Tom Skotidas, Head of Marketing for First Rate, is writing for Australia’s Marketing Magazine:

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), I have to tell you – marketing managers make a lot of mistakes.

I can easily count 20 of them. Of these, there is one mistake that I see over and over again. When this mistake is committed, it can destroy the business value of any SEO project. The mistake I am referring to occurs within SEO Keyword Research.  I call it the High Search Volume Addiction (HSVA).

In his article Tom covers the following:

• What is HSVA?
• Search Phrase Trend Analysis
• Keyword Conversion Analysis

You can read his article here: Mistake #1 in SEO keyword research.

According to various reports, approximately 20 to 35% of all web searches have local intent, meaning that the location of the search results is an important factor to the searcher.

Sometimes this is explicit (i.e. a  search for “north shore dentist”), but even if you omit the location from the search phrase, the search engines are smart enough to understand where you are located and that you are most likely trying to find a dentist who is reasonably nearby.

As you have no doubt seen many times, when Google believes that a specific search has local intent, it will frequently display what is known as a “local 10 pack”, containing a map of your local area with up to 10 links to businesses that relate to the search phrase. The position of the 10 pack varies, but it is often displayed either before the first, or after the third natural search result.

In this example, these seven local results are all displayed before even the very first natural search result. In other words the highly prized #1 position in Google search may not even appear above the fold on the search results page.

So what do you do if your business doesn’t appear in the local 10 pack when you search for your type of business?

Welcome to the world of “Local Search Optimization”

Google operates a product called Local Business Center. The premise is straight foward: “When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business”. Seems simple enough. So what are the benefits?

• Reach new customers on Google Maps and Google.com
• Works great for businesses of any size
• Update your listing at any time

Here is what First Rate’s Auckland local business listing looks like.

So what are the most important things that you should do to increase the chances of your business ranking well for local search?

All of the standard search engine optimisation techniques still apply. You still need to identify what your target search phrases are and make sure you use them in all the right places, such as in the title tag, in the header tags, in the body text of your home page, in image alt attributes, in your domain name if possible, etc.

What’s required is to take SEO even further to include optimisation for location as well as keywords.

Getting Started with Google Local Search in New Zealand

• Make sure you have claimed your local business listing. The easiest way to do this is to go to Google Maps and search for your business name. There is a good chance that your business will already be listed as Google gets feeds of business listings from other directories such as Finda.
• First, make sure the pushpin for your business is in the correct location. Click on it to open the page for the business listing. Near the top of the page there should be a link that says “Business owner?”. Click this to go to the Google Local Business Center. This is where you can validate that you own this business listing, edit your business information and upload photos and videos related to you business.
• Make sure your business address is in your target search city. This might sound like an obvious no-brainer, but it can be a bit of a trap. For example, if your business services the whole of the Auckland region, but your business address is actually in Waitakere City of Manukau City, you may be at a disadvantage compared to your competitors who happen to be located in Auckland City.
• Use a local (eg. Auckland specific) phone number as your primary business phone number rather than a toll free number or mobile number.
• Include your address and phone number in the footer of your entire website or at the very least on your “contact information” page.
• Include your city / town in the title tags of your web pages.
• Make sure you are included in relevant local directories such as the online version of the Yellow Pages, Finda, etc.
• Seek out customer reviews for your Finda listing and Google Local page. Listings with reviews have a higher chance of being included in the list of local results.
• Avoid using the same phone number or address for multiple business listings as this can negatively affect your local ranking.

Contact us if you would like professional assistance optimising your company’s local search results.

The time it takes to load a page has always had a big impact on how visitors navigate around your website, and more crucially, how long they stay on your website. 2010 will be a turning point for your website if it loads slowly.

Visitors won’t endure slow loading pages anymore

In 2006, Akamai commissioned Jupiter Research who interviewed over 1,000 internet users and produced a report entitled “Customer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience“. The main takeaway from the report was that the average time a visitor would be prepared to wait for a website to load was 4 seconds – any longer than that, would see potential customers abandoning the website and going elsewhere.

Akamai again commissioned a report which was published in September 2009 with the objectives of understanding how customer expectations to online shopping have evolved.  The results were astounding – the average time a user would be prepared to wait in 2009, has halved to only 2 seconds!

Source: Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behaviour – www.getelastic.com

Wow – 2 Seconds! Does your Homepage load in 2 seconds?

The respondents in the Akamai Report stated that website load time is second only to high prices on a customer’s list of pet hates.

Have you spent all that time and money making your E-Commerce website look as exciting as possible, featuring products with competitive pricing on a website that has been conversion optimised, only to find out that your customers are leaving without buying because you haven’t put the time into making your page load any quicker…?

It has been proven that you can increase your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate simply by moving all your javascript externally, building your website with CSS, Gzipping, removing whitespace and utilising low latency server architecture. Why not fix this today?

Page Speed as a factor for Organic Search Engine Rankings?

This is where page speed will get interesting in 2010!

Yahoo recently filed a patent that explores the ways a search engine considers the time it takes pages to render, for example how quickly that page is loaded directly after clicking on a natural listing from a search engine. Basically they’re hinting towards the fact that those sites that are the quickest to load will get a boost in the organic rankings.

Since that patent was launched, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) has been interviewed and he said that Page Speed will be a part of the Google algorithm (if it’s not already). We have known for a while that Page Speed has been a part of Quality Score in Adwords, and we should start to see it making a difference when Caffeine starts to go live on the rest of Google’s data centres in early 2010.

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Just this morning, Google blogged about released an experimental tool in Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance. It takes the aggregated data from Google Toolbar regarding actual page load times, example pages, and more interestingly how your site compares to other sites. Although it’s still in labs, it is an interesting development and indicates where SEO is moving towards.

Finally, Microsoft’s Patrick Harris mentions Page Speed as the most important on-page factor to focus on for SEO in the recent webcast “Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” (Dec 1 webcast, 6:50 in the video).

As we can see, in more ways that one, the speed at which your website loads should be a major concern to you in the next decade…

How can you improve your Page Speed?

Other than the Google’s new Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools, there are plenty of tools available to help you monitor and improve your page load speed:

www.WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest is an online tool to show you what parts of your site take the time to download. It provides a useful waterfall feature to give you a visual pinpoint as to exactly where the bottlenecks are.

Google Page Speed

Google have released their Page Speed Firefox plugin (also need to install Firebug, but both tools are extremely useful). This is similar to WebPageTest but you need Firefox and Firebug to be able to use it. It also provides a useful timeline of how your page renders.

Google Closure

An interesting add-on to Google Page Speed is called Google Closure. This plugin can compile all your Javascript into compact, high performance code. It basically checks and optimises your code which helps to make code that is cleaner and easier to maintain.

Recently I came across a website called EverZing, developers of software that can index spoken words. I was very excited about this sort of technology and immediately though about how terrific this would be for SEO.

Many websites are using videos and audio clips (podcasts) more and more, but they do not seem to inherit any credit from search engines for the unique content embedded within this streaming media. I’m not talking about Google Universal Search. Rather, I’m referring to the text version of spoken words within audio files.

When one searches for a keyphrase that was heard on a video or in a song on the radio, and would like to find the source online, then it is very difficult or sometimes impossible to find it. That’s because search engines can (not yet) turn audio into text effectively, at least not yet on a mass scale.

So there is a lot of value “locked away” in sound bits and video files, because users cannot search for relevant content that is hidden within a podcast or audio recording.

Audio indexing can solve this sort of issue and give websites with podcasts, videos or audio a major boost on search engine results pages (SERPs). Current search technology only allows users to search for video and audio files based on titles and descriptions. That’s quite primitive, is it not?

“Software as a Service” (SaaS) solutions such as EveryZing make it possible for media to become discoverable. Content is extracted from the media asset  (video or audio) and can then be published as text, allowing search engines to crawl and index the content. – Just imagine how many websites could publish so much new content much more frequently!

Google Audio Indexing – Good for SEO?

Browsing through Google Labs, I came across another audio indexing project called Google Audio Indexing (short GAUDI), which is even able to directly crawl video and audio using speech recognition technology. GAUDI functions just like Googlebot, which crawls text content on a website without the use of manual “pre-indexing” solutions such as EveryZing.

However, at this stage GAUDI searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels. I am looking forward to seeing the impact of “Big Brother Google” once this starts to index audio from all websites on web, and the output is fed into the main Google index.

In the meantime I will continue testing upcoming audio text publishing solutions and how these can be used for search engine optimisation purposes, and of course I will also keep my eye on Google’s Audio Indexing project as well.

A few weeks ago I arrived at my desk in the morning, when a colleague said “Have you heard of the Caffeine update?” – Jolly, I thought sarcastically, they finally fixed the coffee machine. I quickly enquired to hear more about Google’s latest algorithm update and have been on a quest to research Caffeine ever since!

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