Any good SEO monitors his/her traffic sources. Every once and awhile you glean some incite as to the success or failure of your link building campaigns. Over the last few days I have noticed “traffic” from two referring sites.

www.tinyurl.com/ForexTradingSystems

AND

www.tinyurl.com/UnlimitedHostingService

These slick bastards are creating traffic by somehow clicking sites getting their tinyUrl links to show up on Google Analytics. You, being the good steward of your site, click the link where you get pitched on what ever they are pitching that day.

These referring site links have showed up on over 10 my sites and or client sites. I would bet that they are generating a crud-ton of traffic this way. As a programmer I could probably figure out how to do this but I think I will stick to more traditional SEO.

By Clicking the below link you will be adding this site to their referring sites list on their analytics account.

http://tinyurl.com/Youslickbastards

I can’t be the first to notice this or am I just late to the party.

Cheers,
Scott

Update

I emailed Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.org fame and he informed me that I am 4 years late and a dollar short.

My Email to Rand,
Did I just discover a new type of spam or am I just late to the party?

Rands Reply,
Not new – been around since before search engines, actually (because it was an easy way to get traffic in the early days of the web).

SEOmoz – SEO Software

note: SeoMoz.org is not affiliated with Orlando SEO in anyway.

The purpose of this post is to deconstruct, arguably, the most difficult Google Places client. When I say difficult I mean crowded and competitive. Lawyers have the money to spend on online marketing as the very nature of their service is expensive.  The amount of money that can be made providing a service or product is directly proportional to the money that competition is spending to get that business in the first place. This statement could not be truer when talking about internet advertising.

Purpose and or Intention

1) Find the most competitive and valuable areas of law and related keywords.
2) Choose the top ranking sites for those keywords.
3) Find the methods these sites use to rank.
4) Ascertain the true competition of these sites.

Finding the Most Competitive Areas of Law

When I am doing research on keywords I try to find the whale. The whale would be the keyword or keywords that has the highest search volume. The whale does not necessarily have any real value as keywords with true intent are normally not the whale. Orlando attorneys is less valuable then Orlando personal injury lawyer as the intent, in my experience, is much lower for the whale. A user normally starts out in a vague cloud. The keywords “Orlando attorneys” are probably too vague to be exactly what the user is looking for.

Step 1 – Find a Boat Load of Keyword “Whale” Variations

We can find several variations of the keyword “Orlando attorneys” with a few spins on Google’s Wonder Wheel or the Adwords keyword tool.

note: I have a shady tool that spins this wheel a few hundred times to come up with hundreds of variations of your keyword. This same tool then copies the output to the users clipboard. If anyone is interested email me for more info.

After pruning out silly keywords such as Orlando Gardening I normally drop the bulk of whats left into Market Samurai. This tool can help you dice up the keywords so that you can figure out keyword value. By looking at a keywords adword value and an assorted variety of more exotic keyword valuation stats I come up with
Orlando accident attorney. This keyword runs in the neighborhood of $29 per click. Orlando motorcycle accident lawyer costs $65 per click but the volume is fairly low and I wanted to strike a balance with high CPC and volume.

In Part 2 I will show you the winning sites and why they are “killing it” in the rankings.

You are allowed to defend yourself in a court of law but I would not recommend it. You are also allowed to fix your own car but if you don’t know what your doing I wouldn’t. Business owners may claim and populate their own Google places page but if you think that you’re going to place in any type of semi competitive market then your being naive. Good local SEOs constantly think and research on how to beat people like yourselves and other local SEOs. We test, measure and learn while you busy running your business. SEO is our business.

The Early Months

Local SEO was similar to the early years of organic SEO.  Lame site+ bunch of spammy backlinks = profit. In the beginning, Google’s local search was easy to game as there wasn’t much competition. Now, even pet sitting services are pulling out the shivs and soap wrapped up in pillow cases (I have done software development at a few jails so if you ever meet me ask about the poo wrapped flaming toilet brushes shot at other inmates via a jail made slingshots).

Questions Business Should Ask Themselves

• Would I have a chance against a lawyer in a court of law?
• Could I beat 51 year old John McEnroe at tennis (errr probably not)?
• Do I understand the basics of local SEO?
• Can I devote the monthly hours on Local SEO to suceed?
• Would I be better at local SEO if I had already done 75 other local SEO projects?
• Do I think I have a chance in hell of out ranking a pro (given enough time)?
• If I get in trouble (piss off the Google gods) can I find my way back?

Anger the Google gods?

The last bullet point is an important one. There are a number of pitfalls that local SEO posses. If you don’t have the experience to appease the Google gods then your places page can be buried. Google places spam have given Google a hair trigger. Look, even remotely spammy, and you can trigger a manual review. Your top 3 local search rankings that have been bringing you tons of breast augmentation surgeries will vanish. You could disappear for weeks as the Google reviewers are a bit busy.

I can’t speak for all SEOs but I can say that there are a few things a business should consider.

1. SEOs obsess 24 hours per day about beating people that rank in front of them.
2. We will find a way to beat you and it’s just a matter of time. While you are busy running your business we will hunt your Places page down and beat you.

Scott

Consider the following Color Bars

Exhibit A – Google

This is the color that “Sponsored Links” uses to delineate itself from organic search. If your using a LCD screen, and you probably are on your computer or IPhone, then you have notice that some colors look different at different angles. Look at the above color bar straight on. Now move your head high while looking down at the screen. The light purple bar will disappear at about 5 degrees from center making paid and organic indistinguishable from one another.

Implications

My gut feeling is that Google, in their quest to raise revenue, noticed that light purple disappears on an LCD screen unless you look at it perfectly straight on. Move your head up 3-5 degrees and poof. If this change happened around January 1,  and I am sure I will get emails and calls disputing this date, then I would be willing to bet that revenues jumped a bit January 2. Fellow SEOs, how many times have you spoke to a client that told you something like this… “I never click on the paid links I just ignore them”.  It helps if you imagine them speaking like Hunter S. Thompson.

By the way, Bing seems to be doing the same thing only not as well.

Exhibit B – Bing

Scott

scott

So for the last week I have been having nothing but issues using this methodology. Most of the time I was getting the annoying but normally temporary message. I finally get out of this mode and enter the mode. Wait what? So if there is not enough traffic for a keyword then Google simply does not show your ad? WTF is this BS. The really annoying part of this is that I know that there is volume as I see it every day for this particular keyword set. I also know that this keyword set is registering for a broad search, not one I ever use, because I see my mortal enemies ads showing up. FYI, I see any and all competitors of my clients as mortal enemies. If you happen to be in this group then just know that I am coming for you and you will loose eventually.

Anyway, so thanks Google. SteveLaLonde over on forums.searchenginewatch.com said it best. Instead of giving us the message “there is not enough search volume to display your keyword”, AdWords should be honest and say “we don’t stand to make enough money off this keyword, try something broader”.

I will try to figure out how to get around this inconvenience but even I know that I am only here at the pleasure of the KING (please notice the irony of a noFollow on the aforementioned link).

scott

It’s really basic stuff but its important to start somewhere. Enjoy

GoogleBot

A Starter Guide For My Mom

Google has added a ton of supporting images and content definitions that will help noobies navigate their way through. What is funny is that I never linked to the old document as a good guide. The reason for this was that Google’s old guide was just ahhhh meh. This new guide is a guide I could probably give my mom and thats the definition of a starters guide.

I’ am not sure were there are going with their mascot GoogleBot. It kind of reminds me of Rodger the robot from SeoMoz.org. SeoMoz, for the uninitiated makes Tools & Software to Rank Better.

Infographic by the Pay Per Click Blog