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?

Or, what I learned from Hedgehog Books

Way, way back in time, I took on the job of creating an online bookstore for a couple of teachers who wanted to provide a place where parents could find and buy teacher-recommended books for their children. The name of the site was “Hedgehog Books.”

The name itself conjured up all kinds of cutesy things so we hired an artist to paint our home page, and cute it was. Our artist created a forest scene for us with a hedgehog reading a book to a group of fine, fun, and furry friends. When she was done, I took it into Photoshop and painted in street signs to serve as links into the site. It was, I have to say, when of the cutest home pages I had ever seen.

Local SEO advice coming your way via Kat & Mouse’s “Free SEO Friday” audit for KickAss Coach

Congratulations to Vicki Garcia for winning our free site audit! Follow along as I tell Vicki how she can improve her website so that it ranks high in Google Places for local business search queries.

To begin, let me compliment Vicki on her great looking website! No one should underestimate the value of a pretty page. It speaks of her professionalism and her insistence on quality which as a consumer might also lead me to believe she does the same in her business.