These eight case studies with stats to back them up help reaffirm confidence that local search is a viable option for many types of businesses. Learn how a Horse Stable, Jeweler, Nursery School, Local Bank, Car Wash, Orthodontics, Tanning Salon, and Insurance Company have all used local search to drive leads and grow their business.

Feel free to add more local seo case study links by commenting.

1. Local SEO for Consumer Insurance Products: This case study profiles how Local SEO outperformed radio advertising over a 3 month span.

SEO for a Horse Stable: Local SEO was able to increase website traffic by 75%.

Local Search for Fitness & Tanning Club: SEO techniques at a local level delivered 261 new subscribers (and counting) to their newsletter.

Local SEO for a Orthodontics: Likely PPC based, $1,000 turned into 69 phone calls and 353 visits, includes a video testimonial.

Local Search Marketing for a Nursery School: Local SEO tactics helped deliver new leads, in total during 4 months over 300 new visitors found the nursery school without using its name in the search term.

Local Bank Branches Use SEO: Experienced a 34% annual increase in website traffic, obtained a first page ranking for over 80s words.

Local Search for a Car Wash: Local SEO increased website traffic 150% over three months. Search engine traffic increased 300%.

SEO for a Local Jeweler: Within 10 months website traffic rose from 872 visitors per month (on average) to 2,500 visitors.

Posted 30 November 2009 11:10am by Kevin Gibbons with 3 comments

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Last week the BBC announced it was to start optimising its headlines in an attempt to gain greater visibility in the search engine results pages, so I thought I’d take a look at journalism and the web.

Over recent years, many online news providers have had to adopt search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice into their articles in order to maintain their audience figures.
 
Yet I often see journalists and even some bloggers bemoaning the need to optimise their work, as though it means all the quality has been drained out of the article and replaced with Google-appeasing nonsense.
 
That’s why the first of my points is perhaps the most important. As long as it’s done well, SEO will not make your articles unreadable.
 
SEO is not the enemy of good writing
 
Believe it or not, the purpose of SEO is not to destroy your writing’s artistic integrity, it’s to make sure people can actually find your work to appreciate its genius.
 
I think that SEO is often misunderstood by professional writers, especially those who began their careers offline in the world of print and are suddenly having to adapt.
 
They end up believing that they have to cram key phrases like ‘Britney Spears’ into their serious article exposing the flaws in the government’s economic recovery plan. That’s obviously ludicrous.
 
Search engines are like a newsagent, they are where people find your copy. By bearing SEO tactics in mind, you place your article at the front, right next to the till.
 
Headlines hook more than humans
 
Journalists use their headlines to hook readers into the story, to convince them of the importance of reading this particular article.
 
However, most news websites will use the headline as the page’s title tag, which is one of the places that search engines look to assess the relevance of your article to someone’s search.
 
That means that if you can get the kind of words into your headline that people will search for, you’re more likely to gain a larger audience.
 
So, instead of something funny but inexplicable like ‘King faces whopper grilling’, use explanatory terms like ‘Mervyn King defends Bank of England strategy’.
 
Is SEO the end of the pun?
 
To an extent, this is bad news for the grand old tradition of the journalist’s pun. Look at a recent example. Poole Council replaced their town centre Christmas tree with a green cone that plays music and flashes inbuilt lights.
 
Naturally, almost every newspaper covered this story with the headline ‘Elf and safety’.
 
However, I heard the story on the radio and then Google News’d it at work. I searched for ‘Christmas tree health and safety’, so ended up reading one of the few articles that didn’t make that joke in its headline. (The Telegraph ran with ‘Poole axes real Christmas tree for safer fake one because of health and safety'. There’s a paper that gets it.)
 
I think SEO doesn’t need to be the end of the pun completely, though. There’s no reason a paper couldn’t use creative headlines for its print copy and optimised headlines online.
 
Use a keyword rich introduction
 
If your news story has a standalone introduction then make sure it’s filled with relevant terms. That doesn’t mean you have to make it incomprehensible to people, that will damage your reputation as a writer and increase your bounce rate.
 
To an extent it’s good journalistic practice, you want to summarise the main points and elements of your story to inform readers (and now search engines) what your article contains.
 
Write for your audience
 
There are some great ways of attracting inbound links to your article and getting it Tweeted or mentioned on social media sites like Digg or StumbleUpon. The web audience laps up ‘top tens’ and other list-type stories and are more likely to share these with their friends.
 
So, if you were planning to write an article about where to go for a winter holiday, for example, considering writing it as a ‘Top ten winter holiday destinations’ or ‘Five fashion crimes to avoid on the piste’.
 
These lists also allow you to use sub headings, which make an article more easily read by the online audience and are a great way of giving your targeted keywords an extra boost. Search engines pay attention to sub headings.
 
Consider keywords without curtailing quality
 
Your article doesn’t have to be stuffed with likely search terms but you can make it more search engine friendly.
 
Don’t abbreviate companies and phrases (unless they are as well-known as the full description, like SEO), and aim to use people’s full names.
 
This helps your article cover all the possible terms people are likely to search for and reiterates its subject relevance to the search engines.
 
Link descriptively
 
If you’re writing about the very latest development in an ongoing saga, it makes sense to link to your previous articles to give some background.
 
When you do so, don’t just link using useless text like ‘click here for my previous article’ or ‘for more information click here’ – use your headlines or relevant keywords.
 
Search engines look at the hyperlinked anchor text to help assess the relevance of a page to certain keywords. By linking using your (already optimised) headline, you give your last article an SEO boost.
 
Watch the competition
 
If your newspaper isn’t making its content work hard enough, your competitors certainly will. When even the mighty BBC News has to work to keep its articles visible in the search results, you know that there’s no room for complacency.
 
Soon, journalists who can’t write optimised copy for the web will be under-skilled for their changing workplace. In an industry that’s shedding staff writers all the time, that’s a dangerous position to be in.

Kevin Gibbons is Director of Search at SEOptimise and guest blogger for Econsultancy. You can also find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

http://www.2expertsdesign.com/2009/11/10/11-smart-keyword-related-apps-to-help-you-simplify-your-seo-task/

Whether or not you have a brick and mortar store, it is vital to ensure your website is ranked well in searches for your local area. What does this mean?

People aren’t just searching for ’widgets’ anymore, they are searching for “widgets AND my town” more and more trying to narrow their searches to their own neighborhood. Why is this?

People want to know whom they are dealing with online. They want to be able to visit your business location for your offerings, or at least have the peace of mind that they could if they wanted to.

For example, if you own a dry cleaning business, potential customers want to not only see your prices; they want directions and a map to get to your store. Even in the face of a global economy more and more people are realizing the importance of community and want to give their business to local merchants.

Here are some additional ideas to think about when adding your website to directories on the web.

Community: Yahoo! definitely excels when it comes to including community in local search. They are combining their Yahoo 360 social networks with local listings. The results are most helpful for people who wish to find information relating the their own area.

When you select a listing for a restaurant, for example, you will see all of the consumer-generated recommendations. If a recommender is in your group of contacts, a star is placed next to their recommendation. You know not only other consumers’ opinions, you know when those opinions are from people you know.

Mobile: Do not neglect the mobile search market. With the advent of systems like Verizon’s new technology and the BlackBerry, people search for the nearest theater using their hand-held device. Then they will search for that great martini bar that is nearby and open after the show.

Press Releases: Is your business doing something new and exciting online or offline? Are you you’re promoting it? Take advantage of free press releases from services.

Local City Searches: CitySearch is a major provider of local information for sites including MSN, Ask.com, Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and many others.

Contact Information On Your Website: Have a physical address and phone number within an address tag at least on your contact page and one other page; the best option would be the homepage. By far the best option is to have your address on all pages of your website. Such information builds trust rank value for your website too.

Related posts:

1. How to Block Search Engine Robots
2. Social Networking Strategies to Increase Traffic
3. Search Lessons To Apply In 2009
4. 10 Steps to Higher Search Engine Positioning
5. Anchors Aways: Anchor Text Optimization for SEM

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 by Kerry Dye

Never one to rest on their laurels, the Google Analytics team have launched a huge range of new features recently.Here is a very quick summary of what these are:

• More goals – you are no longer limited to just four
• Engagement goals – use time on site or pages per visit as a goal metric instead of a single page visit
• Mobile OS reporting (for non JS supporting mobiles) does need dynamic web pages your end
• Advanced filtering in table views – cross checking one type of data with another becomes much easier
• Unique visitor metric – use this against any other metric for real visitor numbers
• More custom variables – allowing you to track things specific to your own site and adding dramatically to the power of the program for larger organisations or those with very specific tracking requirements
• Sharing of custom reports – what it says really, share custom reporting with specific people
• Analytics intelligence (automatic) – weird this one, it pulls out unusual blips in the traffic to your site and it automatically tells you anything it thinks is important.
• Analytics intelligence (custom) tell Google what to watch out for. This makes more sense – you might know there is something specific that you want to track (like increases in organic traffic to your site generated by SEO) and being able to look this up quickly (or even have it emailed to you) is a great feature.

The Analytics Intelligence features haven’t yet made it to my account yet, but I will be interested to see how Google picks out the peaks ad troughs in the data. The automatic feature is going to alert you to a lot of things you didn’t even know were important, so it might be a bit of a data overload screen! On the other hand, picking out these oddities is something that I do automatically when looking at a client’s analytics account, so it may take some of the work out for me…

For instance, I might see a jump in traffic for one day, and I spend time tracking down if that was down to organic search or if they just sent out an email newsletter, or got featured on the BBC website. The automatic intelligence feature should pick these out and give me short cut to the right screen in Google Analytics to get the answer quickly. We’ll see.

Some of the other features have shown up in my Analytics account, and I have played with them a bit. I like the double segmentation in the tables, it helps a lot when tracking, particularly when you want to know own to the keyword level. In the last couple of weeks, two of my clients have implemented full conversion tracking, and it is allowing me insights into the successes of their optimisation that I didn’t have before. So knowing that natural search drives e.g. 75% of the traffic to the site, but only 50% of the sales gives me something to investigate more deeply.

As always with extra features, there is a big danger of information overload, but some of these will help distil the data down without having to crunch through reports or export to a spreadsheet, and others extend the reach of Google Analytics into new markets.

Perhaps what is most astonishing is that this product is still free, because in many ways it is hard to see what benefit Google is getting by giving all this away. I know there is some benefit to them in the cross over with proving Adwords ROI, but even so the resources it uses must be considerable.

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Tags: google analytics, statistics, traffic
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Us Grokkers are continuing to focus on what types of things eRetailers can work on to make Holiday Shopping more enjoyable (and persuasive) for their prospects.

Enter the “Product Configurator.” While it sounds a bit like an evil robot out of control, what we’re talking about today is simply an online application to allow prospects to customize a product on their way to buying it. This can be a lot of fun for online shoppers if done well, and lead to increased conversions or it can be a huge waste of money if the user experience isn’t really well thought out. If it’s planned out poorly, it may frustrate visitors and lead to a decrease in performance.

One of the main reasons survey takers give for NOT buying retail items online is the inability to touch/hold/feel the product before buying.  This is a challenge that almost all eRetailers have to work to overcome, and letting them see their customizations in real time as they play around with different configurations and features can be a good tactic to make sure people make it all the way through checkout.  It can also be a way to make gift shopping more fun–seeing the product “come alive” as you customize it for someone special on your shopping list can be very persuasive and exciting.  Finally, product configurators can be a great way to convert Early and Middle Stage buyers; those who aren’t quite ready to pull out their credit card yet.  The ability to save what they’ve configured can be a “hook” to get them back into the buying process, or at least allow you to market to them as time goes on.

When I think of being able to customize a product and buy it, I tend to think of sites like CafePress.com and Zazzle.com who specialize in small items like hats, t-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc.  But I wanted to grab some more interesting examples for you, so let’s look at a couple West Coast companies who let bike riders have a little fun as they create unique products to purchase.

Example #1: Mission Bicycle Company

In the mood to build a custom fixed-gear bicycle?  Probably not, but use your imagination!  This site’s product configurator takes you step-by-step through the process, using clear copy explanations, a progress indicator, and friendly assurances.  They manage to do this using plenty of white space in a clean layout and flow.

In the end, you can see a mockup of your bike’s design, which components you’ve chosen, and an itemized price.  My favorite part is that it doesn’t get too heavy into jargon, which would make the n00b feel intimidated.

Example #2: Timbuk2

Once you’ve designed your fancy bicycle to ride around on the streets of San Francisco, you’ll need a cool bag to haul your laptop and other sundries, right?  This brings us to another West Coast company’s “build your own bag” product app.

Timbuk2’s site does a nice job of using actual photographic images as opposed to illustrative graphics.  It’s impressive that they cover the many permutations (bag types, colors, patterns, add-ons, etc.) with high-quality photos.  The flow through the options is very intuitive, and in the end you definitely feel like you’ve made something that reflects your tastes.  This makes NOT buying it very difficult!

So those are two examples in a very narrow niche.  I ask all Grok readers: Who else is doing a good job with this type of online app?  Who does it well in clothing?  Shoes? (other than Nike, please!)  Laptops?  Leave a comment about whose product configurator you like, why, and what product category it’s in.  Also chime in if you’re building something like this in time for Holidays 2009!

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In B2C, Improving Conversion, Website Optimization, e-commerce, product presentation