BookScan, the organisation which tracks the sale of copies of books across the US recently released the sales hotspots for my book SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page. It appears that Los Angeles and Boston lead the way in areas where most copies have been sold.
I have a weakness I readily admit to and it is that the moment I get hold of some cold, hard, data I go looking for underlying patterns and trends which will allow me to quantify it. The BookScan data seen below was no different and I spent ages looking at demographics, population make up and national statistics figures regarding the main business of each area. What I found was interesting and shows, if nothing else, that practical SEO tips can be applied in just about any walk of life or area of business which needs more visibility online.
Boston has a thriving business community with financiers, business consultants and business brokers forming a core around which many of the other services and business types revolve. LA’s core is its movie industry and film business but within that there are thousands (or maybe even hundreds of thousands) of actors, actresses, bloggers and publicists, all of whom need to have more online visibility, have small or no budgets and know that how easily they can be found on the web can often make or break their careers.
These two diverse cores show that when it comes to SEO and the need to be found online the end result and driving force are the same: whatever you do and wherever you are and whoever you are, you are nothing if no one can find you on the web. The fact that SEO Help is selling so much better on those US cities than anywhere else in the USA is also indicative of the degree of competition business and individuals face in those areas and their awareness and use of the web to improve their business prospects.
Traditionally, from my experience, SEO is what businesses reach for when everything else has failed. The reason they act this way is because they often have little grasp of its importance, do not really understand its effectiveness and are afraid of the costs involved. Those who ‘get it’ often look for the kind of advice contained in SEO Help which allows you to run your own SEO campaign effectively, at zero cost, with all the online tools and time-saving tips a seasoned (and probably expensive) SEO consultant would have brought to bear.
At the time of writing SEO Help is about to become the focus of a national SEO awareness campaign in the US so it will be interesting to see if the BookScan results a couple of months from now.
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