I love logic, order, and simplicity. So let me anger a bunch of people whom I’ve never met, and who will hate me without knowing me either. ; )
Kirkby, Liverpool, Merseyside, England – This is how addresses are often mentioned or written of in the United Kingdom.This is ONE place, not a listing of multiple addresses. This is a “ring” of locations that gets gradually larger, so if you’re piloting a Nazi bomber or telling Mr. Bean how to get to your party, you can narrow your way in on that silk map you’ve got spread out in your lap.
Of course a full postal address ALSO has a house/street number and a postal code as well.
Okay Here We Go with what it all means:
Kirkby – The City. Got it, good.
Liverpool – A NEARBY city. Don’t need to mention it. Yes, it’s the “Post Town”, but unless you’re mailing a letter to someone, who cares? The U.S. has many small towns whose mail is ultimately handled by larger cities, but that city is not included in the address – that’s why there’s zip codes.
Merseyside – A Metropolitan County. Don’t need to mention it. Even the Royal Mail is going to eliminate counties from postal addresses soon. Many of these counties are left over “shires” from ancient times. Many U.K. residents like to identify themselves, or other U.K. citizens with physical and psychological characteristics based on county. But with modern transportation and communication devices, that’s all gradually getting homogenized anyway. And even if it still exists, it doesn’t add anything to me determining where someone lives, it just complicates communicating to and from them.
England – A specific country in the United Kingdom roughly equal in size to one of the large states in the U.S.
GOOD, that pins down roughly where Kirkby is in the U.K. That’s all you need.
Better Way:
Kirkby, England. Adequate and precise enough. Done.
In the U.S. they don’t mention the “county” with the city, it’s too much information/too many characters for easy reference and writing, and can easily be determined with modern mapping websites and other refrences.
Since each country in the United Kingdom is roughly the size of an American State, it’s simple enough to associate a rough geographic location in each country when locating a city. Chicago is in northern Illinois, Los Angeles is in southern California. Very easy to remember, and very easy to refer to. Don’t need to know the county they’re in, or their “Post City” (although they are their own post cities, obviously).
Anyone that takes my little essay too seriously needs to relax, it’s just a small annoyance to me. If it’s the core of your very being and existence, then please continue to use this frame of reference, I don’t care – I just won’t be using it myself.
Rant over, you may return to whatever you were doing.
Beginning Oct. 1, the $10 Recreation Passport replaces the state park sticker for access into all state parks, recreation areas and boat launches. To get the Recreation Passport, Michigan residents can check “YES” on their license plate renewal forms. The Recreation Passport also helps preserve forest campgrounds and trails, historic and cultural sites in state parks, and local parks. Where can $10 take you? Visit www.michigan.gov/recreationpassport for more information.
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Perpetual Jukebox – Cool substitute for Pandora, which now limits your monthly playtime and has audio ads.
Pick an artist on YouTube, and turn on the “auto play” option of the “Mix” box in the upper right corner. It plays related artists as well, so you get the “Pandora” effect.
Customers are standing or driving outside your business RIGHT NOW. Go ahead, get up and look through the window. 14 of every 100 people you see traveling by have a smartphone. And 7 of those 14 are using local search and online maps to find businesses like yours everyday.
“45.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones in an average month during the December to February (2010) period…” HERE is the data behind that statistic.
That’s FIFTEEN PERCENT of the U.S. population. With the recent sales of Apple iPhone and HTC Evo 4g models, that percentage is estimated to rise to 20%.
So it’s easy to see that there are many people nationally and in your local business market who have the capability to use a Smartphone to LOOK FOR YOU while they are out and about shopping.
Now let us see how many people with Smartphones are using them to search for local businesses.
ZD Net recently published an article revealing that 14 percent of mobile device users were accessing mobile maps, and more of them are beginning to use apps than browsers. This strengthens the concept that for a local business, you website is becoming SECONDARY to your local business listings (Google Places, etc.) and your local maps information.
You can have the greatest website in the world, (and we recommend that you DO!), but if your customers are purchasing your product or service locally, rather than through your website, you need to optimize your local business listings now. People are beginning to take the internet out into the world with themselves more and more, and they use that information to FIND LOCAL BUSINESSES.
Here is a very significant point from the ZD Net article.
This is telling us that the relationship between online maps, and online local business search is intimately tied together. Many times, map searches lead to a further search for businesses in the area, and many business searches begin on a map search page.
We have already taken businesses who did not show up in local business searches, and pushed them past 5 or 6 competitors in Google Places, Bing, Yahoo, and Yellowpages.com results. This has also translated in some cases to 200+ percent increases in traffic to their websites as well.
The time to move on optimizing your local business listings is now. In six months, your competitors will have already claimed the top spots – then the battle is 100 times harder to get into those spots. There’s no reason to wait, and 100 reasons not to.
There is usually a little mystery around the cause and effect around Search Engine Optimization (SEO), particularly when it comes to local market results like the Google “7-Pack”. It’s a different set of algorithms and a different set of optimization solutions than one uses for website SEO. The underlying keyword principles are the same, as is the importance of accurate, pertinent information on websites other than the client’s own. But a lot of abstract solutions and tenuous results are thrown around on a lot of the blogs and message boards out there.
So to supply some concrete evidence, and even to reveal a few of the solutions, I give you a fresh success story from the real world.
Our client, Woodward Auto, has been in business for over 20 years. They know what they’re doing, and have the usual phone directory ads, newspaper ads, and a website which actually has pretty good SEO. However, as you see in this first image, they didn’t even show up on the map for “used cars” in their local market. This is one of their main lines of business, yet the 40%-50% of people in their area looking for a local merchant using online search who then buy offline would not have found Woodward Auto at all.
This is like paying for a phone directory ad, and having it published in an insert sheet that falls out on the way to being delivered to the phone customers. Of course Google “7-Pack” listings are free, so it’s an even larger tragedy that businesses aren’t taking advantage of grabbing a top spot for themselves.
Now, one week later, after a few optimization tricks, and one that was so simple I can’t believe it worked so fast, our client is not only in the “7-pack”, but in the number two position.
From nowhere to top of the heap in one week. But in reality, we saw this result in ONE DAY. The trick? Google REALLY LOVES themselves. A lot. They want you to pay attention to them like no one else exists. We have set up a lot of citations and information listings at many other business and search directories, but none of it took effect, or had the immediate effect of completing the clients’ Google Places listing to 100%.
And even then, we haven’t truly filled up everything to the maximum. We don’t have all 10 pictures that are allowed. We have NO reviews yet. We do have some citations and links from other websites that have been around for awhile, so we don’t know yet if that was a catalyst, but we have other keyword phrases for which we rocketed past other listings that had more reviews, more links, and better page rank.
But let me clarify. This client was already at 78% completion on Google places for a long time. When their website was optimized for SEO (there is a lot of room for improvement, but the basics were set up by someone else relatively well), their Google Local (as it was known at the time) listing was set up okay, but not brilliantly.
So we attacked it in three phases:
- Keyword-rich titles, descriptions of services, slogans, and other content.
- Other business info like full hours of operation and special services descriptions, including brand names where applicable.
At this point, the completion amount stood around 83%. All that remained was what we thought was the “frosting” on the cake, and of little importance – Rich media and images.
3. A video link from YouTube, and a handful of uploaded images
We don’t know yet if Google appreciates us using links from their YouTube subsidiary, but it didn’t hurt. Along with the still images we uploaded, this brought the listing completion to 100%. At that point, out of curiosity, we ran a standard keyword/geolocation search just to see how our client’s competitors were ranked.
And BOOM. There was our client’s listing. Not only in the “7-Pack”, but ranked just below #1. We were blown away. There is a LOT of other ongoing work we have done and are doing to optimize SEO for this clients local listing as well as their website, but this Google completion was like flicking a light switch. It might literally have been 30-60 minutes between finishing up the work at Google and checking some of the keyword searches.
Now I am not saying that Google Places optimization (frustrating as it can be) is the end all, be all for local SEO, but I am saying to focus on what FEEDS that listing from outside sources, and also what optimizes it internally. We have done quite a few local SEO projects, but this one went from dramatically negative to dramatically positive so quickly we were thrilled, and hopefully our client is as well.
Of course, in order to generate enough traffic to convert to significant revenue, we’ll need to optimize a lot more!
Good luck fellow local optimizers, and good hunting!
