If you care about SEO and your company's position in local listings and on search results pages I urge you to read this email carefully and respond promptly when asked. We cannot deliver top results without your cooperation.

As you probably know our SEO Marketing Manager Gunn started about two months ago. During this time she has done a fantastic job, along with Kirana (aka Yam) our Content Development Manager to take our SEO engine to another level. They have gone into excruciating detail reviewing the websites we manage, they have studied our analytics, researched SEO deeply, particularly around local search factors, and have come up with an execution plan that will drive a continuous measure and improve cycle for our efforts.

There are two major initiatives underway based on their work;

1.    Local Business Directories

The Google, Bing and Yahoo local business listings are an essential foundation to have in place. There are a number of factors in the content, updates and management of these listings that will improve your search results - in some cases dramatically.

For example; a significant percentage of our clients have substantial difference in the address and phone listings in their Google local listing versus what's on their website. This adversely impacts results. 

Today most clients have set up and manage one or more of these listings. We have frankly had mixed results in getting requested changes done; in part we need improve our communication and management of these requests, and in part many of you are busy and in what should be no surprise, never get around to it.

ACTION REQUIRED

We are going to give you a binary choice; we manage the local listings for you or you manage them yourselves.

• Pronto Managed: If we manage then we'll take full responsibility to make sure they are up to date, fully optimized and refreshed on a regular basis (that in of itself is a key ranking factor).
  • If we manage your local listings it will be within a master Pronto account. This is a standard and Google approved setup. You will need to take a few steps to release the listing to us and we'll take full responsibility from there. If you don't have one, we'll create it.
  • If you decided to discontinue Pronto's services at some point in the future we'll release the listing and you can reclaim it.

• Client Managed: If you manage we're going to tell you what you should do, we are going to remind you periodically but the responsibility is yours. We cannot manage your listing.

NEXT STEPS

We are going to send everyone a Support Ticket "SEO Local Listings Optimization". In this ticket we will ask you if you want to go Pronto Managed or Client Managed for your local listings. Depending on your choice we will then use that ticket to either drive the process to have Pronto claim and manage your listing or provide you the next steps to manage your own.

It's up to you. Our preference is to manage for you - it's clearly more work for us and a huge responsibility. But we want the opportunity to give you the best possible results and welcome the "monkey on our back".

2.    On Page and On-site Optimization

Gunn and Yam have also lead a cross-Pronto effort to build a detailed and structured framework to guide our on page optimization AND conversion elements. This involved extensive analysis of keywords, factors such as keyword density on pages - both ours and high ranking competitors and reviewing the collective analytics.

There are two key surveys we used as our checklist; the SEOmoz Search Ranking Factors (159 individual factors) and the David Mihn Local Search Ranking Factors (49 individual factors). Both of these poll industry experts to get a consensus on the relative importance and execution against each of these 208 ranking factors. One by one we looked at what we could impact and built a prioritized plan. One outcome of this is a content and SEO framework for every major page on your website. From copy, to keywords, to HTML, image use, meta data - every possible factor in a structured, executable plan.

Over the next two month's we will be updating most of the pages we manage to bring them to what we think is a very high standard. Some of this might be fairly transparent to you, other things you'll perhaps notice.

Our goal is to improve the ranking of our client sites on average and to improve the conversion of site visitors to leads. This involves better designed pages, changes to copy and structural elements. It's a lot of work to go back over so many pages but we think it's that important to get it right. And it by the way won't be the last time. SEO is always a moving target and part of our work has been to build in tools and a backend that lets us scale the proactive management of page SEO on an ongoing basis. The team has done some amazing behind the scenes development to make this possible.

NEXT STEPS

There isn't any action for you on this. We've got the team, the passion, and discipline to drive this - we just need some time to implement. But implement we will.

Thanks for taking the time to read this mail. Please keep your eyes open for the SEO Local Listings Optimization support ticket and please respond promptly. For a little inspiration here the great scene from Jerry Maquire.

Regards,

Derek