Mike Blumenthal recently drew attention to the lack of category choices we’re all going to have to get used to in the new Google+ Local dashboard. Previously, we’d be able to create an additional 4 custom categories to describe our business services more accurately besides the one that Google provides. And we did so in hopes of giving us a better chance of showing up for those keywords.

This lack of choice has gotten a lot of Local SEO’s up in arms because as Mike points out:

“Categories are a critical piece of how Google determines the relevance (not rank) of a listing in local search and there are so few categories that the consumer search results will likely not show businesses that should be shown.”

Who am I to argue with “Professor Maps” as the Local SEO world affectionately calls him (and he deserves that distinction), but this just doesn’t make sense to me. I must be missing something. Isn’t that like saying Google doesn’t know what a web page is relevant for without the meta keywords tag it deprecated so long ago? If we rely on custom-made categories to group businesses into buckets, then aren’t we turning over the wheel to reckless drivers? 

Nyagoslav Zhekov, a well-known Local SEO in the industry, recently wrote a blog comparing manual citation building with Yext, an online service that makes the normally long tedious process of citation building short and sweet.

(Citations, in case you don’t know, are mentions of your business throughout the web that include your name, address and phone number. These usually include listings in Google+ Local, YP, Yahoo, Yelp, Manta, Bing, Foursquare, Citysearch, and other hyperlocal directories and are important for helping local business get found wherever people are looking for local businesses. They also help websites rank higher in Google.)

Since there are literally hundreds of places your business can be listed, citation building is very time consuming, so when I first heard about Yext I was thrilled. Imagine being able to create and maintain 50 of these listings from one dashboard with just one account instead of 50. Truly a time and headache saver.

But, aside from the cost, Nyagoslav drew attention to something about Yext that really ‘got my goat,” so to speak.

The word is out. Google has released their disavow link tool, the SEO world is abuzz, and now you’re paranoid, thinking you should do something about it.

So stop worrying, already. You probably don’t need to do anything.

According to Google itself, “The primary purpose of this tool is to help clean up if you’ve hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building.”

Contrary to what you may have heard, when it comes to small and local business marketing, Twitter is not for the birds. And it certainly is not a waste of time – as long as don’t become a social butterfly and you actually get down to the business of getting new customers. Let’s explore some ways to do that. This first blog on the topic will be on how to find your local prospects in Twitter first.

Find your target market in Twitter

If you haven’t defined your target market, then you’ve been amiss because it should have been one of your first objectives when you started your businesses. So let’s assume you have that, and let’s say for illustration sake that you are a local vegetarian restaurant. Your target market then might be everyone within 5 miles of your establishment who might be health conscious or have heart disease, or who might be a member of PETA. How do you find them in Twitter?

The following is my gift to Kim  Kennedy of Vacation Broken Bow Lake in appreciation for her generous donation to the Leukemia Lymphoma Society. Thank you Kim!

Vacation Broken Bow is coming up in the back stretch!

Good news. I’m seeing some things I did not see a couple of months ago when I first peeked at vacationbrokenbowlake.com‘s rank in Google. Back then for their main keywords, they only showed up in the PPC (pay per click) ads. Today, they are in tenth position in the organic listings (free) for “vacation rentals broken bow lake.” For “broken bow lake cabin rentals” they are in position 9. And interestingly, if you switch that around to “cabin rentals broken bow lake,” Google sees that as a local query and returns Place pages where Vacation Broken Bow is in position C and fifth on the page. Looks like the owner Kim Kennedy has been applying some of the things she’s been learning by following the SEO pros in Twitter.  Or maybe she hired out some help. Whatever the case, congratulations, Kim! Nice to see the improvement.

(And once found, how can it stand out in the crowd?)

This site audit freely given to Jen Jaciw in appreciation for your generous support of Team in Training and the Leukemia Lymphoma Society and Kat & Mouse’s ride around Lake Tahoe in support of the cause. Thank you Jen!

Challenge –

Lone Star Limousine runs their business in sprawling Silicon Valley and serves more than 26 cities. How does a local business serving local clientele get found in Google for queries on all those cities for all their services and keywords? Add to that the fact that there are literally hundreds of other businesses competing for that position. And then once found, how can they be the one that gets picked.

Problem – One physical location, many locations served.

How does Google know which sites to return in local queries?