The Maine SEO Blog

One of the best compliments a business can get is a referral.  Word of mouth marketing has been an effective tool for ages, and why wouldn’t it be?  Could even the most brilliant ad hope to compete with the sincerity of a referral from a friend?

Referrals are still as persuasive as ever, but now there is a more modern equivalent.  Online customer reviews were the first big step.  You see them everywhere - Amazon is especially famous for it - their “people who had your taste in books had this to say about this novel” reviews, plus the list of “oh by the way, they also liked these” books.  Upselling?  Maybe.  But effective?  Absolutely.  Perfect strangers can affect the books you buy more than Amazon can themselves!

Now, Google is using reviews, and might even be taking them into account for rankings.  Local Search results (Google Maps, in this case) include five-star ratings and reviews.  My question is: what affect do reviews (whether good or bad) have on local rankings?

I think we can all agree that local rankings seem to be based on location, first and foremost.  In other words, the closer to the address or city in the query a business is, the higher that business will rank.  What if we factor in the small matter that a business (perhaps further away) has both more reviews and stars than the competition?

Case in point, a search for “lobster portland me”.  Here are the first five search results.  Notice only The Lobster Shack (#4) has reviews and stars, and is the only one on the first SERP with them.

It may not seem to prove anything at first.  But take a look at the accompanying map.

Whether you’re from Portland (or Maine, for that matter) or not, you can see that Cape Elizabeth is not Portland.  The entire first page, plus most of the second and third pages, are filled with Portland results; except for spot #4, which is also coincidentally the only company with customer reviews.

Maybe it is a coincidence.  Then again maybe not.  I’ve been noticing this trend for a while now, and while it is not a perfect science (sometimes un-reviewed sites rank much better than reviewed ones), it might be something.

The takeaway?  Optimizing your site is important - it will help with rankings initially.  But reviews (especially if you’re local) are critical.  We often suggest our clients use a sort of new-age comment card system: by asking their customers to review their product or service on these local sites.  Reviews might just be the icing on the cake, enough to give your company the edge!

Nicki Hicks
Local SEO

Finally, the (highly?) anticipated the new features on Google Analytics went live on Monday.  Among the improvements were changes to the User Interface and completely new tools: Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reporting, and Motion Charts.  So here’s a quick run through of the new tools:

Advanced Segmentation

Until now, you’ve been able to segment your Analytics history in each category (number of visits, pageviews, etc.) according to the date.  In other words, you could compare this past month to the month before.  Now, though, you can compare almost everything using advanced segments.

It wouldn’t allow you to see it, but Conversion Goals are also on this list.  You can choose any number of segments you’d like to compare.  Here, I chose to compare All Visits and Referral Traffic from this blog:

The benefit?  I can see that my traffic depends directly on the number of referring links to my site.  Other trends should also show up by using this tool and comparing other advanced segments.

Custom Reporting

If, for some reason, the advanced segmenting misses a conversion you’d like to see, you can use custom reporting.

You can choose which metrics you’d like to measure, then which dimensions to cross reference them by.  While GA gives you the ability to measure almost every conversion possible, the custom reports are helpful if you’d like to see your goals convert for more than one metric or more than one dimension.

Motion Charts

Finally, motion charts.  The Google Analytics Blog did a full synopsis on this already, so here’s a quick recap.  With several of the GA tools, you can “Visualize” the data - you will be redirected to that particular motion chart.  Here is a snapshot of what my new vs. returning visitors for yesterday look like:

Motion charts play like a movie, so this shot is the last frame.  While motion charts cannot be made for every conversion, you can customize the axis, colors, and even size of the data points.  Then, you can save individual motion charts you create - as they return to their default settings when you leave the page.

So, overall, pretty cool stuff.  Helpful, too, for that matter.  I’m interested to see what Analytics will be able to tell us next…

Nicki Hicks
Geeking out at GA

Last week, Virante released glync, a free downloadable compliment to the external links portion of Google’s Webmaster Tools.  While even without glync, you can see your backlinks, glync will give you a visual representation of the number of incoming links you have over time.  Plus, with the pro version (estimated at about $5 per month), you can see the PageRank of each page linking to you.

Here are the number of incoming links for this blog for the past five days.

Just below, you’ll see your pages with the number of external links pointing to them.  Again, you can upgrade glync and see the PR of each page on the left.

Clicking the number of links will direct you to a list of of the pages that link to you.

Glync definitely enhances your Webmaster Tools experience.  But the question is: will Google actually tell you how many backlinks you actually have?  According to Webmaster Tools, I have 1,054.  Using the link:mysite.com command on Google, I only have 7; and using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, I have 1,017.  So does that make Webmaster Tools’ number the right one?

NIcki Hicks
Glync-er

My boss has recently been interested in the benefits of using LinkedIn - his most recent blogpost being about the advantages for small business people and entrepreneurs using LinkedIn.  In addition, I recieved an email from LinkedIn this morning about their newest addition: LinkedIn Applications.  So, I figured it’s high time I do a little investigatory work myself…

The first thing I noticed - while Facebook profiles will, more often than not, outrank it; searches for people with LinkedIn profiles will rank incredibly high (usually the first page).  My profile, for instance, is the fourth result in a search for my name, the fifth being a SERP for my name in LinkedIn:

So…what does that mean?  In all honesty, not all the much.  I mean how many people search for my name other than me?  The catch: searching for your friends, colleagues, classmates, or even businesses.  Say I was searching for the Via Group - an advertising firm right here in Portland.  (Admittedly, they just connected with me on LinkedIn.  But let’s say for the sake of argument I was searching for them.)  Their LinkedIn profile is ranked eighth in a search for “via group”.

Pretty powerful.  Another cool thing about LinkedIn?  They follow THREE of your links! (Most social media sites will usually give you an area to add links for your business, blog, what have you; but will nofollow them.)  For example, my Facebook links are nofollowed (SeoQuake will strikethrough nofollowed links):

Conversely, my LinkedIn profile not only follows my links, but also allows me to choose my own anchor text - even more powerful:

Moral of the story: If you don’t already have a LinkedIn profile (whether personal or business), get one!  And while you’re at it, follow me -

Nicki Hicks
Find me on LinkedIn

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