For a while now, Google has been showing “Related Places” AKA “The Competition in places view.
Google Related Places – AKA The Competition
While looking at the results for one of our clients who has recently opened a new office for his law practice in a New Orleans LA suburb I came across this.
Paginated Google Places Results
Clearly Google is trying to offer some alternative results for “Metairie Divorce” than our guy Will Beaumont at 3814 Veterans Memorial Blvd #302, Metairie, LA 70002 – (504) 834-1117.
You’ll have to click through as I can’t figure out how to link directly.
Beyond going down the page to look at the “Related Places” (AKA “The Competition”) you can now conveniently scroll through them. And, better still, hovering over your searched for phrase at the top of the page gets you this drop-down list.
Select Your Competitor – Google Places Drop-Down List
Have you ever searched for a business by its own name and come up empty-handed? What about searching for its own name PLUS the city it’s located in and still no luck? It happens! Google definitely makes stupid choices at times, but most of the time this happens when we are not telling it the most basic information about ourselves — as redundant as it might seem.
Alligator dogs from Dat Dog's Yelp page.
As a stereotypical New Orleanian, I’m obsessed with great food. I have always noticed and been upset when a business doesn’t rank #1 for its own name, or even in the top 3. Recently I saw the phenomenon three times on the same weekend, so I had to blog about it.
I was hungry for something inexpensive, but really good and meaty, which means I had approximately 1,298,450 locations to choose from in this city. Many of these will never have websites. Somehow it came down to Courtyard Grill, Cowbell and Dat Dog (I have been to only one of these restaurants but can tell from the reviews that I’m going to love the other two). Since I only trust hours of operation posted on official websites, I searched for the restaurant names with city names behind them. These were the results (from 3/28/11):
Aesthetically, most would agree that these sites are beautiful, but since Google is a robot, it does not share this opinion. Of course I don’t expect a year-old restaurant to rank #1 for the term Courtyard Grill, but including the city name should be enough to make that happen. Same goes for the other two. Why are these restaurants not ranking first for their name?
Who dat? Ain't Dat Dog.
Yes, they all are getting outranked by Yelp and Urban Spoon pages with a bunch of reviews, but the big problem here is a lack of on-site optimization. Breaking the most fundamental rule of on-site SEO, Dat Dog and Courtyard Grill both fail to include any content on the home page. Furthermore, they all lack meta-descriptions and only one has a decent title tag. Cowbell performs the best in the results because “cowbell” and “new orleans” are mentioned next to each other twice in the text of the home page; not to mention the address is in text at the top of the page.
Unless you have a unique name, or a URL that perfectly matches your business name — (Bouligny Tavern has both, as you can see here) — you will need on-site optimization to save you from these problems. On-site optimization is so important that even Google, which is secretive about their search formula, has written a guide to this which can be found here. I highly recommend it to web designers and webmasters because it expresses the minimum that you should do to be favored in search results.
Who cares if my site isn’t first? I have 4 stars on Yelp!
You should be concerned about making sure that when people are looking for YOU that they can find YOU, and not another site that is talking about you. Otherwise, why would you have a website in the first place? You want to be in control of your own destiny, and it helps to lead the conversation. Let’s say you have 4/5 stars overall on Yelp, but the most recent rating was a 1; do you want a potential customer to have this information branded in their head so early in the relationship? Even if a customer has a good experience, reading bad reviews can lead to Yelp-fulfilling prophecies. Yelp is a great site, and if you want people to see your Yelp page, link to it with a banner, just like Lock Busters did.
I know I’m not first for my name and city, but x means the same thing as my city.
Even though I am talking specifically about NOLA, it’s a lesson we can all learn: think about the words people are saying when they search for your business, and optimize based on those words. Locals often call New Orleans Louisiana “NOLA” (and it happens to be a component of the URLs for the 3 sites we are comparing), but chances are that when someone is looking for you they are not using this word. The screenshot below is from Google Insights. Not only are people searching for New Orleans a lot more than NOLA, but as you can see at the bottom of the image, people are searching for “nola jobs” and “nola news,” which undoubtedly refers to our friends at www.nola.com, and the term “nola restaurant” probably refers to the Emeril’s establishment called NOLA Restaurant.
Nola What? Nola Who?
On-page optimization does not guarantee you will rank for your name, but you don’t have much of a shot at ranking for anything without content and metadata on your home page. There are other ways, like being linked to via anchor text from an awesome blog, which we are glad to do for 3 great local businesses, but small business owners should go for the low-hanging fruit first.
CityGrid Media, who recently invested significantly in Orange Soda (an SEO/PPC firm out of Utah) has chosen to use the favored tactic of Nigerian princes and Offshore Link-Exchangers to drum up business for their new partner Orange Soda.
CityGrid Media (Orange Soda) Form Spam Image
I’m very surprised to see this kind of thing from a company of this stature.
I’m glad to see that the address is in New York and not American Fork Utah as I’m fairly confident the folks I’ve known at Orange Soda wouldn’t condone this behavior.
Full text of email message follows:
Good afternoon, I wanted to reach out to you about your placement in online search. Citygrid is the largest local content and marketing network on the web. I noticed that you are not populating on the major search engines for a few key search terms. Your competition is capitalizing on this and I wanted to discuss how to take some of this market share. We gain placement on Google, Bing, and Yahoo and offer clients 86% of the local web. As part of our SEO, SEM, (Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing) and content network campaigns we provide phone call tracking, stats, and other comprehensive data to directly track ROI. We will optimize your website to come up on the first page of Google, driving people looking for your services to your business. I’d like to set up a time to speak about this and go over your options to determine if this would be a good fit for your business. Please reach out with your availability. Thank you. Best, x-x-x-x Senior Account Executive P: 212-373-7798 F: 213-351-7011 E: [email protected] www.CityGridMedia.com 555 West 18th St. 5th Floor New York, NY 10011 The largest content and marketing network on the web
This is shameful behavior from a reputable company. I expect better of both CityGrid and Orange Soda.
4. How do my reviews look on Google Maps? Yahoo? Bing? Yelp?
– We could always use more reviews but those we have are looking great.
5. Am I using social media wisely?
– I would say yes. And in your case that means using it conservatively. You’ve got great presence on Video and are developing on Facebook. You’ve got a nice twitter following. There’s always room for more but, yes, wisely for sure.
6. Am I focusing on metrics that matter?
– Definitely – Brand + Conversions are where one with a product so niche as yours needs to be.
7. Am I earning trust with everything I do online?
– For sure. Online, you and your team represent @hallpiano with the class and professionalism due your product and customers.
Search Influence is proud to be taking part in the first ever Foursquare Advertiser Survey with 3 other companies focused on local search and social media.
Over the next 2 weeks, leading up to SMX Advanced, we will be polling businesses using Foursquares promotions tools to get the word out about their businesses.
If you are one of the advertisers we’ve contacted, please be assured we are very interested in your feedback and are excited to share the data we compile.
Foursquare is an exciting new media type bringing together local search, couponing and loyalty / retention programs around a game -based location-centric service.
Our partners in this project are:
Dream Systems Media
Dream Systems Media, “DSM”, is a trend setting, full service Internet marketing firm, with locations in Utah and Arizona, and was born when three successful Internet business entrepreneurs decided to join forces to do for others what they had previously done only for themselves.
Links:
A Nickel’s Worth of Free Online Marketing Advice
Local Business + Yelp App + iPhone = Money
Free Local Marketing Options That Brings Real Traffic
rYnoweb
rYnoweb provides business website services, specializing in WordPress
development and implementation, local search marketing, and on-site
search engine optimization (SEO). rYnoweb serves clients nationwide
and is run by freelance Web Strategist, Chuck Reynolds out of Phoenix,
Arizona.
Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet’s influence on offline consumer purchase behavior. He also is a Senior Analyst for Internet2Go, an advisory service from Opus Research tracking the evolution of the mobile Internet.
We were surprised to learn, in our investigation, how few in our industry were aware of this great free (for now) advertising medium.
We’re excited to begin collecting data so we may learn better how effectively this medium is being used.
Once done, we will be publishing these data on the rYnoweb blog and presenting our findings at SMX Advanced (sure to be the must see session of the show).
Some related posts from the Search Influence Blog:
I was looking for more contact info for Luther Lowe and noticed his tweet about a blog post explaining Yelp’s Review Filter. Luther does a good job of explaining the Yelp Review Filter and Yelp has commissioned a video which tries to explain it in a friendly way. The review filter, Yelp’s legal woes and the general state of Yelpdom have been the topics of many conversations lately.
While in Portland last week presenting on Facebook Marketing at SEMpdx SearchFest I had a couple great dinners with some really smart people. One of those dinners included the aforementioned smart person Luther Lowe who is part of Yelp’s business outreach team.
Luther gave a good explanation in person of the review filter and I think he’s done a good job in the blog post as well. I have to admit, after my personal experience with Luther and his colleagues I’m a lot more positive toward the organization as a whole (I may be influenced by Mat Siltala too).
From what I could discern, that the most critical component of the review filter is one which looks at a users yelpish tendancies to see how active a yelper they are. In other words, if you just created your account, or have a very thin profile you might get filtered.
I’m assured by some of Luther’s colleagues with whom I spoke at SMX West that there are semantic elements too. But, it looks like the biggest factor is how “real” you look by virtue of your history on Yelp.
But, as we learned at SMX, Yelp has 180 in Sales & Marketing as compared to 40 Engineers.
So, I know what you’re asking: “Given all this, how do I spam Yelp”?
It’s easy, be patient and build a quality profile. In other words, if you look real you have a higher likelihood of having your spammy review not filtered. (hint: real doesn’t mean 10 reviews of disparate places within 24 hours)
I’m reminded of the quote with which I start most SEO presentations:
The most important thing in business is sincerity.
If you can FAKE that, you’ve got it made 🙂
Seriously though, I appreciate the attempts at outreach. It’s clear that Yelp is cognizant of the PR issues (and their legal issues) and that they’re working to provide a valuable service. I hope they can get their act together on the sales front before they go up in flames.
Amilia's Diner – SEO Invasion
Amazingly, none of these reviewers were filtered (Amilia’s Diner on Yelp).
Many clients ask what the point of an e-mail newsletter is and how it can help them grow their business. Will people read it? Will it clog up potential customer inboxes? How much is it?
There are several reasons I recommend e-mail newsletters. Not only do they provide free information, they are also one of the least expensive and most effective tools to draw attention to a site. Below are some additional advantages to implementing a company e-mail newsletter.
Stay in Touch
Stay in contact – Keep your business top of mind to your customers so that when they need a service you provide, they will contact you. Newsletters serve as a reminder to customers to come back to your site.
Develop relationships and trust – You become familiar to your subscribers. Familiarity encourages return visits and establishes customer loyalty.
Promotional tool – A great way to communicate new products and announce new services. Specials or discounts are a way to attract customers back to your site. Offers entice subscribers who may not necessarily need the service but will be prompted to act during a special.
Increase site traffic – Again, good to send out when launching a new product or service. Gives subscriber a reason to visit the site, helping drive additional traffic .
Set specific delivery time – Complete control of when information is disseminated.
Trackable – Use the newsletter as a research tool to see what people read about most and what they are most interested in hearing about. Research will allow you to write a newletter for a specific target audience.
Provides immediate results – Real time statistics and data provide you with the information needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the newsletter. Tweak future newsletters from that information.
When developing your newsletter consider the following:
Content has to engage readers. Articles should be more informative and less like an advertisement.
Keep articles brief.
Use images to attract reader’s attention.
Use links and provide URL’s as additional resources.
Frequency is key. Stick to a regular schedule. Try to send out same time every month or week.
So if you are looking for a cost efficient way to target and reach a large group of customers or potential customers, consider an e-mail newsletter.
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.
UPDATE: At the suggestion of Terri Troncale I want to invite submissions for non-profits as well. Please, please – fans, recommend your favorites! I’m really happy to have the businesses self-submit but I want to get rid of these iTunes cards 😀
Also, my original limitation on location was because of driving distance to http://socialsouth.org. Please submit anyone, anywhere using Social Media to drive sales, membership, contributions, or any trackable outcome.
—
Twitter Bird – Tweet, Tweet, Tweet
Let’s get one thing straight right here: I’m not above buying your love. (Just ask David)
I’m going to be taking part in a couple presentations at Social South in a few weeks and in preparation I’ve been asking: who’s doing it?
The “who” I’m talking about: Small businessesin the Southeast United States (hopefully within a day’s drive of B-Ham (that’s Birmingham Alabama, you dig) and non-profits?
The “it” is – using Social Media to promote their business or organization.
So in other words, do you know a small business or non-profit in your area who is trying to use Twitter for business (or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Orkut, or YouTube, or Blogging)?
Now, a couple caveats:
I would prefer local businesses/non-profits: plumbers, lawn guys, doctors, spas, hair salons and organizations trying to promote local causes
I may feature home-based businesses but I’d rather they have a product sales or membership action component
Cash Register goes Cha Ching
What’s in it for the small businesses? First, I will do an email interview and a follow-up phone call which will be featured as a blog post on the Search Influence blog. Those which represent the best case studies will also be featured on Local Search News (and may appear on Search Engine Land).
And, I will do a half-hour interview follow-up in which I’ll make recommendations and offer ideas for other promotional opportunities. And hopefully we’ll all learn better how to use Twitter for business (and other social platforms).
And, finally, a select few will get an opportunity to join me on-stage at Social South to talk about their experiences.
What’s in it for you? (I know, I know, it’s all about you) I’ve got a stack of $10.00 iTunes cards burning a hole in my pocket, y’hear. I will give a $10.00 iTunes cards to 10 randomly selected participants – in other words, comment below including a link to the business in question and their Twitter account page (e.g. Nancy’s Corner, New Orleans Gift Baskets, Nancy’s Corner on Twitter).
[Ginsu Style] But wait, there’s more – 1 lucky entry will win a $150.00 gift card / certificate to the business of their choice from the entrants listed (small print – I need a minimum of 20 entries to execute on the $150.00).
So, please, let me buy your love – help me find participants for this great panel at Social South, I’ll help you get a little more enjoyment out of life with the gift of music and we’ll both help a local business get a little more exposure online and learn about how to use Twitter for business.
All you have to do to enter is comment below with a link to the business (home page or online profile page is fine) and a link to their Twitter, Facebook, or other social media profile.
Oh, and you should definitely Tweet about it – here’s a good example: RT @w2scott: Know a small biz or non-profit using Social Media? Promote ’em 2 win great prizes – details: http://bit.ly/vQqTA Please RT
Look, this is serious, I’m trying to help others understand how to use Twitter for business (and Facebook and LinkedIn and the others) and you can help a local small business get a little further down the road with this internet stuff. And, like I said, I am willing to buy your love.
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?
Dream Systems Media, “DSM”, is a trend setting, full service Internet marketing firm, with locations in Utah and Arizona, and was born when three successful Internet business entrepreneurs decided to join forces to do for others what they had previously done only for themselves.
rYnoweb provides business website services, specializing in WordPress
