Weekly Update Overview
This week’s agenda:
-Google Now Supports Crawling & Indexing Locale-Adaptive Web Pages
-11 Tips For Using Slide Presentations For Local SEO Advantage
Transcript
Good afternoon everyone. This is Scott Gallagher with Local Marketing Source, bringing you our weekly local marketing industry update. Next week our LMS member call going to be on Wednesday February 4th at 4:00 PM Eastern. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly podcast on iTunes, as well as our YouTube channel.
Anybody that was live on the call last week, I apologize that I wasn’t here. I had prepared for the call and just got tied up. Thankfully, I have the support and the backup. I hope you enjoyed listening to Ian Sorenson, he’s my project manager over at WON Marketing. Ian has been with me for quite some time and is definitely understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish for local businesses. I know he got into some questions and whatnot, so I hope you guys had fun and had a little bit of a different flair. We have interviewed Ian in the past and you can actually go watch that video inside the LMS portal.
Next week I have some exciting things that I don’t want to share with you just yet. I have a couple of things in the fire that we’re working on right now. I’ll be able to share that with you next week. We will be announcing in the LMS Facebook group as well as through email inviting you to some of the stuff that I have going on. It’s going to be a lot of fun, it’s going to be a good week next week.
This week for our weekly update and overview we’re going to talk about something called locale-adaptive web pages and Google indexing those. And, on that transition, a discussion about websites that are mobile and adaptive to the particular size. I want to separate the difference of what we’re talking about for locale-adaptive sites and dynamic websites.
We’re also going to talk about creating additional content for local SEO and distribution of that content. We’ll have some tips on creating some of that content, utilizing different slide presentations and how they can be used for local businesses and you can really leverage that content exposure.
I’m just going to take a quick look to see if there are any questions that we have from any new LMS students on the line. We’re using GoTo Webinar software and you can go ahead and raise your hand at any time or type questions in the question box and we will get to you.
I see there are some different names in here today. That’s nice to see. Nick’s back as well. Nick, I don’t think we’ve seen you around for a couple of weeks on the calls, but I could be wrong. Welcome, if you are new.
Nick says, “First week back on deck.” Nick is over in New Zealand. Nick has been a student for quite some time and I really like Nick’s story. I’ll quickly share that with anybody on the line right now. I know when Nick started out he was flustered and frustrated, essentially he ended up getting into the corporate world. Not fully growing his agency to where he wanted it to be. He gained some experience in the corporate world and came back. Now he’s kicking butt running his own business. Hopefully, he’s building and living his dream.
What’s nice about his story is you come back and you push a second time – sometimes it takes that. I always make the comment I have 10 failures before I have one success. That’s the truth in business. Entrepreneurs definitely have a higher element of risk taking, no matter what it may be. For those people that might want to become an entrepreneur or have thought about becoming an entrepreneur, you can look at yourself and see how much of a risk taker you are.
Go around and look at your friends. I could think of all of my friends and just how they live their lives, some of the stuff that they do, where they go and how they go out and assess how much risk they’re willing to take. Sure enough, the people that generally take higher risks are those that have worked or work for themselves and support common goals of the small entrepreneur.
I don’t want to hear that, Nick. He says it’s 32 degrees right now. For anybody in America, 32 degrees is exactly freezing, but that’s 32 Fahrenheit. Nick is at 32 degrees Celsius, that’s like 90 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re in wintertime here and I know you’re indulging in your summertime.
Nick, I was actually just thinking about you. I’ve been on a kick the last three or four days watching videos from I think it’s called Rotorua, watching videos of the skyline, the skyline race and some of the skiing that’s there. It’s pretty awesome. I’m definitely going to go there.
Nick is like 50 feet from the beach. You have to work hard to play hard.
We’re going to talk about Google indexing what is called locale-adaptive web pages. Don’t confuse this with local dynamic web pages. What dynamic web pages are is a webpage that ultimately scales and changes the placement and type of content based off of the display device. This is essentially the same thing, you’re choosing to display certain information based off of parameters. In other words, the web pages become adaptive based off of those parameters.
Those parameters could be the time of day, they could be IP based or geo-IP based, based off location. If you’re serving a different audience, for example, a Spanish audience here in Chicago, the webpage would then display Spanish content based off of certain parameters as opposed to English, whether it’s for geo-location or language dependent type of content.
Now Google has publically come out and said that they support the crawling and indexing of locale-adaptive web pages, as well as dynamically changing web pages based off of the display device.
I remember back in 2006 there was a blackhat technique that we could utilize and it was squashed really quickly where you would show different information to a search engine than you would a user. Obviously, that’s not what we’re talking about here. You’re not showing different information to a search engine. It’s based specifically off the location and it’s in the code, the search engine is going to be able to see that HTML code based off of the location that is being sent.
SEO for local businesses is really just marketing. It’s all about creating content and distributing that content. Far too often, I’m frequently hearing link counts and a lot of different metrics that are involved in SEO that just really aren’t that important. Those raise the red flag. The moment somebody mentions tools, I know that there are some tools out there that are very good, but we have to take a big picture at everything here.
When you take a step back and recognize what the search engines are trying to do. I’m going to raise a term in SEO that you probably haven’t heard of in SEO, but I’m going to go on the record right now and predict that in the next five years we’re going to see this term inside of SEO. It’s an important thing. It’s kind of where I’m trying to wrap my head around and get an understanding of this.
When you’re watching what’s going on at the Consumer Electronics Show every year, this has been one of the most exciting years. I’m actually disappointed I never had a chance to make it. There are many different industries that are dancing around this topic that I’m going to talk about. Our industry itself is also dancing around this topic. We’re going to see all of this come together.
That is the discussion of artificial intelligence. Going all the way back to the folks of 1984, artificial intelligence is something that man has been talking about for decades. There’s a lot of scarcity about it. When we start to look at predictions there are a lot of experts that are saying that by the year 2030 – that’s only 15 years away, that’s not really that big of a deal. I’m 40 years old this year and when I look back I have great memories from 20 and 30 years ago. So 15 years is not a long time. – Just this notion that they say in 15 years nobody in the United States will be allowed to drive on highways, period, because cars will be doing it. To have that, there has to be an element of artificial intelligence.
With artificial intelligence, talking on a search engine level, we’ve seen some of that a little bit already when we talk about personalized search. But, there’s really a whole new wave of data that is now coming out, especially when we see a lot of the tracking features on the paid side and the segmentation for Facebook. The amount of data is just ridiculous.
I go do a search on Google Now and it knows me, it tells me what shows I’m going to, what concerts are coming up that I’m signed up to with times and it maps it all out. Google is really trying to figure out what I’m searching for next. That’s really what the premise of Google Now is. If you don’t know much about Google Now, it’s time to start to reading about it.
That’s exactly what Google Now is trying to accomplish, is giving you the answers before you ask the question. In order to accomplish that, that’s artificial intelligence. Really, what is artificial intelligence trying to replicate? It’s just trying to replicate human behavior. That’s it. That’s really all that artificial intelligence means is replicate human behavior.
On that note, thinking in that fashion, what are the search engines really trying to do? They’re just trying to replicate human behavior. How they go about it and all the different 10,000 factors that they’re looking at, all the different metrics, they’re trying to weigh a balance and a scale to determine what can we look at that’s going to give us the best information to really replicate what humans are doing.
As marketers, no matter what angle we look at the algorithm – I’m giving you a very different perspective than I have in the past – the principles are identical. Regardless, we’re just trying to mimic what human beings are doing and have done. Marketing by definition is creating content that is going to be consumed by a society and an audience of that consortium, of that business. We’re trying to create material and we’re trying to put it where people are going to read it. Where are people going to read it? On the internet. Or see it, listen to it, watch it, or view it.
One day computers that are going to have retina scanning are going to know where we’re looking at on a webpage and what we’re reading. That data is going to be more relevant in the algorithm than shares or likes, but today that’s the metric that the search engines are looking at. They’re constantly changing metrics based off of environment and technology.
I’m a hockey fan and 2015 is one of the most exciting years for hockey in terms of technology. The technology that is now just this year involved in it – and all sports are going to change dramatically in the next five years with the data that we’re going to be able to collect from every single different movement, it’s going to be ridiculous. You throw that stuff into algorithms and tweak it, it’s exciting.
Artificial intelligence, constantly trying to mimic what human beings are doing. Just getting out into the community and understanding. I look at my local newspaper, for example. I could go to the degree of saying the newspaper industry as a standard has declined by (I’m going to pull this number out of the air) 80% in the last decade. But my local newspaper’s revenue has only declined by 60% in the last decade. They’re not shrinking as fast as others. What does that say about my community? Maybe our community is a little more old school and trying to get content into print form.
As we create this content, of course we need to be able to have this content readable by the search engines and whatnot. We just got a new client recently and they showed us their new website. We look at and think, “That’s a nice looking website.” We try to make it 10 inches for a tablet and everything gets all out of whack, it’s no good for a phone. It doesn’t have a mobile standard. Even though it was a dynamic website, it just was not dynamically working.
In addition to that, the whole website was built by their graphic designer. It looks beautiful, but there isn’t a single word, it’s all images. Search engines just can’t read that stuff. Not only that, images that change in size when you go down to a mobile level and you have an image that’s at a desktop size and you shrink it down to a mobile size, the text shrinks too. You need text. 12 point text is 12 point because that’s a good size to read. You still need 10 to 12 point text on your mobile device, as well as your desktop. Text size generally is not scalable.
These are some things the we need to think about as marketers when we’re creating particular content.
One thing that is often overlooked is presentations. I want to talk a little bit about presentations.
For example, I’ll do presentations for my agency and I will invite local businesses. I will take that presentation and record it. When I record my screen and I record my audio, I now have a video that I can go and upload to YouTube. I can take that video and put it into my email autoresponder, so anytime I have people that sign up I’m driving traffic on a consistent basis to that video. As long as that video is continually being watched, it’s going to be in the YouTube ecosystem, and the algorithm ultimately likes videos that have constant flow of traffic and likes.
I’m going to take that video and put it on my blog. I now have a blog post that I have availability to it. With that, I may take the content from each of the slides and make them available for download or available on my blog. Now I have some additional content with that.
I take my recording and I get it transcribed. You could utilize software to transcribe it or pay somebody about $1.00 per minute to transcribe it. You now have a 12 to 15 page document for a presentation that you put together with the slides. You could take that and utilize it into your autoresponder, you can propagate it through social media in little excerpts, have a blog post, or take that exact presentation and offer it to a theme related site, such as an industry based site, as a unique piece of content for them. Now you have exposure back.
What’s beautiful about it when you do this from presentations, inside of the PowerPoint you’re going to have your citations, you’re going to have your maps in there, and you’re going to have links. In other words, exposure.
Creating presentations is a great source to start for a piece of content, because from that piece of content you can get videos and you can get articles. Based off of those videos and articles you can create a press release from it to release the actual content and have a campaign around that presentation.
Because you’re doing a presentation that is discussing the topics, such as in my case working with chiropractors we’re going to talk about conditions and symptoms, symptoms being knee pain, back pain, joint pain, headaches, fatigue, when you talk about that aspect those are now keywords that are getting into your content that are based off of symptoms, in this case. Then of course you’re going to offer the solutions, which are a discussion of the conditions, and those are also main keywords to be searched for. Within those solutions of the conditions is going to be a treatment, that’s your services that you provide.
You can see how to create a high quality presentation for somebody you’re providing the education to them, you’re addressing their concerns, so you’re alleviating their pain, you’re discussing the benefits, how it’s going to make their lives better or make them feel better. When effectively creating the content and when you’re talking about the benefits for somebody you’re going to say to yourself, “Who am I talking to?” Maybe I’m talking to women between the ages of 25 and 40. You’re going to use content and dialogue that is going to resonate with them. In other words, the article is going to be more specific and enjoyable, and with that you are actually getting your keywords into it.
Keep in mind, as we talked about before, don’t use images or text inside of images on these presentations. Make sure you optimize your slides when you create your presentation to have all of the effective conditions, symptoms, or in the case of a pizza delivery company the benefits of the pizza and the quality aspects of what makes them different.
Definitely use links to be able to share your presentation inside the presentation and outside of the presentation if you’re going to host on a site like SlideShare. Definitely make the slides available, because those are all readable, and have them available for download.
Create your video, as mentioned. Finally, from some of this content you can in turn make some info graphics based off of your presentation. Info graphics are great as a standalone or to add to a blog post and they ultimately do get shared.
So there are some tips for today. There really wasn’t a lot to update on, not a lot in the news for local this week. I really enjoyed that tip and thought that you guys were going to get some value from that.
The Local Marketing Industry Weekly Update, presented by Scott Gallagher. Scott is the co-founder of Local Marketing Source and has become the recognized expert in providing local marketing services to local businesses.
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