog post, and generally when SEOs talk about “rankings,” they mean “How high one of your website’s pages appears when someone searches for a specific keyword.” For example, if you own a hardware store, someone searches Google for “local hardware stores,” and the front page of your website appears in the third spot on the search results page, you might say that your homepage ranks third for the term “local hardware stores.”

Tools like Google Webmaster Tools will also give you a list of keywords that have a number next to them, this number tells you (on average) how high that page of your website ranks for certain search phrases. As you can see from the image, Google Webmaster Tools calls this number “Average Position,” but it means the same thing as “ranking.”

A lot of people get really excited about rankings when they first get into the world of SEO. In theory, rankings are the perfect measure of how well your business' SEO campaign is going. Search results are a big scoreboard, and when you search for your keyword phrases, you can tell right away where you stand, both overall and compared to your competitors. That's why it's called a "ranking," right?

Unfortunately, that's not how rankings actually work.

Let's dig a little deeper into exactly how Google (and other search engines) come up with search results so we can better understand what, exactly, a ranking is and what it is not.

How Rankings Work

Pretend that your friend has just asked you for a movie recommendation. It might be easy to just give them a list of your three favorite movies, but if you want to make sure you are helpful to them — you’re a good friend — you would ask them some questions to help clarify what might interest them.

• What genre of movie do they have in mind?
• Are they going to be watching the movie by themselves?
• Will they watch it on a date?
• With a bunch of friends?
• With their family?

Depending on the answers to those questions, you might recommend entirely different movies.

Search engines are similar. When someone searches for something in a search engine, “good movies” might be the words they type, but the search engine will try to figure out as much as they can about the person searching so that they can give them better search results.

Google is well-known for personalizing its search results. Google places a cookie in your browser that tracks the websites you visit. That way it can figure out what kinds of content you like (long articles or funny videos?), what you normally look for, and what seem to be your favorite websites. This has become even more personalized since the recent launch of Search Plus Your World, where if you search for something through Google while you are logged into Google+, it will use information from your profile, your search history, and your friends on Google+ to try to bring you more personalized results.

Even if you are completely logged out of every Google product, have cleared your web history, browser cache, cookies, and are browsing in “safe mode,” Google can still figure out what kind of computer or mobile device you’re using, what browser you’re using, your internet speed, and most importantly, your location.

Sound a bit creepy? Maybe. However, personalized search results do usually deliver on their promise to make search results more useful for the user. For example, if you search for “local hardware stores” while you are physically in Tampa, Florida, don’t you want to get different search results than someone searching for “local hardware stores” who is physically in Redmond, Washington?

The bottom line of this customization is that no two people have the same search results. Let me say that again. No two people get the same search results. A more in-depth article about this can be found here. This means that, unlike a scoreboard, where each website would always be third or tenth across the board, a business’ website may show up much higher or lower in the search results for different people searching in different locations on different computers at different times.

So if websites never show up at the same place in the search results, how can you have one solid number that’s considered your “ranking” for a keyword?

The “rank” numbers available from tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are more like an average. If your rank is “8″ for a certain term, that means that on average, your website is showing up eighth in the search results for that term.

Why “Rankings” Aren’t a Good KPI

Not Really a Score: Now that you know that nobody sees the same search results, it’s easier to understand why rankings can’t be a hard-and-fast measure of SEO success. It’s great to have a higher ranking than your competitors, but that doesn’t mean you will always show up higher in every search result set just because you have a higher ranking. Even if you have a higher ranking, your competitors may sometimes show up higher than you. Conversely, even if you have a lower ranking, you may show up higher than your competitors. It all depends on who is searching.

Depends on Good Keywords: I’ve hinted at it several times throughout this article, but I’ll say it explicitly: There is no “one” rank for your entire website for every keyword. Certain pages of your website will have a rank for a specific keyword. For example your home page may have a ranking of “5″ for “local hardware store,” but it might not even rank in the top 10 for “stores that sell nails.” The reason this is important is because if you are trying to rank for the wrong keywords, you may never have true “success” in the form of customers who want to buy your products. As a hardware store, ranking in the top 5 for the word “tools” feels really good, but accomplishing that top ranking won’t necessarily bring in the kind of people who are looking to buy your products from you.

It’s Getting Harder To Track: There used to be several tools where you could enter in a keyword or phrase that you were trying to rank for, and then you could track week-to-week or month-to-month whether your rank for that term was rising or falling. Unfortunately, due to some updates in Google’s policies, there are few, if any, tools that do that anymore. The only places to get information about your site’s rank are through Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, and neither of those tools have the functionality or present the information as well. This makes it difficult to track whether or not your rankings for specific keywords are changing.

So What Are Rankings Good For?

Essentially, the only thing that rankings are good for is that they can give you an idea of, on average, how visible a page of your website is in the search results for a certain keyword phrase. That’s it. Sorry folks.

Bullet Points For Review:

• “Rankings” are how high your website appears in the search results for a specific keyword.
• Search engines personalize everyone’s search results, so no two people ever have the same results.
• A “ranking” is really an average number, meaning sometimes you will show up higher than your ranking, sometimes lower, depending on who’s searching.
• This makes it hard to use as a comparison or as a definite measure of success. At best, it can tell you generally where you are, but not much else.

The post What’s Your KPI: Search Rankings are a Terrible Performance Indicator appeared first on 435 Digital.

One of my favorite ideas from Chris Boggs’ presentation was the idea of comparing diagnostic SEO to triage at a hospital – figure out who to treat or fix first. In most hospitals, triage sorts patients out so that those with the worst injuries get treated first. However, Chris says that we should treat SEO diagnostics more like a military triage: treat the least injured people (or fix the less-broken areas of your site) first, so that they can get out there and start fighting again.

Also according to Chris, if you ever notice a sudden drastic drop in rankings or traffic, first check with IT to make sure they didn’t mess anything up. In his experience, sudden losses of rankings or traffic are usually due to IT messing up something like the robots.txt file or the redirect list. Then, once you’ve checked out all technical problems, you should look at on-site content issues, such as tags, titles and meta descriptions, and internal links. Finally, check your backlinks and off-site promoting efforts.

Grant Simmons gave a very interesting presentation about how to use Google itself as a tool to diagnose the SEO health of your website. The best thing about using Google as an SEO tool is that it’s completely free and available to anyone, and you can use it for all kinds of things, from checking site structure and internal linking problems, to indexing issues and other potential problems.

Grant’s list of SEO Uses for Google

• Use Google Suggest to see what comes up when you search for your brand, or when you search for one of the primary keywords you’re going for.
• Google Instant Preview: One of Google’s ranking signals is now page layout, with sites that have a lot of ads or not-useful information above the fold ranking lower than sites that don’t. Check out how Google sees your site with Preview.
• Do a brand search and see what percentage of the SERP you show up for. You should see your website and your social media sites at least.
• The “site:” operator is an SEO’s best friend.
  • You can search for “site:yourdomain.com” and “site:www.yourdomain.com” and compare the number of results Google finds. The number of results should be about the same, otherwise you might have some canonicalization problems.
  • Do a “site:” search of your domain, and go to the very last page. If it says “[x] number of results have been omitted because they are very similar to the results displayed,” you might have a duplicate content issue you need to look into.
  • You can check explicitly for duplicate content on your site by copying a sentence or two that you suspect is duplicate, put it in quotation marks, and search your site with “site:”.
  • Just do a “site:” search for your domain without any keywords and see what comes up. Your homepage should be first, followed by other important pages. If some obscure page like your privacy policy is high in the results, you may have an internal linking problem.
• Check the titles and snippets that show up. If the snippet doesn’t really match the keyword very well, or isn’t interesting or descriptive enough for people to want to click through, see where the snippet is pulling from and change it. (Often, the snippet is the meta description.)

This presentation showed that you can really do a lot of SEO sleuthing with very minimal tools.

The post SES Chicago: SEO Diagnostics for the Skilled Search Engine Mechanic appeared first on 435 Digital.

The Web Analytics Dive Deep session on Thursday afternoon was presented by Thom Craver (@ThomCraver). This session focused primarily on how to use Google analytics to tell stories about visitors on your website, especially from the perspective of someone who does a lot of email campaigns.

There are ways in Google Analytics to track clicks from various campaigns, primarily email campaigns. Use Google URL Builder to create custom URLs for each link that you put in your campaign. Thom used a good example from an email from the Obama campaign, where each of the three calls to action in the email had a different custom URL so that they could be tracked. That way the Obama campaign would know which of their calls to action were working better for which people, not just if that email in general was converting people.

When it comes to telling customer stories and teasing information out of data, ask yourself some of these questions:

• Which segment (20%) of visitors is providing the most (80%) conversions?
• The most revenue?
• The most profit?

These three areas aren’t necessarily the same, and by asking yourself these questions, you might be able to increase your profit a lot while only having to raise conversions by a little.

All in all, it was a fairly interesting session, especially for companies who do a lot of email marketing. Even for those who don’t, it was good to get some tips on how to start segmenting website visitors in order to better understand them.

The post SES Chicago: Web Analytics Dive Deep appeared first on 435 Digital.

With that in mind, Jon Ball (@linkbuildingjon) talked about linkbuilding strategies that, while perhaps not as easy as buying links, will allow you to rest easy whenever Google releases a new update. He spent the first part of the session outlining some general philosophies of doing good linkbuilding, and the last part of the session going over some specific linkbuilding strategies that can help you know where to look to get links. I really enjoyed his presentation; he had a very entertaining speaking style, and I think some of my favorite quotes out of SES came from his session.

The three pillars of SEO are technical (is your site getting indexed properly by Google?), content (do you have good, solid, useful content with keywords in it on your site?) and linkbuilding. If you’ve done the other two and you’re still not getting rankings, there’s probably “a giant elephant in the room that says “linkbuilding” every so often.”

If you’ve gotten your technical SEO and your content SEO down, and you’re still not ranking very well, there’s probably a giant elephant in the room that says “linkbuilding” every so often.

Seven White-Hat Linkbuilding Philosophies

• If Google didn’t exist, would you want this link? That is to say, if you sell kitten beds, are you getting links on sites where people looking to buy kitten beds will be? Plug the marketing cord into the SEO cord whenever possible.
• Relevancy first!
• Website owners are people, and are more likely to link to other people.  Don’t get lost in the mess of computers and internet and email. Talk to people face to face. Call them. Remind them there’s a real person on the other end of the link.
• The most powerful linkbuilding tool is your brain.
• Linkbuilding is a team sport. Brainstorm ideas with other people – it’s much easier to come up with ideas that way.
• Forget viral! If it goes viral, it goes viral. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
• FTBOM: For the Betterment of Mankind. Don’t just be self-promoting all the time. Do things for people that actually help them, and they will be more willing to give you links.

These were all pretty basic, as far as linkbuilding advice. Probably the most useful piece of information for me was the “Relevancy Tree” that was one of the slides. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to replicate the graphic he used, but the concept is similar to those “mind maps” that people sometimes use for brainstorming. Get everyone in a room, and ask them everything they think about when they hear your product. Everything from related products, to who might use or buy that product, who might need information on that product, everything you can think of. Then sort all those ideas out into a map of categories and related terms, starting with the most relevant in the middle and working outwards towards the least relevant ideas. This can give you a good place to start.

Now onto the more specific stuff, which I found to be somewhat more useful.

(Somewhat) Specific Linkbuilding Strategies

• Have a blog! But make sure that you’re writing it to the people who buy your things, not to your other industry people.  Also, use catchy blog titles. Which are you more likely to read, “Best Children’s Books of 2011” or “Worst Children’s Books of 2011”?
• Do interviews with people. If you write it up on your blog, they’ll probably link back to you.
• Research your “local keyword universe” to see what’s out there. Do Google searches for
  “[Keyword] news” (or experts, associations, forums, blogs, trade shows, events, classifieds)
• Guest posting. Write great, useful content for other people’s sites. Don’t make it pitchy. Rise above the ghettos of SEO spam. Write things that are useful for them. Then, “if it gets published, don’t just hide in your cave and laugh, promote it!”
• Write testimonials. If you ever go to a business or hire someone and you have a really good experience, write them a very nice unsolicited email and maybe send a picture. They might put you on their blog.
• Build a museum.
• Build a glossary – especially if your industry has a lot of jargon, this will be very useful for your customers and potential customers.
• Get on people’s resource pages – but only if you would actually be a resource to their audience.
• DIY sites are very popular and content-hungry. Write a how-to related to what you do.
• Badging! Make a really nice-looking logo/badge that people can put on their websites. If it’s some kind of recognition or award, they may be more than willing to put it on their site. For example, a badge for a “Extreme Couponing Award” given to mommy bloggers who use a lot of coupons from a coupon website.
• Contests
• Reviews
• (Forums … be very careful with these. Make sure it’s a forum you actually want to contribute to and are interested in.)

A lot of these tips are certainly already out there, but it was nice to see them presented all in one place as a good reminder, especially with a dash of humor. Unfortunately, he ran out of time to talk about each one of them in depth, but I will definitely be using more of these tips in the future.

The post SES Chicago: Linkbuilding in a Post-Penguin World appeared first on 435 Digital.

As one of the last sessions of the first day of SES, Bill Hunt (@billhunt) spoke about ways to improve your keyword research – both how to find better keywords, and how to better use the keywords that you find. With keyword research, we as digital marketers have the opportunity to really match what the customer wants, and the better that we do that, the more likely we are to gain customers. What’s more, keyword research from SEO can inform PPC, and vice versa, and both sets of keyword research can benefit (and benefit from) Social Media, so if you do your keyword research right, all areas of your digital marketing campaign can grow.

Bill Hunt’s Tips for Better Keyword Research

Since Google is now hiding a lot of the search terms under “not provided,” there are several other ways to find out the terms that people are using.

• Use the data from Webmaster Tools and any AdWords campaigns you might be running to get a good idea of the terms that most people are finding you for.
• The information from your site search is also a gold mine – if people land on your website and can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll probably use the site search to try and find it.
• If your company has a call center, start having the phone reps ask callers how they found the company. If the caller found your company through a search engine, ask them what search terms they used.
• Add “purchase cycle phrases” such as buy, discount, sale, closeout, upgrade, in stock, refurbished, and special price to your keywords and check the search volumes for those terms.

Tips for Using Your Keyword Research Well

• The most important reason for analyzing your keyword data is so that you can figure out what customers are looking for and what their intent is. That way you have a better chance of delivering customers what they’re looking for, which makes them more likely to convert and more likely to come back.
• Use categories to sort your keywords – do most people search by product type (shoes, hats, pants)? By the place or event they plan to use it for (weddings, date night, yoga)? By body type? What other categories can you think of?
• Create audience personas: What terms does an amateur or infrequent user of your product use to search for what you offer? Are they looking for different products than a professional or more experienced user? What keywords does each type of customer use in the buying cycle (which ones are more likely to search for “cheap” or “discount” as opposed to “first-class” or “professional”)?

How to Use Keyword Research Across Disciplines

• Use PPC and Social Media data to inform your keyword research. Social Media can help you find how people feel about different keywords, the context in which people are using those keywords, and even discover new words that you didn’t know people were using with your product. Make a word cloud of most-used words associated with your brand or product.
• Use Keyword Research to Inform PPC. Take your top 20 most expensive PPC keywords and hand them over to the SEO team. Any gains in organic rankings for those keywords save you money that can be put to good use somewhere else.
• Use Keyword Research to Inform Social Media. Since good keyword research will help you understand what people are looking for, use social media to answer people’s questions before they even ask them.
• Use keyword research to identify industry influencers. Take the top 1700 keywords you’re trying to rank for and see who shows up in the top 10 organic results for those keywords most often. This can help you identify social media influencers, potential linkbuilding partners, and your competition.

Keyword research can be really powerful if used in the right way. If you’re not harnessing the true power of keyword research, you’re truly missing out – no matter what aspect of digital marketing you do.

The post SES Chicago: Keyword Modeling Analysis appeared first on 435 Digital.

Let’s face it: most of us who work in a web-related industry are or have been nerds at one point in our lives. And what nerd doesn’t love a giant reference to all their favorite inside jokes? This video is an all-out celebration of two supremely nerdy pursuits: marching band and video games.

In this amazing half-time show, which they pulled together in a week and a half, Ohio State’s marching band performs a collection of video game theme songs, accompanied by matching formations. They have a little bit of everything, from classics like Space Invaders, Tetris, Pac-Man, and Mario, all the way through Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, and even Halo.

It’s a long video (9 minutes!) but it’s well worth the watch – wait until you see them make Link’s horse, Epona, actually run! Major props to Ohio State’s marching band for pulling this together so quickly and performing it so well.

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