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Category: Vertical SEO: Video, Image, Local

Dive into vertical-specific SEO tactics.


  • Hey Jared, To an extent, the process of outreaching video is much the same as the process of outreaching infographics, blog posts or other promotional content. There aren't really good places to share videos, just by the virtue of them being videos. The best places to upload your content will very much depend on the style and the target market of the content itself Would you be able to share the screen capture videos with me? I might then have a better idea for some specific outreach ideas and places to seed the contnet - rather than offering generic points about process. That said, there are some specific points for the two video hosting platforms you mentioned. Vimeo: I assume this is corporate content which you're putting up on vimeo pro (rather than a standard licence)? Use this version for your link building outreach Embed the video at 640px by 360px  content on a rich, accesible page on your site with lots of surrounding copy. include a sharable embed code below the video which links back to your target page with the anchor text you want. Submit an XML video sitemap to GWT with the page your vimeo video is hosted on. Build strong internal links to that page Youtube: Put a link as the first thing in the video meta description ensure you have uploaded a closed caption file - use http://www.captiontube.appspot.com to easily create one. optimise the keyword tags, title and meta description for the keywords you want to rank for. link to it from your main website.

    | PhilNottingham
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  • Thanks for the advice! will work with that. Gonna setup a Google Docs form and send it to the business owners.

    | nvs.nim
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  • And if you need  a technical explanation on this, Rob, including some proof, here it is: http://rob-hammond.co.uk/how-google-handles-alt-text-in-h1-tags (look at the bottom what they have to say about other SEs besides google.) also look at this, a similar question asked earlier in SEOmoz Q&A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-images-work-as-a-h1 warm regards to all!

    | virtualhandshake
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  • You won't see the change right away. Google will take a bit to get it in. From Google: ** Updates to existing listings, including the removal of photos or entire listings can also take up to two weeks. .** The phone change is causing your problem and you need to request that you get reverified. From google Places: Note that if you edit your business name, address, or phone number, you'll need to verify again before these changes can go live. Just go in and reverify and you should get all. If you get the PIN in quickly, you should be up within 24 hours of getting it in. Good Luck

    | RobertFisher
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  • The issue is going to be around how you use the name. What Google does not want is what I would call a misdirection by a business (and many unscrupulous ones try often). So, if you are in a town and your business is John's Coffee in town, but your national brand is HotTime Coffee, the issue will be around who you are. Due to the number of people utilizing Places, you need to be clear prior to the upload that you are using a viable (within the guidelines clearly) method or presentment.  My suggestion would be to first do one or two. You can get those verified in a day or two. Once you have the format of presentation correct, try one more to be sure always utilizing a distant location so you have a good view of the landscape. Then do your bulk upload.  To me, this would be better as you would spend 2to 4 days getting ready and reduce time on the backend by having had it right to start with. Best to you

    | RobertFisher
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  • Hello Whitespark's paid citation tool continues to be the most widely-cited in the Local SEO industry. However, have you tried SEOverflow's Local Search Toolkit? http://www.localsearchtoolkit.com/ I know it was free when it was released. Not sure if it remains so. Might be worth checking out! Miriam

    | MiriamEllis
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  • I like that infographic from searchenginejournal.com Does anyone know of an infographic that they can show me that is made out of a definition or content rather than statistics? And what do I need to keep in mind when doing that kind?

    | BobGW
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    | vinku
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  • Thanks for your help Robert! I just read Phil's post and it complements EGOL's answer really well. Thanks for pointing me into the right direction! Best, Daan

    | daan.loening
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  • Hi Brandon, When I search, I also see your site ranking in the #2 position. Here's a screenshot - https://skitch.com/cyrusshepard/gidyr/raleigh-bail-bonds-google-search No two people hardly ever see the same search results due to Google's effect of both localization and personalization, but there are some ways to mitigate these factors. 1. Add pws=0 to the end of your search query URL. This "depersonalizes" the search results. So your final URL will look something like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=raleigh+bail+bonds&**pws=0** (notice the pws at the end?) 2. To minimize the effect of localization, set your location to as wide as possible. For the US, hit "change location" and type United States into the box, like this: [image: WLiVgkgQkUE0SkySSEsheCfwfOEgPSB5a8OEAAAAASUVORK5CYII=] Here's a whole blog post with tips and tricks to get neutral rankings - written by a smart and overly handsome man. Best of Luck!

    | Cyrus-Shepard
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  • Greetings! I wanted to provide some resources for you to review before making a decision on this. Here is an SEOmoz discussion on this same topic: http://www.seomoz.org/q/call-tracking-and-local-seo Here is an article from 2009 by David Mihm which continues to be pointed to in most discussions of call tracking: http://searchengineland.com/be-wary-of-call-tracking-numbers-in-local-search-26895 Here is a detailed and excellent article from Chris Silver Smith regarding cloaking and call tracking: http://searchengineland.com/for-local-seo-lack-of-call-tracking-solution-spawns-cloaking-70198 I believe that a read of these three resources will give you all of the information you need to make an informed choice regarding the risk/benefits of call tracking in a local campaign. Good luck! Miriam

    | MiriamEllis
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  • Hello Waquid, Thank you for coming to Q&A to ask your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Members are doing a good job trying to share what they've personally seen in terms of updates. However, I don't believe that anyone can provide a simple answer to your question regarding if/when your client should see a change in his rankings. The reason for this is that while you are working on your client's properties, his competitors are working on theirs. So, for example, let's say that you have amassed some citations for your client over the past two weeks. During those same two weeks, a competitor has amassed a bunch of new reviews. None of this is occurring in a vacuum and the data is constantly changing. It appears to me that citation sources are updated at least once a month, but this is pure speculation. Also, you mention having had to remove duplicates and 'fix' listings - indicating that the business in question may have violated Google's policies in the past. If this is so, the degree of the violations may play a big role in how quickly Google may be willing to 'trust' the profile again. So, as I've said, there just isn't a simple answer here. My advice to is to educate the client about the work you are doing and the vital nature of cleaning up his record so that he can work towards becoming trusted. I never make promises of high rankings or set specific dates with my own Local clients because this sets incorrect expectations for them. Instead, show that the what you have done to clean up records, amass reviews, citations, links, improve the geo hooks in their website, etc., and let them know that you are doing everything possible towards improving their standings. This is the most any Local SEO can do, giving the competitive, complex, changing and often buggy nature of Places. Miriam

    | MiriamEllis
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  • Hi David, Nice to see you again! I want to be sure to link to a 2009 interview of Carter Maslan that covered this very topic. Though Carter's advice was meant to be taken as opinion rather than facts straight from Google, his remarks are really relevant to what you are asking about: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-carter-maslan-032710.shtml This is the part of the interview I'm referencing: Eric Enge: Let’s say you have more than one location, 100 for example. In your view, is it helpful to have individual pages on the website for all of the locations? Also, is it helpful to have the Google local business center linked to each of those individual pages rather than having 100 locations that point to a single web address? Carter Maslan: I can tell you what I think the ideal end state is, and there are various levels of getting there. Ultimately, we would like to have the store-specific page known so that people can just click through and see today's specials and any kind of adjustments for that particular day. We would love to have all of that information on a direct click to the most specific page for that location. That’s what we encourage, but there are still a lot of chains and things that just link to their top-level domain. I guess it's a split answer. We want to get to a store specific page, but we are not uniformly there across all of the businesses. Eric Enge: Could that potentially be encouraged by making it a ranking factor, for example? Carter Maslan: Yes. I guess there are two sides to it. If you create a store-specific page that really just has an address, it wouldn't be as helpful as having some genuinely good content on the page that the user would really appreciate having as the first click-through experience. That’s what I think we need to work through. We don't want to arbitrarily tell people that they must create a store-specific page, because we are really just trying to find the most useful page for that business. That’s why I am not so definitive on the store-specific page or not. I really just want what’s best for the retailer, store or businesses, first and foremost giving the user what he would want to see when he clicks on that business. Eric Enge: Say you have a store-specific page that lists specific and individual things about just one store location. Depending on the kind of business that could be an inventory list that shows you've got extra stock? Carter Maslan: There is a chain of stores that carries yoga equipment that my wife really likes. They have special yoga instruction, carry special brands, and host lectures on some special days. There are all kinds of things that the retailer does that relate to that specific store location, and there is also a general corporate catalogue page. So this is not black and white, and even though we want to encourage it, it's not that there is a definitive guidance saying companies need to have that page. Eric Enge: Obviously it’s good if there is a quality page with information unique and specific to each location. Carter Maslan: Yes, that's great. If we know that there’s good information about that page, then that helps on search and the snippets that we can show on the search results, because we know that the page is referencing that place. It does help even if it ends up not being the page that you list as your primary homepage. If there is good content that we know is content about that place, then it helps us do a better job with query results. If a company has a page that's store-specific and talks about its class schedule, and there is one that says its holding Tai Chi class tonight and someone is searching for places to do Tai Chi, then that helps us to score it. If a lot of people have found that page helpful about the Tai Chi class, then when people search for Tai Chi we would know that that location has something to do with Tai Chi. In your shoes, my advice to this client would be this: Keep the basic contact information on the landing pages front and center. Put the complete NAP (name-address-phone number) first on the page in hCard. Follow this up with whatever the pitch is. Hire a good copywriter to write 3 -5 paragraphs of unique text for each of the 10 pages. Hire either a designer or video specialist to create a unique chart of statistics or a great video for each of the 10 locations. In addition to displaying this media, describe it in text. With these steps, the pages will be rich enough and different enough so that they don't simply come across as cut-and-paste jobs. Whatever is created should be specific to the town being targeted - whether this is a description of the location, the building, the office, crime statistics or what have you. Yes, this takes effort, but every website owner has decided to opt into the publishing business and this is their time to get publishing! Hope this helps! Miriam

    | MiriamEllis
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  • I'm having one problem with that. My businness is just one, so Google doesn't let me add listings via uploading an Excel file. Do you know how can I manage to add it in different languages without an Excel file?

    | arielbortz
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  • Hi Dylan, Wow, I totally should have read your question before I posted one  of my own. First of all, no hard evidence on this..but it appears to me that Google is giving a page a rankings boost when a video is embedded on it...and in my case, these videos are hosted a variety of places - not just YouTube (one on site, one on a product manufacturer's). Conveniently enough, they also give you a chance to gain more of the SERP by pulling out the video within with a thumbnail. In my case, the two pages became visible in brand searches for my company, though those pages were NOT optimized at all for our brand terms, and have nothing but internal links to them. Investigation is on-going - I haven't checked if they rank for what they're optimized for, but this is probably moot since they ranked well before. Anyway, takeaway for me appears to be Google is giving more love to videos as quality content & ranking factors...and hosting platform doesn't matter...but my evidence is minimal at this point. Also, all searches were performed Universal Google..not on Youtube.

    | Blenny
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