In Google Local Results, the search results that show the business’ name, address, phone number and map is referred to as a 7 Pack. Now it is called a 7 Pack, because it used to list 7 locations. See my example below when I search for ‘restaurants boston massachusetts’.

Lately though, you may have noticed that the traditional 7 Pack is smaller. The narrower your search, the smaller the ‘Pack’. See my search below for ‘coffee portland maine’.

Now there are plenty of reasons this could be showing up the way it is, but I happen to know there are WAY more than 3 coffee shops in Portland, Maine. But what if I didn’t know that? What if I was new in town? Google, as usual, is trying to make the best search experience for the user (not for your business). By doing that, they are focusing just on the most important results.

What does this mean for you? For one, if you aren’t showing up in this 7 Pack or 3 Pack or however many pack, people may be missing you!

So what are some ways you can put your best local search foot forward?

• Claim your business through Google
• Create a Google+ Local Business page and choose the option with the red balloon to be found on local listings
• Participate in social media (and completely fill out your profiles)
• Have a business website and make sure your address is prominently listed
• Make sure your location in listed in your meta descriptions on your site

Now I could write a blog post or two about each of the bullet points above, but I just wanted to define Local’s 7 pack, give you an idea of how that impacts you and let you know that there are things you can do to perform better.

So go check it out. Sign out of Google (if you are signed in) and try some local searches. Search for your geographic location and industry terms and see how your site is ranking. Does it make the 7pack?

Dave, Katie and I were lucky enough to spend two information-packed days at SearchLove in Boston last week. It was a lot of fun. We learned some new SEO tricks, we met and hung out with some smart people, and (let’s be honest) we nerded out. It was a great way to start the week. We’ve all got a list a mile long full of things to try, tools to test and new ideas to put into action.

To say the least, these conferences are energizing. You’re learning new things, gaining fresh insight, collecting all kinds of nerdy tools… Also cool? Knowing that you’re already doing a lot of what’s being talked about. After all, it’s a crazy, fast-moving digital world out there. And there’s so much to keep tabs on. I’ll be writing more blogs on a few of these things this summer.

While it’s impossible to recap everything in one blog post, we figured we’d pass on the love by sharing a sampling of some of our favorite takeaways.

Image ALT and title attributes may appear to do the same thing at first glance, but they are actually quite different in how they work and how they are interpreted by users, search engines and browsers.

First, ALT (or Alternative Text) is meant to help describe the image which you are placing in your post or page. This is important if your image fails to load in a browser or email program, because the descriptive text is displayed in the same position as the failed image. In addition, ALT text is considered to be important for SEO, in that search engine crawlers try to gather data from this attribute in hopes to serve you better results when you are doing an image search. Be brief, but descriptive. And remember, you don’t need to use words like “picture” or “image” in your description; search engines already know it’s an image.

Other benefits to using ALT text is that some browsers may not display images at all, such as screen readers.  Visually impaired persons depend on this extra information when “browsing” your site.

Much like the ALT text, the title attribute is used to help describe the image, but in a slightly different way. Image title attributes help by providing users with advisory information about the image in a brief pop up animation. This happens when a user hovers over an image that has the title attribute set. One tip to follow is that it is not always necessary to use a title attribute on an image. Try to reserve them for when the image links to other content or a larger version of itself.

Once the pages are merged:

• Your YouTube videos will be viewable right from your Google+ page, on a separate YouTube tab
• You will have access to hosting live ‘On Air’ hangouts
• You can upload videos from YouTube and autoshare them on Google+ to specific circles
• Multiple people can now manage your YouTube channel, without having to share a password.

The merge is currently in Beta but we decided to give it a try.

Below is a video showing you how easy it is to merge your YouTube channel and your Google+ page. With Google owning so many tools we all use for business, it is not far off to expect them all to be linked at some time.

If you can’t see the video, please watch it over on YouTube here.

Instructions on how to merge your channel and your G+ page

First to set you up for success, you need to make sure the Google account that your YouTube account is assigned to is already a page manager of your Google+ page. If it isn’t, you can set that in the Managers section of your Settings.

After that, just follow these 5 simple steps and you will have merged your two profiles:

1. Make sure you are logged into your Google Plus page and your YouTube channel
2. In the upper-right hand corner, go to Settings
3. Under your Account Information, click on Advanced
4. Choose to Connect with a Google+ page (beta)
5. Confirm your request

After that has been done, you can go to your Google+ page and see the new YouTube tab added to your profile.

If you want more information on merging your Google+ page and your YouTube channel, they actually set up a Google+ community on the topic for feedback and issues. Since this feature is still in beta, I am sure feedback is being taken into account as they decide what to do next.

This article from Business Insider talks about how Proctor & Gamble is struggling to meet its marketing goals after the CEO made an announcement that they were going ‘all-in’ on social media.

In a recent interview, P&G’s CEO is now saying they are instead going to increase their paid search budget and focus on traditional marketing efforts like sampling. While P&G is working with the biggest ad budget on the planet, what they learned can shed some light for the rest of us.

Facebook Changed the Rules

One thing that made the gamble on social media not work the way P&G planned was that Facebook changed the rules of the game. Facebook changed its algorithm for what people see in their news feed. Business pages went down in impressions significantly.

Is it unfair for Facebook to ‘change the rules’? Not really. Facebook is a free service. It isn’t like you paid for the features they promised you. That free service comes to you thanks to ads delivered to you by your ‘likes’ and activities. As Facebook matures, its job is to show users the content and ads they respond to best. That left many a brand page on the cutting room floor.

What can you do?

So what is a business supposed to do? If Facebook is your marketing channel of choice, you need to make darn sure you are delivering really, really good content that people like and respond to. The more people like and respond to your content, the more you will show up in people’s news feeds.

Second, you need to focus your marketing efforts on your own territory! Those rules won’t change at the drop of a hat.

Your owned marketing territory is your website, your blog, your email list and/or your contact list. Social media sites are great, they are popular, they are where people are, but they are also owned by stakeholders that are worried about their social media sites making money, not how you use them to market your business.

Social media is a great way to let people know about your company, build trust, create conversations and engage current and future customers. What we as businesses need to do is use those opportunities to get people to do something else with your business like participate on your owned marketing channels.

photo credit: Images_of_Money via photopin cc

It’s not often that you get to see a real Google big wig in the flesh – much less, here in Portland, Maine. Earlier this month we had the pleasure of meeting and gaining a few pearls of wisdom (and hints of what’s to come) from Steve Arthur, Google’s Head of Industry: Retail at the Ad Club of Maine’s Google This! event. He had some interesting things to say so I thought I’d recap the main takeaways and a few things that may be on the horizon.

It’s Not Just About the Hard Sell

Gone are the days of the hard sell. People research everything now. And the evolution of online search, shopping apps and other technology has empowered consumers in a way that makes standing out from the crowd essential. Drawing people in and grabbing them with stories and experiences is becoming more and more important than ever. Arthur cited Fab.com, ModCloth.com and others as sites that are doing this well.

What Happens on the Internet Influences In-store Decisions

It’s no secret at all that consumers have become increasingly connected thanks to mobile devices and the roles they play in people’s daily lives. This means that we as marketers have the opportunity to reach our customers in more ways than ever before, throughout their daily routine, making the internet even more influential to offline sales, not just online sales. It’s important that retailers (and business owners alike) think of their site as a path to purchase, not just an online storefront.

Thinking beyond the basic conversion and looking at the bigger picture is essential. We need to remember to consider multiple customer interaction points as conversions and assign these conversions with different values. It’s not as simple as “they came, they browsed, they purchased” anymore. Arthur cited King Arthur Flour as a brand that is doing this well by integrating multiple onsite interaction points: video views, chatter, recipe page views, bakers hotline requests…the list goes on and on.

Attribution and Mobile Don’t Always Mix

Increased mobile adoption is great, but we could do without the attribution challenges it brings. Think about it: If you access a website from your work computer, mobile phone, tablet and your home desktop computer, you’ve got four sets of cookies floating around for one person. Arthur mentioned that they are hoping that Chrome log-ins can help them to create models that will eventually enable them to better understand user behavior and return on investment. It will be interesting to see how Google attempts to improve upon this.

Oh Yeah, And Self Driving Cars? Sooner Than You Think.

Less internet marketing-related, but a fun tidbit. Self-driving car technology could be here sooner than we imagine. Wonder how they’ll integrate that into their advertising platform… 

Photo credit: TheCulinaryGeek

Neither of us have high school aged children, but now it seems kids just need to Google it and maybe purchase a reference on Amazon. Information surrounds us wherever we go.

We. Google. Everything.

We Google things we want to know more about. We Google people, news, questions, health facts, directions, businesses, videos, things to make us laugh, ex-boyfriends, the weather, answers to math questions, recipes and so much more.

The way we search is constantly evolving. In this Search Engine Journal article, the author speaks to Duane Forrester’s (Sr. Product Manager at Bing) breakdown of the new ‘search session’. We no longer type in a ‘one-and-done’ search. Instead, we make a series of searches, open multiple tabs and we rework our search terms until we feel we have found the perfect keywords to show us the best results.

Search is about the whole picture, now more than ever

So if that is how you and I search, why are we still optimizing for the one-and-done search? Each of those modified searches is part of the new search experience. The one-and-done search is now more about the entire experience. Meta descriptions, author markups, social media presence, page load time, multiple pieces of content marketing, user experience and design are a bigger factors than ever in the ‘search process’.

So what can you do to be prepared for new search behaviors?

• Take stock of the whole picture your company is showing the world.
• If there is a term you NEED to be found for, be found by multiple sources (your website, news, guest blogs, social media).
• Be aware of the search landscape, how people find your site and of what makes them buy from you. You can find a lot of information in your site’s analytics to help you get a clearer picture of how people find you and move through the funnel. You also can learn a lot from your customers and your sales team about what value customers saw in your company that made them choose you over your competition.
• Be clever. This title tag change from Infinum was brought to my attention from our designer. See below (or on their site) how the title tag changes when you click to a different tab in your browser. Clever.
  

Search engines have changed – they have become more personal and show varied results. Searchers behaviors have changed, we no longer do the one-and-done search. What we use search engines for has changed. We need to adapt to these changes or we may be left in the dust. It may be time to rethink your company’s search experience and think less about keywords and rankings.

photo credit: dicktay2000 via photopin cc

There was a really good presentation on Slideshare recently about Simple Design (I have embedded it below). We shared it around the office and then talked about a few of our favorite places to find images for our blog posts and webinars.

Here is a short list of what we came up with and why we like them:

• Flickr – An old standby, Flickr has a large collection of photos and a decent Advanced Search option. Using the Advanced Search, you can find Creative Commons licensed photos that you can use.
• Creative Commons Search – Speaking of Creative Commons, they have their own image search service. It is easy to use and has a large selection of photos.
• Photo Pin – Photo pin also pulls from the Flickr API to find Creative Commons licensed images but the interface is a little easier to use. Two things I like is that one of the ways to rank the images is by ‘interestingness’ and they provide the HTML for your photo attribution.
• Google Image Search – Google Image Search also has some great advanced search options. You can search for particular sizes, colors, phrases and usage rights. As much as I like the bells and whistles, I have a hard time actually finding an unlicensed photo that I can use for commercial use. I still like to check it out every once in awhile though.
• Pixabay – This one is new to me but we have been testing it out. Pixabay is a site offering photos without copyrights that do not need attribution. There is no obligation to have an account either. Users who want to submit their photos need to log in and waive their right to the photos that they upload.

Hopefully with a few options you can really spruce up your presentations and blog posts! Did we miss one? Do you have a photo search tool that you like to use? Let us know.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc