There's a very small, simple, yet very important skill needed in PPC.  What is it?

Spelling

Whether it's a keyword, ad copy, URLs, or what, the simple fumble of a few letters can cause major damage to your marketing efforts.

Scenario #1: Misspelled Keywords

By (unintentionally) misspelling a keyword you miss out on traffic.  Yes, you can harness the power of misspelled keywords, but that's not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about mistakes in your main set of keywords.  Who's going to search for Myrtle Beach Glof on purpose?

In PPC, not only are you going to loose out on traffic, you're going to pay more.  AdWord's Quality Score is based on the relevance of the keywords, ads and landing pages with a nice mix of CTR, performence history, and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure.  Misspelled keywords are usually going to have a lower relevancy and lower performance then normal keywords, negatively affecting quality score.  If you've got a strong, conscise keyword list, a simple spelling error can cause you to pay more than you should.

Scenario #2: Mispelled Ad Copy

Stupid.  Period.

Scenario #3: Misspelled URLs

This can be broken into too parts.  First, if your Display URL is misspelled, that falls under scenario #2.

Second, if your Destination URL isn't right, you might as well not run the add at all.  This should be a no brainer.  If searchers click on your ad in hopes of having you fufill their innermost desires (or at least their most pressing) and they get an error message, that's like you telling them that they're stupid and you don't care about them.  Maybe that's hyperbole, maybe not.

A simple mistake in your destination URL can screw things up bad.  Not only is that lost revenue, but how does that reflect on your brand?  It gives the cusomers a bad impression.  It's like running a newspaper ad saying that your store is open until 7pm.  When Joe the Shopper strolls down to the store at 5:30 and finds it closed, he's going to feel decieved and it's more than likely going to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Conclusion

To sum things up: check your spelling!  Not only will you prevent some potentialy costly mistakes, it transfers well into other parts of your life.  Start checking your spelling and your coworkers will stop laughing at you behind their backs after reading your emails.  You know they do...

By the way, did u notise anythin?  I bet it was annoying, huh?

I have a simple point to make to my SEO industry peers...

Should SEO Success Be Measured By Rankings?  Traffic?  Conversions?

There's been a lot of discussion in the SEO community over the last few months about how important rankings are or are not, and whether the main goal of SEO is rankings, traffic, or conversions.  What annoys me is that articles are written as if there's one best answer for all cases.  There isn't just one way to do it.  Every client has different needs.  And every client has different key metrics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... without rankings, you can't get traffic or conversions.  Some keywords yield more traffic.  Analytics help optimize for keywords that result in the most leads and highest revenues.

The Most Important Thing In SEO Is...

What are your client's goals?  What is their business strategy?  How does SEO fit into that strategy and those goals?

• If their main goal is leads, then optimize their SEO for the keywords that get the most leads.
• If their main goal is revenue, optimize for the keywords that get the most revenue.
• BUT if you have a client (and we have several like this) that need top 5 or even #1 rankings for particular keywords to fulfill other parts of their business strategy, then FOCUS ON RANKINGS.
  

For example:

We have a client that sells advertising on their site, and part of their salespeople's process is to point out the #1 ranking we have for that niche.  That may not be the best sales technique, but that's what works for them, and if we can keep that #1 ranking, we're doing the SEO job they want.

It took me years in SEO to realize that no matter how right you are about the best way to do it, that doesn't mean it's the best way for your client.

Stop trying to fit every client into your style, and see how your skills and talents can help that company achieve their unique goals. 

Optimal SEO Does Not Always Come First

SEO can be strategic, but it needs to fit with your client's overarching business strategy and goals.

It's understandable that optimizers would want to do SEO optimally, every time. 

But take the bigger view: your real goal is to help your client do business optimally.  So, fit SEO into their overall business objectives optimization.

Here's another example- this one from Pay Per Click:

A client came to us with this problem: they are state-funded, and they had not spent their entire advertising budget.  To ensure they retained funding next year, they had to quickly spend the rest. We spent nearly $8,000 for them within five days.  This required focused, short term work to ensure we spent as much as possible.  The KPI was the spend. 

This is not, in my opinion, the optimal way to do PPC.  I'd much rather do conversion-optimized PPC.  But we met our client's goals, and that's our job.

We in the search industry do a lot of things, including

• Staying on top of industry changes and trends
  
• Honing our skills
  
• Educating clients how to do it optimally ;-)
  
• Improving processes and efficiencies

But ultimately, the job is to serve the client's needs and goals.

UPDATE: This opening has been filled as of 8/26/2008.

Join our cool team!  Just saying that because that's what cheezy companies say that want you to think they're a cool, team-oriented, fun environment.  But we actually are cool, team-oriented, and fun.  Really!

Fuel Interactive has an entry-level opportunity in the exploding field of search engine marketing and optimization.

You will work directly with the Director of the department, another Search Marketing Specialist, our Web Analytics Specialist, Account Managers and other team members.

Fuel Interactive is a rapidly growing internet marketing agency partnered with one of the top traditional marketing agencies in the Southeast and another long-standing successful technology company.

We need a sharp individual interested in on-the-job training and working hard in a quick moving environment. You'll learn cutting edge internet marketing techniques and tools.

What's the Job Like?

One Search Specialist says, "it's cool working in an innovative industry not everyone knows about." It's not easy work. He says, "I've read and studied more in the last two months than I did in college." Search is always evolving and requires constant learning.

But Search is a growing field. In these times of economic downturn, getting a job in this field is "true job security in troubled times." While employers in other industries are laying people off, Fuel has been hiring like crazy.

Responsibilities and duties include:

* Following up on SEO research, build relationships with other sites, help build links to client sites
* Mining of multiple data sources to develop keyword lists
* Creating and editing text and URL's for SEO
* Gather and organize data/research from various websites to aid in SEO and PPC efforts
* Pay Per Click and SEO reporting
* Campaign management- on the job training provided
* Similar activities for Online Reputation Management and Social Media Management programs

Skills needed:
* Ability to handle multiple tasks and work independently
* Must be attentive to detail, good spelling a must
* Proficient with Excel- importing, sorting, cleaning data
* Good written and oral communication skills, team player
* Ability to prioritize, multi-task and dependably deliver results
* Ability to quickly learn new software tools
* Analytic and quantitative abilities

Pluses:
* Experience with AdWords, Yahoo PPC management, SEO, blogging, social bookmarking, Twitter, Google Analytics, Omniture, Urchin, HTML, CSS, CFM, PHP, ASP
* Sense of humor, or just the ability to pretend you have one
   
Location: Myrtle Beach, SC

I’m a big fan of the “Now Discover Your Strengths” series of books, including “StrengthsFinder 2.0”, and “First Break All the Rules”.

If you’re not familiar with these books, the big idea is:

It makes more sense to do what you’re really good at, what you’ve always been a natural at, than it does to try to perfect your weaknesses. 

This goes contrary to common business organizational practices.  And that may be one reason why so many businesses are mediocre.

Why Focus on Strengths?

Strengths are

• Things you do naturally do...
• Things you love to do…
• The ways you tend to think, and
• They lead to you perform excellently. 

On the flip side, no matter how good you get at your weaknesses, you’ll never excel by doing them.  You’ll never beat a person who’s natural at those things.

Don’t misunderstand: you can’t be incompetent at certain things, and you should manage around your weaknesses, but you should spend most of your time doing what you do best. 

Enough italics?

Organizationally speaking, there are enough humans with varying talents for you to focus on yours.  Find your spot.

This isn’t just some neat-o-keen idea to sell business books… it’s based upon the Gallup organization’s research on 1.7 million employees at 101 companies in 63 countries.

What Are Your Talents, or “Strengths”?

Gallup discovered 34 strengths or talents… things like: Competition, Relater, Learner, Input, Deliberative, and Ideation.

It takes a while to learn what these strengths all are and identify which ones really are your top strengths.  The first two books I mentioned above each comes with an online test to find them, but as they explain, these tests aren’t perfect, and you really need to understand the definitions and then watch yourself for a while to accurately diagnose.

For example, I would have denied that I was a competitive achiever until I read these books- then the more I watched myself the more those strengths explained stupid things I did like having to pass other cars on the freeway.  It’s stupid, but I think I’m winning and achieving when I do that.  Just so you know: if I pass you on the road, I win!  Deal with it.

Is There Just One Set of Key Strengths for SEO or PPC?

Even more complicated for this particular article: there probably isn’t one set of best strengths for PPC and SEO.  For example, a recent article about SEO’s pointed out the difference between technically-oriented SEO’s and copywriting-oriented SEO’s.  Each requires different talents.  You might have both.

The point of this article is to figure out how to get people who are naturals at the talents required for SEO and PPC.  Some companies hire neophytes and train them from the ground up.  Skills and tasks can be trained but, alas, talents cannot.  Although you could probably train many people to be mediocre SEO’s or PPC’s, my hope is that you’re looking for potentially excellent ones, or wondering if you could be an excellent one.

I’m going to take a stab at which strengths are required.  I assumed that SEO and PPC would require a different set of strengths, but upon review, I found the talents to be quite similar.  Naturally, many talents are required in business, but I’ve tried to include the ones that are most unique to SEO and PPC job functions.

How to Criticize My List of SEO/PPC Strengths

Feel free to discuss and disagree, especially if you’re familiar with the 34 strengths system!  I may have shaped these potentials to fit just our company’s vision- let me know if yours is different and requires something else. 

The other thing to keep in mind is that all strengths look good- it's like looking at some dessert menus- you want everything.  As you read them you may say "of course we should have this, too!"  But everyone can't have every strength- and any job candidate may have a few of these along with others that aren't as critical for SEO and PPC.  So the question to ask of each strength in the list below is "is this talent really essential to excelling at SEO or PPC?"

I tried to put these in order of importance, yet I feel all are indispensable.

The 7 Essential Strengths of An Excellent SEO/PPC Employee

1.    Maximizer – Obsession with making good things excellent.  Optimization.  This one’s a no-brainer for all analytics-based marketing.

2.    Achiever – Relentless need for achievement.  Key for making consistent improvements and getting more and more results.

3.    Focus – Need goals and clear destination.  Filter actions based on effectiveness and efficiency.  Key for getting things done.

4.    Individualization – Tendency to look at how things, people, websites are unique.  Key for dealing with unique niches, varying semantic spaces, and current client’s website situation.  Key for writing ads that are highly relevant to the keywords and landing pages in an AdGroup.

5.    Arranger – Loves complicated challenges.  Productively configures countless variables and factors.  Key for dealing with the number of things that affect search rankings and indexing, and working on all those things at one time.  This is also key for creating tightly focused AdGroups in PPC.

6.    Strategic – Sort through the clutter and find the best route.  Ability to see what would happen if you did this or that.  Key to anticipating possible results of any optimization.  Also important for thinking through the ramifications of interconnected PPC factors like CTR, bid, and quality score.

7.    Analytical – Prove it.  Show me the data.  Key for results-oriented SEO.  Without this you can have lots of fascinating conversations but you need this to get the best results.  However, there’s a lot of mystery in SEO, and if you’re too analytical you might not be able to tolerate that- for this reason, this is probably a better PPC strength than SEO.

Strengths for the SEO Team

Just after publishing this, @DerrickWheeler an SEO at Microsoft told me to check out his comment on this Bruce Clay blog post... it's his summary of the strengths you should have somewhere in your overall SEO team (scroll down to the comments).  I'm reserving my comment for now on the specific strengths he chose until I've had a chance to think about it, but that's another good angle to look at when checking your resources... if you're adding to your team, you can inventory existing members for strengths, find out where your strength gap is, and emphasize your talent search in that direction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#5. Barack already is mentioned in the #1 google result for "presidential candidate".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The number of new articles on these topics per day is at least 50... 50 good ones.  How do you keep up?  How do you know which ones to read?  How can you filter the god from the bad?

You don't have to.  We do that for you.

Josh Williams, Shannon Sell, and I (Brian Carter) post the best of the best SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing articles in a special FriendFeed "SEM, SEO, PPC, social media, media placement links, articles" room.  (If you don't use FriendFeed, check that out too- it's a way to aggregate all your most important social networking feeds in one place.)

Get most useful, most relevant-to-the-real-business-world info there.  Check it out!

    

These are a couple of SEO women who had a major fictional fight over a guy and ended up having to resolve it on the baseball field in Sumo suits.  Because that's the best way to resolve an imaginary guy fight - fake-sumo-fighting in front 3600 baseball fans and 20 of your fellow employees who are drinking beer in a suite at a Minor league baseball game in a Southern U.S. beach town!

 I did the pre-fight interview and the post-fight smack talk about Tennessee (hey, Katie's a fellow former buckeye... what can I say?)

Kudos to Brandon Tucker (funny golf blogger and video man from worldgolf.com) for filming it (in HD no less) and the killer editing, music, and slo-mo replays.

Of course we put it on YouTube... so it can go viral! 

• Tell your friends,
• Email your sumo buddies, or
• Send a carrier pigeon to your grandma with this video on an ipod tied to the pigeon's itty bitty bird feet...
• DO IT NOW!

Here are some preview images:

Why I Wear Graph Paper Shirts: Fashion & The Business of SEM

Previously a fashion choice made only by engineers and MIT students, graph paper shirts are now all the rage in the hot, young, explosive search marketing industry.  Coincidence?  I think not. 

 

Graph paper shirts symbolize everything that's right and good about the business of Search Marketing. 

I'm going to tell you why:

1. Aren't Graph Paper Shirts Nerdy?  Yes.  And that's a good thing!

Good SEM is analytics-based.  Analytical people like order.  Does anything say "I'm organized and logical" better than a shirt with lots of parallel and perpendicular lines?  Graph paper requires thinking inside, alongside, and through the box. 

Is there an "outside the box" in SEM?  Yes, but it's inside some other box. 

Sorry, you visionary freaks!  Think of something new.  We'll categorize it and assign metrics to it and define the process for doing it optimally.  Then you'll be in another box to think outside of.  We'll keep you visionaries on the run, and you'll love it, because you define yourself in opposition to us.

Alternative Lifestyle Indulgences: Wear mock turtlenecks or your old Metallica Ride The Lightning t-shirt and talk about "conversations" and "engagement".  Watch the facial lines of worry stay stubbornly etched into the faces of executive decision makers handcuffed by a recession economy.

Best Solution: Wear graph paper shirts, talk analytics, talk metrics, talk bottom line.  Use charts and graphs.  Project profit.  Get more clients.  Make lots of money.

Taking it Too Far: Drawing 45 degree upward ROI lines on your graph paper shirt with those big sharpie markers is kind of unnecessary ...Rob.  ...Duh!

2. Professional?  Yes.  Clients like it.

SEM, like most new computer things, is an unknown quantity (scary) for the traditional businesses we're trying to help. 

Your prospects and clients don't understand PageRank Sculpting, Quality Score, or Information Architecture, but they do understand charts, graphs, and metrics. 

Even if they haven't used KPI's adequately in their own businesses, your evangelizing of ROAS while wearing your graph paper shirt speaks reassuringly to their bottom line. 

And they do understand the bottom line.

Fun Alternative Business 2.0 Lifestyle Choices: "Hey, we're new and wacky, we're business 2.0, we wear hawaiian shirts and birkenstocks and tattoos- we are new and powerful and weird, respect us!"  Cool, may work for getting small SEO contracts for surfboard shops, but take that to a posh real estate development company in the South, and... um... nuh uh, see ya!

Best Solution:  Wear graph paper shirts, talk analytics, talk metrics, talk bottom line.  Use charts and graphs.  Project profit.  Get more clients.  Make lots of money.

Taking it Too Far: Creating your own graph paper pants. That's common sense, guys.  Just say no to graph paper pants.  Yes to graph paper shirts.

3. Changes Your Attitude?  Yep!  Use it!

Don't get me wrong, it took me 34 years to darken the doorstep of a Brooks Brothers store.  I'm the ultimate cool casual clothing sorta guy.  I used to work at an outdoor gear retail company where business casual was a The North Face fleece, convertible khakis, and Merrell hiking shoes. 

But dang it I'm in the South, and I'm in management.  Have you read the research that shows that one of the biggest determinants of who gets to be the leader is the one who most looks like the leader?  Studies also show that the taller you are the more money you make.  I'm not a tall guy so I have to impress people with my stunning good looks, my mind-blowing intellect, my cantankerous obsession with results, and my ridiculously hilarious sense of humor. 

But all of that would fall apart without my graph paper shirts and Italian dress shoes.  Why?  Because I think and act differently in different clothes.  Are you so different?  Try it and see what happens.  I act more professionally, more conservatively in dress clothes. 

Conversely, I'm more lax and self-centered in casual clothes.  I call it being "creative", being "me", etc. but the measure of my value at work is the potentiation of my internal resources (knowledge, decision making ability, analytical ability, creativity, everything) in a team framework- and I'm simply a better team member in dress clothes.  Weird, but true. 

Self perception affects behavior, behavior affects self-perception.  Classy clothes stimulate classy behavior, classy behavior creates a classy person.

This from a guy who used to say "it shouldn't matter how I dress- you should accept me for who I am".  But if it doesn't matter how you dress, then dress respectfully- and if you won't do that, that says something about who you are, doesn't it?  Noncomformity is disrespectful, because other people have limits in their perception of value- we use external cues to guess at truth- and if how I dress changes my own behavior, then I'm optimizing my work value by wearing different clothes... as an SEO I understand that clearly.

Alternative: Wear whatever you want, and witness yourself starting emails to clients with phrases like "hey dude..." and "hey man!"  Sure there's a place for that, but it shouldn't be the default.  Try an experiment- measure your productivity from client perspective, what you got done for them, and alternate your dress on different days for 6 days- analyze the results of your productivity in your different get-ups, and let me know what you find.

4. Morality?  Yes, Clothing Affects and Creates Business Morality

Everybody in SEM knows morality is an issue.  At the recent SMX Advanced conference, Danny Sullivan asked Matt Cutts how it felt to be the moral compass of SEM.  SEO professionals must decide whether to and when to use gray and black-hat techniques. 

Fundamental to this decision are questions like:

• Is this truly not a white hat technique?  (Discernment)
• Will this technique put my client at risk? (Altruism)
• Will this technique put my reputation at risk? (Vision)
• Is there truly no better white-hat alternative to this (Creativity)

It may be argued that gray and black hat techniques don't jeopardize an SEO's career, especially if they only do it on their own sites- some may even posit that usage of these techniques increases SEO savvy.  However, if your use of these activities could injure your client and could directly or indirectly injure your career, I'd argue that your attitude is immoral, instant-gratification-oriented, unwise, and more importantly: un-American, and you probably support the euthanizing of homeless people.

Is there less chance you'd engage in gray or black hat activities if you were wearing a graph paper shirt?  Of course!  Read on...

Alternative Amoral Clothing Choices: Everyone knows that the Enron executives got tattoos and road Harley motorcycles to work and wore leather boots just before defrauding their investors of millions of dollars, right?  Just kidding.   But Enron executives did not wear graph paper shirts, and they should have.  They wore black suits and ties, and that may have been a problem, but more research is needed.

Best Solution: Wear graph paper shirts, go to church, feed the homeless, write down your SEM ethics, and follow them.

Taking it too Far: Using a red marker to check a box on your graph paper shirts every time you beat the temptation to take gray or black hat action.  We don't need to know, buddy.  Keep it to yourself.

Bottom line?  The clothes make the man or woman.  And if you disagree, you're wrong.  I know, because I wear graph paper shirts, so I'm right.

More reading on Clothing, Self-Perception, and Business:

• BusinessWeek: Leaders Must Look the Part
• The Influence of Appropriateness of Dress and Gender on The Self-Perception of Occupational Attributes
• Clothing interest, clothing satisfaction and self perceptions of sociability, emotional stability, and dominance
• Search Google Scholar for more!

 

Naturally, our star this time is not Ramses, but Moses... (Charlton Heston style)

If you read about my SEM 2.0 Pyramid, you may have noticed the references to and picture of Yul Brenner from the classic movie, The Ten Commandments.

It hit me a few days after publishing that, that there's a perfect way to extend the theme of the post and go into more detail.

That's right, it's...

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SEM 2.0

1. Thou shalt test everything everywhere; test thy messages, offers, and appeals in social media, on thy site, in thy ads, and in thy search listings.
2. Thou shalt win friends and influence people via Social Media; thou shalt turn competitors into allies via networking and SM.
3. Thou shalt not beg, cajole, or threaten people to give you links for thy networking and value surely shalt bring thee more links (blessed are the poor in links who deserve more links)
4. Thou shalt create valuable content and useful tools that people will want to use, link to, and share.
5. Thou shalt use analytics to discover which keywords, placements, ads, offers, and audiences get thee the results thou needest most.
6. Thou shalt use lessons from each of these three channels: social media, SEO, and PPC to doest better in the other two.
7. Thou shalt use thy seo wisdom on landing pages to increase thy PPC quality score.
8. Thou shalt re-optimize and re-strategize based on clues provided to thee by thy analytics.
9. Thou shalt monitor what people are saying about thee, stay up to date on thy competition, and watch for new competitors.
10. Thou shalt attain wisdom from pre-internet marketing and PR books and teachers and test them in thy SEM efforts.

And finally, thou shalt not argue about whether there is any sense to the order of these 10 commandments.  Because there ain't.

This is a huge topic, since Google's universal search results include images, locations, business listings, videos, news, and now/coming-soon merchant services... so I can't cover everything, but I want to give our SEO clients a short primer on what universal search is, how important it is, and what we can do to optimize it, especially for local businesses.

The basics are this: without you asking, Google gives you more than just websites in web search results.  It's been like that for more than a year, so I'm sure you've noticed... but you may not know how this impacts SEO.  Here's an intro to Google's blended search and what's included in the results.

 There's a New Definition for "Number One Search Results"

A bunch of our clients are local businesses.  For example, we have some clients who are either golf courses or advertising cooperatives for golf courses in Myrtle Beach, SC. 

Look what happens these days when you Google "myrtle beach golf":

The Division of Search Results Real Estate

This is on a 1024 pixel wide browser-

• There are 345,000 square pixels of area in these search results above the fold
• 51% of the space is local search results
• 49% is AdWords ads
• Natural search results (individual webpages apart from local results) take up 0%

Yes, zero.  Ye ol' natural website listings are not visible above the fold for this local search.  And we didn't ask for that- that's just what Google naturally gives us for this search- it decides this is an important search to show local business results for.

So if your critical target keywords show local business results in Google's search, YOU MUST BE IN THE TOP LOCAL BUSINESS LISTINGS.  If you have any doubt about that, check out independent research that shows that blended search changes searcher behavior.

Getting in Google's Top Local Business Listings Search Results

How do you do that?  Luck? Voodoo? 

• Some have alluded to the importance of reviews on the third party sites Google aggregates- sheer number of reviews, and keywords in the reviews.  Note, you cannot optimize that in a white-hat manner. 
• Many of these third party sites also discourage businesses (hotels, for example) from telling their customers to post reviews. 
• I'm certain Google would frown on you telling them to post a positive review with specific keywords in them. 
• What about keywords in the local business profile?  I regret to say I don't have enough data on that to comment yet.  My SEM stock answer?  Test, test, test.  But don't spam.
• Check out Matt McGee's 10 likely elements of the local search algorithm

Some businesses are lucky (or smart) to have keywords in their URLs and brand names.  Look what happens for "Myrtle Beach Resort" when you type in the popular keyword "myrtle beach resort"...

...instead of a variety of local listings, the one business is featured.  And they have the number one website ranking, so they get all 51% of the non-ad space above the fold.

The hotel group "Myrtle Beach Resorts" does not get the same privilege for the search "myrtle beach resorts":

Evidently, Google lets the plural form trigger a listing of multiple results, and MyrtleBeach-Resorts.com does not appear to be optimized to win in the top local business listings for this keyword.  Looks like they need more backlinks and more reviews with that keyword in it!

An interesting question that comes up is: what keywords bring up local business listings in the Google search results?  We tested a bunch of keywords in multiple cities, and it turns out that it depends on the city and what the businesses there are. 

For example, "myrtle beach mosque" does not produce local listings...

...but "new york mosque" does:

Why?  There aren't any mosques in Myrtle Beach, but there are a bunch in New York City. 

How Do You Know Which Keywords Will Have Local Business Results?

The easy answer is search all your target keywords to see if local business listings come up and see how your client does for them.  Every business should be managing a Google local business profile anyway- and that's part of the solution.

NEW! Google Merchant Search

Google Merchant Search was just outed by Search Engine Land -  it's still in beta in the UK. 

This is like the local biz results but not local and only service providers- so if you want to compare secured loans, you can compare rates and even fill out a lead form to get rate quotes. 

Will it replace websites that get business leads?  Probably not, but will it be another important channel?  Yes.  And will someone have to manage that information for these service businesses?  Yes.  Who?  SEO's, of course! 

Doncha think?

Videos in Local Search Results

Just a few tests demonstrate that you can get locally relevant video results not just from keywords that contain video like "myrtle beach funny video"...

(note "myrtle beach video" brought up listings of video stores like Blockbuster)

You can also get video results from keywords closely enough related to the title of the video, e.g. "myrtle beach funny commercial"...

My Tips on Video SEO Optimization are:

• Know which keywords will NOT bring up local business results, avoid the ones that do bring up local biz results, because I suspect the local results will trump video results, and your video won't show up in those search results. Let me know if you ever see blended search results with both local biz listings and videos on the first page- I haven't seen it.
• Upload videos to multiple sites via tubemogul, especially youtube, as youtube videos generally rank highest
• Put your target keywords in the video title, the video description
• Put your website link in the video description
• Put a title on the video itself with your website url so viewers know where to go for more info
• Link to your video from your websites and blogs

Herewith endeth ye ol' lesson.