Link: What is Location Prominence?

Love: unraveling local search ranking factors.  So you’re a small business (or a large one for that matter), and after doing some reading on SEO, you’ve gone to Google Local Business Center and claimed your business’ listing.  You’ve read about PageRank and the importance of attracting high quality incoming links with your sparkling content.  But what other factors go into the ranking algorithms for local search?  How do you climb up that 10-pack?  How do you improve your “Location Prominence” score–the equivalent of PageRank?  In this post, Mike Blumenthal takes a look at a Google patent to help provide insight into the factors that explicitly help determine this Location Prominence.

Potential Factors in Ranking a Website Highly for Location Specific Searches:

1. Incoming links – not simply directory links, but links from other authoritative sites; sites with a high PageRank or Location Prominence score.
2. Reviews – I’m particularly interested in how Google uses reviews as a factor in local search rankings.  There are the metrics that are already quantified–the actual number of reviews a business has received on a site like Yelp for example and rating itself, 3 stars, 4 stars or 5 stars.  But how do you quantify the content of the review?  How do you turn “good”, “bad”, “efficient”, “okay”, “disgusting”, “spicy” or “pusillanimous” (maybe you rented a guard dog, alright) into a number?  What’s the scale for all negative words?  What’s the most negative word you can give a restaurant?  Does that mean that word passes along a -100 score?
3. Citations – it’s not merely about links, but how many times your business and its accompanying address appear on a website, not as a link.
4. Information about the business – search engines want information.  It helps them develop a rich tapestry of search results.  They’re machines, not humans.  They can’t decipher meaning like you and me.  Providing the search engines with little information about your business is like the difference between a picture from an inexpensive camera versus a professional camera.  If you don’t participate in sites like Yelp, Google Local Business Center, comment on industry blogs, add your business to Best of the Web, then you’re taking a picture of your business with a cheap camera.  Google wants you to use that Nikon D3X!  What’s the business’ annual revenue?  How many employees does the business have?  How long has the business been in existence and how long have they been present in listings across the web?

Link: Page Speed

Love: the need for speed!  Recently, Google announced they were open sourcing a nifty Firefox add-in, integrated with another superb tool called Firebug, called Page Speed.  Page load time is a factor in quality score on the PPC side of life and there have been rumblings about whether or not page load time plays a role or will play a role in natural search rankings for some time now.  Let’s assume it doesn’t play a role in natural search rankings, though.  Does that mean I should compress the images on my site, enable gzip compression or remove unused CSS from my site anyway?  If you happen to have a site that takes a bit longer than usual to load, I’d vote yes.  Users find pages that take too long to load annoying, which translates into users bouncing away.  The thinking behind improving page load, and as a corollary the user experience, is driven by five best practices:

1. Optimizing caching – keeping your application’s data and logic off the network entirely
2. Minimizing round-trip times – reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
3. Minimizing request size – reducing upload size
4. Minimizing payload size – reducing the size of responses, downloads and cached pages
5. Optimizing browser rendering – improving the browser’s layout of a page

Aside: “…reducing…cached pages.”  Hmm, interesting. Nofollow links to your About Us page, AND robots.txt them out?

Link: Web Data Quality: A 6 Step Process to Evolve Your Mental Model

Love: data, but don’t allow imperfect data to cause you to freeze and not act.  One of my favorite lines from this post says there is no limit to the amount of data to you can collect and store on the Internet, and it’s headache-inducingly correct.  I’ve mentioned in previous posts the importance of collecting data, analyzing data and then providing an interpretation of that data for insight into what action should be taken, and I of course still feel that way, but I’m not a Quant.  There’s a point where granular becomes so microscopic that the difference in dataset A and dataset B will not cause your client to change his or her decision. Therefore, you need to accept imperfection and act.  I know we’re big into models and science and equations, but so was Wall Street, and we saw what happened there.  Certainly collect your data, but don’t allow it to bog you down into indecision, and don’t allow incomplete data to bolster that indecision.  After all, it’s all incomplete (esoteric alert!).

“How do you measure the effectiveness of your magazine ad? Now compare that to the data you have from DoubleClick. How about measuring the ability of your TV ad to reach the right audience? Compare that with measuring reach through Paid Search (or Affiliate Marketing, or …). Do you think you get more useful data from Neilsen’s TV panel of between 15k – 30k US residents to represent the diversity of TV content consumption of 200 million American television viewers?”

Link: 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites

Love: social media for something other than retweeting, posting pictures or helping you acquire links.  Social media websites work because they facilitate communication and sharing amongst users (and they allow us to talk about ourselves, of course).  The good ones also work on a different level–user interface.  Thinking about your website in this way, and incorporating these features, can help drastically improve your conversion rate.  Remember, it’s all about the user, not you!

Link: Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive

Love: scientifically proven ways to do anything.  Who doesn’t want to be persuasive?  You’re a business, right?  You’re trying to tell your story in order to persuade the potential client to help you write the next chapter, right?  A few favorites from the post:

• Too many options necessitate selection, and hence frustration…
• How restaurant mints are a personalized affair
• Asking people to substantiate their decision will lead to higher commitment

(Thanks to @ifss who tweeted this post)

Apogee Search’s director of product development Ian Strain-Seymour will be speaking at this month’s Web Analytics Wednesday Austin. To help get the most out of this session, post your questions in the comments, and Ian will do his best to tackle these questions on Wednesday.

Not sure what Ian will be talking about? Read on then, oh seeker of knowledge!

Are you trying to understand how engaged your website visitors are? Do you want to know which marketing channels bring in your engaged visitors? Or perhaps you are just tired of discussing how to best measure engagement with your boss/team/coworkers?  Maybe your problem is how to best share this data within your company or how to measure the return on your efforts.

These questions and more will be the focus of this month’s edition of WAW Austin. Post your questions in the comments and they will be addressed this Wednesday. The best question will win a free lunch (who said there was no such thing?)!

This month’s Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) – Austin will be held at Little Woodrow’s in downtown Austin on Wednesday, October 8th at 5:30 PM. It will be hosted by Ian Strain-Seymour, Director of Product Development at Apogee Search.

This month’s event will use a “birds of a feather” format. Each table will have an assigned topic, allowing people to easily find others that have similar interests. Attendees will be able to easily network and share knowledge by moving from table to table (the only problem may be making sure your drink order finds you).

Table topics will include:

• Measuring visitor engagement
• Online marketing success
• Web analytics for events
• Offline conversion

Want to add a topic? You can do so on Web Analytics Wednesday’s LinkedIn group.

Details on the event can be found on the official WAW website.

Information on the Austin Web Analytics group can be found on LinkedIn or on Facebook.

What is Web Analytics Wednesday?
Web Analytics Wednesday (WAW) is a monthly networking and educational event. It is held on Wednesdays around the world. It is a great chance for web analytics professionals (and amateurs), online marketers, online merchants, designers, developers, students and anyone else interested in web analytics to meet and share knowledge.