by Miriam Ellis

Talk about Happy Holidays and the spirit of giving! Mike Blumenthal has just published the very first Complete Google LBC Category List we've ever seen. This is the gift Local SEOs and local-focused business owners have been waiting for and it vastly simplifies the process of picking the right categories for a given business - something you can't afford to make a mistake about!

Choose 5 And Choose Well

When adding your business listing to Google's Local Business Center, you are prompted to choose 5 categories that best describe the nature of your entity. Just like those old Yellow Pages categories, LBC categories are critical to helping users navigate their way to your business and choosing the right categories can mean the difference between traffic coming to you from Local Search or not.

Some businesses offer many more than 5 different areas of specialization, but the point here is to use the LBC as Google dictates and pick the 5 main categories that best describe what your business offers. With Blumenthal's new list, considering your options just got so much easier.

In the past, when picking categories for my Local SEM clients, I had to do a lot of experimenting to find good choices, typing in various keywords, looking at the competition, etc. Now, all I have to do is refer to this list to quickly understand all of the possibilities and this not only saves time on my part, but it reduces the chances that I might overlook a category that could potentially be of high importance to a client. All of the categories are laid out in plain view, accompanied by a very interesting list of synonyms that apparently cause these categories to be called up.

There is much discussion going on about the synonyms. No one is quite sure how Google arrived at this list. Mike Blumenthal says he senses these are likely drawn from general organic searcher behavior, rather than LBC user behavior, so the synonym list should be taken note of by anyone doing any type of SEO. You may be able to identify some interesting patterns from the keywords associated with each main category.

Don't Get Too Fancy, Pal

I want to share an anecdotal tip here that I feel is important to consider while we're on the subject of choosing categories. Steve Hatcher of Axe Media relates the following:

I had a rash of business owners contacting me over past month or two because their maps rankings plummeted. Most of them had been stuffing extra keywords into the categories, including city names.

Again, the point here is to use the LBC as Google intends it to be used. As a Local SEO, my life is made so much tougher by people trying to get fancy and outwit the bots. They stuff, they spam, they ruin the quality of the results by trying to get ahead fast instead of planning to stick with it for the long haul. Granted, with bugs, glitches and a chronic lack of oversight on Google's part, the temptation to fool around is pretty strong, but it's totally antisocial to do so.

The whole point of Local is to create indexes that yield pertinent, real and helpful information for communities that improve the quality of life for local people. Sets of results that list the same business 7 times in a row with variously over-optimized titles do not deliver a quality user experience. It's my belief that participation in Local carries with it a responsibility to understand Google's rules about their own product and to play by those rules to the best of your ability. It's a smart plan for your business in the long run and a decent way to treat your neighbors.

Stay tuned on this subject of LBC categories. Blumenthal has revealed that he is currently working on a database version of this list that will make finding the right categories for your business even easier than scanning the whole long list. Now there's something to make visions of local sugarplums dance in your head!

by Christian Arno

The case for SEO is quite a simple one really. If a business ranks highly on Google for its industry's most popular key search terms, then they are far more likely to succeed than if they have a poor ranking. This is reflected in research conducted by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) which found that two-thirds of marketers planned to increase their SEO resources in 2009.

But we don't want to preach to the converted here. Most of you will already be aware of the power that SEO holds in terms of targeting domestic markets, which is why you're here reading this.

However, many small businesses could be missing a trick by limiting their SEO scope to domestic shores - the world is a big place and 75% of the earth's population speaks no English at all. Furthermore, whilst English may well be the most widely spoken 'second language' across the globe, people simply prefer to do business in their own tongue.

In Europe, there are over 200 indigenous languages, 23 of which are spoken in the 27 European Union (EU) member states (some of the languages are spoken in more than one country, hence the disparity).

Figure 2: Top five European Languages

English is spoken to some degree by over half the population of the European Union. But from a native-speaking point of view, German has plurality with almost 20% of the EU population speaking it as a mother tongue, followed by English and Italian each with 13% and French with 12%.

Which languages you work in naturally depends on which markets you intend to target, a decision based on the nature of your business and where you feel there is a gap in the market which your business can exploit. But consider that if your business was targeting a sector in the South American market, having your website available in Spanish opens your business up to a potential 350 million native speakers around the world; expanding further into the burgeoning Brazilian economy and a Portuguese website opens up an extra 200 million speakers.

Of course, it also pays to be wary of the linguistic differences that exist between, say, the Spanish in Spain and the Spanish in many Latin American countries. For example, the word carro in Spain is a cart that you push or pull to transport things, whereas in Latin America it is an actual car that you can drive around in. A car in Spain is a coche, whereas a coche in Latin America is a baby stroller.

Similarly, dejeuner is 'lunch' in France, but 'breakfast' in French-speaking Switzerland and Belgium. And whilst France often import Anglicisms directly into their language, French-speaking Canada tend to translate the English terms directly: e.g. 'Weekend' is le weekend in France, but fin de semaine in Canada (literally: 'end of the week).

There are many dialectal differences within languages that help to highlight the importance of adopting a fully localized marketing strategy. And the only way of ensuring your message is properly localized, is to use a professionally qualified translator who is native to the target country. Furthermore, the linguist should ideally live in the country too, as language is constantly evolving and they must be up-to-date on the latest local lingo.

So how does all this fit in with SEO, the issue you're all here to read about? Well, keywords are the cornerstone of any SEO campaign...domestic and international. However, it's important that you DON'T translate your keywords directly from English...they too should be localized.

The correct dictionary translation of a keyword or phrase may NOT be what people use to search for the desired product or service locally, they may use abbreviations, colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing.

To help illustrate this point, consider this scenario. A US car insurance company that has dedicated a considerable amount of resources to ensure it ranks highly on Google.com for the search term 'car insurance' decides it wants to launch a campaign to target French markets.

A literal and not-incorrect translation of 'car insurance' into French would be 'l'assurance automobile'. However, Google's keyword tool indicates that this term yields very few results. A little research into the key search terms actually used in French search engines reveal that people tend to use variations of this term, such as 'assurance auto' or 'assurance voiture'.

By taking just a few minutes to research the keywords that consumers actively use to search for car insurance abroad, a major problem can be averted.

Similarly, in some markets it won't be necessary to translate some of the key search terms at all. In Germany, for example, English terminology is often used, especially with technical and web-related subjects. So a website design company that ranks highly in the US for the term 'web design' would be fine to incorporate the English phrase into its German-language website.

So in the same way as you identify your industry's highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google's free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimized.

Once you have your keywords identified for each country, you can then incorporate these into a professionally translated website. It's important that native speakers are used to translate your website as it must exude professionalism in all your target markets.

English may still be the dominant language in terms of content on the Web, but the majority of the world's internet users' first language isn't English. And this disparity creates a rather lucrative opportunity for those seeking to enter new markets: the competition for key search terms is much less on the non-English language internet, therefore it's possible to achieve high search engine rankings far easier than in English.

The importance of localizing your website for the target market can't be over-emphasized as there is a myriad of cultural and linguistic complexities that must be addressed - this applies to your international SEO initiatives too.

by Mike Moran

Image via Wikipedia

Trust me. I know the right way to do organic search marketing. I know that you start with metrics. I know that you must measure the traffic that comes to the site and see how many people convert. I've even written a couple of books that have a strong metrics focus to Internet marketing, organic search marketing in particular. But when I talk to small businesses, I am more and more wondering if search metrics are optional, at least at first.

Yeah, I know that this is crazy talk. Blasphemy against everything I stand for. I know.

But I've found myself chatting with several small business owners recently who have no idea how to do search marketing and I found myself reluctant to make metrics the first step for search marketing, as I always do for a larger firm.

I spoke with one small business owner that asked, "What should I do first for organic search marketing?" And I knew that he has very little money to spend on consultants or fancy tools. And he has less time than money. So, could I, with a straight face, tell him to figure out his conversions and implement Google Analytics? He has no chance of being able to do that on his own and no money to pay someone to do it. So, is that really the first step?

I'm forcing myself to say, "No." We need to tell people how to do something tangible that might cause money to roll in.

So, I found myself asking him what keywords he thinks his customers use. (No, I didn't suggest keyword research, because he doesn't know how and can't afford someone who does.) And I found myself suggesting that he change the titles to emphasize those keywords. And just putting a new phone number on the Web site so that anyone who called it he would know is from the Web.

These are things he could do. And some money would start to appear in the cash register. I know that my advice was "wrong" but I hope it was wrong in the sense of "do it wrong quickly." Let's get started doing it wrong to drive some value and then later we can come back and invest more to really do it right.

So, if the boss is already convinced search is a good idea, do you need to start with numbers that prove it? Or can you start by doing some of it and only later coming back and investing in measurement (and keyword research and all the other important stuff we do)? Or is that new phone number enough of a measurement that we can live off that for a while? I don't swear I know the answers, but I continue to realize that if the advice given doesn't reflect the real client needs, it doesn't matter how many best practices you know. The ultimate best practice is to give clients something that they can do.