A lot of people don’t realize that when you are physically in another country, and you try to do a search on Google.com, Google redirects you to that country’s version of Google.com. So for example, if you are in Canada, and do a search on Google.com, it will redirect you to Google.ca (Google Canada) and display the Google.ca results.

Why is this important? Well, it may seem obvious but as a Canadian company, to measure the success of your SEO efforts you have to measure your organic (i.e. unpaid) rankings on Google.ca not Google.com, and, moreover, the organic results on Google.ca differ significantly for most searches that the organic results on Google.com.

Through our SEO work for clients in Canada we’ve found the following steps to work well to bring their search engine rankings higher in the unpaid Google Canada rankings:

1) Set Geographic Target to Canada in Google WebMaster Tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools Website is a great tool for Website owners – it provides excellent information on how Google sees your site. Within Google Webmaster Tools you can also tell Google the geography you are targeting with your Website. For Canadian businesses you need to set this to Canada – this is very important if the client’s site is a .com and not a .ca site.

2) Get Canada on Website

Seems obvious again, but get Canada on the Website. Get it into page title tags, get it on the pages itself.

3) Get Business Address on Website

Related to this, and very important to local businesses, get the physical address of the business on the site pages – often putting them in the footer and on a Contact Us page works well.

4) Build Site Pages That Talk About Canadian Locations

If your business is targeting several different cities or regions in Canada, create different pages on your Website that talk about these different regions in Canada. Google doesn’t know to rank you high for cities unless you talk about them on your site.

5) Build Links from Canadian Websites

Probably the toughest step – don’t just get more inbound links to your site from other sites, get them from .ca Canadian Websites. This takes a lot of work, just like link building in general, but pays big dividends.

With some site optimization and link building, you’ll see your Google.ca unpaid rankings go up in no time.

NPower has a unique mission – to help Washington state non-profits use technology to better serve their communities. I was really excited to speak to the team because I believe so strongly in what they are doing. And they do it well. I am really impressed at how the NPower Seattle team is leveraging open source technologies, such as the Plone Content Management System, to build fantastic non-profit Websites at a low-cost. Plus, they “get” SEO and the sites they build are very search engine-friendly. NPower Seattle also offers non-profit technology training, non-profit network support, and non-profit database and CRM consulting.

As a FYI, NPower Seattle is the original organization that led to the creation of the larger NPower Network, which provides non-profit technology consulting across the United States (Washington D.C., Atlanta, Charlotte, New York, Austin, etc.).

So if you (or someone you know) needs a non-profit Website in Seattle or Washington, I recommend you contact NPower Seattle.

And if you (or again someone you know) needs non-profit technology help outside of Seattle, you can contact the larger NPower Network organization.

More and more, Google is inserting this box into Google searches.  Typically it is inserted when someone searches for something locally, like ‘seattle pizza delivery’ .  Because this box often contains 3 (and sometimes 7!)  local listings, all of the other organic (i.e. unpaid) search engine listings get pushed down much lower on the results page.  This means that even if you did everything right in terms of SEO, and got your Website into the #1 Google organic listing, you would still only be in the 4th unpaid position (or 8th!) on the Google results page.  And believe us when we say, the site visitors you get from being in the 4th position on the page are way fewer than the visitors that would come from the  1st position – and if you get pushed down the 8th position on the page, you essentially will not get any site visitors from that search.

This is why, for local businesses, and also for businesses with many locations, Google Local listings are extremely important for your Website traffic.

And here is the tricky part – there are a whole set of SEO activities that you need to do to try to rank high in the Google Local listings – and they are very different from the activities that are used to rank high in the regular Google (unpaid) listings.

Here’s a Top 5 Google Local SEO To Do List:

1) Claim (or Create) Your Google Local Listing

Go to the Google Local Business Center and either claim the Google Local listing that Google has already generated for your business, or create a Google Local listing.  During this process, choose categories for your listing that describe the business you are in.  Also, in the description of your business (the paragraph you can write) include keywords that people typically use to find your business in the search engine, including your city.  Enter the accurate address and phone number for your business.  Once you’ve updated your listing, Google will ask you to verify it.  This consists of telling the Google system to call you on your business phone number (they give you a PIN and you enter it back into your Google Local account) or Google sometimes will mail you a postcard with a PIN instead.  Completing this verification process is key – it helps Google establish confidence that you are indeed the owner of the business and it is at the location and phone number you’ve submitted.

2) Put Your Business Address and Phone Number on Your Website

We have clients put their business address and phone number in the footer of every page of their site.  We also have them put it on their Contact Us page.  For businesses with multiple locations, the strategy is a bit different, but you want to make it easy for the Google search engine crawlers to get to the addresses of all of your locations.  Make sure you have a search-engine friendly locations section.

3) Submit Your Business with the Major Local Data Providers

There are a number of companies who collect data on local businesses.  It turns out the search engines rely on these data sources quite a bit in ranking the local business search results.  Here is a great list from David Mihm of the key local data providers to have your business listed in.

4) Get Customer Reviews

Encourage your customers to post reviews of your business to popular review sites such a:

• InsiderPages.com
• CitySearch.com
• Yelp.com
• SuperPages.com

Look at your competitors who are ranked above you in the Google Local results and see what sites they have reviews from.  They may have reviews from other sites like JudysBook.com or DexKnows.com – if they do then you may want to encourage your customers to post reviews of your business there.

Interestingly, the current thinking is that is doesn’t necessarily matter if your rev hadsiews or positive or negative, but instead that you have a steady, regular stream of reviews being posted.  Use your home page, emails you send to customers, your Twitter/Facebook activities, etc. to encourage customers to post reviews of your business.

5) Add Your Location to Your Website’s Page Title Tags

Each page on your Website has what is called a page title tag.  It is defined in the HTML code of your site.  The page title shows up on your Web pages in the very upper left corner of the Web browser window, next to the Firefox or Internet Explorer icon.  You need to get the city or neighborhood that your business is in into your page title tags.  This is just a good SEO tactic in general, and is an important factor for Local SEO as well.

Chair 10 Marketing provides SEO and pay-per-click services for businesses, including local SEO.  Contact us if you are interested in our services.

For this article, thanks go to David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal and Shagun Vatsa for their ongoing great work in local search.

Well, if it was as simple as that, then Google would not be a $196 billion company.

It is true, the optimal situation to strive for is one in which your Website ranks in the Top 5 organically for all of the search engine keyword search terms that are important to your business.  However, given the effort it takes to achieve a Top 5 organic ranking for most search terms (because of competition), and given the need of most businesses to start driving more targeted traffic to their Website sooner than later, most companies use a combination of both SEO and pay-per-click.

With pay-per-click advertising, you can quickly run your ads against thousands of keyword searches.  Compare that to SEO, where you have to work hard to get ranked in the Top 5 organic positions for just a handful of keyword searches.

For our clients, we start out by understanding their business and target customers.  Then, we do exhaustive keyword research to understand what people type into search engines when they are looking for their products or services.  We use this research to come up with an initial list of keywords to target for SEO work.  At the same time however, we recommend launching a pay-per-click advertising effort which will let us run ads against thousands of keyword searches that are potentially relevant to the business.  Then, using detailed performance tracking, we measure which keywords produce leads and sales, and which don’t.

This data from the pay-per-click campaign then either verifies that the initial keyword targets for SEO work were correct, or that this SEO keyword target list needs some editing.

So in this way, pay-per-click advertising and SEO are complementary.  Pay-per-click campaigns quickly give us data on which keyword searches are worth investing SEO effort into.