Related posts:

1. Local Wine Stores on Local Search: the Top 10 Things You Can Do
2. How to Rank Higher than your Competitors in a Local Search on Google
3. Wine Stores and Local Social Media

And she has already made some changes that local businesses need to be aware of. In fact I suspect this blog post will be out of date within the month things seem to be moving so fast!

Let’s look at an example. Note the local keyword Chicago. This makes it a local search rather than a general search.

“Chicago Wine Stores” on Google

This search query appears as per below:

We have 3 organic listings at the top, followed by 7 Google Places listings. To the right is a map with local Adwords results below it (ironically bing is advertising on Google, the world is a strange place sometimes ).

Only a few months ago the map would be in the center column with 7 or 3 business listings down the side - the so called “7-pack” or “3-pack”. Before that it was just organic results with no local listings.

How to beat your competitors into the higher spots

A survey is done every year on Local Search Criteria by one Local SEO expert called David Mihm.

He asks 34 prominent Local SEO experts to rate the importance of 69 factors as to how they influence the rankings in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Note this survey is only about the search engine results for a local query.

I’m not going to list all 69, if you’re interested check out David’s Local Search Ranking Factors Report, instead I’ll give the top 10 with a bit of wine industry perspective.

1. General Importance of Claiming Place Page / Local Listing

The most important and easy-to-do local SEO task is to claim your Google Places business listing. Remember to fill out as much information as you can including photos as this helps your rankings even more.

Note if you don’t claim your listing then sometimes malicious competitors do. They either put in the wrong info or create a new phone number just for this task – and then disconnect it. So when a customer rings you up there is only a disconnect tone!

2. Business Address in City of Search

Business Address is prominent? Great. But does Google include your business in your target city? There is some sort of invisible border for each city and, if you’re in a competitive market, you need to be inside it. If it’s not so competitive you may still get listed if you’re nearby.

One way to check what Google regards as being your town is by using Adwords. Go into a Campaign Settings, then edit Location and choose your town. The blue areas are the invisible boundaries of the towns in Chicago that start with “A” (see sceenshot below).

3. Associating Place Page with Proper Categories

Google Places has a section for categorising your business. Take your top keywords and match them up with the pre-set categories in Google Places.

4. Volume of Citations from Major Data Providers + IYP Portals

In the internet world citations means links from other websites. IYP stands for Internet Yellow Pages. The more of these local directory links the better. It looks like yelp.com and citysearch.com are two of the important ones.

5. General Importance of Off-Page / Off-Listing Criteria

This is related to 4 above. But instead of local directories these are just any links from relevant and high authority websites. This is the most important factor in general organic SEO but ranks only 5 in local SEO.

6. General Importance of Customer Reviews

Having reviews from credible websites is important. The jury seems out as to whether positive reviews are better. Again yelp features here.

7. Quality of Citations from Major Data Providers + IYP Portals

The more relevant and higher authority the website the better the link.

8. Product / Service Keyword in Place Page Business Title

Your most important keyword should be in your Google Place Business title. So best if your title reads something like “Chicago Wine Store” perhaps, “Bruce’s Wine Store, Chicago” for example. If you need a primer on Google Places here’s the official video:

9. Volume of Customer Reviews associated with Your Business

Having at the least same number of reviews vs your competitors is important. If you have a few more then that’s great. Lots more may not help. See your Google Places account to find out the actual number.

10. Quality of Unstructured Citations

Relevant and authority local blogs or local organizations (e.g. Chamber of Commerce) linking to your website is a powerful way to increase rankings. And there are 59 other factors of positive and negative influence on your rankings. But the above 10 is a great start.

Changes every year

This survey has been done for the years 2008, ’09, and ’10. Each year the factors change as Google takes note of other important ways and means of making their local search results as accurate and informative as possible.

For instance in 2008 Google Places did not exist so other Local Business Listing sources were the number 1 factor. In 2009 it was making sure your business address was inside the invisible boundaries that Google set for each town. In 2010 it is clearly claiming and filling out your Google Places listing. Another review will come out in June this year.

I think one thing is for certain: if you do nothing else claim your business on Google Places .

What have you seen to have the most influence? Please comment below.

Related posts:

1. Local SEO and Wine Stores in 2011: an Update of the Top 10 tasks
2. How to Rank Higher than your Competitors in a Local Search on Google
3. Wine SEO: Local Search and Review Services like yelp

1. Trust/Authority of the Host Domain (i.e. “www.the-domain.com”)
2. Link Popularity of the Specific Page (i.e. “www.the-domain.com/the-specific-page.html”)
3. Anchor Text of External Links (i.e. this is what anchor text looks like )
4. On-Page Keyword Usage (e.g. keywords in the title tag – usually seen at the top of your web browser)

EDIT (June 2011): Recently the power of links have become less important and social media has become more important for SEO. See the same updated seomoz report.

Note that you only control the last one – everything else is controlled by third parties.

So getting to the top of Google rankings, with the resulting huge boost in traffic, comes down to getting other quality sites to link to you.

This is what this post is about (and what traditional internet marketers – the SEO crowd – do every day). I’ve previously put a fair amount of emphasis on SEO for traffic but, as you’ll see in a post to come, I’m about to deemphasis this part of the service.

However it’s still important – just not the most important challenge of internet marketers in 2011.

It is all about creating great content.

Content is King – but not just for the reasons you think

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this post:

• Search engines like unique content
• What search engines look for the most
• Show Google that you are an expert wine store
• Boost traffic with Adwords
• Use Social Media to spread your word
• Make it easy to buy
• Use professional email marketing software
• Start creating content

Meaty post huh! And not just about SEO – but that’s the main focus.

Let’s look at what the search engines want

The search engines (Google and Yahoo/Bing) are in a fierce competitive battle. The better their search engine results, the more people use them, the more advertising they sell, and the higher their profits.

People, or “users”, want the most relevant results for their search query. They want to type in a keyword phrase and see the solution to their search problem straight away.

So if someone types in Stags’ Leap Napa Valley Merlot 2007 they may want to (a) buy it or (b) get information about it.

It’s difficult to work out what a user wants from a simple phrase. So the search engines provide a list of possible answers feeling reasonably confident that one of them will solve the searcher’s problem.

When I searched Google for the merlot product above (in the US in 2010), Stags’ Leap winery headed the list, then there were shopping results after that, some shopping comparison sites, some wine stores, and lastly wikipedia. A nice set of possible answers to an unclear query – and the reason why so many people use Google!

Google knows users wants a list of different answers – not a list of the same results from different websites.

Which brings me to my first point.

1. Having the same standard product description is not good enough to do well with search engines

This is what Google’s top search engineer, Matt Cutts says,

“do I want to make the Ecommerce site if I don’t have a lot of original content?”

And what you should be asking yourself is… do I want to make the Ecommerce site if I don’t have a lot of original content or value add or if I have a lot of duplicate content … And so I’d ask yourself, do you really want to jump into that and start optimizing that, or do you want to look for something a little more original or something more compelling … And so my advice is … think about how you can move more towards that high value add, unique sort of site, not just … a page that looks just like 500 other pages that they’ve just seen on the web.

Top ranking websites have unique content.

The search engines also want Credibility and Relevance

I think it’s commonly known that search engines want to show the most relevant results. If I search for Stags’ Leap Napa Merlot I don’t want Sonoma Zinfadel.

What’s not terribly well understood is how the search engines rate your site for a particular search phrase – they are looking for credibility and relevance. Credibility is from high authority websites linking to you. Relevance is having descriptive link text (usually blue and underlined) that is about your subject.

So if the Wine Spectator’s Blog wrote about a great Napa Merlot tasting event at your wine store, with the phrase Napa Merlot as a hyperlink to your Napa Merlot page, then you have a high authority link with great descriptive text. You would find that you get more traffic from Google for the search phrase napa merlot.

Which brings me to my second point.

2. You need other (wine) websites to give you high quality links to your website.

This is known as off site optimization and is the most important element in your ranking. The best way to do this is to have great content that people want to link to. More about this below.

Relevance and your website

Search engines also want to assess your site for subject matter expertise. It’s pretty easy to show them you sell wine.

It’s much harder to show them that you are a subject matter expert on Napa Merlot, it’s even harder to show them you have more information about Stags’ Leap Napa Merlot than your competitors.

But it’s harder still to tell them that you are a subject matter expert for

• wine buyers
• who live near your store
• who want to buy Stags Leap Napa Merlot 2007.

If you think about it there are hundreds of wine websites that sell Stags’ Leap Napa Merlot. They all have respectable eCommerce websites with a Merlot category. Scores of them are in your town.

How do you show you are a better search result than any of them?

Which brings me to my third point

3. Clearly show Google that you are a subject matter expert for wine categories.

In this case the category, or what I call a “theme”, would be merlot. With a sub theme of Napa merlot, and the product Stags’ Leap Napa Merlot (2007).

You clearly flag to Google your subject matter expertise by keeping your products in strict themes. You write unique content about each theme and sub theme, and carefully delineate themes through internal links.

Now when Google looks at your site it sees that

• the major theme is wine store and there are clearly some other (sub) themes
• one of them is merlot and there is some interesting unique content about your Merlot range that Google’s users may find very useful
• there is clearly another sub theme in the merlot theme about Napa merlot with some more interesting content
• you can buy Napa merlot products
• and if the user is near the store then it flags that as well.

Here’s my fourth point

4. It’s not just the left hand side of the Google result page, it’s also the right hand side or Adwords.

Adwords are also known as “sponsored links”, Pay Per Click (PPC) or Paid Search.

So if you can’t get on the left hand side buy your way onto the right hand side. This is less about great content and links and more about straight out Direct Marketing.

That great content you’ve written for those themes comes into play here too. You create an adwords campaign for each (sub) theme with the ad clickers landing on your theme web page.

So here’s my fifth point

5. Use social media to spread your word, your “content”

Not all our time is spent searching for things. We also like to interact with others about things that we are passionate about. And oh boy is wine one of those things! Google has now recognized social media as an important indicator of authority.

We talk about wine to our friends on facebook, tweet to our followers on twitter, and present videos on youtube. This interaction can drive lots of traffic to our websites by diplomatically including our website address and, guess what, it’s all your interesting unique content.

Social media also includes blogs and forums. The classic example is Gary Vaynerchuk. He creates content on video and interacts with his fans on his winelibrary.tv forum.

There are other examples such as Must Love Wine, Wine 2.0 as well as 100s of wine bloggers.

But first and foremost there is your blog. More about that soon. First let’s talk about what your web browsers want.

Which leads us to point six

6. Make it easy to buy

So you’ve got them to your website. Congratulations! That was hard work so let’s not let them down.

You’ve got all this great information about wines they want to know about. It’s carefully organized so it’s easy to find due to your careful content categorization and theming.

They wanted a Napa merlot. You’ve convinced them that you can offer them the perfect wine on its own wine page. They now want to buy. This is where you have a clear call to action saying BUY NOW. Then you make it as easy as possible to buy.

If this is through eCommerce then ensure no registration is required, checkout is one page, payment is secure, and shipping costs are clear. If it’s by phone then the phone number is obvious. Or you may just be driving people into the store in which case your address should be clear and present.

Sure its great to have eCommerce software but MyLocalWineStore is not so much about software, it’s about a system or process of boosting sales.

Lastly point seven

7. One purchase is nice, but a customer for life is better. Time to use professional email marketing software.

The real aim is not to sell one customer one bottle, but many customers many bottles. This is where your email marketing comes in. All that time and effort you spent creating theme based content is used many times to make many sales.

And this is one reason why an email service that can easily broadcast your content to an interested list is important.

Creating Content is a Real Pain

By now you’ve probably seen where I’m heading. First let’s review.

• Search engines want to list the most relevant sites for a user query.
• They do this by looking for unique content that is linked to by other high authority websites.
• Social media sites are awash with potential customers but you need to provide them with a reason to visit your website.
• Once they get to your website you want to make it easy to buy.
• After they’ve made a purchase you want to keep them buying.

You need to start creating content. Not just cut and past winery reviews but create good content for search terms that are important to your business.

Images courtesy of: Poster Web 2.0, istockphoto

Related posts:

1. Wine Blogger Audience and Blog Quality Factors

If you’ve read my eCommerce posts, you’ll know that I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to design. It’s not that I think design is unimportant but rather there are so many more important things a wine retailer could be focused on.

So why have I redesigned my site?

Speed and Search Engines

…is the main reason. Together with content constipation, messiah movements and WordPress politics.

But first let’s look at website speed and Google.

The Internet Emperor says faster

Earlier this year Google announced that the speed of your website was one of the factors taken into account when deciding search engine ranking. Note the qualifier, “one of”. How Google decides to rank websites, it’s “algorithm”, is a source of much speculation and confusion. The algorithm has many super secret parts that constantly change to improve quality and to stay ahead of the spammers.

So when an announcement is made the SEO community listens intently. Their verdict was that it matters a little but other factors remain much more important.

In perspective

Indeed external links from relevant high authority sources probably remains the most effective strategy for ranking well in Google – as well as the hardest.

My main strategy for doing well with Google is to write the best blog posts I possibly can. You, dear reader, decide how well I do this by linking to them. And if you’re from a relevant high authority website then Google regards this as an important indicator of authority and bumps me up the rankings. If you’re just a small blog then I still appreciate the link! but in appreciative human rather than business terms.

So that is the MyLocalWineStore search engine strategy in a nutshell. I combine it with social media and email marketing (and do a similar thing for my clients).

With my content progressing well, I’ve looked at the peripheral SEO areas one of which is site speed.

Google Webmaster Tools and site speed

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google.

It tells you:

• what terms you are ranking well for
• how many impressions those terms have on Google Search Results Page
• any specific problems Google has in crawling and indexing your site
• formally tell Google where to start crawling your website (sitemap.xml)
• and lots more…

… including Site Performance.

Google told me that my site was, “slower than 83% of sites”. Gulp.

I checked this using Firefox Firebug Speed extension, and the much more intuitive service offer by WebsiteOptimization.com.

They also said YOUR SITE IS SLOW. Capitals intended – and the message was heard loud and clear.

WebSiteOptimization.com told me a person on broadband (1.44Mbps) would take 8.02 seconds to load my home page. Stop. Count to Eight…
one thousand and one
one thousand and two
one thousand and three
one thousand and four
one thousand and five
one thousand and six
one thousand and seven
one thousand and eight

… long time huh?

So I fixed it. And got it down to 5.12 seconds (EDIT: about a week later got it to 3.7). Still too long, still needs some more work, but I’m trading speed for functionality – more about that trade-off later.

First here’s how I got the speed up.

Optimizer software

What’s that? One optimizer software vendor puts it this way:

Here’s another video with a slightly more technical description for you fellow geeks (note my server is in Michigan, a comment which will make sense if you watch the video above).

A good analogy is a turbo charger

A turbo charger compresses the air flowing into the engine cylinders. More air means more fuel, which means a bigger explosion, which means more power.

Put simply an optimizer compresses your website code while still on the server, then sends it in a smaller number of files, through the narrow internet pipes, to your computer.

There are so many parts to a web page (html, javascript, css, images etc) that the usual process is very bloated and sporadic. You type in a website address and the browser asks for some code, which the server delivers, then the browser asks for more code, which the server delivers… and it goes on for 68 times in my old website.

The optimizer software cut that down to 48 times, and reduced the size of the files (20 would have been better, have to work on that).

The optimizer I use (for WordPress) is called W3 Total Cache, the same as mashable.com’s, but there are other software plugins you can use as well. For example WP Super Cache is also popular, and Magento eCommerce software has an optimizer built into it that you turn on. Both of these are free, unlike the rocket science Aptimize software (in the video above) which charges the likes of Microsoft and Google mega bucks.

Note optimization is where you’ll get most of the your performance increase.

But I also had an image problem

Well not me personally you understand, my website did.

It had a large 20 Kb logo image on every page (Kb means kilobyte, 500 characters takes up 1 Kb):

I like my logo but it is way too big. So I cut it down to 2 Kb by splitting the graphic and text, and making the graphic smaller:

Phew, that sped things up, should have done that ages ago .

Speed’s important but…

…it ain’t everything.

At the bottom of this page you can see a “wibiya” toolbar with social media and search buttons splashed across it.

I was getting lots of speed warnings about this toolbar. In the end my testing showed wibiya added 0.1 seconds to the download speed. Significant, but I decided the functionality it provided to readers was worth the extra download time.

Likewise I always make sure that I have lots of pictures on my posts. I want this blog to be readable, not dry and sterile, so I accept a drop in speed for this reason. It’s a typical SEO issue you face.

If you only wrote for Google then your posts may be full of search phrases that turned Google on but your human readers off. The trick is to start with the humans first and then subtly adjust for Google without ruining readability.

The next change I made was to help my readership find the content they need.

Content constipation and a table of contents

I don’t have a problem with writing. Sure, like most people I sometimes get writer’s block and struggle, but if it’s a topic I like such as wine internet marketing then I usually have no problem writing a post.

My problem was, that over the last 6 months I have virtually written a book on selling wine online but it was hard to intuitively search for relevant information. I would receive an email from a reader with a question, I would suggest he checks out such and such a post, and wonder why he hadn’t seen it.

I decided I needed a sort of blog table of contents that you could skim over. So I created a new home page. It lets you more easily find answers to your internet wine business problems.

Note it’s probably not good SEO practice to have so many links from your home page, so again I’ve chosen functionality over SEO best practice.  I luv ya Google, but not that much.

Messiah Movements and WordPress Politics

Lastly my WordPress radar was sending me warning signals (WordPress is the software I use for this website as well as for clients’). I was using a template called Thesis, but things just didn’t smell right. Here’s why.

In an earlier post I outlined the three elements of a website:

• the content e.g. a blog post or a photo
• the presentation e.g. colors, fonts, and columns
• the code (or logic) e.g. software that says take this photo, use this font and send it to the internet browser (explorer or firefox etc)

The only thing that I changed in this website is the presentation i.e. the design. The content and the code remains the same (er… ignoring the optimizer).

Matt Mullenweg

I was using Chris Pearson’s Thesis for the presentation element. Then back in mid July the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, and Chris Pearson got into a fight over something called GPL.

It all happened in a telephone call moderated by a business blog which titled the call, “Would WordPress Sue The Maker Of Thesis, A Leading WordPress Theme?“. And it was a doozy of an argument with Chris completely losing his cool.

Chris Pearson's sense of humor wasn't enough for him this time.

A few weeks later he backed down. But by that stage a group of messiahs of the business social media world had already made their minds up and moved to fully compliant GPL licensed WordPress themes. Social media experts will recognize the names of Brian Clark and Chris Brogan – the “messiahs”.

I liked Thesis and wasn’t worried about any license issues. But what worried me was the reaction of the community.

WordPress is arguably the world’s most popular website software (11% of sites is one figure I heard on a recent podcast). It’s done well because of this huge amount of community development and support.

If Chris was going against the community and the messiahs were moving, then my feeling was his theme would slowly lose community support. Loss of support means less development and less assistance when I need it.

For that reason I moved to Genesis. Here’s a non affiliate link. It works well, so far.

So that’s the background to why this blog looks a little different today than it did yesterday. I hope you like it.

If you have any comments about the site please let me know.

Photos courtesy of: Ares I-X Rocket: A Beautiful Launch, Mirage in the Desert, Slow, Jochen Siegle/TechShowNetwork, Save Button

Related posts:

1. Wine Internet Marketing: Why Web Design Must Die

Not by any usability tests, sales, content, wine range or other consumer factors – just industry SEO analysis .

It is based on the SEO factors in the legend which is discussed below. But first I suggest you click on the graph below to see it at full size.

Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US by SEO factors for query buy wine

Wine.com is miles ahead of anyone else

In fact they do so well that it’s easier to talk about what they struggle with – which is Google News. Winebuys.com gets 193 mentions vs wine.com’s 9 mentions. The only other factor that stands out is wine.com having a lower rank in their top 10 pages than wineweb.com. But now I’m getting finicky.

Winebuys is behind the rest of the pack

Behind by quite a bit (but remember they’re still number 5 for a key query!). The home page is not bad and it has excellent Google News coverage – but every other factor is poor. Afraid these guys probably need to get focused around getting quality external links to their site.

It’s the middle of the pack that are in a serious battle for spots 2 and 3

And there is a big difference between these rankings. It’s been estimated that position 2 (“P2″) in the search results gets 3.5x less then position 1, P3 get 4.9x less than P1, P4 gets 6.9x less, P5 get 8.5x less.

Wines.com is doing well out of dmoz, has a good home page Page Rank, and does generally well in all the factors with the exception of Yahoo Site Explorer (back)links. I can see why they are a “nose” ahead with a good all round performance.

Winezap is doing exceptionally well with Google blogsearch links and Yahoo Site Explorer (back)links but needs to work on all the other factors about equally if it wants to come second.

Wineweb has an excellent average page rank of the top 10, good Google News strategy but needs a little more work with the bloggers and Yahoo Site Explorer (back)links.

What’s at stack is a 100%+ increase (or decrease) in traffic. It’s a battle I’ll watch with interest.

Methodology

It is for the broad keyword term buy wine using seomoz tools. I first used the seomoz keyword difficulty tool to see which five websites ranked the highest then put these results into trifecta, indexed them and graphed them above.

Buy wine because it arguably covers only transactional queries not more general information type queries. I think the keyword wine would include too many educational sites (and my blog is about wine retailers).

I acknowledge this is simplified as I haven’t weighted the factors – but you can only go so far in guessing the Google search algorithm . I also rely on seomoz (and recommend their) tools.

So it does throw light on the relative differences between these wine retail websites (especially given my index approach).

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Local SEO and Wine Stores in 2011: an Update of the Top 10 tasks
2. Local Wine Stores on Local Search: the Top 10 Things You Can Do