Google Searches Go Hyperlocal

Have you ever noticed that your Google search results are different from somebody else’s, even for the exact same search term? I was on the phone with a friend last week, looking for a good place to meet for a bánh mì.* I searched for “banh mi phoenix,” he searched for “banh mi phoenix,” and…

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Google Now Serves and Labels Searches Solely by Searcher’s Location

On Friday, October 27, Google announced on their blog a change to the way they serve and label search results based on the searcher’s location. Previously, Google localized your search results based on a combination of your location and the Google site you used (e.g. Google.uk for England). Beginning Friday, the Google site/domain you use…

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Improving Search Ranking for a Local Business

Last week I got a note from a friend who was disappointed in the number of inquiries coming in from his website. He was specifically interested in knowing what he could do to improve search rankings for his small service business. I took a look at his website and wrote him some recommendations, and I…

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How to Blog with an SEO Brain

To write effective website text that will be optimized for search, the most important thing is to write for the intended audience. The search engines’ natural language algorithms are highly adept at determining the topics and meaning within website text, so the outdated technique of stuffing text with keywords is not only unnecessary, it is…

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Does PPC Spend Affect Natural Search Results?

An associate in Northern Arizona pinged me about an odd effect she was seeing in one of her client’s online marketing campaigns. They turned off their PPC campaign for a while and saw a quick and dramatic drop – 50-60% – in traffic from NATURAL search. Not from PPC, which obviously plummeted to zero, but…

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Get Top Search Rankings with Sneedobb

I had a lively discussion with a writer and online marketing guy from a local ad agency over beers last night. (Side note: Wednesday is wings night at Sun Up Brewery, the hot wings are tasty and just the right amount of painful, and the Trooper IPA cools the fire with delicious efficiency.) Our conversation…

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Using KEI for Keyword Research in Wordtracker

If you’re using Wordtracker to do keyword research for search engine optimization, you may find this useful. Wordtracker is a great tool for keyword research, but it does have one puzzling quirk: Wordtracker gives us two indexes – KEI and KEI3 – and they don’t agree. KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, and it’s a…

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