Local Businesses – Optimize for more than just your brand

On the weekend we were headed to Milestones in Yaletown for brunch with the family. Being the Internet people that we are, we naturally went to Google and searched for ‘Milestones Yaletown hours’. And guess who came up in the top 5 organic search results? Well it wasn’t the milestonesrestaurants.com web site. This is surprising.

Local businesses need to look at their optimization efforts from all different angles. It’s not enough to just optimize for your brand name anymore even if you are well known local brand. In the case of Milestones, web sites such as dinehere.ca, foodvancouver.com, martiniboys.com, urbanspoon.com, all came up in results way before the Milestones web site when we searched for ‘Milestones Yaletown hours’. Milestonesrestaurant.com was #9!!!! Milestones should be number 1 for this query especially considering that we included their brand name in our query.

So how did the other sites rank so well for this …

Did you see the lights over False Creek last night?

You can control the Searchlights that are lighting up the night sky over Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics! This is for real….keep reading.

As part of the Cultural Olympiad, a massive light sculpture consisting of 20 10 kilowatt xenon robotic searchlights installed on either side of the entrance to False Creek in downtown Vancouver will be on display. The sculpture itself, known as the Vectorial Elevation, is controlled by us the public.

We can submit designs via a slick web site found at http://www.vectorialvancouver.net/home.html . You craft instructions (very easy to do) that position the 20 spot lights, preview the display as a 3D Google maps model complete with all of downtown Vancouver, and then submit the instructions to an Internet connected server that controls the lights. You might need to wait an hour or so for your work to occur but when it does you …