Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

You should all be familiar with testimonials - comments, quotes and recommendations about your business/products/services provided by people that have purchased from you and experienced positive results. Testimonials are one of the best social proofing tools available in online business and if you don’t have a testimonial page on your business website I’d get to work now and produce one. In fact many people use testimonials as the main sales copy since they are so effective at converting new customers. However, this article is not meant to promote the use of testimonials as a general marketing tool, instead I want to explain to you another way I made use of testimonials recently to improve my local search rankings.

Local Search

When I refer to local search I mean when people use local terms like city names to find products or services. Local search can also mean specific locality based search engines that allow you to use geographic boundaries or maps to search for retailers (etc.) in your area. That’s not exactly what I am referring to - I simply mean when someone types in a search term like “Sydney plumber” into Google to find, well, a plumber in Sydney. Using city names is a very common method people use to drill down to find local information and as such Internet business owners should consider this when optimizing pages. Of course if you only service a particular area, like a bookkeeper that only works with clients in Toronto, then your primary keyphrases should focus on your local city. If you are global then there is no specific city you have to focus on, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t forget about local search optimization.

The First Money I Invested In Online Marketing

I just received an invoice from one of the very first online promotions I did for BetterEdit.com, my student editing and proofreading business. When I initially launched the website I was quite random with how I spent my meagre advertising budget and one of the very first methods I tested was to pay for a placement in an Australian directory site. The directory is a yellow pages style website, with categories for basically every business industry you could think of.

The directory was launched a long time ago, I’m not sure how many years, but at least before the year 2000. Back in 2001 I stumbled across it when I was doing some local search research in Google to see what the top results were for terms like “Brisbane proofreading” and all the other capital cities when I did an Australian based Google search. I figured a lot of people would use local city based search terms to find a proofreader and I wanted BetterEdit to be in the first page of results. I came across this directory and noticed that it was showing up really well for proofreading terms because it had a directory set up for each major city in Australia with a “proofreading and editing” category. At the time I didn’t know exactly why it had such good rankings (I would assume it’s because of how long the site has been online - it’s very well established) but I thought it was a good advertising method to test.

I emailed to ask how much it was to get a listing and after some negotiations BetterEdit was placed into the big three cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, under the “proofreading and editing” and “secretarial services” categories for $100 plus GST. Shortly after I was pleased to see that for a city based search including the term proofreading, the directory category with BetterEdit was coming up usually in the top three Australian based Google search results for the three major Australian cities. Thankfully I never had much competition in the proofreader category in the directory with only an occasional freelancer paying for an entry, but no real serious businesses, so any traffic that came to the directory category would end up at BetterEdit.

Fast forward to late 2005 and I received my latest invoice for my directory listings. I told them that I no longer needed the entries but I thanked them for helping me get established back when my website was brand new. Nowadays the directory has a few more entries in the proofreading categories but BetterEdit.com is the first result in Google for most Australian city based proofreading search terms. Hence I really don’t need the directory listings anymore.

How Testimonials Can Help With Your Local Search Rankings

It was during some research in Google that I noticed BetterEdit’s testimonial page was often coming up as the local search result for “cityname proofreading” and the like. It was because I wrote each testimonial to contain the city location of the person that gave the feedback quote. Since I optimize BetterEdit heavily for phrases including the term “proofreading” BetterEdit often ranks top three for city based search results, at least for Australian cities.

With this knowledge I decided to test the power of my testimonials page. My page was getting very long with over four years worth of testimonials built up so I decided to break it up into four smaller pages so it wouldn’t take as long to load the testimonials. It also looks more impressive having multiple pages of testimonials and I’m proud to say they are all unsolicited comments students have sent through - genuine testimonials - often the poor English is testament to how genuine they are!

With my four new pages I went to work playing with the title tags. On the first testimonials page I placed some major cities, mostly Australian and Canadian cities, which match the student testimonials in the text of the page. This page is usually the main page that ranks well for “cityname” local searches including the term proofreading. On the second testimonial page I included some more city names including US, Canadian and Australian capital cities. On the third testimonials page I tested with some different city names and also some states. On the last testimonials page I played around with some major university names like Harvard, Oxford and Yale to see if I could rank well for those local search phrases as well.

The Result - Improved Long-Tail Rankings

My results have been quite good. Almost all of the location based search phrases paired with “proofreading” that I targeted with my title tags bring up BetterEdit as a top three search result in Google. This of course wouldn’t work as well on a site that isn’t optimized for it’s primary keyword (proofreading in this case), but it does demonstrate a fantastic technique to get top local, long-tailed, search engine rankings.

Remember the long tail is a very important online marketplace because it’s very targeted. If you can rank well for hundreds of secondary keyphrases in the long-tail this will almost definitely bring you in a lot more targeted traffic than ranking well for a single phrase.

Once you get your site well ranked it’s worth testing techniques like this because you really don’t know results until you try and you may be surprised with how quickly you can rank for phrases you hadn’t considered before. Often pages of competing sites ignore local terms so simply optimizing a few of your sub-pages is good enough to get top rankings . If you stumble across a high trafficked local search phrase you may hit the gravy in terms of targeted traffic, or at worst you will get a trickle of long-tail targeted traffic that will give you exposure in new areas. Monitor your website referrer stats to identify the best performing terms and keep playing with your title tags to test different phrases. Easy!

Yaro Starak
Local Search Optimizer