Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

I’ve been seeing more and more local businesses advertising in their windows lately to “Follow us on Twitter” or “Check us out on Yelp” and every time I do, it makes me smile. It’s hard to be a local business owner. In a large market like Chicago, it takes something really unique to stand out amongst all the other businesses. Whether you have a dog walking business, sports apparel store, or a Mexican restaurant, there’s always somebody else who can undercut your costs, offer a wider variety of products, or just make more noise than you.

But online reviews and social media allow a new kind of intimacy never before had when it comes to local businesses. Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, and even FYIndout are all empowering local business owners and their customers to raise their digital hands and say “This place is the best!” (or worst) It also allows your customer service and staff to shine through, even if customers have never visited your business. Here are a few ideas for using social media for your local business, regardless of whether you are a social media ace or just dipping your toe in the water.

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Recently, I’ve been asked to help out a few friends do some PR on the side. Just some basic stuff, but it amazes me how much PR professionals could benefit from just a little search marketing training. Hence, I’ve put together 5 things every PR professional should know in order to better serve their clients, as well as get them a little more search savvy.

1. Use “quotes” or exact phrasing in your queries
   Now this one is pretty basic and I think most PR professionals already know this one.  If you’re trying to find where your press release was quoted, listed, or mentioned, you need to use quotes around your phrase. So if your press release is “Tommy won the big race at Sunday’s fair”, then you would use that phrase exactly, as I’ve shown here.
2. Use the “link:” syntax in your queries.
   Now most search engines support this syntax, however, I’ve found Yahoo to always have the best results for this. The “link:” syntax tells you what sites are linking to your press release. I think this syntax is actually more important than the one above, as it will show you all sites that are linking to your press release, regardless of whether they quote your press release, reuse part of the content, or just put in a random link. In any case, it shows you which sites have “staying power” and which ones are just fly-by-night press release zombies who simply regurgitate whatever the PR wires give them. You can learn more about the “link:” and see an example here.

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As it’s now summer in Chicago, there’s plenty of opportunities to dine al fresco and I’ve been looking for new and fun places to eat. The one thing I don’t find is actual restaurants ranking well in search engines for common phrases: wrigleyville al fresco dining, restaurants with outdoor seating in chicago, or outdoor dining in the loop. The majority of sites which are ranking well are listing websites (Yelp, Metromix, CenterStage, etc.). Herein lies a real opportunity for a local restaurant to take advantage of this situation with some simple changes. Below are five tips any local restaurant could use to improve their rankings:

Page title, party of 65. Your table is ready.
Although brand recognition is something to strive for, especially in a competitive market like Chicago, you can’t rely on that alone. Unless you are Starbucks or Alinea, people are probably just looking for a lakeview mexican restaurant. You have to give your users, as well as search engines some context as to what your restaurant is, who you are, and who you serve. And you only have 65 characters to do it in. I know, that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s more than you think. Here’s some examples below of what I’m talking about:

Instead of “Mom’s Diner“, say “Mom’s Diner – Quality Food in Northcenter Since 1935“. That’s only 52 characters, you still have about 13 or so left.

Here’s another one. Instead of “The Road House Bar“, say “The Road House Bar – Roudiest Bar in the South Loop and West Loop“. That’s 65 characters. This can be as much a part of your branding as the design of your website itself. Remember, Google is only as smart as the information you provide it.

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Just an awesome use of technology and social settings. Here’s a bit of explanation of what’s going on:

ZYGOTE is a lightweight inflated ball, illuminated from within, that responds to pressure applied to its surface. Interacting with the ball is simple: punch it, bounce it, squeeze it, or tap it and the ball’s internal LEDs react instantaneously.

NUday-ZYGOTE from todo.to.it.

No matter how often you talk with a client or how in the loop your agency is, there will always be things that slip through the cracks in terms of information coming from the client. Whether it’s “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Joe’s been transferred to Omaha” or “Man, you guys should have talked with us last week. We had a bunch of fires to put out.” Each one of these is a lost opportunity to assist the client and improve your existing relationship, but it’s also lost revenue for your agency. Well, there are many ways to stay more in the loop as a result of information constantly being posted online, specifically your clients.

The following are three ideas of how you can stay more in the loop, better service your clients, and improve your bottom line at the same time.

Job alerts
You’re probably thinking, what am I going to learn from job alerts from my client? Well, the first thing you’ll learn is whether they are going to be a client much longer or not. As marketing is often the first place cuts are made, when your client stops hiring, it often means their bottom line is flattening or starting to decline and hence your relationship may come into jeopardy. Second, it will clue you into things that are going on within the organization that you are often not privileged to as a third party. Are they hiring in sales or marketing? Product development or HR? Are there trends or is this an ongoing thing? For example, if you are constantly seeing the same position come up within the marketing department, does it mean the department is growing or do they just have a lot of turnover? Do you need to make other inroads and obtain other client champions in case your client contact is transferred, laid off, fired, etc.?

Ok, you get the point, so how do you do this now? Well, the first place I would start is:

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Following up on my last post concerning Social Media Emergency Plans, I decided to provide a little more detail into the legal section I outlined. As I said in my last post, I would make sure to contact your legal counsel to ensure you know what to do in scenarios where social media (or any other media) gets out of hand. It’s probably a good idea to do some sort of risk assessment prior to starting any of these campaigns. Part of that process though is to know who to contact once you decide legal action is required. Below is a list of the “who’s who” on the web and each of their copyright and/or DMCA pages.

• Twitter’s Copyright Page
• Youtube’s Copyright Page
• Vimeo’s Copyright Page
• Facebook’s Copyright Page
• Myspace’s Copyright Page
• LinkedIn’s Copyright Page

And in case it gets indexed before you can remove it:

• Google’s Copyright Page
• Yahoo’s Copyright Page
• MSN’s Copyright Page

As I couldn’t find any document to really show how to do a social media risk assessment, part 3 of this series will be an outline for a document on how to do just such an assessment. Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see and I’ll make sure to include it.

And for any law firms or lawyers reading this, here’s a trio of twitter tips for you. Enjoy.

Over the last several months, there have been several examples of how social media is still a space where many are still trying to learn and mistakes can happen, and often do. Whether it’s Motrin Mom’s, where being off message with certain audiences can lead to online outrage, or the recent Dominoes YouTube issue where a few bad apples threw an entire brand under the bus. In either case, there are several things that can be learned prior to starting a social media campaign. But just in case everything goes south, it’s still a good idea to have a contingency plan in place, just in case.

So you’ve kicked off some social media effort and all of a sudden you see 20 people, 60 people, 500 people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs calling your efforts lame, repulsive, inappropriate, and so on. Or even worse, a proprietary document that was never supposed to see the light of day is now floating around in the social media universe. What do you do?

Breathe deeply and think
The first lesson is not to fly off half cocked. Stop and pause for a minute and think.

• First define, who are “they”? Where are “they”? Twitter, Facebook, blogs, traditional media? Are they competitors? What does it say about “them” because of the spaces they frequent?
• How vocal are “they”? Put them somewhere on a scale with relevance. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is “harmless razzing” and 10 is “foaming at the mouth”, where do they fall? Anything registering on this scale, is both important for marketing efforts going forward and anything over a 2 or a 3 probably needs further investigation.
• How much influence do “they” have? This is extremely difficult to define. With Google, Yahoo, Buzzmetrics, Radian6, and everyone else scraping the internet for content – if it’s online, it has influence. Anyone with “influence” can always find a no-name bit of information and report it as their own.
• Why are “they” so vocal? What is the context they are making these comments? Only by understanding their frustrations can you make an articulate response.
• Did “they” see the original version of the video, ad, comment, press release, internal document, etc.? Or did they see some subverted or doctored version meant to cause this kind of response?

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So I recently had some difficulty describing two types of paid search techniques. The first was in regards to a set of keyword terms which include a geographic location such as “Chicago dentist” or “New York plumber”. The second set of keywords I was trying to describe was a paid search campaign which used generic keywords “plumber” or “dentist”, but only showed those ads within a specific geographic area, such as Chicago or New York. Well, after some discussion with our head of media, he let me on two terms to describe both.

Geo-targeted: Which I was able to describe prior to this discussion. This is my latter example where a user enters a generic term and you show only the paid advertising for the geographic region they live in. For example, I’m searching in Chicago and I search for “pizza” or “dentist” and the mere fact that I reside within the targeted geographic area means the ad will display for me.

Geo-modified: Which I understood the technique, but just didn’t have the vocabulary to describe. This is the former technique whereby a user is explicit and says “Chicago dentist” or “New York plumber” and it doesn’t matter whether I am in Chicago or Denver. If I search for “Chicago dentist”, the geo-modified keyword phrase will cause that ad to be displayed.

And in case you missed it, Google decided to liven up the whole mix over the last few days by releasing geo-targeted results for natural search queries. So when a user queries things like “pizza” or “dentist”, Google returns the natural results, but also includes “relevant” local results. This is still to be determined as to how accurate these results are, but at least it’s a start. I’ve included a screen shot of what this looks like below:

I’m kind of against this technique as it trains users away from using longer queries to get more detailed information. I understand the logic that many of the queries they are using are localized queries: pizza, dry cleaning, chinese food, etc. however, I’m not 100% sure users will understand that when they need local information, they can just type in a one or two word query with no modifier. I think this might confuse Google’s experience a bit for any cases where Google either provides too much or too little information. If a user enters “Chinese restaurants“, they receive information about those restaurants, along with localized listings. If they use the phrase “traditional Chinese restaurants“, they do not receive any local listings. I know I’m giving Google a hard time about semantics and they will get better over time, but it’s the behavior they are reinforcing that I have an issue with. It should be “local modifier + term” yields local results – every time. If no local modifer is specified, it should yield non-local results – every time. By creating this muddy situation, they are diluting from the user experience, ever so slightly.

Any other cool targeting terms of features I should know about? Let me know if the comments.

Photo courtesy of timsnell.

I don’t think we’ve reached jumped the shark territory yet, but we’re getting there pretty fast.

I think we’ve either just about crossed over the peak or we’re about to shortly and are now heading towards disillusionment. As soon as American Idol starts using Twitter as a voting platform, we’re done.

So a while back I did a little experiment to see if I could rank #1 for a keyword phrase in one day. By creating a site that morning, doing a bit of SEO and link building throughout the day and by the end of the day have a ranking site in Google. And not just ranking, but ranking well. I had seen it done previously by others, but hadn’t done it myself. And with Google’s index updating more rapidly over the last year, I knew that it was feasible to have a site go from nothing to ranking in a matter of hours or days.

Now typically, we tell our clients that it will take some time to see results and depending on the competitive set and the keywords they want to rank “well” for, it can be anywhere from two weeks to two months to two years, in extreme cases. In this case, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just see what I could do.

So one morning I read a story which threw out a bunch of buzzwords like microblogging, crowdsourcing, web 2.0, etc. and I said, this is getting out of hand. So I did a quick URL search to see what domains were available, purchased one I liked, set up a hosting plan, and posted some files I threw together quickly. All within the span of a few hours.
That’s step 1.

Step 2 is that I set up Google analytics and Google webmaster tools to ensure that Google would both crawl the site that day, as well as give me statistics on what traffic I could generate over the course of that day.

Step 3 is that I blogged about it via my own blog, posted it on Twitter where it was RT’ed a few times, and posted it to Sphinn, Digg, Del.icio.us and a few other social bookmarking sites. And by the end of the day, VOILA! You can see the results below.

So if you are in crisis mode or you really drop the ball on some marketing effort, there is still some hope that you can make up for it by creating, optimizing, and launching a site all in one day*.

*DISCLAIMER – subject to competitive set, age of your website, amount of traffic on your website, your websites authority in your space, content to support your optimization, your knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. etc. etc. Do not try this at home – results will vary