SEMNE Presentation on Local Search
Posted by richard in Uncategorized on November 25th, 2009
Last week I presented at a SEMNE event on local search tactics. I’ve only been to two SEMNE events so far, and have been pleasantly surprised with the sophisticated and knowledgeable membership. Jonathan Hochman, Jill Whalen and Pauline Jakober have really put together a nice organization.
I started with local search statistics to demonstrate that local search has value to many types of local businesses. Alone, the two stats below should convince a local business to hire a local search marketer. Couple this with the decline in print yellow pages and there are some types of businesses — especially those that rely on lead generation — that should be beating down the door.
- 82 percent of the people using local Web search sites follow up their research with offline action, including in-store visits, phone calls, e-mails or purchases.
- There have been estimates that nearly 40% of all search queries have some sort of local intent.
There is a lot more information in TMP Directional Marketing’s White Paper on local search. You can download the PDF here.
Local Search Tactics
The bulk of the presentation showed slides pertaining to the different tools that my company uses to attain great local search results. These include:
- Website Optimization
- PPC
- Verticals (video, news, blogs)
- Internet Yellow Page (IYPs) sites & Directories (SuperPages, Merchant Circle, Hot Frog, YellowPages, etc.)
- Classified ad sites (CraigsList, BackPage, Kijiji, etc.)
Website Optimization
Ultimately this would be a lesson in SEO, with the goal being of optimizing the site to ensure that it can be found relatively high on a SERP for a search term with a geographical modifier — such as “Florist in Rocky Hill, CT.” The key here is to make sure that the site ranks well for all neighboring towns as well — wherever the florists clientele may come from.
Just because my flower shop is located in Rocky Hill, does not mean that that’s the only town I need to rank for. I also have to rank well for “Florist in Glastonbury, CT,” and any other neighboring towns where I may draw traffic from. And if I do floral arrangements for weddings or funerals or such, I may need to rank throughout the entire state of Connecticut.
For this I showed a series of slides on how to build out site content to address all these various search terms, including building individual pages for Rocky Hill and Glastonbury if it’s necessary to get the site to rank well enough to draw business — of course, preferably in the first position, especially for higher trafficked keywords.
PPC for Local Sites
Typically this works very well, and my company has found that the three major search engines all return good value on their PPC when done right. How to do it right? Learn it or find a small, responsive company or individual — because although the big agencies will be glad to take your $2k – $3k per month, your small business site has very little value to them.
Let me say this about the four PPC agencies (Reach Local, Beyond ROI, Ambassador, Sudden Impact) that I have previously outsourced our PPC to… I hired an expert and brought it in house.
I also always ignore any agency that calls and their phone rep says that they’re calling from Google, or that they can get me onto the first page of Google. If they have an outbound telemarketing arm, it seems that they’re more concerned with volumes of new customers, as opposed to performing well for their current clients and getting referrals.
Vertical
Images, video, maps, shopping, news, books… these are some of the verticals that we use to help our sites rank well in local search. Optimizing video and images, publishing news articles on press release sites, and getting our sites into the Maps or Local verticals on Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all important (Maps especially because of its typical top-of-the-page positioning).
Video is a great part of local search because Google ranks it so well.
Prominently displayed videos for a fairly competitive local search term
Although I didn’t say much about Maps, because the other presenter that night was George Aspland, who presented on how to optimize Google Maps. I did say that it is important to get Customer Reviews onto your Google listing and any site that the engines are scraping reviews from.
IYPs and Directories
I talked about using these to build citations (which are one of the criteria for getting ranked well on Google Maps) and to build more awareness for a local business on the search engines, as some of these are trusted and ranked very well. There’s a bunch of them, so it makes sense to start with the largest, such as YellowPages.com, SuperPages, CitySearch, Yahoo Local, etc.
Most of these offer free listings which are good enough in most cases, but to see where the value is, check how they rank and what it takes to get more prevalent placement than your competitors.
I did post an earlier article back in May about why I thought search engines were pushing directories and IYPs, but I almost want to retract what I said there. Maybe out of wishful thinking, or maybe that I see Google really pushing its own directory in the guise of Google Maps. And then what would be their need or advantage, or any of the search engine’s need or advantage, for ranking any other directory or IYP?
To attest to this positioning of Maps well ahead of any competitive directories, Aaron Wall posted an article on SEOBook about Google testing flat-fee advertising in San Francisco and San Diego. The following depicts a very similar search to the one he did in his article, and you’ll see how four flat-fee ad results push the natural listings that much further down the screen.
Classifieds
The last tool that I spoke about in my presentation was the use of Classifieds, and how to grab local search business from them. These are simple and mostly free.
One downside to the classified sites such as CraigsList, BackPage, Web Cosmo, and the others, is that their is not much in terms of lasting value. There’s a lot of labor involved to procure small-ish (as we’ve seen so far) results, but we are continuing to plug away at this in hopes that we find greater value.
Another caution is that the classified sites seemed to begin ranking very well with all the hype about real-time search. If this fades, or the engines develop better ways of handling this, I’m not sure of the longevity of the classified site’s ability to rank so well — as I can’t say the results are great for users in many cases from what I’ve seen out there.
Wrap Up
Simply, when all these sites / tools are used in conjunction with each other, some great results can be achieved, and any local business can level the playing field with their major competitors — who many times aren’t local businesses, but rather lead generation sites, IYPs and directories.
Questions for the Search Engines
Posted by richard in Local Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing on September 13th, 2009
In October, I will be attending SMX East in NYC at the Javits Center. I was reading Danny Sullivan’s preview on the conference and one session, Ask The Search Engines: Best Practices Edition, is a must attend.
I do have a couple questions:
- Is it OK in Google Local Business Center to have a business listing for each of the 30 phone numbers my client has? Meaning for each and every tracking phone number, to set up a separate business listing as many businesses (or their marketing agencies) are doing. This is a tactic hugely rewarded, so I am just curious if after more than a year of this going on if it is accepted practice.
- My followup to the above question will be: How about a business listing for each address of every employee in the company?
- And one more followup: How about simply using randomly picked residential addresses from the yellow pages?
All three valid questions. I do have a couple other questions:
- Is jamming a dozen keyword-stuffed classifieds (backpages, craigslist, webcosmos, kijiji) and clogging up a SERP for any-given keyword a valid practice? Or can this get a business in trouble? After all, it’s not y site that I’m spamming with.
- Should I register a bunch of cheap .info keyword-rich domain names and auto-generate content for these to get 7-8 listings on a SERP for a very competitive keyword.
- My followup would be: Is it OK to build 10 sites for the same business (each with the content slightly re-written and placed in a different order on the page) to try to get each organic spot on a SERP.
You can probably all guess my final question, and like most questions asked at these conferences, the answer is self evident:
- Are all the above practices, used in conjunction, acceptable for marketing a Web site online?
One might think so, if one looked at the last year’s worth of SERP data.
SEO Rabbit says I rant, but I’m just a marketer trying to do best by my clients. And when, over extended periods of time, a marketing tool with a majority of users in the search vertical can’t keep the playing field level, it’s tough to forgive, and thus I rant a bit. Again, to Google’s credit, they are the only one worth griping about. And believe me, I bitched about the Yellow Pages forcing me into buying the double-page spread and then selling a leader ad in front of it.
Leveraging Interviews, Press, Articles for Online Lead Generation
Posted by richard in Online Lead Generation, Uncategorized on August 24th, 2009
Here’s a great example of leveraging a blog site for credibility. This helps generate some traffic to the site (note the link to Basement Systems), but really, will pay dividends for converting existing traffic into leads, as well as leads into sales.
Check this out:
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/08/entrepreneur-grew-sales-using-5-success-principles.html#comment-665972
Basement Systems, Inc. has a dynamic owner who has built education, integrity, and caring into his company’s culture… but no one knows this except his employees. So, as marketers, we have to get this message out… and we are lucky, as it’s a great one!
Of course we can write about all the great stories and unique selling propositions (USPs) on our Web site, but as everyone does this — whether it’s true or not — it has little value. Getting this from a third party, however, delivers a ton of value.
Building Credibility to Improve Lead Conversion
So we solicited Small Business Trends, a great site with lots of traffic and Google trust (PR6), to interview Larry Janesky, the owner of Basement Systems, Inc. They did the interview and it went great. The writer, Anita Campbell, did a fantastic job, and on the first evening the article already had 9 comments.
I added the 10th comment, shown below.
Comment on the Blog to Build Credibility Even More
This gives Small Business Trends’ pretty loyal readership even more reason to promote and talk about Larry Janesky and Basement Systems. To get our next article or interview, we will point the next writer / news outlet to this article so they can see the value of a new story about us.
What We Have So Far
- We have an article on a trusted Web site.
- We have a link back to our Web site.
- In the article the writer linked to a comment by business guru Tom Peters.
- We have a comment linking to a blog post by author and marketing consultant Perry Marshall for more credibility to a facet of the story (the book in this case).
That’s pretty good stuff, but something’s missing. What about the people who don’t visit Small Business Trends, they won’t know about our company and all of our work seems to be wasted on a relatively small population.
So we blog about it on a couple of our own Web sites, (and not only Basement Systems, but Larry Janesky also owns Total Basement Finishing, Inc., and Foundation Supportworks, Inc.) and link this back to the post on Small Business Trends. Now we have an article that will help build credibility and improve leads and sales. We’ve helped build link popularity of the third-party articles that exist about us, and this is a never-ending loop that we follow.
Blog on your own site to let your visitors know how great you are seen from other people's points of view.
The only difficult part is the leg work to get a writer or news outlet to publish our story. And once these things start coming, they get easier to get.
Look for your great internal messages and use these as your USPs. Solicit third-party outlets, and interlink them to leverage each article to its fullest benefit. Showing the outlets that you will be marketing their site and can help them drive traffic and build popularity for their site will help you get published as well.
Online Lead Generation Speaker’s Pitch to SMX East
Posted by richard in Local Search Marketing, Online Lead Generation, Uncategorized on June 30th, 2009
Search Marketing Expo - SMX East
Here is my pitch to the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East for something that has been missing from both the SMX and SES conferences, Online Lead Generation for Small Services Companies.
Now it’s pretty much just called Local Search, and if you read SearchEngineLand, you will see that Local Search is pretty much all written by IYP employees. Ya know, IYP was taboo to the search engines two-to-three years ago. The thought was that why would a user search on an engine to receive a SERP, and then click to go to a directory’s SERP. It made no sense then, and makes no sense now ( I do explain why search engines show IYP results here) — I’d love to see the bounce rates of the IYPs.
Enough of that, as SEO Rabbit says, I tend to rant rather than divulge information. So, below is my Speaker’s Pitch to SMX East.
The search engines have been changing the way in which small services businesses are found on the Web. This has been gradual, but obvious, as the engines try to figure out how they are going to replicate what the print yellow pages had previously done — that is to get 30-100 services companies that all do business in a particular area for a particular service to all be represented on a single SERP.
That’s right, it’s impossible. And, unlike the yellow pages, where flipping pages was easy and actually made some sense that the first full-page ads were from larger companies that were typically more expensive, and the last few smaller ads were from the down-and-dirty cheaper companies; users don’t usually click deeper than page 1 for any search query, and the more-expensive-to-cheaper theory of print isn’t reflected.
In light of this, the search engines are favoring mega sites, such as the IYPs (Yellow Pages, Merchant Circle, and Super Pages] and the lead aggregators [Service Magic, Leads,com, and Bob Vila with Reliable Remodeler).
For the individual company that has to compete with the numerous IYPs, the lead aggregators, and, of course, other agencies who work with competing companies, it’s difficult for an in-house agency to not only be competitive, let alone to be dominant and highly lucrative.
At Basement Systems (which owns Total Basement Finishing, Inc.; Foundation Supportworks, Inc., and Relia-Serve Corp.) we have been dominant and highly lucrative.
Details of the Online Lead Generation Presentation
My presentation would be the above overview and then methods of how we do this, including SEO, PPC (which we do all in-house with PPC Panda who we recruited after many costly failures with running our PPC through agencies), link building, social media, micro blogging, email marketing, and using sophisticated tracking to make sure that our dollars are spent wisely and to ensure that we’re not missing anything that our competitors might be doing. I will show examples of our tracking methods and data analysis.
In 15 minutes it would be a quick overview, but would contain lots of real-life examples of what can be done to generate leads. This would be a meaty presentation that I’d love to attend if it were offered. I’ve been to many conferences, and really, most presentations are thin, whispy little puffs of smoke. And this means one of two things: 1., that the speaker didn’t want to divulge anything important, or, more likely, 2., that the speaker had nothing important to divulge. 
I haven’t seen a presentation like this, and in this mega-million dollar industry of lead generation, I would think that this might draw a fair amount of interest.
We’ll see what SMX East thinks, but through Relia-Serve, we are starting to take this show on the road and train companies in the home services industry how to generate leads. We also offer this service as an agency would, but with a history of solid high-performance results, and a great performance-based fee structure. For more information, you can contact me at richard (@) basementsystems.com.
-Richard Fencil
Internet Marketing Director
Basement Systems, Inc.
Some SEO Keyword Goals – The Small SEO Victories
Posted by richard in Local Search Marketing, SEO on June 22nd, 2009
Wow, when you’re up to your elbows in chasing leads on the Internet every day, managing a team of 15 SEOs and site tuners, and marketing 150-plus client and in-house Web sites, it’s easy to go off on some tirades about the inconsistencies of search marketing, and, of course, the cheaters who keep kicking it up a notch.
But enough of that. This is the positive side of SEO. A couple places where you can declare small victories.
The AdWords Plus (+) Sign
This plus sign, or Plus Box, is a great way to make your ad stand out. In the home services industry it helps build trust when homeowners can really see that you have a physical location. To see it expanded, click on one of my competitors Plus Boxes.
But before that, I want to also point out the Baby Site Links — another small win — that helps to add depth and more interaction with the listing. Of course being listed in the Ten-Pack is great also, and for this it’s the mother site basementsystems.com that is ranking and not connecticutbasementsystems.com — this is actually due to some managerial issues with the Local Business Listing and the two companies working out of the same building. At this search we had made changes and are awaiting verification from Google.
I’ll say this: It can be a real problem for Google to get the Local Business Listing correct when more than one company shares the same building. Google seems to like to merge the info into a single listing with elements from each. Be careful here and use the appropriate Suite numbers (although, I still can’t say that this will clear up the listing). This is an element that I left out of “Local Business Ten Pack Hell” and will have to go back and update.
Having the three listings above the fold is a nice win for SEO though. The next that most are familiar with are the Site Links as shown below.
Google Site Links
Site links are like capturing the flag… you simply dominate the keyword query. We also manage quality1stbasementsystems.com as well.
This next one, the SERP search box, is pretty much the Holy Grail of SERP domination, but I’ve only seen it for a brand search.
SERP Search Box
Rotten Tomatoes uses the on-site Google search and I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the SERP result or not. Hasn’t worked with the paid un-logo’d version of the on-site Google search box, but it could be that our site isn’t large enough or doesn’t have the strong brand.
If someone knows, please give me a heads up so I don’t have to waste my time tinkering with this.
Google Local Business Ten-Pack Hell
Posted by richard in Local Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Uncategorized on June 13th, 2009
It’s almost enough to make you throw your hands in the air and send out some postal mailer coupons again.
Google’s Local Business results are so bad, and so obnoxiously in the user’s face with the large color map right at the top, that I honestly feel that soon spamming these Local Business results will be the only way to compete. And would I be wrong to do so. I have a business and I have clients who need to at least be competitive and results like the ones I’ve copied below are really starting to not only become aggravating, but I believe hurt business.
10-Pack Spam
The above is just your run-of-the-mill Local Business result where a spammer (and most likely, an unaware spammer – meaning just someone who probably doesn’t even know spam from ham) figured out how easy it is to get multiple listings and did so. I reported this to Google on April 8, 2009, it’s June 13, 2009 at this posting.
I know that Google likes to do everything algorithmically, but I think it’s time that they get some recent college grad googlers in there and start straightening this out by hand.
Here’s another result:
Local business result spam
This one adds injury to insult with natural SERP spam as well. All those .info sites are the same company, but they were a little cleverer and bought a bunch of keyword-laden .info URLs and stuffed a Web page with keywords. Then they posted each as it’s own Local Business listing — some have the same phone number and different addresses, but that doesn’t seem to matter — and they have 11 spots on the first page — plus one (1) AdWords spot — that’s the icing on the cake, if these were real business, wouldn’t maybe more than one have an Adwords account?
The thing that’s so galling about this spam is that it’s so easily recognizable. It’s like competing against children on these things and because the ref won’t call a foul, the kids are dominating the court. I only recently reported this one, so I’m in for the long wait if I want to continue to let business slip by.
And plus, the multiple site thing doesn’t seem to bother the search engines… but that’s another article.
So I have to ask myself… is it worth waiting? Is it worth trying to abide by Google’s rules? I feel like I’m doing my clients and myself a disservice by waiting for this thing to get cleared out… and… what’s the repercussion going to be of a little cheating anyway? Some of my work gets omitted after time? But in the meantime, I have happy clients and generate some business.
I’ll have to make a decision, but from this post I hope two things:
1. That any SEOs that read this, recognize the futility, as I have, of playing by the rules and simply go the multiple listing route. Why? Because if the problem gets even more ridiculous than it is, than it will have to be addressed more quickly.
2. I hope against hope, that some googler whose unfortunate job it is to watch the Google Alerts for their company name, forwards this to the Local Business spam patrol and it hurries the fix.
Is this a difficult decision on how to proceed? I don’t think so. I know what I’m going to do… who’s with me…
Why Search Engines are Pushing More Traffic to Directories
Posted by richard in Local Search Marketing, Online Lead Generation on May 3rd, 2009
Search engines are in a conundrum. With more than 40% of all small retail and contractor businesses still without Web sites, the search engines need to figure out – before theses business do all get online – how to return meaningful results.
Is it possible? Of course it is. Print yellow pages have been doing it for decades using simple categorical listings. But can search-based queries deliver the results intended by the user.
Here’s an example search query: “Fairfield connecticut house painters”, with the intent being to find multiple painting companies from which to get three quotes to paint a house.
Let’s start with the One-box result.
In this case I got the 10-pack, with two results for Lowes, one MerchantCircle, one wild-card-content-switching (is this the common term?) lead-selling site (paintingservicedeals.com), and six actual contractors (two without their own sites). So really I got four contractors, not bad since all I want is three quotes.
OK, let’s say that of the four, I felt comfortable enough with two to get quotes. So let’s look at the natural results.
Uh-oh. I only picked up one more painter – rightcontractors.com. I did get two craigslist and two kijiji. The rest are all lead sellers.
Really, these results are ok, but not great. I could call a Craigslist or Kijiji ad, but in light of recent news, I think I’ll stick with a company with a Web site and real address.
Are there only 5 painting contractors that will service Fairfield CT? I’ll bet there are 10 in Fairfield, and at least another 30 that service this town. So what are they going to do to get leads? And what is Google going to do to help users find these contractors?
Directories.
The question then becomes, why would I start at Google if they’re just going to push me to a directory. Soon I’m going to have a favorite directory for services.
What does this mean for Google? It probably means less AdWords money. Google will still be a great tool for finding reference material, but that’s not going to pay the bills.
New Quote Link on Google SERP – Huge for Lead Generation
Posted by richard in Online Lead Generation, Search Engine Marketing on April 18th, 2009
I saw this SERP returned for our industry’s largest search term, “basement waterproofing“. Google was testing a link with an icon in the 4th organic position. We have the 1st organic with the Basement Systems Inc. domain, and we were in the 4th position with the icon.
Google Quote Link SERP Result
This would be a great result if Google decides to go with this. It makes sense, because it is the path of least resistance to requesting a free quote. And yes, I am spinning, hoping that a Googler may read this and agree with my logic.
It’s not as good as Amazon’s one-click purchase, but Google can correct that with a “Get Free Quote Now” button under the listing for people logged in (adding more benefit to being logged in) and a little code on the quote-offering Web site.
Having that link with the icon would be devastating to our competitors. It would make it look like not only are we the best choice – Google-Approved – but really the only smart choice to get an estimate … which Basement Systems is, and maybe this is just some more of Google’s push to get trusted brands ranked better.
Some oddities with the SERP were that, granted Basement Systems Web site has a ton of pages, but I couldn’t find where the title or snippet below it for the Google Quote-Link came from. We typically say “U.S.” in our copy rather than USA, and “Ireland” instead of a misspelled “Scottland,” as Ireland isn’t included in the “UK.” It could come from a directory listing somewhere, but I tried searching Google’s index with quotations, and found nothing. It’s almost as if a Googler wrote it… which could make sense if it was only a test in some small-ish markets.
I can only dream of a SERP with a QuoteLink
This is a great SERP for Basement Systems- 1st and 4th position, with an icon, a great third description line “Contact us for a free estimate,” and the third PPC spot with the Reg Mark (I Photoshopped the 2nd result out to save space) for the local Basement Systems dealership, Connecticut Basement Waterproofing Systems.
I’m not sure if “free” has anything to do with it – meaning if we charged $300 for the estimate, would we still be eligible for the QuoteLink… I don’t know, this is the only QuoteLink that I’ve seen.
Baby Sitelinks (One-line Sitelinks)
Posted by richard in Search Engine Marketing on April 15th, 2009
Google now displaying Baby Site Links (or classic site links)
Google’s new Baby Site Links, as coined by Josh Gister – Google refers to them as One-line Sitelinks, but about a week ago I saw them refer to them as Classic Sitelinks. These are great for making a site stand out better in the SERPs. It’s great to be rewarded for SEO and local search marketing work done for Connecticut Basement Systems, a basement waterproofing company in Connecticut.
Local Search Marketing and Directories
Posted by richard in Local Search Marketing on April 13th, 2009
As an Internet marketing professional who has had success with getting small businesses to rank well and generate traffic from the SERPs, over the past half year I’ve seen that the face of competition is changing.
In the local contractor and retailer SERPs, Google has been rewarding large directory sites like Merchant Circle, SuperPages, CitySearch, many various yellow pages, many vertical sites like ServiceMagic and Yelp, and now even local.yahoo results are starting to show. This makes a guy like me worried. I have no mega site like these that I can expect the engines to rank, and thus I am now considering that I may have to join the flat-rate-pay-model bastards on their directories.
I swear it wasn’t three years ago when I would chuckle that the print yellow-page people were so screwed up in their flat-fee model that they’d never be successful on the Internet — I went as far as to imagine sending them a resume and saving them from their horrible flat-rate plans. But a year, year and a half ago, I did start to express my thoughts that this $26 billion – or whatever it is – industry was just too big and was going to buy their way in. That no matter how good the pay-per-click model seemed, these less-than-agile titanics were going to outspend even Google and force feed us their traditional flat-fee yellow-page type advertising model on the Web.
And mark my words, it’s coming.
What does this mean for the PPC model? Probably nothing, the search engines will just continue to push results from directories, smattering in a few local businesses that can afford to pay to play.
But the question still remains, why do the search engines seem so eager to push a their traffic to directories that now monetize the search at their end?