M-commerce? Dude, WTF?
Popularity: 2% [?]
“6,000 People Are Researching Restaurants In A Cab”
If you still don’t get it, check out the new Sprint spot, around the 39 second mark…
Phones are changing our behavior…
Sprint’s point with this commercial is that this is “now” how people do things – now, 6000 people are researching restaurants in a cab – not at a computer, not in a phone book – in a cab. Will they find your restaurant? You can bet they’re going to end up at a restuarant they do find from their phone…
See those stars over the cabs in the commercial? Those represent the added deep data that the user expects to find when they research restaurants – reviews, comments, pricing, payment forms accepted, hours of operation, all those things that are instantly available in a local business profile at the touch of a button, but which are not so instantly available on your own web site. This is not about sending traffic to your web site. You don’t even need a web site. You want traffic to arrive at your door!
And how many “nows” do you suppose there are in a day? Think about it… this is what thousands of business owners are missing out on because they are not taking full advantage of local search tools.
Popularity: 53% [?]
Piggy Back on PPC
This week AdGooRoo released its search engine advertiser report for Q1 2009. This report is designed to give advertisers an overall picture of the paid ad landscape. Anyone who’s read my other blogs knows that I’m a huge fan of watching the overall landscape, even when the news isn’t particularly what you’re looking for, because you can run across tidbits that mean something totally different to you than to the general audience. It’s like discovering a secret.
One of the features in this month’s report is a list of the top 25 advertisers on Google, Yahoo and MSN. This list is meant to demonstrate to everyone else how insignificant we are when it comes to the big picture and PPC and what kind of money it really takes to own the paid ad world. Why’s this list interesting to local search marketers? It’s because of who’s in the list.
Observe:
We ran a search on “baton rouge day care” and here’s what we found – in the paid ads, position 3 was localadlink.com, position 4 was yellowpages.aol.com, position 5 was theyellowpages.com, position 6 was local.com, position 7 was areadguides.net… there were only 7 advertisers and positions 1 and 2 were wasted impressions caused by Google’s bizarre attempts to predict my behavior, showing me ads for law firms because my previous search had been for personal injury lawyers…
None of the paid ads under “baton rouge day care” were being run by any day care company, because they don’t typically have the money to burn on PPC. But by being included in the five yellow page sites, any day care in this city can piggy back on the paid ads that those huge companies have put into this niche.
Now back to the AdGooRoo report… included in their top 25 lists for each search engine were both well-known, and not-so-well-known local listing sites: Local.com (on the list for both Yahoo and Google), DexKnows.com (a fairly new player with an impressive budget), Business.com, and PureLocal.com. To put this into perspective, included in the Google top 25 advertiser list for Q1 are Amazon, Dell, Ebay, Expedia, Nextag, PriceLine, Target, Travelocity, and Zappos.
I’m thinking you have to spend some serious money to show up on that Google list, where Business.com, DexKnows.com and Local.com all appeared. Google contains more advertisers, so the competition is more fierce – to place in the top 25 means you are a big spender. We don’t all have to spend that kind of money if we’re smart about where else we get placement.
It’s All About Changing Habits
The face of search relevance is changing… it’s no longer about having one (or two) specific page(s) from your site appear organically in the top 10 search results or directing shoppers to your specials with a paid ad. Search engine marketing is now about how pervasive you are – after all, the more places you are found, the more harder-better-faster-stronger you are, right? Users are more savvy and less inclined to just take your word for how effective you are as a vendor. You need back-up. Local business listings not only offer you more ways to flash your name in front of people, they also offer additional resources like photos and images, reviews, and a whole host of other deep-relevance data that you can take advantage of to illustrate that you are serious about earning new business.
Look at the odds here… say you have one listing in the top ten that is your web site. Even if you’re number one, what are the chances that the search will stop there? If half the top ten organic listings are comprised of other business listing sites, like Superpages.com and Local.com, you’d better be there too – that increases your chances of getting to show your ads, and repeat your message. If you’re also included in the paid ads on the sidebar, whether it’s your own ad or you’re piggy backing off a paid ad listing being shown through a business listing web site, you have again increased your chances of ad exposure even more… and it the clicks on that ad don’t cost you a cent!
Popularity: 100% [?]
Our Services
Metric Voodoo Local specializes in massive local search listings updates. What does this mean?
Local Search Described
There are hundreds of sites on the internet whose purpose is to provide local business information. Superpages.com is one of them. So is CitySearch.com, as well as Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Local.com, Yellowpages.com, and Switchboard.com. Some of these sites feed one another’s results, some of them feed the search portals of other services like the search portal featured on the Blackberry.
We have built a trusted relationship with these services which allows us to create or update all of these local business listing websites at once.
This means you can go through one service provider to keep control of all your potential business listing space – keep phone numbers and addresses accurate, post specials, offer discounts, list your key inventory, post your hours of operation – any of scores of specially enhanced, deep-relevance content that can increse the online visibilty of your physical store location!
How Local Search Works
Local Search websites have been around for over a decade. The problem has been that there was no real practical use for them – they were supposed to replace phone books for locating local business services back in 1995, but that never actually materialized. Then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus began trying to utilize local search tools for inbound linking and generating web site traffic. That worked ok, to an extent. But who keeps up with those listings once the SEO analyst is done creating them? And what about new services that launched in the meantime that the SEO analyst had no way to know about?
As the new century began, folks began to experience business listing hijacking and malicious listing abuse. Anyone could log into an online yellow pages site and create a bogus business listing using anyone else’s business name and steal their business, or worse, slander them online by creating offensive entries. As recently as February of 2009, Google was trying to implement more security improvements to prevent hijacking and abuse of Google Maps listings.
Authoritative Listings
One of the techniques used to combat this sort of fraud was the development of trusted core data companies, whose job is to provide all of these search engines and business listing companies with “authoritative data.” These authoritative sources guarantee the accuracy and legitimacy of the data they report on local business locations, so they are given precedence in the pecking order. If a local business listing has two differing sets of data and one came from the web site’s form and the other came from the trusted data provider, the trusted data provider wins out. This is how they prevent hijacking and the spread of malicious entries, which come only through the web-based interface. The problem is, the legitmiate owner also normally has to use the web-based interface… until now.
Data providers cannot advertise. They can’t solicit your business to add to their databases because that puts them at odds with their main value proposition as an unbiased, authoritative source of accurate information. Because of our relationship with these data providers, we can ensure that your business listings not only contain accurate name, address and phone number, we can pump your listings full of keywords and content to increase the relavance of those listings to potential search terms.
Practical Use
Imagine a group of friends meet for lunch at a resturant only to find that they have an hour and 15 minute wait. One of them takes out the iPhone and Googles “family italian near downtown Austin” to look for an alternate venue. As of this writing the top three listings are from the sites Yelp.com, Yahoo! Local, and CitySearch, followed by Google Maps’ top ten business listings. These are ALL “local search business listing” web sites and these users are seeing 13 possibilities in the top half of the page alone. What do you think the chances are of this group choosing one of those places for lunch?
Add to this scenario the fact that GPS location from a phone can improve local ad targeting and it’s practically guaranteed that the top returned results are all going to be local restaurants – assuming they’ve done their homework and they have submitted accurate details, including keywords like “family italian, downtown, lunch specials, austin family dining” and so forth as part of an enhanced listing.
How You Can Go Local
Metric Voodoo Local has several data submission plans designed to allow businesses to take advantage of our trusted relationship with these search engines through our Local Search Submission services. We’ve designed programs to assist very dynamic businesses, like restaurants who might want to include seasonal menus in their enhanced content, as well as programs for more static types of businesses like lawyer’s offices who may not change their data often but who have to maintain accurate address and phone numbers along with keywords pertaining to court cases, recalls, class-actions and so forth.
Information can be set up for submission annually for businesses who just need to maintain accuracy, or as often as monthly for businesses who are either prone to problems or who will need to continually change the enhanced data.
Take advantage of our South By SouthWest (SXSW) Special or try the three-month intensive submission package today and see the difference local search makes to your visibilty.
Popularity: 54% [?]
Facebook vs YellowPages: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
I ran across an online argument today that, to me, sounded ridiculous. I found this message among the tweeps I follow on Twitter: “Facebook just shot a HUGE hole in yellowpages.com’s business model. Why? Think about your phone books. http://ff.im/1l4mu” The link goes to a FriendFeed series of comments where people are basically arguing over the wrong point… how useless paper phone books are.
Duh.
Apparently, Facebook is adding White Pages and Yellow Pages functions. Ok, so what? In a world soon to be run by cell phones, Facebook isn’t exactly my first choice for finding the local specialty shop on my way to the bridal shower I forgot about. Their “new” look actually seems to have made some parts of their interface less phone-friendly.
These people are missing the point. When you execute a local search on the internet, you don’t go inside Facebook to do it. You may not even go inside Superpages.com or YellowPages.com to do it. You’ll probably go to Google or Yahoo or use the search portal interface built by your phone service company. After executing your search, if the businesses in question have done their jobs right, you’ll see Google Business listings at the top with a map before you notice anything else.
Afterward you might notice that there are half a dozen other listings for the product you’re looking for but the links will be to Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, CitySearch.com, Yahoo! Local, and even Facebook.
From my point of view, the function of Yellowpages.com is to give me another place to post accurate information about my business. Facebook is a place to build relationships. Those two functions don’t interfere with each other.
I dunno what all the fuss is about!
Popularity: 48% [?]
DexKnows Debuts
Forget about your typical local search site; the new DexKnows.com is completely unique and far more user-friendly.
That’s the idea behind the launch of dexknows.com, a new type of internet business listing service produced by R.H. Donnelley Interactive. According to president Brian Barnum, “it was built from the ground up with the consumer in mind. Each consumer searches in different ways, and with DexKnows.com, they now have a site that allows them to quickly and easily find relevant information about local businesses that can meet their needs.”
Boasting an interface that starts with two criteria instead of a single query, dexknows begins every session by asking for your topic in one field, then asking for your location in another. You are presented with the results, but in additional navigation, you can choose to refine the search even further buy selecting things like Features or Atmosphere. This sort of prompting for refinement makes dexknows.com a bit different from the standard IYP or Yahoo! Local listing.
“Overall, DexKnows.com is smarter, more sophisticated and much closer to what consumers have come to expect in a local search site,” wrote Charles Laughlin, analyst, The Kelsey Group, in a recent advisory report. “The site offers a number of new features aimed at making it more intuitive and less like an online version of the Yellow Pages.”
One downside though, is that dexknows.com seems to be a little narrow in its interpretation of some searches. For example, when I queried “family italian restaurant” in the topic and put “dallas” in the location, I got eleven search results, but not a single one of them was even in Texas. I wasn’t prompted to change my entry or click on “dallas, tx” or anything ot that nature. For the mobile web user who doesn’t want to retpe their query, this could be a handicap that sends users right back to Google.
Popularity: 48% [?]
