NotaryBids.com Blog

I finally just completed installing a feature I have been working on and off over the last year or so. I am VERY excited to announce that now when a notary search is done on NotaryBids.com the distance from the entered zip code to the notaries that are displayed is automatically calculated to help our clients choose the closest notary.

There are only a few competing sites that offer this feature which puts NotaryBids.com in the upper echelon now.

This doesn’t necessarily help us from an SEO perspective, but this is an important feature for companies looking for notaries and it will certainly help our traffic and get our notaries more business.

First let’s talk about the business model. When I started NotaryBids.com my thoughts were that if I was an Escrow agent or Title company I would much rather find a way to have notaries contact me rather than me having to make phone calls. Woudn’t you agree? Take a look at this graphic depiction of how notarybids.com saves our clients time and money:

Makes perfect sense when you look at it that way right? I think so…

I never planned for NotaryBids.com to be a “free directory” like numerous other sites out there like 123notary.com and notaryrotary.com If you recall my goal is to get more traffic and more business coming to NotaryBids.com and our notaries. To that end I’ve decided to take a calculated risk and change our business model so that we now offer 2 distinctly different ways for our clients to find notaries. The first is our core service based on the graphic above. The client enters a zipcode, chooses the best local notaries then submits the signing details and have notaries send a bid. The 2nd is a free search clients can perform and then call notaries from the resulting list. The home page now supports both services. If you have not seen it yet check out the new updated notarybids.com home page.

The change to the home page was not just to add the new service but I did a complete redesign based on what I have learned about Search Engine Optimization. Studies have proven that when people view a web page they start from the top left of the page, scan to the right, then down to the left. With this in mind I moved the zip code entry form from the center of the page to the top left portion of the page (as this is what will be seen first), then to the right I placed a new short summary about NotaryBids.com and below that 2 links to start a notary search using either of the 2 methods.

In the lower center I added a clickable list of states a searcher can click to see a list of notaries in that state sorted by city and their contact info. Based on my keyword research this feature should improve our search results when a city or state is entered and the word “notary” however there is still much work to be done.

In the bottom left I added a new “Most Popular Searches” box that contains links directly to the most common cities & states searchers look for notaries. Searchers can see a list of notaries and their contact info in that area with just 1 click.

One of the main features I realize clients need is a system that shows how far away each notary is from their target signing location. To my knowledge, only notaryrotary.com and signingagent.com offer this. Well I am excited to announce that soon notarybids.com will have it too! I was working on this over the weekend and I have the code working that calculates the distance in miles from an entered zip code to the zip code of the notary on the list!. However I am not ready to add it to the site yet because I still have to figure out how to sort the resulting notary list by closest to farthest. That’s going to be rough!!!

Some other recent changes include:

• another change to the home page title tag, “Mobile Notary Signing Agent Search System”
• changed the color scheme slightly on the main menu sub menus to make it more easily readable
• some notaries and clients may not notice the login area at the top of every page so I changed the main menu to now include a “LOGIN” option
• added a “START/JOIN” option on the main menu (not sure about this one yet)
• increased the size of the font from 10pt to 11pt site wide (I always thought it was too small)

and a few other miscellaneous changes.

With these changes, and upgrades I believe the site is becoming more “search engine friendly”, more usable and more valuable to the industry but there is still much more work to be done.
- Chris

Although I have a general idea of what keywords are relevant to Notarybids.com it’s time to choose more carefully and start optimizing the site and specific pages to target searches done using those keywords. Since NotaryBids.com is a provider of mobile notary services and loan document signing services I will be targeting keywords and phrases that people would commonly use to find mobile notary services and loan document signing services. To do this I decided to use the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool I like it because it suggests tons of keywords and also shows you a side by side comparison of how much advertiser competition there is and how much search volume there is for each keyword or key phrase. With this information my goal is to find the keywords/phrases that have the lowest advertiser competition and the highest search volume.

Basic Keywords

Initially I am going to identify the basic keywords searchers may use that could lead to NotaryBids.com. Those are: notary, notaries, certified, mobile, loan, signing, agent, document, traveling, public, national, nationwide, service. Some of these are too generic to use by themselves but we will get in to that later.

Key Phrases

Next I’m going to identify the key phrases that would be considered the most popular used by searchers. Those are: mobile notary, mobile signing agent, certified signing agent, mobile notary signing agent, mobile notary agent, loan signing, certified loan signing agent, certified notary, traveling notary public. I hand picked these from the Intial Keywords Report I created as the most widely used with the least amount of competition. One thing I noticed is that in many cases the key phrases people are using to search are either state specific or major city specific and many times they are abbreviated. For example:”ca notary”, “fl notary”, Phoenix notary”, Portland notary”. The beauty of these key phrases is that there is little to NO competition at all for those so I am already forming a strategy in which I will be adding new content (pages) to the site with the focus on those key phrases. Cool stuff!

Singular & Plural

Another strategy to employ is the plural version of the main keywords and phrases. Google looks at “signing agent” & “signing agents” differently. For certain keywords and phrases we will consider the plural version relevant and necessary also.

Misspellings

Although many times searchers misspell words the search engines do a pretty good job of correcting them. Based on my research there is not much to gain by using misspelled versions of keywords so I wont bother.

What’s next?

My next post will discuss the discovery process of identifying the core terms or phrases (Themes) that individual web pages will be developed around.

Blogs have become very well known for their impact on SEO. Search engines love them! Forums also…I have witnessed this first hand via Google Alerts. A few nights ago I did a post on a forum site and within an hour I received a Google Alert about that post! Crazy…I have wanted to start blogging for quite a while and I have messed around with it some (like my ActiveRain Blog) but I didn’t really know what to blog about that I was passionate about and what would also fuel my business interests.

Recently I met Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures (www.VerticalMeasures.com) and I started learning fascinating information about how professional SEO (Search Engine Optimzation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) companies do what they do. I guess you could call this information “secret” but it’s all available on the Internet. You just have to know where to find it and what actually works and what doesn’t. I won’t be giving away all the secrets but I will be sharing enough information where you may want to stop back by from time to time. In addition, you also have to know what NOT to do because there are some shady tactics out there commonly referred to as “Black Hat” (super shady) and Grey Hat (Questionable) that may get you removed from Google’s index or possibly Yahoo. OUCH!

This blog is going to serve several purposes for me, NotaryBids.com, our notaries and our clients. The first is it in itself will improve NotaryBids.com’s position in search engines by adding numerous pertinent links from this blog to the notarybids.com site. That means more traffic and exposure which means more business for us and our notaries. It will also have “fresh” content on a regular basis which the search engines also love. Secondly it will be an ongoing diary of where the NotaryBids.com site is ranked in the search engines starting from this post to the day we are listed on the first page of search engines based on our key word and key phrases (I hope!). My hopes are that others will find this blog useful and interact with me and each other about this topic so we can all share ideas and learn from each other. Finally, the effort I am about to undertake will provide a working environment to implement all the awesome knowledge I am gaining about SEO, SEM and web site publicity.

So, here we go! Wish us luck…

- Chris