I have been fielding a lot of calls from sites big and small that believe they got hit by Penguin, Google’s “over-optimization” algorithm. Or maybe it was Panda? Who knows? Traffic is down and everybody is freaking out.

I have a particular soft spot in my heart for the small, local businesses that have been hit, in many cases because they bought into someone’s spammy linkbuilding scheme.

I have had a few discussions with other SEOs who are attempting to take down clients’ spammy looking links, and while that might be effective, the ROI on finding and getting all of those links deleted seems iffy at best.

This mindset gets at the heart of why the site had a problem with these wacky animal updates to begin with – linkbuilding is not a substitute for a marketing plan.

With that in mind, I thought I’d offer up all you localistas out there some tried and true local marketing tips that just so happen to also help generate links, hopefully without infuriating any Google algo-beasts:

1.  Sponsor My Kid’s Baseball Team

There’s not much for us parents to do while watching our little Jeters learn the fine art of hitting off a tee, so getting your name on their jerseys for cheap might be a good way to build awareness.

It also might get you a link or two from the league’s website which is what we call a “citation” in the local SEO biz.  Here’s an example. It also gives you an excuse to connect with all of the parents on Facebook if you’re into that kind of thing which brings me to my next idea…

2.  Doing Something Socially Good In Your Community

How about a fundraiser for cancer that gets you a link from one of the top newspaper sites in the area? Or maybe a charity golf tournament?

3.  Join Your Local Business Association

Sure, it’s a good networking opportunity, but chances are, you will also get some nice links/citations out of the deal. Check out the Pleasanton Downtown Association’s Business Directory (which is not very well optimized btw – Hey PDA, give me a call!).

Another upside of joining these types of groups is that they help market you.

4.  Run A Contest

The state of today’s media is that pictures of dogs with funny ties is news – see proof to the right. Well, so are pie eating contests.

If you need something to wash the pie down, how about a local brew crawl (promoted by the Pleasanton Downtown Association, btw)?

5.  Make A Video

One of the great things about the Web is that it’s super easy and cheap to make and distribute your own videos.

Find a local artiste who is looking to build their rep and have them whip out something for you that can get some attention (and links) like Presidential Car Wash.

I could go on, but hopefully by now you get the picture. For SEO to succeed over time, you have to invest in marketing your business.

If you stop thinking of SEO as some alien witch-crafty thing and start thinking of it as a natural compliment to your marketing plan (assuming you have a marketing plan that is) – you’ll find that the only Penguins and Pandas you need to worry about are the ones your kid is spending way too much money on on Farmville (excuse me if my farm is more exotic than yours).

Bizible’s team is made up of former Bing AdCenter guys and counts a PhD and a stats expert on their staff, so their study is a more scientific attempt to figure out what’s going on with Google Places than your typical “here’s what some SEOs think” kind of thing.

For methodology, they studied 30 potential ranking factors by querying approximately 20 cities across approximately 20 local categories (about 400 search terms), looking 30 results deep in Google Places rankings. They looked at each factor in isolation and then looked at them in combination to see if there were any multiplier effects.

While there are likely some holes in their methodology – for example, changing physical location of the browser might lead to different results (Bizible used a variety of IP addresses to try to mimic this), there’s no accounting for personalization or Google SPyW results and their approach sounds like something a quant geek might approve of. Their site has more detail on their methodology if you’re into that kind of thing. Also note the research was conducted before Google’s Venice Update which changed the way Google ranks URLs for local queries.

So what did them fancy PhD-types discover? Some interesting stuff.

The Bizible data shows a big difference in ranking factors between improving ranking when the local result were integrated in the main SERP page and when it did not make it in the 7 pack/5 pack/universal results.

Top 3 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages In Integrated Results

1. Places page category matches a broader category than that of the search (search for “pizza”, Places category = restaurant). This only applies of course if there is a broader category. This applies for both primary and secondary Places page categories.
2. The search category appears in the business name (“Rocky’s Pizza” for a “Seattle pizza” search).
3. The search category appears in the “at a glance” section.

Top 5 Factors To Improve Ranking For Pages Not In Integrated Results

Three stars isn’t so bad in any real-world rating, but online reviews tend to be rather extreme, so anything lower than 4 stars can be off-putting to the searcher.

As you start planning your reputation management strategy, you think that perhaps your staff had a bad day, so it’s just a matter of responding well to the bad review and mollifying the situation.

Then you start seeing bland, broad, confusing, or cross-promotional reviews. Paranoia sets in and the next thing you know, you’re muttering to yourself about being a victim of a “negative SEO” campaign by that competitor across the street. But is that really the case?

Check The Source

Checking the past reviews of those giving the bad press is your first step. Like with most low-quality reviewers, having only a few sparse reviews, especially purely negative ones, can be a sure spam signal.

Of course a potential spam review can come either through error or an intentional hatchet job, so you need to be careful.

Looking at past reviews will also show you the normal “editorial style” of the patron, allowing you to identify a perennial hater or a normally nice guy who had a truly wretched experience.

Either way, a business owner should exercise prudence in responding to reviews.

Answering a review with an uncertain source could muddle an issue that most readers would likely ignore as clearly spam anyway, and give the impression that the business doesn’t understand the marketing avenue they’re using.

Volume & Velocity

Two other factors can lead a business owner to a spammy conclusion – volume and velocity. The first is easy to see: if a reviewer has negatively reviewed your company multiple times, he’s either a glutton for punishment or actively trying to “downvote” your brand.

Two different reviews from the same person on the same day with somewhat different stories? Maybe the salmon mousse made the reviewer a little loopy, but that review history smacks of someone forgetting to log out between submissions or not realizing that the first try had gone through.

This kind of volume can be an honest mistake, however, and doubled reviews don’t show on Place Pages.

However, for a business owner, this kind of activity can show that sleep shouldn’t necessarily be lost over the customer’s experience.

Speed of reviews in a short period of time can point to a user trying to build clout for their profile without putting in a lot of effort. But 65 no-comment reviews in one day can show that the review your business received isn’t legitimate.

This review is positive for the restaurant, but taken into account with the other reviews on that day, the cause for praise is blunted.

To be fair, a regular user might be bored one day and quickly give all the places he’s been a star rating and nothing more – but is that kind of reviewer the one who’s going to warrant a meaningful response?

Is The Review For You?

Often, businesses with no relation to each other but similar names will get users or even Google Places confused. For example, I know for a fact that Ninja Restaurant and Sushi Bar in New Orleans unfortunately does not serve the wondrous Spam Local Moco.

Again, you have to turn to the reviewer page. A quick Google search shows that there is a Portland sushi bar with a similar name that serves that Hawaiian delicacy, and the reviewer talking about the dish is largely active in and around that city. A simple confusion on the reviewer’s part about the name of the place led him to one that was thousands of miles away.

Fortunately for this restaurant, his experience at the accidental sister sushi kitchen was positive, but a first-time patron of the restaurant wouldn’t be able to identify such a case of mistaken identity based on menu choice alone.

What You Can Do About Bad Reviews

The rules of review responses haven’t changed, and you can’t dismiss even a wave of bad reviews as just your competitors besmirching your good name. Most reviews, even ones that look like spam on the top level, are real people, and ought not be treated as a SEO trick unless you’re 100% sure.

Respond, help, and give your company a good name – even if it doesn’t change the minds of those who wrote the reviews, the visitor will likely be happy to see that your business is being proactive about its online presence. Being meaningful and helpful, even for those who might be confused or even intentionally smearing, will make sure even a low review score will win over potential drop-ins.

For those of us who have far-flung social networks, the impact on local queries will likely be small as there will not be enough truly local social network content to populate queries outside of some top categories such as restaurants and events.

If the current experience is any indication, I would say Google’s Panda algorithm should eventually purge many of these results as they will not generate decent click-through.

For example, here are some page one results for me when I search Chinese Restaurants:

If anything, these kinds of results might make me delete some of these guys from my Google+ network, just to avoid them polluting my results.

Of course, many people could have tight local social networks so they might get better results, but again, probably not outside of some key categories.

One of the big differences between Google’s approach to social and Facebook’s is that Facebook started with people first. Google tried starting with people, but the SPEW strategy seems pretty targeted at getting businesses to do the hard work of priming the social net. And therein lies opportunity.

While there are plenty of exhibitionists among us, I am not sure the idea of having your Google+ posts show up in Google SERPs is much of an incentive to get people to socialize on Google+.

That said, it’s a huge incentive for businesses. So get ready for some aggressive social local networking from your friendly local service providers. Some predictions:

1.  Local directories will start working hard for your +1′s Google Places has shifted a large amount of organic traffic from local directory sites to Place Pages. Up until Search Plus Your World, there was no decent way for directories to get around Places. But now, they just need you to +1 them and/or connect with you on G+ and their relevant content should start showing up high in local results.

This is going to lead to +1 promotions similar to how companies advertise “like me on Facebook” campaigns. Perhaps we might even see some “Like Plus me dude” campaigns.

2.  Local businesses will start working hard for your +1′s SMBs will be able to play this game too.  If +1′s and G+ connections improve Places rankings we are quickly going to see an entire economy built around local social business networking.  In fact, people with strong local G+ networks could easily get a business to pay them in exchange for connecting with them on G+.

3.  Google+ connections are going to become the new link

Where Google has frowned on “link schemes” to game rankings, I don’t see how it can control social promotion schemes. If I want to compensate you for connecting with me on G+ and mentioning my service, how can Google tell?

This system could put an unusual amount of power in the hands of those who have strong local social networks. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of local entrepreneurs take advantage of this.

Tis the season to contemplate the future of the local Web marketing for small businesses (SMBs) my friends. For all of you tight-fisted hands at the grindstone, 2012 is loaded with opportunity. But are you going to be a Marley, the walking dead bogged down by the chains of your past, or a reborn Scrooge, dancing in the streets in your pajamas?

“There is never enough time to do or say all the things that we would wish. The thing is to try to do as much as you can in the time that you have. Remember Scrooge, time is short, and suddenly, you’re not here any more.” – The Ghost of Xmas Present

The Ghost Of Present Local Web Marketing

I know, I forgot the Past. The Past is done. Move on already. Local Web Marketing was and is a simultaneously compelling and confusing opportunity for small business marketers. Some present-day stats to consider – courtesy of BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor study released earlier this month at the ILM West conference:

SMBs Are Spending An Increasing Amount Of Marketing Budgets Online

87% of SMBs surveyed are spending 24% of their marketing budgets online. In a recession/post-recession/whatever you want to call this thing we’re in. Where do you think that number is heading? Certainly not down (ok it went down this year, but the long term trend is up).

If you are not focused on the Web not only are you missing out on a lot of the action, you are getting totally served by your competition who is already there.

But SMB Websites Suck!

Can you believe only 13% of SMB websites have a local phone number on their home page? I sure can. Think of all the missed opportunities. I often hear SMBs say that they don’t care about clicks to their website, all they care about is calls and people walking in the door. Well, this stat, along with the general crappiness of most SMB sites says that they really don’t care about any of it.

Forget about SEO, social media and other fancy-pants ways to get customers online. Spend a little time on your website, figure out what it is you want the customer to do there (e.g., call you) and make sure the primary thing it does is help the customer do it (e.g. put your frigging phone number on the home page).

So the Present is a bit bleak. But again, let’s move on and focus on the future:

“Ghost of the Future, I fear you more than any spectre I have seen.” – Ebenezer Scrooge

The Future Is Mobile Baby

When it comes to local search, mobile is quickly becoming where it’s at. Cases in point:

• 40% of Google’s mobile search queries (about 1 billion/month) have local intent
• 40% of Yelp’s Traffic is Mobile
• 42% of moms with smartphones use them for shopping

…and on and on and on.

Now I know what you’re thinking. It’s too early. It’s not for my type of business. There’s not enough volume, etc. Well, in a sense that all may be true. The mobile marketing biz is in its infancy, but out of the mouths of babes consider the following:

1. As mentioned above, mobile search volume continues to grow at an astronomical pace, and the new smartphones unleashed over the holidays should keep that trend going.

2. Mobile-optimized websites should have a natural advantage in mobile SEO. Why wouldn’t Google and Bing want to send a mobile phone user to a mobile site instead of a normal website?

3. The competition for mobile advertising at a local level is low. Most of your competition can barely wrap their heads around standard search advertising, let alone mobile advertising. This means that a mobile AdWords campaign are cheaper on a per-click basis.

Check out the following list of common local search keywords and the comparison of their CPC for desktop queries v. mobile queries:

According to AppStack, a SMB mobile marketing start-up (Full disclosure: I am an advisor to AppStack), local mobile advertisers are currently saving about 50% on cost-per-click via Mobile AdWords on a consistent basis. Now I don’t know about you, but when I see I can save 50% off my ad budget and get the same clicks, I pay attention.

Mobile-optimized websites can convert mobile traffic at much higher rate. According to Google, mobile optimized ad campaigns can see a 49% increase in conversions. Combine this with a lower cost-per-lead and you are looking at big potential savings on your cost-per-conversion.

So my advice to you, dear reader, is to explore mobile this year. See if it works for you. At the very least, optimize your site for mobile traffic. Make sure your phone number is displayed prominently and offer a limited set of options for visitors that will look good on a phone browser.

And for those of you who choose to ignore the mobile in 2012 here’s one last quote:

“I’m just mad because I’ve lost my money… my shineys.” – Scrooge McDuck

As Yelp says, “negative reviews can feel like a punch in the gut”. Even better, according to a recent study by Cone Communications, four out of five consumers have changed their minds about a recommended purchase based solely on negative information they found online.

But there’s a lot of lemonade to be made from those review lemons. After all, negative reviews can increase sales. Negative reviews can help potential customers feel like they have “done their homework” which moves them further towards making a purchase decision. Negative reviews can also add credibility to your positive reviews. And perhaps most important, negative reviews give businesses a chance to respond and show how awesome they really are.

So when your business gets slammed on a local review site, be it a legit complaint or a crackpot customer, you can’t afford to ignore the negativity.  So let’s look at how to turn these major bummers into teachable moments.

1. Have A Game Plan

As Mike Blumenthal recommends in Responding To Negative Reviews – Your Prospects Are The Real Audience: ”Never respond to reviews unless you can own the issue, describe how future customers will not have the issue, and offer to fix the issue”. He also recommends that when you do respond, you “write with your prospects in mind”.

2. Understand The Tools At Your Disposal

Get to know the sites that all merchants to respond and learn how to use their tools. Miriam Ellis has a great post Edit, Remove and Respond To Reviews – Tools for Conflict Resolution that outlines what kinds of merchant responses are allowed on different local reviews sites. I have adapted her list to create the one below.

3. Learn How To Mine The Gold From Negative Reviews

Check out this video of Seth Godin interviewing Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio and Food Network’s Sarah Moulton about how they use bad reviews – and bad reviewers – to make their businesses better. Thanks to Al for pointing this one out to me. Check out his post on Tools for Managing Negative Customer Reviews for more great words of wisdom on the subjet.

4. Study At The Feet Of The Masters

Take a page from R.J.Hidson’s Place Page,  R.J., an Edmonton Wedding Photographer displays a textbook example of how to respond to a negative review when he got slammed for showing some ‘tude at a customer’s nuptials.

I’ve got to say I like RJ’s ‘tude.

5. Don’t Ignore It. It Won’t Go Away

Lisa Barone puts it thus about what can happen when “a review develops legs”: “Staying quiet simply because you don’t think it’s serious enough to warrant a response is almost certain to invite the fire to spread beyond Yelp and onto other blogs and news sites. You don’t want that to happen. The best way to contain the mess is to handle it at its source. If something is gaining legs, get in the conversation and help calm it down. Often just a few words from you will be enough to soothe the hype and get the conversation back on track.”

Several years ago, a ego-maniacal little blogger found himself on the wrong end of some bad service and blogged about it. To say this review “developed legs” is putting it mildly. But the merchant ignored the problem and likely lost business because of it.

If said merchant had followed Lisa’s advice and merely contacted the pesky little blogger to explain his side of the story he probably could have saved himself a lot of grief, and perhaps he would have even gotten some business out of it.

I am particularly intrigued by the new Ripples feature, which allows you to see who has shared a post and track it as it gets shared by others. It is, in fact, like watching a ripple.

Ripples strikes me as much more of a feature for marketers than for consumers. I suppose Google+ wants to attract power users who typically have more of a marketing mindset than the average Joe.

So of course the first thing I thought of was that Ripples would be an excellent tool to find local influencers on Google Plus. Here’s how:

(Warning: The techniques described below are merely for educational purposes. I take no responsibility for the potential spam and privacy issues Google has unleashed here.)

1. First Find Google+ Users In Your Target Location

I am sure Google+ will eventually have some nifty ways for you to find people near you who share similar interests, but let’s say you wanted to find those people today. Perhaps you want to engage with them about subjects you share in common.

Maybe you’re a vegan restaurant in the Bay Area and you want to build a network of local vegans to share recipes with and perhaps at some point get them to promote your restaurant. Well there’s an app for that — a search app that is, called Google.

Go to Google and do the following search:

This query shows you URLs of Google+ members who use the word “vegan” and whose profiles show that they live in the Bay Area. Depending on the query, you may need to play around with this a bit by adding additional filters. For example, if you were looking for people in Brooklyn but didn’t want to find people named “Brooklyn,” you would add “-intitle:Brooklyn”.

Here are the top results of my Bay Area vegan query:

2. Find People Who Are Interested In What You Have To Say

Google gave 2,740 results for this query, which means that you now can find several hundred people who might be interested in your vegan vittles. You could click on each of their profiles and figure out which ones seem interesting and willing to engage, but first:

3. Find The Most Active/Influential Ones

Go back to Google and do the following query:

This query, in theory, will show you all of the posts for a particular member — in this case, me. As you can see, I have made 191 posts thus far (nothing about vegans, though):

If you want to see if the person has been active recently, click on the “Show Search Tools” link at the bottom of the left-hand navigation on the Google SERP:

Set the filter to “Past 24 hours” or “Past week” or a custom range to see how active the person is.

Once you have found the right people, it’s time to check out some Google+ Ripple action. Review the posts by the member that contain the keyword you are interested in by doing the following query in Google Plus:

When you have found a post that looks relevant to your subject click on the “View Ripples” link on the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the post:

Now, you can see who else has shared this post:

This data shows you how influential the person is, how popular the post is and who else is interested in the subject. By examining this data for each member, you can start to figure out who is most influential about your subject matter in your area.

Once you have built the list, then it’s up to you to figure out how to engage with them in a way that will be mutually beneficial and help get your message out.

Now it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyhow: These techniques are only valuable if you can convince people to invest their attention in you.

And there are no magic queries in Google that can do that for you.

1.  Duplicate Content

Just as in traditional Web SEO, duplicate content was determined to be the biggest negative factor. And while plenty of news sites create duplicate content on their own, those surveyed focused on the use of other sources’ content on your site, particularly scraped or plagiarized content.

Google is getting better at determining the original source of the content and degrading the rankings of the sites that “borrow” it. And if you are distributing press releases on your site, make sure you separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site and adding “nofollow” tags to all links to press releases.

2.  Vague, Abstract Headlines

This is a fancy way of saying headlines that don’t target specific high value keywords. I remember when Eliot Spitzer got caught with the hooker and the NY Post ran the headline “Ho No!” Awesome headline. Amazing linkbait.

If you can write a headline like that, then go for it, but everyone else should stick to “Spitzer Caught With Hooker”. If you are writing headlines for a news site, you need to learn how to do keyword research.

3.  No Google News Sitemap

I am always surprised when I find a news site not using these. I have seen dramatic differences in crawling, indexing and rankings as a result of using a Google News Sitemap. It’s not particularly hard to implement. What are you waiting for?

4.  Poor Quality Content

Google News has ways of algorithmically and manually determining if your site tends to misspell words, use poor grammar, and generally produce poor quality content. There’s no excuse for bad writing!

5.  Blocking Googlebot Via Robots.txt

This is one of those classic SEO screw-ups that keeps a SEO consultant’s phone ringing in the middle of the night. If your organic traffic just tanked, one of the first things you should do is check your robots.txt file and make sure you don’t see these two lines:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

6.  Poor Site Performance

If your site is slow and/or produces a lot of 500 errors, your rankings are going to suffer. Google wants to send people to fast-loading pages. There are variety of tools you can use to monitor your site’s performance including the Crawl Stats and Site Performance reports in Google Webmaster Tools and Google’s Page Speed Tool.

My favorite technique is to use a script to track your server logs for when Googlebot gets 4xx or 5xx response codes, then send out an email to the team notifying them of the errors. Whomever is responsible for performance will have a heavy incentive to keep the site error-free and keep those emails to a minimum.

7.  Poor CitationRank

CitationRank is the measure of how well a story on a news site gets linked to from or referenced on other sites, particularly other news sites. These kinds of citations demonstrate that the story is authoritative on the subject. If you can’t get others to link to your story, it’s going to be harder to get it up on top.

8. Low PageRank Domain

If your site’s overall SEO program is not competitive, you will have a harder time ranking. Make sure you are at least getting the basics right. Make sure your site is accessible to search engine robots, targets high value keywords and regularly gets links from other sites.

9.  New Site

Just as new sites can have a harder time ranking in Google’s Web results, sites with low/no trust and/or history in Google News will have a harder time ranking well.

New sites must demonstrate trust by getting linked to from other authoritative sites, by getting well-shared via popular social media channels and by getting well-clicked-on relative to other sites in Google News for a particular story.

“Category Authority” was deemed by our panel to be the most important ranking factor, so new sites will likely have the best luck if they focus on a specific niche to be expert in.

10. All Syndicated Content With The Same Titles As The Source Site

While this is basically the same thing as Duplicate Content, the panel seemed to think this case deserved special mention as more and more news organizations put more reliance on syndicated content, without even bothering to rewrite any of it.

If you don’t put your own spin on the news, you are not going to do well in Google News.

For more information on various Google News Ranking Factors, check out www.googlenewsrankingfactors.com.

In my experience, when it comes to reviews there are four types of businesses:

• Businesses that get most of their business from referrals, don’t get any online reviews and could care less about them (perhaps the biggest chunk of businesses).

• Businesses that get most of their business from referrals, get online reviews and think that nobody reads them or cares.

• Businesses that think reviews are hugely important and work hard to get a lot of them.

• Businesses that think reviews are hugely important and work hard to get them, but don’t get many, if any.

What the types that rely heavily on referrals and ignore reviews don’t realize is that some time in the next year or two someone is going to write something about them online and there’s a good chance it’s going to be negative.

If you search Google for “kids backpacks”, you’ll see a “Nearby Stores” link displayed just below the image/shopping results, the most prominent section of the SERP.

If you sell kids backpacks, you’ll probably want to rank well for queries for it year-round, but back-to-school time is probably when it really pays to rank well for the term. In this case, you’d want to make sure that your inventory is available in Google Shopping so that you can show up in the Nearby Stores SERP.

As you are considering your SEO efforts, you should be thinking about the seasonality of your business as well as how it effects how your local customers use search.

For seasonal and locally focused SEO campaigns consider the following tips.

1.  Plan Ahead

If you want to rank for a seasonal keyword like “back to school sale” in your city, you’ll probably want to try to rank for the query ahead of time. While putting up a great piece of content and getting links at the time of the event can work, as people are more likely to link to something that’s current, I have found it’s more reliable to get your content indexed and linked way ahead of time.

During the actual time you want to have the best rankings, you can also add additional content that targets variations of the keyword and links back to the original page you are trying to rank. This can both bolster the original page as well provide an additional URL that can rank.

2.  Understand The Time Window

Planning for your New Years Eve party usually starts around December 1st. So if you’re a restaurant, you’ll want to rank for “New Years Eve menu” well before New Years Eve comes around.

3.  Understand The SERPs For Your Keyword

While Google and Bing update their various SERP displays regularly, having a handle on the different SERP inventory available for your target keyword is a good idea.

If Google is showing a lot of images, then you know you need to work on image optimization. If there are Shopping results as in the backpack example, you know you need to get your inventory in Google Shopping.

For event-based keywords like “Black Friday Shopping”, Google often shows relevant News links above the organic results around the time of the event. For the News results, consider writing an article on “Black Friday Shopping” for your local newspaper.

Often times, SERPs with News results also show blog results, so this would be an indication that you might want to add some content about the event to your blog. If it’s a hot term, update your blog regularly throughout the day, as Google will often update these links with the latest content.

4.  Create An Editorial Calendar

One of the challenges (and opportunities) with the Web is that it forces businesses to start thinking like publishers. But businesses should already know when their hot seasons are.

They also should know the types of products people will be looking for and the types of questions they will be asking search engines. Map out the seasons that effect you in a editorial calendar spreadsheet and start figuring out where your areas of SEO opportunity are going to be over the next year.

To help you get started, I have created a Local SEO Seasonal Calendar that shows some of the major events for the year, complete with relevant local business categories/keywords for those events and the window of time for each.

And remember, with local SEO, ’tis always the season.