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Local Search Update #9
STAYING ON TOP WITH SEO It's a big reason why there's rush of advertisers that want their site easily found by today's consumers. Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, citing a recent comScore study said, " Performing a local search, drives consumers to take action. " He was referring to second quarter data for 2006. Greg noted, that 41 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior while 41 percent made contact offline". As a merchant, professional, or tradesperson, you'll clearly want your business found when consumers are in the hunt for goods and services. So what's the best approach to drive traffic to your door step, phone or office? It used to be the yellow pages, direct mail, coupons, or your local newspaper. However, as web savvy consumers increasingly go on line to research and shop for services, knowledgeable advertisers and marketers will choose to follow. As an industry, we have coined the term Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to highlight this approach and in order to strength a company's position on line we have characterized this process as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Briefly SEO, for example entails the process of optimizing web pages to rank at the top of natural or paid results in the search engines for targeted keywords. There are many factors that contribute to successful page or site optimization--- one particular strategy for example would be to encourage advertisers to dominate the LOCAL category in the Local portion of the major search engines, i.e. Yahoo! Local with keywords that are genuinely unique and local to the business' geography. Online newspapers, merchants, even those without a web site, can accomplish SEO by working with specialist companies and consultants to gain good first, second or third page placement on the engines. After page 3, it really does not matter. With Search Engine rankings and consumer purchase decisions increasingly held in the balance by "your presence" on the web, whether it is through natural (organic) search results or paid search results, you'll want to lean on experts that can get the job done for you. This month's principle contributor, Jason Nagy, CEO of JN Development (www.JNDevelopment.com) is just such an expert, helping to get a publisher's site better positioned and found on the web. For our part at Search Initiatives, we are more than pleased to share with you the story of our recent acquisition of eLocal Listing, LLC, (www.eLocallisting.com) based in Temecula, CA. eLocal is a company completely devoted to helping local businesses get their website and business positioned prominently in the top local positions of Google, Yahoo! and MSN. We are so confident that we can do this in a local category for the major search engines, we promise a money back guarantee within the first 30 days of ordering the service. Going forward, the art of Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization will be our focus in the coming couple of editions of The Local Search Update. We hope you enjoy this month's musings and advice by Jason Nagy. We look forward to helping you understand Best Practices and SEO 101 in the coming months. |
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Sex, Lies and Video |
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How To Do Internet Marketing Campaigns According to Google Trends, in early 2006, "video" surpassed "sex" in search volume. Of course, there are not many people searching for "lies", but there are a number of people searching for "truth"! Search engine optimization (SEO) gets these key "words" into the search engines for people including potential customers to find. Good SEO is a continual process, which largely uses keywords and several other techniques to position your Web site above your competition in search result pages. According to comScore, Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April 2006 and it continues to grow monthly. In 2005, Google Sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (858 million), Time-Warner Network (457 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (384 million). In an older study of January 2004, "Seventy- six percent of all Web users performed at least one search, totaling 114 million Web visitors to search sites. Fully 64 percent of Web users employ search as their primary method of finding things." (see footnote #1) Remember all these searchers, including potential customers, use keywords and phrases to find what they are looking for and the numbers are growing exponentially. What are your keywords? If potential customers were to look for your site, what would they type into their favorite search engine? When they do type in your keywords, do they find your site? How many potential customers are finding your site? Are your potential customers being converted to actual customers? Search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO projects help answer these questions and put the search engines to work for you. If your company is anything like the millions in existence, SEO wasn't the first thought when building your web site. With more and more potential customers using search engines to find what they are looking for, there is no better time than now to optimize your site for the search engines. Make it easier for your potential customers find your site instead of your competition. Some of the alterations you can certainly do yourself, and some you may want to leave to a professional who could save you time and money. To optimize your site, you will require a good marketing sense, some technical web skills, some knowledge of SEO, and in most cases, not an insignificant amount of time. Has your site has already been optimized? One quick check, to determine if your site is optimized, is to refer to the title bar of your browser when looking at your site. If the title bar reads "your company name" or "your web site name" or contains something like "Home - www.mydomain.com", then your site is NOT optimized. The title bar on each page of your site should include the keywords for that page. Another quick check involves hovering the mouse over images on the page. If a popup doesn't appear with a clear description of the image, then your site is NOT optimized. In HTML, these are known as ALT tags on image links and they should all contain descriptive text. Optimization certainly doesn't stop here; however, you should now have a sense if your site is on the road to optimization or not. At this point you really have 3 choices: leave your site alone and risk not being found; learn SEO and apply that knowledge to your site; or hire a professional with a monthly SEO maintenance plan so that you can focus on your business and still get the local search traffic you expect and need. There is much to learn and many good resources on the web. I wish you all the success with your SEO efforts. If you have any questions or concerns please let me know. Jason Nagy President JNDevelopment 1. Margan, Mike and Hunt, Bill. Search Engine Marketing, Inc. Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web site. Stoughton, MA: IBM Press, 2006, pg 4. |
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SEO War Stories from The Trenches |
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SEO Sales Specialist and Trench Warrior
Daniel Valles of Sunset Plumbing Inc., in Long Beach, CA, has an amazing story of SEO success with eLocallisting.com. Way back in December of 2006, while in the daily hunt to help small business improve their presence on the major search engines, I encountered Dan. I had been cold calling and happened upon Daniel in the hopes of placing his company on the front pages of Yahoo! Local and Google. Dan expressed great interest although he was extremely busy and didn't have time to talk. He requested a call back later that night. I often have to do that. Most busy professionals and trades folks are just jammed with the day-to-day task of making a living. So I did. We discussed his plans for the future of his business and how he was going to accomplish his goals. Dan told me his biggest dream was to one day be able to pass down the company to his son after achieving great success. He envisioned that his son would take over the business next year, once he had built the cash flow up a little more. I then asked if it would be a problem if I helped achieve his goals much sooner. He enthusiastically said, "No, that wouldn't be a problem!" My straightforward plan was to attract more Local clients looking for Daniel's specified plumbing services using our SEO placement service and expertise. I explained that the more times potential clients saw your business and phone number, the more inbound calls he would receive. Obviously, the more inbound calls received, the more likely clients would be convinced to do business with Sunset Plumbing. Simple equation! I then explained our product, cost and terms of service. He was very pleased with this "straightforward" idea, but he had two reasons why he couldn't set up immediately: First, he was booked up for the next month already, and secondly, he felt he couldn't "afford" this kind of advertising presence. After clearly explaining our deferment program, and stressing our 100% Money Back Guarantee for performance in the first 30 days, it boiled down to a no-cost, no risk situation. We reserved his city and industry and keywords. We deferred starting our service for 1 month, resolving his "booked up " concern, immediately generated new money for the next month, and he was off and running. Dan had nothing to lose except this great Opportunity to be Number One locally for the keywords he thought were important to him. In fact, the results have been so good that he was able, after just five months, to achieve his ultimate goal -- 7 months ahead of schedule. He tells me he is turning over the business to his son much sooner than he planned and on a firmer footing. Who would have thought that our SEO program could be so wildly successful for just one small family business? Sincerely, SEO War Story Correspondent, email: jeff.rapson@searchinitiatives.com |
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About Search Initiatives, LLC & eLocal Listing, LLC |
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Search to Sale ... Simplified Search Initiatives is fast becoming one of North America's premier providers of local search with enhanced listings on a self-service ad platform. Our private-label local search and ad serving solutions enable publishers and portals to build traffic and grow online advertising revenue dramatically. We are committed to helping local media and advertisers position their brand and business on the World Wide Web, and through our services be at the heart of the local sales opportunity. Our world class search services allow a local media and advertisers to compete cost effectively for both Web traffic and commerce. Search Initiatives and eLocal Listing are privately held corporations based in Nashua, NH and Temecula, CA respectively. |
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