Not too long ago I needed to hire a lawyer. As I looked at different attorneys in the area I turned to Google Maps to find which ones had the most reviews and most positive reviews. Although I could have done a basic search in Google I find that when looking for local services a Maps search gives me a better list for consideration. I went to visit the lawyers in person that seemed credible from the reviews that I read. After visiting with the two different lawyers I found that the reviews online were a fair representation and decided to hire the lawyer that had more reviews than the other.

As we went through our business dealings with this lawyer (I am going to call him Chris from now on to simplify things) I noticed things he did to improve the amount of reviews he was getting online. Although Chris is a lawyer, I feel many of these same tips can be applied to any person or business that offers services locally.

1- Start Early and Look For Clues

During my first with Chris he wanted to know how I found out about him. This is a common practice for businesses because it helps identify what part of their marketing budget is working. I mentioned that I looked at online reviews during this discussion and Chris said he would greatly appreciate it if I would also provide a review when the services were provided.

While a sales person is trying to build rapport with a potential client it is easy to find out how technical an individual is. Once a sale is made to a tech savvy person you can plant the idea early on that it would be great if they would share their experience online through a review or social media.

2- Emphasize the Unique Value Proposition

When I was “sold” on going with Chris he emphasized his Unique Value Proposition (UVP). As I continued through the process with Chris I noticed him talking about his UVP, not in exact words usually but the same idea was expressed over and over. Chris was telling me what I could expect through the process and what he was doing to make sure that he delivered on what I was sold on. By doing this Chris was priming me to see the things that were unique to him and his practice.

3- Repeat it Often

Although my business with Chris was not a long and drawn out process I want to give some suggestions about how you can keep the review fresh in the minds of your clients even if your services stretch over a long period of time. Usually longer service contracts have bench marks or progress points where a client can assess the progress of the campaign. Every time you provide a win for the client, fulfill something you have promised them, or reach a goal be sure to inform them. With tact and preparation, the client-facing individuals in your company can get testimonials/reviews that can be used in sales material, website testimonials, or online reviews. When a client is happy with the progress on the project it is easy to ask them for permission to use what they say as a testimony. This can be as simple as: “Thanks. We try to provide great services here at XYZ. Although we are not done, I am seeing great success in this project. I like sharing successes stories with other clients in similar situations. Can I share part of what you have said to some of my other clients?” At this point you can identify what information can be shared and how many people it can be shared with.

4- Strike While the Iron is Hot

Chris was very helpful throughout the entire process. When we got done I was happy with the end results and so was Chris. Right as we were finishing up our business together Chris expressed his happiness with the results and he said something along the lines of: “I really would appreciate it if you would write a review about the great results we achieved. Can I send you an email with a link to a location where you can write a review?” There it was. He asked for a review right after we had experienced a win together.

5- Keep it Stupid Simple (That is right I switched Kiss to mean it needs to be stupidly simple)

When I got the email that he promised he would send I noticed several things.

• There was a live link to their Google Places page. I was already in my Gmail so I easily went and wrote a review.
• Chris re-emphasized the great results we had achieved together. None of this was new to me or something that had not been mentioned before, but it kept everything fresh in my mind so I did not need to search for things to say about the process.
• He included a brief set of directions on how to provide a review.
• I was thanked for my willingness to provide a review. This made me even happier to do so.

All of this was done in two short paragraphs because word economy is very important. If you have clients with a Yahoo email then send them a link to your Yahoo local listing. Likewise if you have someone with MSN or Hotmail accounts send them to your Bing local listing. If their email is some other type use your best guess. In any of these situations it would not hurt to provide the client with links to multiple locations where they could provide an online review or become a fan, follow, like, etc. These links could include Facebook Twitter or Yelp. Remember to make it as simple as absolutely possible.

Through this entire process I was able to learn how businesses can get better reviews for their sites. If you want more reviews or testimonials it is not always as simple as asking for these reviews. There are many things along the way that you can do as a business owner to encourage people to provide these reviews though the most important thing, of course, is to always provide a quality service.

Chris is an attorney not an online marketer yet he does things that really help out his online campaign. I am not sure that he even concisely did these things to encourage more interaction online. Once a company has a process for encouraging online interaction in place, implementing it could take just a few minutes each day yet have a huge impact in an online campaign.

To learn about how local search works in more detail, watch this webinar Learn the Secrets of Google’s Local Search

While “man-scaping” may be a painful experience, “seo-scaping” certainly is not.

Here are a few simple guidelines to keep in mind when trying to SEO-groom your site. Whether the site is in its infancy or well seasoned, the items we will cover here will remain applicable.

Website Technicality

Usability — Your website’s purpose makes no difference if visitors cannot find it, view it correctly, or if the site takes any longer than a few seconds to load. Here are a few tips:

• See what the search engines see. Use a text browser like Lynx and examine your website. What you find will likely be similar to what the majority of search engine spiders do, too.
• Utilize the robots.txt file on your server. This will communicate to crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. As long as this is current with your preferences, you will be in control with what will be crawled and indexed.
• Test each Web page in the various Web browsers for both visibility and functionality.
• Pay attention to your website performance and optimize load times. The goal of every search engine is not only relevancy, but also a great user experience.

Navigation and Content

Site Navigation — While nearly every website will approach their navigation with slight differences, one thing should always remain: keep it simple and straight forward. Here are a few tips:

• Link Structure — Every top level page should have at least one link directing to it from each of your pages.
• Site Map — This is a great way to show the search engines the extent of your website and also help your users find what they are looking for when all else fails. A combination of both a plain html formatted map for users and an XML sitemap will do the trick. For a clear walk through on the standards for your XML sitemap visit the protocol.
• Overall Linking — A commonly held idea is to stay below 100 links per page. Anything more than this typically will not be crawled.

Content — The content placed on the page will be a main driving factor in who arrives and how they will interact once landing there. The first question that should come to mind when creating content is “does the page clearly communicate the subject and goal at hand?” This is often achieved by keeping your subject matter down to one topic per page. Here are a few tips:

• Make sure the page is actually useful and provides quality information.
• Check for broken links and correct the HTML.
• As much as possible use text over images to display prominent content such as headings, addresses, names and links.
• Brainstorm words people would commonly use when searching for your website, and make certain the website actually includes those words. (Go here for a more in depth walk through on choosing keywords wisely)
• Keep your URL structure simple. Remember when using URLs that are dynamic (for instance if it has a “?” character in it), not all spiders crawl dynamic pages. It helps to keep the dynamic parameters to a minimum or to write them completely out where possible. The following format is ideal for a URL:

Quality Assurance

With competition always on the increase, now is the time to show your true colors. And just this once, it does matter if you are black or white, otherwise you might experience what JCPenny did. Keep your website on the search engine good graces with these tips:

• Keep your links in the right neck of the woods: avoid links to Web spammers, which commonly have an adverse effect on the website.
• The best page is a natural page. Search Engine Optimization does not have to be forced. Make sure your pages are created primarily for users, not for search engines. Refrain from “cloaking,” or displaying content different to search engines than visitors.
• Avoid tricks solely dedicated to manipulating search engines. A test is to ask is, “Does this help my users?” SEO and website usability can play nicely together.

I feel confident in saying the best Search Engine Optimization is found in natural processes. Make sure the content you create is unique and worth sharing and then create lots of it. Do this and follow the above guidelines and you will end up with one handsome website.

A special thanks to my amazing wife, Tiana,—the SEO.com hair removal specialist and Doc for his amazing video production. The experience was an inspiration to us all.

Here’s the video:

Even with all the things that WShomes.com is doing right, they are not showing up as well as they could be in the search engine results. I took the keywords that WSHome.com was targeting on their home page and did a little research to find out how they were doing. Below is a sample of the keywords on their home page and how they are ranking for them.

I ran this report two different days to make sure that I had a good representation of how they were doing. The numbers on the left side of the dash or arrow show where they show up in Google for that particular keyword. The number on the right of the dash or arrow show how much it has moved (green arrow showing upward movement, and red arrow showing downward movement). For the most part, these keywords seem to be staying about the same. In this report the site has only three keywords on the front page. I used the Google Adwords keyword tool to see how competitive these keywords are. Below is a screen capture showing how competitive the words are.

This shows how competitive these keywords are for paid advertising in comparison to other keywords. By looking at advertising competitiveness and the number of searches for the keywords, it is fair to say that these are competitive terms.

As I looked through this site I felt that there was a need for more content on the pages. The search engines like to see unique content on the site and WSHome does have good content on their individual product pages.  However, aside from the product pages, the rest of the site doesn’t have much content. The pages look good but there is little more than navigation and links into the individual products on most pages.

The navigation needs some changes to be more search friendly. The site uses images in their navigation instead of words. Why not just make it easier for the search engine bots to do their job? At least they’ve labeled their images with alt tags.  However, it would still be better if they changed these images to words.  One benefit of doing this would be to provide keyword rich internal links to the inner pages. The other major problem with the navigation is that it uses Java Script to control the drop down menus. In general it is not a good idea to use a lot of java script in site navigation as it makes it more difficult for the search engine bots to crawl and index every page of a site.

After looking at WSHome.com I wanted to see how other Williams-Sonoma websites were doing. I looked at PBTeen.com, and just like WSHome.com, it did a good job with having unique meta tags on all of its pages. The Google toolbar page rank is only a 4 on this site. There are not as many links to this site either. Google says they have just over 200 links while Yahoo says they have 3,900. With all these numbers I expected this PBTeen.com to be doing worse in the rankings than WSHome.com. The image below shows what I found.

PBTeen seems to be doing very well in the rankings and has a fair amount of number one positions. It would seem same to assume that these keywords must be less competitive, right?  This is what the Google Adwords tool showed:

WSHome.com had a keyword with over 134,000 monthly searches on it in February but averaged 50,000 searches most months. PBTeen.com’s highest searched keyword, teen bedding, averaged over 60,000 searches most months.

Both sites have about the same amount of content on their pages and they both use images in their navigation. So why does PBTeen.com seems to be doing so much better in the rankings? Take a look at this graph showing the difference in traffic the each site.

PBTeen.com seems to have a lot more traffic. I have my feelings as to why these two sites are experiencing differences in ranking and traffic to their sites.  One reson is that PBTeen.com has a better navigation system.  PBTeen.com uses ‘breadcrumb’ naviagation which is more user freindly and also seo friendly as they add keyword rich links.  There are a couple other reasons, but I can’t give away all my secrets in one post!

To explain how this is possible, I am going to use a specific website for an example. Donald Trump is known to take pride in having the best of what is offered when it comes to golf courses, resorts, hotels, and luxury high-rise buildings. He complements these establishments with clean and professional looking websites. But are these websites both professional in design and SEO friendly? Let’s take a closer look at this question with a specific example: Trump Tower Philadelphia.

My initial impression of this website was similar to my impression of each of Mr. Trump’s sites. It has a clean professional look that gives a great user experience. I was able to find a lot of good information about the tower and the accommodations offered there.

But is Mr. Trump’s website SEO friendly? I only found the website because I knew exactly what I was looking for, “Trump Towers Philadelphia.” If I didn’t know about Mr. Trump building a tower in Philadelphia, I might search for something more general like “Philadelphia Luxury Condos” or “Philadelphia Resort.”

Although the website does rank number one for “Trump Tower Philadelphia,” when I searched for the other key terms I did not find similar ranking results. In fact, the website was not even listed in the first page of results.  By only searching on those related terms, I would not know about the prestige and lavishness that the Trump Towers has to offer.  So, it appears that the website is not SEO friendly.

To maintain this site’s professional look while making it SEO friendly, here are a few things that I would change.

• Flash: Flash is not very SEO friendly. I would not have the entire site in flash and I would not make the index page of the site be a flash introduction movie to the website. Flash movies can still be used as elements on the pages of the site.
• Content on index page: I would make sure there is plenty of good content on the index page and all other pages outside of the flash movie.
• Static text links: I would make sure that the main navigation of the site was coded as static text links to make it possible for each page to be able to be crawled by search engine spiders.

Combining these changes with the optimization of various other elements on the site pages will have a great effect on search engine rankings. These changes will take a site that has a professional design and make it SEO friendly as well, thus giving the website the best of both worlds.