Dev Basu Interview – Local SEO

In my constant quest to understand better the knowledge surrounding search marketing I run a few interviews with guys and gals who understand every nook n’ crannie of their niche. I am delighted to bring you my recent interview with Dev Basu, about Local SEO. Here’s the interview :

Me : Dev, welcome to NSM, can you please give us some background info on yourself and your current role within the Search Industry today?

Dev : Thanks Paul. I’ve been active in the search marketing industry since 2006, although I stumbled upon SEO as a marketing medium in late 2005. Since then, I’ve worked at Microsoft Canada as a channel marketer, with my role evolving into managing their OEM web portal. My first serious foray into SEO was when I started blogging about affiliate marketing and attracting conversions through organic search.

I’m passionate about search marketing, so I’d say my role is spread the word, and help businesses of all sizes realize how much they can accomplish by leveraging search.

Since then I’ve worked at firms such as Search Engine People as an SEO and Social Media Specialist, and at a Forex powerhouse called OANDA. Currently, I’m the Director of Online Marketing for a Yellow Pages advertising agency called Publipage.

Me : I’ve known you for some time online, Dev, and have seen you write some great articles on Local Search for SME’s – can you briefly bring us up-to-date what all this ‘Local SEO’ means?

Dev : Part of the reason for my move to Publipage was to help the traditional Yellow Pages print client – an SMB or SME client spending mega bucks on the print product, to get a better media mix by leveraging SEO/SEM and Local Search. To me, Local Search is the proverbial low hanging fruit for any business, because all business by nature have a local component – even national advertisers.

Simply stated, Local Search involves finding local business results, when searching for a business service or product in your own city or town. For example, garage doors toronto, or dentists ayrshire would yield local map results on Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Local search doesn’t stop at the tier 1 search engines though – it extends to IYP hybrids like Yelp, Praized, CitySearch, and MerchantCircle. In fact, the Yellow Pages and other publishers were the first truly local search engines.

Me : I understand the importance of YellowPages, but how do you put local search to work with a young, dynamic, company that has ideas of expansion, as its brand becomes better known?

Dev : Local search can be the feather in your cap no matter whether your brand is well known or not. Based on the premise that people are looking for ‘what you do more than who you are’, local search can present the unique opportunity to essentially ‘get-ahead’ of months of tedious organic SEO work, and score a top listing on Google, Yahoo, or MSN Maps. Furthermore, local search isn’t solely about having a business name and a phone number. The local business profile one creates can include images, videos, descriptions, and user reviews.

User reviews are a particularly good way to increase conversion rates. Adding videos to your profile, which can be linked from sites like Youtube offers another opportunity to rank well in local search, while giving one the opportunity to tell their brand’s story at the same time.

Me : I have witnessed an increase of manipulation to Google Business services, where a little tinkering can feature a company in the top-half of a localised search via Google Map display … do you feel Google needs to re-evaluate … say displaying its local business search results in less prominent positions, i.e. serve the first 4 / 5 organic results before the local business results?

Dev : In my opinion, Google’s giving small business owners a fair chance at leveraging the power of Google’s search product, and I quite like the fact that the maps are triggered for local queries. Local search is in its infancy, much like organic search was in 2001-2004. As Google keeps adding more variables into the local search algorithm, there should be more legitimate ways to rank well, and less occurrences of the map spam that is so prevalent today.

Me : How is it possible to run a social media campaign on the Internet that is strictly governed by boundary searches i.e. local submission.

Dev : That’s a tricky question that might need a little more definition to answer properly. One way to see a synergy between social media and local search is to make the two work with each other. I’d segment this out into two process of the customer life time cycle – a) Discovery b) Engagement.

In the discovery phase, one may find a particularly active local business through a generic local search term such as ‘pizza ayrshire’. Let’s say that this local pizzeria is doing some conscientious community outreach initiatives which are promoted through social media. In the ‘engagement process’ one can utilize tools such as hyperlocal blogging, twitter, facebook, wiki-like directories (eg: Yelp), and even Google coupons to engage the customer in their local offering and services. Not only do such social media sites help in promoting the business by engaging local customers, they help in their organic and local rankings too by generating inbound links. In the local search context, such links are known as ‘local citations’.

Me : What is the best way for a site to geotarget a number of towns / areas within a local seo campaign? I have myself built individual pages to target seperate towns, in the past, but found it extremely time consuming trying not to make the pages look similar in content, is this still the best way forward?

Dev : The best way to do so is to build city/town based landing pages. The approach I endorse is time consuming too, but has a great pay-off in attracting laser targeted local traffic. The first step is to build out the landing pages in a logical structure such as domain.com/state/city-kw1-kw2.html. The landing page needs to contain information a specific format and have certain elements such as:

- Address in hCard microformat (this seems to be a growing trend in local search)
- Address across the footer pages
- Main local keywords in an H1 tag. Eg: London Personal Injury Lawyer

You can find more about best practices for landing pages in this post that I wrote: Search Landing Page Design

Duplicate content doesn’t seem to be too big of an issue for me given that I use a couple of ways to get around it:

- Having a short blurb of the locality + services that are slightly different for each page.
- Submitting a geo-sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools.
- Submitting a KML file to http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlSearch.html
- Building links to the individual landing pages from local business directories such as Yelp.

Me : Quick fire round, Dev – Do dialects and spelling really work for local seo? Does the location of the server have any effect in running a local seo campaign? Is it best to get inbound links from other websites within your targetted region?

Dev : Dialects and Spelling: Yes, they do affect local search. For example, it’s ‘optimisation’ and not ‘optimization’ in the UK, so it’d make sense to utilize the spelling that folks in that region use. This is a simple task through basic keyword research because you’re just adding local cities based modifiers to the tail end or front end of the generic keywords pulled through keyword research

I haven’t seen any definitive evidence that server location specifically affects local search, although it definitely affects organic search. That said, the local search algorithm does borrow heavily on how well organic SEO is implemented on a particular website, so it might be a factor to consider. One way to increase this geo-targeting would be to associate the specific directory containing the local landing pages to your region or country.

Inbound links: The best way to assess if this is an effective strategy is to survey the IBL’s for the top 10 sites ranking organically for a competitive local search term. If they have common inbound links coming from local business directories, then you should go after those first, then follow up with your own arsenal of local link targets.

Me : OK, Dev, final question, can I have your view on how you feel the search engines will handle local searches in the future and how do you think personalisation will fit into this?

Dev : I wrote about how Google is taking both location and personalization into shaping user search behaviour at Google Suggests Local Keyword Searches. Essentially, Google is shaping queries such as ‘lawyer’, ‘dentist’, ‘dry cleaner’, into locally relevant queries. Once you’ve associated your Google profile to a particular city or postal/zip code, Google will always aim to deliver local results to you based on your search behaviour, and particularly searches involving local queries.

I think that in the future, Google will employ a mix of IP based targeting and personalization data that users provide to create a more relevant and robust local search algorithm.

Me : Thanks, Dev, for a thorough insightful view into Local SEO

Over the next few weeks I’ll be dipping into more ‘Parky’ mode and inviting guests from various search related niches to be interviewed as I try and get into the minds of people who understand how all this interwebby stuff works.