“There are three things that matter in property: location, location, location.”

-Various Attributations

The saying “location, location, location” has been attributed to a few different people (primarily Lord Harold Samuel and William Dillard), with apparently no clear indication of who said it first, though the paper of record found the term “location, location, location” in a real estate ad in the Chicago Tribune listed before either man had exited puberty. Given the word “location” is a direct adoption from latin, it’s possible that thousands of years ago a Roman real estate magnate when asked why the Hippodrome was doing so well replied “location, location, location” verbatim. Read More…

So, in the dead of night, Google rolled out another change to their Google+ network. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s what it looks like:

The largest changes are the new, responsive cover photo and the now-circular profile picture. Besides being uniquely troublesome for companies with square logos, it offers some new optimization opportunities which we’re going to detail below. Beyond those, they’ve rearranged the About section and made some tweaks to the presentation on the Photos and Videos tabs. Read More…

It’s spring, the season of moving, cleaning and lightening our winter load. Search histories begin to include “donate used school supplies Pittsburgh” and “donate kids shoes Raleigh” and “old computer donation Cedar Rapids.” The searches lead to organizations that specialize in those items and everyone wins.

Or they don’t.

Connections are not always made because many organizations, both nonprofit and for, do not commit to a specific geo. There is a fear of casting a narrow net. If we service the all of Allegheny County or the North Carolina Triangle or Eastern Iowa, shouldn’t the website? For small organizations, the answer is often no.

Should my SEO target a city or broader region?

This article examines some local on-page optimization tips for SMBs and community organizations. Before addressing how, let’s review why. Ask yourself two qualifying questions.

Where are customers from? Look at organic search traffic and conversions by city in Google Analytics. If half or more of either visit from your city, you should not be afraid to position the website as a Pittsburgh or Raleigh or Cedar Rapids organization. Showing some hometown pride helps your neighbor find you. Plus, it is still possible to target a national (or even international) audience while targeting a particular city.

Which geo receives the most search traffic? Where your audience lives or works is only part of it. It’s our job as SEOs and online marketers to understand the terms they use in search engines. Here is a look at search volume (from Google Adwords Keyword Tool in “phrase match”) for each of the three geos.

People don’t always search with the phrases that best complement our service area. Sure, you provide legal counsel to personal injury plaintiffs from around the North Carolina Triangle, but do those in need of representation search for “triangle personal injury lawyer” or something else? For many industries, people tend to search by city instead of country or region. Is that true in your industry? Read More…

Google AdWords gives advertisers a myriad of options to target and refine when, where and how their ads are shown on the Search network. And as Jonathan Weber talks about in his most recent blog post about the location report in Google Analytics, you can easily compare and contrast location data from different advertising channels. Read More…

Want to know the ROI of your email marketing? What about the performance of your print ads? Are your posts to Facebook leading to conversions on your site?

Tagging your marketing campaigns is essential to get these actionable insights from Google Analytics. But you might have more than one person responsible for all of your marketing initiatives (imagine that!). You might have teams of marketers and content writers who all dip their hands in the the campaign cookie jar from time to time. That’s great! If you’ve gotten to the point where your non-web analyst peers are tagging their URLs with campaign parameters, you’ve already overcome the biggest hurdle. Now, if only you could get them all to use the same naming conventions… Read More…

As a followup to my post on interpreting Language data in Google Analytics, here’s some insight into locations as well.

You can find the Locations report under Demographics in the Audience section. Google Analytics determines locations from a visitor’s IP addresses and where internet service providers assign those ranges. (If you remember the dark old days of web analytics when you could look at a report like this and you saw that 80% of US web traffic came from Virginia — because that’s where AOL was located — you can rejoice that these reports are much more accurate.) Read More…

When Google first made the announcement that they’d be transitioning Google Places into Google+ Local, I was pretty darn excited. I’d dipped my big toe in the local water not long before, helping businesses verify their Places listings at an internship and then publishing a still applicable guide to Google Places. I couldn’t help but think that Google+ held new and exciting opportunities for business owners looking to communicate with existing and prospective customers. All in a beautiful new interface, too. That was the cherry on top.

It’s been a fair amount of time since the transition now, and I’m still a fan of the switch. Having recently gone through the process of updating LunaMetrics’ location information via the Places (or + Local?) Dashboard, though, I thought it an appropriate time to voice my concerns with the whole relocation process. Without any further ado, my three wishes: Read More…

As part of our social media auditing and competitive analysis services, we see the same basic mistakes over and over again. This post is our effort to try and curtail some of those common gaffes and make the social web a better place. Here are our top ten common social media marketing mistakes.

1. Forgetting to add a symbol before ‘@’ in a public tweet

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A while back, analytics aficionados hailed the return of Google Analytics Page Value, formerly known as $ Index, one of the fastest ways to figure out which pages get more visitors to convert.
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In Part 1 of the Demystifying Dynamic Search Ads series, we discussed the pros & cons of incorportating DSAs into your paid search strategy.  Now that you’ve decided that Dynamic Search is something you would like to put to use, we can discuss the actual campaign set up and creating what Google refers to as auto-targets.  We’ll also cover exclusions and run through a few examples of common ways DSAs are being put to use.

Dynamic Search Campaign Set-Up:

To create a Dynamic Search campaign simply begin by building a new search network campaign as you normally would, but when you reach the “Type” settings, select the Dynamic Search Ads setting to enable targeting based on your website content:

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