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.