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  • Plastic Surgery Internet Marketing Hits the Big Time

    The New York times is out with and interesting piece on Plastic Surgery Internet Marketing and how effective it can be.

    Update: I’ve expanded on this post greatly in: Internet Marketing for Plastic Surgeons – Less Scary than You Think.

    You may also be interested in: Convert Offline – Everybody’s Doing It

    I’m sad to say we weren’t featured. That said, we absolutely believe in Internet Marketing for Plastic Surgeons (as any of our Plastic Surgery Clients will tell you).

    I may say more later but for now, here’s the NY Times piece.

  • Convert Offline – Everybody’s Doing It

    Return on Investment Through Call Tracking

    Since I’m clearly not going to get to the proposals I had on tap for tonight I thought I’d go ahead and document a recent client experience I’ve been talking to a few folks about.

    I’ve told this story a few times recently in support of our use of call tracking numbers.

    There’s an old joke “Half of my marketing budget is wasted, if only I knew which half”.

    For anybody who doesn’t know, call tracking is not a new idea. Yellow Pages have used them forever they called them RCF (remote call forwarding) numbers. Essentially a call tracking number is a number which routes calls to the main business number for the purpose of tracking incoming calls. Typically, these are assigned to an ad or campaign to gauge their effectiveness.

    I believe in Return on Investment! If what we do doesn’t make money for our clients they should stop paying us. The good news is we make them money and they continue to pay 🙂

    But, part of what we do includes helping them understand which of their marketing (ours or otherwise) is worth the money.

    We have been blessed to attract a significant number of clients within a high value vertical market. As you might imagine, we’re not the first and so many of our clients are already spending in directories and portals.

    Some of these are expensive.

    One of our clients was paying $20,000 / year for placement in one of these directories.

    And they questioned the value.

    So, we recommended the installation of call tracking numbers on their web site both for general web traffic and for referrals coming from this one directory site. After a few months we had the data we needed.

    We developed a simple system that would automatically switch the phone numbers displayed on the site depending on the referral source. So, if a visitor arrived from this one site they saw a different number, calls from which were tracked.

    To be clear, we did this on their site. Using simple PHP and Javascript we avoided mirroring their site and the only change was the phone number.
    After 2 months we made a decision…

    They had gotten 4-6 calls a month from referrals from that one site…

    They shut it down and now have 20 K a year to put into more effective marketing.

    We use call tracking numbers on a number of sites, both for general information and for comparative analysis. This however was a special case, and it was great to be able to help our customer stop wasting money.

    Call tracking numbers are inexpensive and easy to set up. If we’d paid 10X as much for the numbers it would have still been worth it when we saved our client 20K.

  • Miriam Ellis Asks A Lot of Questions

    At the risk of repeating myself, Miriam of Solas Web Design in her SEO Igloo blog has been engaged for a few weeks in an investigation of Local SEO culminating with a series of interviews. Miriam was nice to include me and most recently asked me to respond to some questions from the comments on one of her recent posts.

    This is an answer both to Miriam and to current and future clients wondering about our process.

    What this post will not cover:

    • Managing offline conversion (I’m working on a case study for this)
    • Effective map spamming techniques (If I knew, I wouldn’t tell – “first do no harm”)

    So, here we go!

    Most of what we know around here comes from years of testing in the local space on behalf of yellow pages publishers.

    Yellow pages are in decline and usage is moving online. In response to this, Google, Yahoo, MSN and a hundred other folks small businesses never heard of are trying to connect local searchers to local businesses.

    I believe that small businesses need to control their own destiny. They give up this control whenever they pay someone else who has a vested interest in outranking them.

    This argument sometimes leads us to counsel against paying for inclusion even when there’s traffic to be had from that source. And it always leads us to be skeptical… and to test (see upcoming post on managing offline conversion).

    In working with local small businesses we believe the following to be self-evident:

    • Expectation setting is the hardest part
    • Local SEO is long tail SEO (long tail: more specificity leads to higher likelihood of conversion)
    • “Low value” links are still valuable links

    We work with clients with monthly budgets of $99.00 to $9,900.00 and more. In every case, it’s important to realize that even small results can have a big impact when the expectations are right.

    And, amazingly enough we have been able to obtain #1 rankings for our clients’ “money” phrases at even the lowest budget levels. It just sometimes takes time (expectation setting is key).

    Working with service businesses with a local focus we find we can leverage the long tail nature of local search to deliver ready to buy customers.

    Here’s the great news: given the long tail nature of local service searches, link-building becomes less challenging.

    Even low value, free inclusion, directory links can have significant value.

    Not everyone needs Yahoo! directory and BOTW to win. For local businesses targeted inbound links in abundance can make the difference.

    Two examples:

    baton rouge wedding portrait photographer — we were working with this client’s content longer than expected and started our link-building before site changes were deployed. They ranked #1 for this phrase without saying it once on their site with “low value” links alone.
    baton rouge signs — having hovered at #4 & 5 forever, our client finally turned the corner after a year and took the #1 spot. Again, no paid links, no heavy duty paid directories, just steady link-building with directories and articles over time.

    These two are indicative of our small business clients. We have a package for them. It fits their budget and they get results.

    It should be obvious these aren’t giant budgets or super-competitive phrases. We have clients who are after those too, but their budgets are MUCH larger, the cost of their links greater and the variety of technique infinitely more.

    So, to answer the question, our lower budget clients are still doing great in local SEO with a comprehensive package of what some would consider “low value” links.

    It’s an oversimplification, but I always say it’s about 2 things, content and links. With those two, lather – rinse – repeat until you move on up. The more competitive the market, the more you have to repeat.

  • SEO Igloo puts us on the hot seat

    My friends at Solas Web Design are doing a great interview series on “Local SEO”.

    These interviews are a little technical in some cases but still make a great read regardless of your level of knowledge. How do I know so much? One of them is with me 🙂

    Among the other usual suspects so far are:

    So, the most telling thing I’ve learned thus far is that 3 of 5 interviewees are Yellow Pages refugees.

    Miriam is doing a great service blogging, writing over at Search Engine Guide and keeping up with the goings on in local SEO.

    It’s a good thing too — It’s easier to live vicariously than try to add all that to my plate.

    Following any links in this post will take you to some great reading.

    Cheers,

    Will

  • SEO Matrix (SEOMatrix) – Cold Call

    Update:

    If you’ve been contacted by SEO Matrix please give us a call. We’ve learned that the way they prospect is by calling people who are spending money on online advertising.

    Most of our clients come by referral. We can help you too (and in most cases for much less than SEO Matrix).

    We have spoken to a few SEO Matrix cold-call recipients and would love to speak with you too.

    Call (504) 208-3900 today.

    Original post follows:

    Just a quick post to talk about a call I just got from SEO Matrix. Al, from SEOMatrix was kind enough to call and begin to educate me about their services.

    Normally I would just sit tight and listen for the competitive value (in the interest of full disclosure, we have used telemarketers and will continue to do so). But, I started poking around their site, got a little more educated and asked a few questions.

    My first question for SEO Matrix was “what kind of guarantees do you offer”? And I got a good answer, that they don’t like to over-promise, which let Al into a discussion of the fact that SEOMatrix’s employs only “white hat” techniques. So, for whatever reason that’s where I lost my cool.

    Again, I was trying to maintain so I could get a sense for what they were saying to see if it had value when we go back into cold-calling (w/in 30-60 days).

    I just couldn’t do it. Why? It offended my sensibilities and I said so. I told Al, that the average consumer of his product doesn’t know what “white hat” is, and that it’s irrelevant to their needs. I then expressed my frustration that he hadn’t even looked at our site — this in itself was funny because he responded that he thought we might do PPC (Note: the title tag includes “Economical SEO“).

    In any case, I don’t think they’re Traffic Power, but it would seem they’re not making a great name for themselves in the market since this is the #4 Google result for SEOMatrix.

    I’m still trying to pinpoint what set me off. It was one of several things:

    • The pricing was silly high
    • The caller didn’t even realize he was calling an SEO (even though he knew the company name and was looking at the site)
    • The language used was a combination of buzz words and gross oversimplification (my favorite pseudo buzzword: Hard Hat SEO)
    • They call themselves an “Ethical Search Engine Optimization Company” — like they’re the only ones

    I don’t know, if we have one goal, it’s to de-mystify this stuff. If nothing else the presence of competition, good or bad, validates the business.

    I’ll come back and fill in some of the blanks. I just wanted to get this down while fresh in my mind.

    —

    Due to the inflammatory nature of some of the earlier comments I’ve decided to turn off all comments on this post.

    If anyone has issues or questions (especially those of you who gave of your time to post a response) please feel free to contact us directly [email protected] / (504) 208-3900.

    I would also like to draw your attention to my post on Swine Insemination.

  • Giving SEO for Christmas – Local SEO Guide

    Andrew Shotland at Local SEO Guide has kicked off a great concept: Giving A Little SEO for Christmas.

    To that end, I’m going to work a theme close to home:

    Nice idea Andrew.

  • Trusted Reviewers Impact on Google Maps / OneBox

    A Case Study of Trusted Reviewers’ Impact on Google Maps Placement

    David Mihm, a local SEO in Oakland CA recently pointed me to a post by Tim Coleman of Convert Offline who offers Search Engine Marketing help for small business entitled “Is Google Filtering Reviews or Reviewers”.

    Tim’s post suggests that trust is an issue in map ranking as well as general listings. There’s some question whether age of the review has an impact as well (from Small Business SEM author Matt McGee). Mike Blumenthal of Understanding Google Maps has a wealth of knowledge on the subject and made some valuable contribution to the discussion.

    I thought that we needed something a little more concrete and decided to do an experiment specifically focused on reviewer trust.

    Google Maps and Local are notoriously slow to update so this experiment may take some time to reach a conclusion.

    As it turns out, we have relationships with 3 providers of the same health / wellness service in the same metro area, none of whom are currently represented in Google maps (I’ll be storing screenshots dated for archival purposes).

    We have asked, and the practices have agreed, to begin asking their patients to go online and write reviews.

    In the interest of controlling the experiment we’ll use only InsiderPages. There are a few challenges selecting the review engine of choice:

    • Despite multiple universities our area is NOT tech-savvy
    • No review site has significant local depth
    • Few reviewers on Insider Pages have profiles which would indicate trust
    • On Yelp, the highest power reviewers are from out of town

    Considerations and methodology:

    • None of the websites are in the OneBox or on page 1 of map results.
    • None currently have reviews
    • None have been heavily promoted (on a scale of 1-10 for internet promotion they represent a 1, 3 and 5)
    • All are seemingly equidistant from the Google centroid
    • Reviews for 2 of 3 will be from virgin reviewers
    • Reviews for the 3rd will be solicited from already active reviewers
      • We will make contact with power-reviewers and ask them to visit our test subject
      • We will not attempt to influence editorial content
    • In the best case each practice will have the same number of reviews.

    Additional comments to the original were:

    • Miriam Ellis has written a very understandable follow up deconstructing Google reviews.
    • Cathy of Avant Gardens points to what can happen when the discussion goes negative.
    • Mike Muntz expresses concern that the de-emphasis of reviews may be in response to deceptively negative posts.

    Some questions for anyone who wants to collaborate:

    • Should I showcase the sites and current standings in question at the risk of skewing the results?
    • Does the proposed methodology seem sound?
    • What am I missing?

    This exercise is going to take some patience and I’ll update every two weeks at a minimum. In the early going I’ll be sure to indicate once we’ve got the reviews in place.

    By starting from scratch I hope we eliminate the “age” question and are able to focus solely on “trust”.

    I hope this is instructive because I think it’s critical we find a way to effectively combat all the map spam that’s cropping up.

    Tally ho!

  • Learn to Avoid This Big Mistake in Internet Marketing – Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket

    I live in New Orleans where people do occasionally rent a television for the big game.

    It’s an event. No need to call consumer credit counseling.

    If I’m renting my 17″ Sylvania that may be a problem.

    Website promotion is the same. Rent or Own.

    Ultimately you want to own.

    How do you own your web site ranking? Simple, when someone searches for what you do, it should be YOUR WEBSITE they find.

    You may ask “what about paying a top ranked directory or portal? That’s almost the same right?”

    If you could rent a car, drive it every day and it was cheaper than owning you’d do it right?

    What if I add some conditions?

    • I can come take your car any time
    • You rented a Cadillac and I replace it with a Yugo
    • You’re paying $50 and I raise the rent to $5000

    I’m sure you get the point.

    This is what it’s like to limit your internet marketing to industry directories.

    Stop paying and see what happens.

    This is also what it’s like if you advertise with a third-party company where they control all of your listings.

    Let me explain…

    If you know what my return is on your lead acquisition technology you can raise your prices up to my acceptable profitability and I’ll still pay.

    The worst case is that I’ve put all my eggs in your basket — it happens, especially among small and medium sized businesses.

    My favorite example from Yellow Pages is the transition from black and white to color, then to multi-page ads.

    The Yellow Pages ranking is ad size and seniority. The biggest ad which has been in the book the longest comes first.

    Soon enough black & white was no longer good enough and the publishers added color. If you didn’t upgrade you lost your spot.

    Then came the “Double-Truck” — an ad spanning 2 pages or more (in Las Vegas some Entertainers cover 4 pages or more).

    Upgrade or lose your spot. You don’t own the ranking — it owns you.

    I’m not saying directories have no value. There are paid directories which deliver customers. These should be part of any program and they’re not proprietary closed systems. They’re part of an holistic marketing package.

    When developing your plan to build online sales (or leads) you must ask “what happens when I stop paying for this?” With little knowledge of online advertising, limited budgets and thin margins, small businesses can be hobbled when the one bet they could afford doesn’t work.

    If you rent your store, an increase in rent can be tragic. Ask my friend Nancy Murphy who makes New Orleans Gift Baskets (the irony is that Nancy’s old landlord is still without a new tenant).

    In the long term, owning it is usually less expensive than renting. And, if you own it, you don’t have to lose sleep over your provider not performing, or worse yet performing well enough to hold you hostage.

    It does makes sense, If you have the budget, to test multiple marketing channels. Just make sure you’re tracking which leads come from where.

    If you have a limited budget you must be sure that at the end of the day you can at least drive away free and clear in your Yugo.

    Resources:

    All of the above offer a wealth of resources for small business owners looking to better understand online marketing.

    Photo Credits:

    Bush Photo: A La Gauche – and yes, that is one of my all-time favorite post-K pictures
    Yugo Photo: All World Cars

    Many thanks to Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide for his editorial comments.

  • M-LAT – Pay No Attention to That Man Behind The Curtain (Medical Lead Acquisition Technology)

    Pay No Attention to That Man Behind The Curtain: M-LAT, Medical Lead Acquisition Technology

    I’ve mentioned before our current vertical focus on Cosmetic / Plastic Surgery.

    I got a call from one of our clients who had attended a dinner in Los Angeles with 40+ of his colleauges in the LA area – “Doc-Hollywoods” he called them. As part of the dinner there’s a chance for vendors to present. At this one, the vendor was a company calling themselves M-LAT (Medical Lead Acquisition Technology).

    To hear my client tell it, M-LAT told a story of their new, revolutionary $3 Million dollar product which enabled them to magically capture personal information the moment someone landed on one of the surgeons’ web sites. And then, the surgeon would be able to use data, mystically acquired by the magicians at M-LAT to market to those prospects who’d visited the site.

    It was an exciting story. At least in the retelling. Now… to be clear, I wasn’t there. I did not hear them say that they could get the contact information just from a web site visit.

    This is what my client asserts they said unequivocally.

    So I decided to check it out. I visited the site of one of their clients (something of a poster-boy, in fact) David Hopp a Beverly Hills Cosmetic Surgeon.

    And when I got there, after being redirected past a mandatory flash page I saw a pretty average web site with a video intro from the doctor himself. I was looking, searching, and not finding the magic which was going to mystically suck my contact information through the browser. How did these other-worldly medical lead acquisition technologies work and how were they going to acquire me as a lead.

    And then, all at once, I saw it! It was an 800 # at the tail end of the video which stayed on screen. It was an 800 # with a list of extensions for different typs of information. What? An 800 #, a 24 hour hotline?

    I know there’s no one in the doctor’s office at this time of day.

    And then it dawned on me. We occasionally get call-forwarding numbers on behalf of our clients for call tracking. And one of the features is that the system tells you what number is calling, just like caller ID in your home. Ah ha!

    Well, that’s a little boring. So, using my Skype out line I called the number – no need for the wife to wonder about some 800 # in LA. It was an information line, closing with “press X to speak to a representative”.

    Then, my client faxes me the collateral material from the presentation. I now have a tri-fold slick which talks about what the system that I can study. I have to give these guys credit. They’re good salesmen.

    From that tri-fold:

    Three million dollar M-LAT Technology, Embedded on Your Talking Web Site

    The Medical Lead Acquisition Technology System automatically turns your website’s visitors into live customer leads. This technology extracts key information that includes the potential patient’s phone number, as well as name and address. It instantly turns website browsers and surfers into valuable customer leads [unwritten magic: as soon as they pick up the phone] that your staff can contact and quickly book as consultations.

    And then they go on to talk about other more traditional marketing techniques. Postcards, Direct Mail, Video and (Ah ha!) SEO & SEM. All of the other marketing techniques are pretty easy to understand and definitely advisable when used smartly.

    So, I figured it out. M-LAT has perfected a medical lead acquisition technology. The technology is apparent when you dig a little deeper.

    First, it’s not possible – without spyware – to magically acquire contact information from a casual web browser. But, once that browser calls an 800 # you have their phone number and can use that the develop other contact information. Better still, play them a compelling message and then have them talk to a rep.

    In all, M-LAT (Medical Lead Acquisition Technology), seems to be doing a nice bundle of some traditional marketing tools.

    • Remote Call Forwarding (custom phone numbers) – a Yellow Pages staple
    • Info-line – again borrowing from the Yellow Pages
    • Direct Mail
    • Direct Response Advertising
    • Video
    • SEO / SEM

    All of the above are good to have and enable better lead acquisition and management of the lead pipeline.

    So, to sum it all up – from what I can see – M-LAT is offering a bundled suite of services, none of which are revolutionary and packaging it in pretty smart way.

    If the presentation is as it was described to me, and having read the flyer, the pitch is disingenuous at best, misleading at worst.

    Is it worth the money? Maybe. The good news for plastic surgeons is their margins. They can break even on a $3000.00 spend with one new patient. In any major market these techniques along with effective internet marketing will probably make their customers money.
    I don’t know if the assemblage of the system cost 3 Million. Maybe it did.

    The great news is that similar results can be achieved at lower costs by simply assembling the parts yourself. And if you do (or if you have a trusted source do it for you) you then own the system instead of the other way around – the system owns you.
    References:

    Ask-Leo.com: How do I find out who’s at a particular IP address?

  • Swine Insemination & Reputation

    What on earth does Swine Insemination have to do with SEO?

    Pigs from WikiMedia - Click for AttributionThis is a funny story and turned out to be a pretty good example of what reputation management, as I understand it, is all about.
    Now, keep in mind there are people who focus on reputation management. We dabble.

    I would define reputation management (online) as assuring that the most positive message about you or your company is the one with top ranking for any given relevant phrase. Relevant phrases might include your name, your brands, your corporate officers or any phrase for which you would naturally have a vested interest.Often, given the high degree of vitriolic speech on the web a company can find itself maligned by a blogger or commentator, who by virtue of their online reputation (authority), winds up ranking for the business name or the name of one of the principals of the company.

    For example — I’m not arrogant enough to think we had an impact on a successful venture backed company like Yodle (formerly natpal) — but, a blog post I wrote about what I thought were very dangerous SEO practices a while back managed to rank well for the word “Natpal”. As it turns out, Natpal shortly thereafter ended this dangerous practice and I gave kudos to their CEO Court Cunningham.

    The episode demonstrates the concern though. What if some blogger or yelper decides to speak negatively about you and then obtains ranking? The squawking can, if you’re not careful drown out your message.

    “OK, cool” you say but what does this have to do with Swine Insemination? I’ll get to that.

    For example, we were recently approached by a New Orleans financial startup who on searching for their name (a brand new domain) found that one of their competitors was on page one and they were nowhere.

    Thankfully their business name wasn’t something like Free Coupons, but was instead a much less searched for phrase.

    The good news was that they did have some presence. They’d been running some ads on local job boards and they’d gotten included in some local press so they were at lease known, if not yet visible to the big G.

    What we did was pretty simple. Something I like to call authority borrowing (people less nice than me call it “Parasite SEO”). My mother tells me no one who’s not in the business of website promotion will know what I mean by authority so in brief: Authority is your reputation with the search engines. There are lots of factors but sum it up to say it’s an indication of how much the search engines trust you.

    So basically, if you have a brand new site and you don’t own a 100% search phrase matched non-hyphenated .com domain, you’re hosed.

    As I said, the good news is that the search phrase wasn’t super-competitive. So our job in knocking brand-X off page 1 was that much easier. Other good news was that we happen to have control over a locally relevant directory 🙂

    So to the details:

    1. We put a listing for our client company in our own New Orleans business directory.
    2. We built them a Craig’s List “Local Business Ad” (free and very effective but transient – in other words they’re not good for long). The secondary benefit of this is that Craig’s list has a TON of authority and so the link back has a lot of weight.
    3. We submitted their site, our Buy Local Buy NOLA listing, the Craig’s list ad and some of their other press to a number of social media sites and directories.

    Blammo! That was all it took. Within 48 hours, brand-X was off the home page and we controlled 9 of 10 remaining listings.

    To this day, relevant sites still control 7 of 10 – brand-X is buying adwords against a phrase they used to rank for and we only just lost the #1 spot because their exact match domain seems to have changed hands and the new owners switched it to an SEO savvy host.

    I guess our guys should have signed up for a longer term engagement ;>

    Finally, Swine Insemination.

    OK, OK here’s where the swine insemination part comes in. I was talking about all this with a friend of mine who does web design for plastic surgeons and others. She on a lark decided to put our business name “Search Influence” into Google to see what came… well, there in the #5 position was some site talking about Swine Insemination.

    So I decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. OK, not really. My piggish behavior tapered off toward the end of my twenties.

    Really though I thought it was a great example of the point I’d just been making (and which I’ve spent the last few minutes writing up.

    The last thing you want when someone goes searching for you is negativity. You want sweetness and light above the fold. And, great news, you can control it.

    Your name is likely not a heavily searched phrase – you should own it (unless of course you’re named Will Scott, then you’re probably out of luck).

    And honestly, I’d rather see Swine Insemination or a competitor’s name than mine smeared.

    And I think you would too.

    P.S. If you want to know the name of the company for whom we did that, call or email.

    References

    Some of the better known authorities with some great information on reputation management in general are:

    Media References: