I have most recently become a fan of “ProBlogger”, Darren Rowse. His website problogger.net contains rich insight and useful tips that can be used by both a blogger newbie up to a more seasoned one. I have found that his suggestions transcend to Internet Marketing and are easily applied to one of our favorite topics – increasing site traffic.
We always want our clients to have a steady increase in website traffic, the reality is that there will be occasions when a dip may occur. A recent post published by Rowse offers explanations and suggestions to better understand declines in blog, or in our case, website traffic, 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It].
I found this post especially helpful as I am always monitoring my Client’s website traffic and I don’t ever like seeing lulls occur. So instead of fretting when I see a dip I can use this post as a check off list. There will be certain factors that we can take control of and improve to boost traffic and others that will just have to run their course before we can once again increase site traffic.
I have most recently become a fan of “ProBlogger”, Darren Rowse. His website problogger.net contains rich insight and useful tips that can be used by both a blogger newbie up to a more seasoned one. I have found that his suggestions transcend to Internet Marketing and are easily applied to one of our favorite topics – increasing site traffic.
We always want our clients to have a steady increase in website traffic, the reality is that there will be occasions when a dip may occur. A recent post published by Rowse offers explanations and suggestions to better understand declines in blog, or in our case, website traffic, 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It] .
I found this post especially helpful as I am always monitoring my Client’s website traffic and I don’t ever like seeing lulls occur. So instead of fretting when I see a dip I can use this post as a check off list. There will be certain factors that we can take control of and improve to boost traffic and others that will just have to run their course before we can once again increase site traffic.
This is the slide deck from my presentation at Local Search Summit “Using Facebook & Twitter to Drive Local Leads” this afternoon.
We had a great crowd and I enjoyed the heck out of putting this slide show together. I was trying to position some real tactics in using Twitter for local business.
I’m hopeful that it was tactical versus theoretical and I look forward to your feedback.
In conversation one day, I mentioned to Will that for what we charge some of our clients, I can put a real value on it when I compare it to yellow pages spending. And what I mean by that is for what a plastic surgeon or a dentist or a wedding photographer might pay for a large display ad in their local yellow pages, they could be spending the same or less in search engine optimization (SEO – Organic Search) / search engine marketing (SEM – Paid Search) and getting so much more return on investment for their marketing budget.
Orlando Plastic Surgery Yellow Pages Ads
I worked in the yellow pages industry for just short of 10 years at a CMR, Certified Marketing Representative, where all of my clients were national clients in multiple markets. So I’ve spent a full decade of my life working in the yellow pages industry, which is not a glamorous media, but at one time it was incredibly profitable for clients based on their return on investment (ROI). That ROI in yellow pages is now dropping dramatically with every year because of the overwhelming competition from internet for media dollars.
It is in the yellow pages industry where a lot of tracking techniques were started. I can’t tell you how many tracking phone numbers I have set up and used in a yellow pages ad. And given a client’s number, had to track a very real ROI each month based on the calls made.
I have organized split run comparisons where we run 1 ad in half of the distribution area of a phone book and another ad in the other half of the distribution area, and then sit back and watch the tracking phone numbers data.
When Will first asked me to work with his company, Search Influence, I hesitated – I mean what did I know about search engine optimization?!?
It turns out, it’s a lot of the same stuff. Getting our clients in the right directories, listed under the right categories, tracking incoming calls, proving value …
It is this last, “proving value,” that is the most telling. Knowing what a large display ad costs in the yellow pages which a lot of our clients would have been doing 10 years ago, and comparing it to what Search Influence charges for SEM and SEO, I realize that the value is definitely in the internet.
In yellow pages, a plastic surgeon might buy a full page or a half page ad for a large percentage of their annual advertising budget. In some larger metro markets, this can easily reach up to $100,000.00, over $8,000.00 each month, with a yellow pages industry average of 5% increase each year.
This gets the surgeon an ad that is in print for a year, and that’s what you get. Hope that people pick up the fat book shoved in the back of the cabinet, find the heading, (not under “Doctors,” not under “Physicians & Surgeons-Cosmetic Surgery,” but buried under “Physicians & Surgeons-Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery”) and choose your ad to call.
Most people today are already in front of the computer for work. They just type it in exactly what they want, no digging, “Plastic surgery Houston“. It’s too easy to use the internet.
The internet is a living, breathing medium. For the same amount of money or, amazingly, much less in some big metro markets, SEO actively finds the people searching for your product.
Ringing Phone = Profits
Changes can be made daily or hourly for specials and promotions. Yellow pages ads are in print for 12 months.
Tracking is not limited to phone number tracking – we can find which pages are working and which pages users are most likely to leave the site on, edit some graphics and compare the traffic patterns week to week instead of year to year.
The average yellow pages display ad attracts over 440 calls per year (Source: YPPA Media Impact Study, 2004). Search Influence has many client sites with thousands of visits each month, with hundreds of contacts each month.
Businesses are moving their marketing dollars to the internet from yellow pages more and more every day because it’s smart money spent. I mean I don’t want to glorify SEO for more than it is, but dollar for dollar, internet marketing gives so much more impact for money spent by bringing in real customers.
I did a very informal survey which I think sums up America’s use of their phone books. Here are some responses to “Where is your print phone book?”:
“I may have thrown it away, if I have it, it is in the pantry.”
“I threw out the new ones.”
“I saw it this weekend when I was trying to make room (in the kitchen cabinet)”
“I don’t have one.”
Another, “I don’t have one.”
Of course, my survey of 5 people may not be fair because I did only ask people who sit in front of a computer all day, and so I ask, do you know where your phone book is?
Must be a lot of locks in all those tall buildings to need so many locksmiths.
This is an interesting development which makes me wonder about the statistical likelihood of one moving from the main search engine results to the maps view.
If I had to guess i’d say it seems likely that this will lead to a wider implementation which will lead to stronger calls to action from the main search engine results page.
UPDATE:
So, funny story – I’m in New York for Search Engine Strategies and find myself invited to dinner by Yelp with my friend Mat Siltala (in all honesty they would have never invited me without him :)).
The yelpers brough along a couple of happy customers. One was the guys who run the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck – an only in NY kind of thing – and the other was, drumroll please, a Locksmith! NYC is famous thanks to this post and a couple others for Locksmith spam. But here’s this guy, an honest and dependable practitioner having dinner with us in the East Village NY. Locksmiths, to hear him tell it, may deserve their bad rap, but Jay publishes prices right on his site and has nothing but 5 star reviews on Yelp.
I’m proud to announce that I have been asked to take part in a new Local Search News site http://www.localsearchnews.net/ (note: Local Search News is dead and we’ve moved the Barnacle SEO post to the Search Influence blog.
And, my first post is live!
In this post I argue that with a judicious application of Barnacle SEO, even the smallest budgets can have an impact on small business website promotion.
Small business owners are generally a frugal lot.
Of course there are some who’ve got the budget to invest heavily as long as they see a return, but what about those who don’t?
A long time ago someone coined the phrase “Parasite SEO” talking about the abuse of Blogger and WordPress.com to get better search term positioning. I love the term, but “parasite” is just so ugly sounding. I prefer “Barnacle SEO.”
Barnacle SEO: attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current.
People also ask
Is SEO still alive?
Who is king of SEO?
How important is SEO?
I’ve been so busy with the turn of the year that I forgot to mention that I had a rare opportunity to contribute to Mike Blumenthal’s Loci 2008.
For those of you who don’t know, Mike is THE authority on Google Maps and Local.
I’m very proud to have been asked to take part and would gladly do it again!
My contribution is here, excerpt follows:
Search Influence has been in business since 2006 but 2008 is the year I realized there is a community of like-minded folks and engaged with that community.
I made an offhanded comment on Tim’s blog for which Mike called me out and the rest is history.
So, David asks, I contribute — surely not as knowledgeably as some and it leads to one of the most valuable events I’ve attended: The SLOMO Local Search Sit Down as chronicled in David’s conference recap. Talk about some heavy hitters — the biggest names in Local Search around one table for the evening.
The Yellow Pages Association has launched a blog .
I added it to my feed reader under Local Search. I put it there because I don’t have a category for Dinosaur or Dead Trees or Dying industry 🙂
I kid — I think the Yellow Pages has 5-10 years of life left in it.
There may be some consolidation and there will certainly be heroic efforts to save it, but ultimately it will completely lose relevance in a world of ubiquitous connection.
Trust: to have confidence or faith in Authority: the power or right to give orders or make decisions Yellow Pages: a telephone directory listing businesses by category
Often as Search Marketers we use words which have been redefined by our industry without thinking about how they’ll be understood by customers.
“Trust” however has the same meaning to marketers and customers. We just need to understand the differences in how trust is measured by our customers and the search engines.
When talking with clients I often slip into SEO-speak and use the term “authority” differently than above.
My use comes from the idea of “Authority Sites”, and “Hubs and Authorities” in the search algorithms.
But customers need an example, like: “The same phrase on YouTube has much higher likelihood to rank than on drkim.com because YouTube is an authority site“.
Really though it’s about Trust. How much do the search engines trust your site? What are the signifiers of trust? Are they the same for search engines and humans?
As it turns out, they are. When trying to describe the concept of Authority I often use the analogy of personal referrals. “It’s one thing for me to tell you how cool I am, but if you hear it from 30 other people you’re more likely to believe it, right”?
It’s the same for the search engines. Ultimately they’re looking for indications of your trustworthiness. There’s a great point here relative to off-page SEO but for today let’s talk about the Yellow Pages and what we can learn about human behavior from 100 + years of experience.
New Haven directory, November, 1878.
For many years, the Yellow Pages ad design process has been directed by adherence to what are called the “RASCIL Factors”.
RASCIL is a way of distilling down the elements of an effective add to communicate many of the most pertinent decision making factors for a Yellow Pages shopper.
What might not be wholly intuitive, however, is that many of these factors speak directly to the idea of building trust.
I’m reminded of my friend Jerry Kennedy of KAMS Construction who’s tagline is
“At KAMS, the first thing we build is your trust”.
Yellow Pages – Fingers Walking
The RASCIL Factors
RELIABILITYTime in Business, Affiliations, Memberships and Certifications, Guarantees, Size of Firm
SPECIAL FEATURES AND/OR SECURITYCredit Cards and payment options, Hours of operation, Special Services
COMPLETENESS OF SERVICEProduct Types, Pickup and Delivery, Buy, Rent and Lease
ILLUSTRATIONHigh Impact Pictures and Headline
LOCATION Location or Locations, Areas Served
As you can see, a lot of this actually makes for good web design too. Or as Tim Coleman says, Local Seo Is Easy… Just Create A Good .
Hard at Work Thanks to The Yellow Pages
Authority and Trust in Website Promotion
It’s unfortunate that small businesses no longer have such ready access to that friendly and helpful Yellow Pages sales agent.The great news is that many who are marketing online have little experience with traditional media, including Yellow Pages advertising.
Additionally, most of your competition don’t know how to appear trustworthy to the search engines.
Just as your web site (or any ad) needs to instill trust in humans, your online behavior needs to instill trust in the search engines. And interestingly, there’s a pretty strong correlation to theRASCIL factors.
Below are just a few examples:
Reliability: Time in business (domain age), Affiliations (links from chambers of commerce, BBB, professional accrediting organizations), Mentions in regional / national press
Authorization : Authorized brands (links from manufacturer / distributor web sites)
Location: Do you deserve to show up on that map result?
Illustrations: Does your site look professional? Does it match the marketing message which brought the visitor
Unfortunately, there are some things which are harder to affect. You can’t reset your domain registration age. It may be possible to buy an old domain but the chances of buying one relevant to what you do are very slim.
Simply put: trust = links.
And authority matters. A link from the BBB is worth 100 from a free links directory. If you’re a real business though, most of those authoritative, trustworthy, links are easy to acquire…
… just ask.
A Happy Customer
And best of all, many of the steps you take to appear more trustworthy to the search engines are equally valuable offline — to the human beings with whom you want to do business.
Updated after another day of marathon editing by Aimee:
Wow!
Talk about some great feedback!
Thanks to everyone’s input we already have an updated theme incorporating all that feedback.
Please feel free to reference the original (and of course the comments). I’m feeling pretty good about the current design. I think it needs a little more polish, like amplification of the navigation but otherwise it’s approaching Ideal. Then of course there’s the sub-pages and blog-theme (whew, it’s a good thing Aimee ‘s a friend of mine).
So without further ado, here’s the version incorporating all the feedback of the last couple days + some which didn’t make the blog, like my mom :).
Revised to include all commentary – Click Image for Full Size View
A recent post published by Rowse offers explanations and suggestions to better understand declines in blog, or in our case, website traffic, 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It].
When talking with clients I often slip into SEO-speak and use the term “authority” differently than above.
